"State Education: A Help or Hindrance?" by Auberon Herbert (1880)
        -- excerpts:

 "At present we have one system of education applied to the whole of
 England. The local character of school boards deceives us, and makes us
 believe that some variety and freedom of action exist. In reality they have
 only the power to apply an established system. They must use the same class
 of teachers; they must submit to the same inspectors; the children must be
 prepared for the same examination, and pass in the same standards. There
 are some slight differences, but they are few and of little value. Now, if
 any one wishes to realise the full mischief which this uniformity works,
 let him think of what would be the result of a uniform method being
 established everywhere -- in religion, art, science, or any trade or
 profession. Let him remember that canon of Mr. Herbert Spencer, so pregnant
 with meaning, that progress is difference. Therefore, if you desire
 progress, you must not make it difficult for men to think and act
 differently; you must not dull their senses with routine or stamp their
 imagination with the official pattern of some great department. If you
 desire progress, you must remove all obstacles that impede for each man the
 exercise of his reasoning and imaginative faculties in his own way...
 
 A great department must be by the law of its own condition unfavourable to
 new ideas. To make a change it must make a revolution. Our Education
 Department, for example, cannot issue an edict which applies to certain
 school boards and not to others.... Follow still further the awkward
 attempts of a department at improvement. Influenced by long-continued
 public pressure, or moved by some new mind that has taken direction of it,
 it determines to introduce a change, and it issues in consequence a
 wholesale edict to its thousands of subordinates. But the conditions
 required for the successful application of a new idea are, that it should
 be only tentatively applied; that it should be applied by those persons who
 have some mental or moral affinity with it, and who in applying it, work
 intelligently and with the grain, not mechanically and against the
 grain....
 
 If only one wishes to realise why officialism is what it is, let him
 imagine himself at the centre of some great department which directs an
 operation in every part of the country. Whoever he was he must become
 possessed with the idea of perfect regularity and uniformity. His waking
 and sleeping thought would be the desire that each wheel should perform in
 its own place exactly the same rotation in the same time. His life would
 simply become intolerable to him if any of his thousands of wheels began to
 show signs of consciousness, and to make independent movements of their
 own.
 
 But suppose that a man of fresh mind and personal energy were to be placed
 at the head of our Education Department who perceived the mischievous
 effect of uniformity, could not this official tendency be counteracted? It
 might for a short space of time, just as some muscles of a strong man can
 for some hours defeat the pull of gravitation, but gravitation wins in the
 end. Such changes would only be spasmodic; they would not be the natural
 outcome of the system, and therefore could not last. Moreover, for those
 who understand the value of liberty and of responsibility, it is needless
 to point out how utterly false the system must be which makes the nation
 depend upon the intelligence of a minister, and not upon the free movement
 of the different minds within itself....
 
 From boyhood to manhood the teacher himself is undergoing examinations; for
 the rest of his life he is reproducing on others what he himself has gone
 through. It is needless to say, that the higher aims of the teacher,
 methods of arousing the imagination and developing the reasoning powers,
 which only bear fruit slowly and cannot be tested by a yearly examination
 of an inspector -- whose fly will be waiting at the school door during the
 few hours at the disposal of himself or his subordinate -- new attempts to
 connect the meaning of what is being learned with life itself, and to
 create an interest in work for work's own sake instead of the inspector's
 sake, ... all these things must be laid aside as subordinate to the one
 great aim of driving large batches successfully through the standards and
 making large hauls of public money...
 
 And now, leaving much unsaid, I must ask what practical steps should be
 taken by those workmen who suspect that state education is but a part of
 that coercive drill which one half the human race delights to inflict upon
 the other half. First of all get rid of compulsion. It has been made the
 instrument of endless petty persecutions. It is fatal to the free growth of
 an intelligent love of education; ...to a true respect of man for man; for
 each man's right to judge what is morally best for himself and for those
 entrusted to him. It is an attempt to make one of those shortcuts to
 progress which end by making the goal recede from us.
 
  ...It is a copy of a continental institution, taken from a nation that,
 living under a paternal government, has not yet learned to spell the
 letters of the word *liberty*. The example of Germany and its highly
 organised state education is not alluring. ... Where you subject people to
 strong official restraint, you seem fated to produce on the one side
 rigidity of thought and pedantry of feeling, on the other side those
 violent schemes against the possessions and the personal rights of the rich
 which we call socialism. Careful respect for the rights of others, vigorous
 and consistent defence of one's own rights, a deeply rooted love of freedom
 in thought, word, and action -- these things are simply impossible wherever
 you entrust great powers to a government, and allow it to use them not
 simply within a sphere of strictly defined rights, but as a supreme judge
 of what the momentary convenience requires.
 
 ...It is always difficult to introduce freedom into a system that is
 founded on authority and officialism."
 
 Excerpts from "State Education: A Help or Hindrance?" *Fortnightly Review*,
 1880; in *The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, and other essays*
 by Auberon Herbert, Copyright (c) 1978 by Liberty Fund Inc., Indianapolis,
 Indiana. ISBN 0-913966-42-8