RHI Seminar: ''The Complementarity of Education and Skills in Pre Industrial England”

Abstract:

Recent analyses of the drivers of the industrial revolution have drawn attention to the importance of two ingredients in the implementation of new technologies. First, the ideas that were created, disseminated, and refined by an extensive group of inventors and industrialists who were utilizing the tools of science and were informed by the values of the enlightenment. Second, the mechanical skills of the upper tail of artisans and mechanics trained through apprenticeship who implementation these ideas into useable technologies.

In this paper we document a novel channel that connects the enlightenment and industrialisation by showing that the supply of skilled artisans grew in response to the expansion in formal education in Britain. Locations in England that saw an increase in the provision of schooling also saw a growth in investment in apprenticeship training. We argue that this reflects the value of formal education for apprentices who were then better able to access training positions based on their competency in reading, writing and numeracy, skills that youths were expected to obtain prior to entering an apprenticeship. General and vocational human capital formation were, in short, complementary in this period. Given that the substantial expansion in schooling was promoted and justified by enlightenment ideas, this demonstrates a further connection between the major social and cultural shifts of the period and the economic transformations that followed