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Excursions Tuesday: Spencer, Sumner, and Social Darwinism
Today George H. Smith presents us with the second part of his look at social Darwinism. This week he explores the thinking of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, and shows how each explicitly repudiated the ideas so many today blame them for.
To associate market competition with biological competition is to misunderstand how Spencer and Sumner (and other classical liberals) viewed the market. Biological competition, in which one individual survives at the expense of other individuals, is a zero-sum game, whereas market competition is a positive-sum game in which all participants gain from voluntary cooperation. Therefore, it is precisely in a free society that social Darwinism does not apply. In a society with an advanced division of labor and where we must give others what they want in order to get what we want, the “fit” are those who can enlist the voluntary cooperation of others. When success depends upon persuasion rather than coercion, social fitness is measured by one’s ability to influence others by offering them something of value, i.e., by benefiting them.
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Excursions Tuesday: Barack Obama and Social Darwinism
In a budget speech last week, Barack Obama accused Republicans of embracing “thinly veiled social Darwinism.” In this week’s Excursions, George H. Smith argues that the President doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
It is clear that “social Darwinism” and “survival of the fittest” were intended by Obama to evoke feelings of fear and disgust. It is highly doubtful that Obama knows anything about the history of these ideas, and it is even more doubtful that he cares. A concern for truth is not the coin of the political realm. But these expressions have long been of interest to me, mainly because the great libertarian Herbert Spencer is frequently said to have originated social Darwinism.
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Excursions Tuesday: Thomas Jefferson on Public Schools
Today George H. Smith begins a new essay series with a discusion of Thomas Jefferson’s ideas about education and his plan for a decentralized system of public schools in the state of Virginia. Smith writes that contrary to the beliefs of some historians that would link Jefferson to Enlightenment advocates of state schooling like Benjamin Rush, Samuel Knox, and Noah Webster or to the common school movement of the 1830s, Jefferson favored schooling on a more local level:
The key to local school districts, according to Jefferson, is that they give parents direct and ultimate control over how their children are educated. To suppose that schools will he better managed by “any authority of the government, than by the parents within each ward…is a belief against all experience.” A government can no more manage schools than it can manage “our farms, our mills, and merchants’ stores.” Elementary education should be the concern of local communities under the supervision of parents; it should not be controlled by the federal or state governments.
Extreme decentralization was thus the centerpiece of Jefferson’s plan for public schools, and he warned of the potential consequences should this feature be ignored:
“What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or the aristocrats of a Venetian Senate.”
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Excursions Tuesday: A Free Market in Education
Today George H. Smith brings us the fourth in his series on the critics of state education. He explores the Voluntaryist critique of those who support free trade in religion and commerce but advocate state interference in schools as well as the debate between J. S. Mill and Herbert Spencer about the proper role of government in education.
When fellow free-traders, such as Richard Cobden, supported state education, the Voluntaryists took them to task for their inconsistency. Those who embrace free trade in religion and commerce but advocate state interference in education, argued Thomas Hodgskin (a senior editor of The Economist) in 1847, “do not fully appreciate the principles on which they have been induced to act.” “We only wonder that they should have so soon forgotten their free-trade catechism,” wrote another Voluntaryist, “and lent their sanction to any measure of monopoly.”
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Excursions Tuesday: The Problem of Indoctrination and the Need for Diversity
George H. Smith has another Excursions essay for us this week, continuing his look at critics of state education. With part three of the series, he explores more of the Voluntaryist objections.
Indoctrination is inherent in state education, according to Edward Baines. State education proceeds from the principle that “it is the duty of a Government to train the Mind of the People.” If one denies to government this right — as defenders of a free press and free religion must logically do — then one must also deny the right of government to meddle in education. It “is not the duty or province of the Government to train the mind of the people,” argued Baines, and this “principle of the highest moment” forbids state education.
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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.
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Excursions Tuesday: Joseph Priestley and the Critics of State Education
Today Smith moves from the roots of state education to the history of its critics. He begins the series with a discussion of Joseph Priestley, the Englishman who discovered oxygen.
