Human capital theory has suffered much criticism. The filter theory of education (Arrow 1973), the theory of education as a “signal” (Spence 1973), and the theory of “screening” (Stiglitz 1975), for instance, have seriously challenged it from within mainstream economics, and heavy criticism has also come from other paradigms, with Franck Bailly (2016) recently documenting the critique from the radical school. Within this set of ideas that flourished in the post-WW II period and challenged human capital theory, John Kenneth Galbraith’s analysis of the dynamics of the education process is often neglected. In his original institutionalist and firm-based approach to the evolution of education, Galbraith placed great emphasis on the issue of the requirements of the planning system when he tackled the issue of human capital investment. More surprisingly—since he is unanimously recognized as the “founding father” of the “human capital revolution”—Theodore Schultz himself developed a substantial critique of human capital theory that shares some ground with Galbraith’s. The aim of this contribution is to provide new insights into the history of post-WW II ideas in the field of economics of education by reviewing Schultz’s and Galbraith’s respective analyses of education and highlighting their proximities. Both authors raise doubts regarding the idea that the aggregation of individual choices must be regarded as the relevant generative mechanism of the dynamic of education and the basis of the allocation of education resources. Consequently, both question the equivocal concept of student sovereignty.

中文翻译：

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战后美国教育的经济分析：西奥多·舒尔茨和约翰·肯尼斯·加尔布雷思的新见解

人力资本理论饱受批评。例如，教育过滤理论（Arrow 1973）、教育作为“信号”理论（Spence 1973）和“筛选”理论（Stiglitz 1975）在主流经济学中对其提出了严重的挑战，并且重批评也来自其他范式，Franck Bailly (2016) 最近记录了激进学派的批评。在二战后蓬勃发展并挑战人力资本理论的这套思想中，约翰·肯尼斯·加尔布雷思对教育过程动态的分析经常被忽视。在他最初的制度主义和以企业为基础的教育演进方法中，加尔布雷思在处理人力资本投资问题时非常重视规划系统的要求问题。更令人惊讶的是——由于他被公认为“人力资本革命”的“开国元勋”——西奥多·舒尔茨本人对人力资本理论进行了实质性的批判，与加尔布雷思的观点有一些共同之处。这篇文章的目的是通过回顾舒尔茨和加尔布雷思各自对教育的分析并强调他们的接近性，为二战后教育经济学领域思想的历史提供新的见解。两位作者都对个人选择的聚合必须被视为教育动态的相关生成机制和教育资源配置的基础的观点提出质疑。因此，两人都质疑学生主权的模棱两可的概念。