Free Schoolbooks and Resources

The Norwegian government has recently passed a law requiring the state to produce free school books and resources for teachers and students at Norwegian high schools. Having seen that Norwegian publishers have been making a healthy profit from schoolbooks, they have concluded that it will be more efficient to develop school books and resources centrally and thereby save themselves the profit margin pocketed by the publishing companies.

This is a good example of how the Norwegian government acts to implement laws based on the idea of the common good. The introduction of a publishing company that has no profit motive, but only serves to fulfill the need for reliable school resources bypasses the profit of a few to the common good of thousands of students every year.

The theory put forward by the Norwegian government with the introduction of this law seems rather clear and straight forward. The central production of schoolbooks and resources will save the Norwegian society as a whole a net amount equal to the profit made by the publishing companies. It assumes that a profit motive is unimportant for the quality of schoolbooks, and it further assumes that the central publishing company will be at least as efficient as the privately owned publishing companies. The net benefit to society is simply identical to the profit made by the private publishing companies today.

If we analyze this law using the natural rights theory we will see that it is seriously flawed and will in fact lead to poor quality on schoolbooks, and will turn out to be far more expensive than predicted by the common good theory.

The first thing we can expect to happen is that the introduction of this law in itself will make all private publishing companies stop investing in schoolbooks and resources for high schools, and will increase the price on existing schoolbooks in an effort to get as much out of their intellectual properties before it becomes worthless.

The second thing we can predict is that the state monopoly that follows in the wake of private publishing companies laying down their school book departments, will mean that there will be no competition on price or quality on the books, and there will be no incentive for the editors to do their work properly apart from personal pride in what they are doing. In the absence of competition, the price will increase, and quality will suffer.

Finally we can expect schoolbooks to be shaped by the views of politicians, rather than the need of the market, since the market for school books no longer exists, and political dogma becomes the ultimate criteria for editing. There will be much interference from politicians when it comes to subjects like social sciences and history, and objective and balanced teaching will be increasingly difficult to do.

The net result will be lower quality on the students graduating from high school, and schoolbooks becoming increasingly expensive, despite the fact that they are officially free. Nothing is free, of course, and free schoolbooks only mean that taxes must increase. The increased taxes will most likely turn out to be more than the cost of schoolbooks in the free market that has now been dismantled.

We now have two theories with conflicting conclusions and we need to find ways to test them in order to make a reasonable assessment of what will actually happen. With the law only recently being enacted, we can only test this against very recent events in Norway, but we should be able to find comparable examples in world history to make up for the little we so far can see in Norway.

The latest developments in Norway show that no new schoolbook project has been started for high school students by the private publishing houses, and investments in schoolbooks for other students have also been reduced drastically out of fear that the state run publishing house will expand its activities. In the face of uncertainty, short time profit is already becoming more important.

The government has reacted with some surprise to this initial development. They had assumed that the private publishing houses would dismantle their activities more slowly and orderly than what is in fact happening. Everyone rushing for the exit was clearly not a scenario that they foresaw.

At the present, there is something of a vacuum in the high school book market, with the state publishing house still being developed, while the privately produced schoolbooks are frozen, and some damage to the quality of teaching can be expected, but no numbers are currently available.

Looking for other examples of state publishing, we are limited to old communist countries and some fascist countries which had seriously flawed laws in many other respects than just their publishing philosophies, but history does in fact show that political interference in schoolbook editing was rampant, and the schoolbooks were seriously biased on topics of social sciences and history. The books were dull and of poor physical quality compared to free markets, and they were in fact no less expensive than the superior quality books of the free world.

We can in other words assume that the new publishing law introduced in Norway will further deteriorate the already fragile Norwegian infrastructure by pushing school quality further downwards.

Already scoring alarmingly poorly on international school test, despite record expenditures on education, Norway can expect to slide further down the international scale of school results and at the same time further up the scale when it comes to cost per pupil.