John Stuart Mill on Educational Choice

As a follow up to Meyer v. Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters, I would like to share the views of perhaps the greatest lover of liberty of all time (next to Mel Gibson's Braveheart character that is) on government schools and educational choice:

"A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation, in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body." (On Liberty at p. 106)

So what was Mill's preferred approach to the education of children?

 

He called for "diversity of education" and parental choice. He said rather than provide education in government schools, Government "might leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children, and defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no one else to pay for them." (Id.) 

In our society, the problem is not so much government schools, which serve the needs of many families who prefer a secular progressive education, but the government school monopoly. The school funding monopoly favors parents who prefer the secular viewpoints taught in government schools and strongly disfavors dissenting parents who wish their children to be taught from religious or competing secular points of view. Realistically, because most dissenting parents cannot afford to educate their children outside the public school system, the funding monopoly results in creating a captive audience of impressionable children to have their minds molded by the preferred viewpoints of government officials who control the strictly secular public school curriculum.

 Freedom of thought and freedom of belief cannot exist in a State that effectively requires all but the wealthy to send their children to government schools. As Mill said, it results in a "despotism over the mind."