Excursions Tuesday: State Education and the British Voluntaryists

George H. Smith has a new Excursions essay this morning, another in his series on the critics of state education.

One important Voluntaryist was Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), a leading libertarian philosopher of his day. Although Spencer became an agnostic, he was home-schooled in Dissenting causes by his father and uncle. “Our family was essentially a dissenting family,” Spencer wrote in his Autobiography, “and dissent is an expression of antagonism to arbitrary control.” Much of Spencer’s first political article, written in his early twenties and published in The Nonconformist in 1842, was devoted to a critique of state education, and it possibly influenced the birth of the Voluntaryist movement in the following year.

Read it here.