Revisionist works on the history of education are of uneven value, to say the least. Some blame the problems of American education on “capitalism” – that ever-popular bogeyman of restless intellectuals. For example, in Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis throw everything except the proverbial kitchen sink at the feet of capitalism, including “drugs, suicide, mental instability, personal insecurity, predatory sexuality, depression, loneliness, bigotry, and hatred….” This is alarming news, indeed, but it is at least good to know that such problems do not exist in noncapitalistic societies. (Only academics could get away with this kind of Marxian claptrap.)
Even among the better revisionist works we find a troubling omission: Most pay scant attention, if any, to the libertarian critics of state schooling who flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet these advocates of free-market education – or “Voluntaryists,” as they called themselves in nineteenth-century Britain – predicted that governmental control of education would result in precisely those problems that revisionists later complained about.
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Excursions Tuesday: Aristotle and Education
Today George H. Smith continues his examination of the intellectual roots of state education by turning to the views of Plato’s most famous student.
Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was born in Stagira, a small coastal town in the political orbit of Macedonia. He traveled to Athens while still in his teens and enrolled in Plato’s Academy, where he remained for almost twenty years. Plato’s influence on Aristotle was profound, but there were also significant differences. For example, Aristotle criticized Plato’s stress on uniformity; and, in response to Plato’s call to institute communal property among the guardians (the elite class of rulers), Aristotle defended private property with arguments that would be used for centuries thereafter.
Aristotle explicitly repudiated the notion of limited government that was defended by some of his contemporaries. He quoted the sophist Lycophron as saying that a government exists “for the sake of alliance and security from injustice” and that laws should serve as “a surety to one another of justice.” Aristotle disagreed. Rather than confine itself to this negative function — the enforcement of justice — the state should actively promote the good life.
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Excursions Tuesday: Plato’s Case Against Free-Market Education
George H. Smith continues his look at the intellectual roots of state education. This week he shows how history’s first great philosopher wasn’t a fan of educational freedom.
Plato’s argument that average people are not competent judges of educational quality was closely linked to his dislike of Athenian democracy, which he regarded as little more than mob rule. Plato harbored a deep distrust of the common man in politics and in every activity that requires special training. Derogatory references abound in the Platonic dialogues to the “nondescript mob,” the “ignorant multitude,” “the great beast,” and so forth.
This is the major reason why Plato attacked the sophists and Athenian free-market education. Educational entrepreneurs give the public what it wants and so cater to ignorance and vulgar desires. As Plato says the Republic: “Each of these private teachers who work for pay, whom the politicians call Sophists, inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled, and calls this knowledge wisdom.”
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Excursions Tuesday: The Spartan Model of Education
George H. Smith takes up a new theme in this week’s Excursions?, beginning a series on the intellectual roots of state education. The first essay takes us quite far back, all the way to conflicting philosophies of Athens and Sparta.
As post-Renaissance intellectuals looked back on Sparta, many saw something other than brutal totalitarianism. They saw a planned, well-ordered society where individual goals were subordinated to the common good, a society where education was controlled by the state and where civic virtues were instilled in children at an early age.
Plato and Aristotle, though by no means unqualified admirers of Sparta, endorsed the Spartan principle of state education, and their endorsements played major roles in elevating the Spartan model to a pride of place in the modern era. Plato’s blueprint of an authoritarian society called for a state system of centralized education supervised by a minister of education. “In this conception,” wrote the Greek scholar Ernest Barker, “Plato was definitely and consciously departing from the practice of Athens, and setting his face towards Sparta.” Plato’s aim was “to combine the curriculum of Athens with the organization of Sparta.”
Plato’s view of the relationship between the child and the state reflects the Spartan influence, as we see in this passage from The Laws. “Education is, if possible, to be, as the phrase goes, compulsory for every mother’s son, on the ground that the child is even more the property of the state than of his parents.”
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