Response

J. S. Mill offers a surprisingly sensible proposal for ensuring high-quality public education within a liberal state. The proposal itself consists of two elements: a federal law requiring that each child in the state receive a good education, and a system of privately organized schools, funded either by a voucher system or by need-based grants to families unable to afford the tuition. On Mill's proposal, every family can choose which school their children will attend. Mill's argument for his proposal is also twofold: state-controlled schools are unnecessary for the main purpose they are created to serve, ensuring that each child in the state receives a good education; and such schools pose a threat to liberty by producing a uniform intellectual outlook on the citizenry.

Taking these arguments in reverse order, one has to sympathize with the concern that state-controlled schools generally impose a single-flavor ideological outlook on their graduates. Mill's own objection to such uniformity stems from his more general defense of ideological pluralism, the claim that truth is more likely to surface when diverse beliefs or theories compete on an open intellectual market. For Mill, intellectual uniformity within a state is objectionable in itself, regardless of its cause or its content, and not everyone will be convinced of this claim.

Mill's proposal can find support from another line of argument, however, one that appeals to freedom of conscience or freedom of religion as fundamental human rights. This approach marks much of Catholic social teaching and is reiterated by Pope John Paul II in his 1981 apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio. The Holy Father quotes Vatican II and its insistence that "Parents must be acknowledged as the first and foremost educators of their children" (FC, 36), and he adds that "The right of parents to choose an education in conformity with their religious faith must be absolutely guaranteed. The State and the Church have the obligation to give families all possible aid to enable them to perform their educational role properly" (FC, 37). The current system of public education claims to accommodate diverse moral and religious views by attempting to eliminate reference to such views in the curriculum. This approach fails miserably, however, since the goal of a value-free or value-neutral education is an illusion. Failure to engage worldviews and moral commitments of the students distorts their understanding of almost every field they study and leaves them with the impression that a wholly secular, irreligious, least-common-denominator viewpoint is the only intellectually respectable one.

Mill's concern is that, even in a democracy, public education tends to establish "a despotism over the mind," the main thrust of which reflects the opinions of "the majority of the existing generation." Given the current state of our own culture, this is a frightening prospect in itself. More troubling still is that public education in the United States reflects not the opinions of the majority of citizens, but the opinions of the majority of the cultural elite—especially those in the media and the academy. Further, given the politics of school governance and teachers' unions, parents have almost no power even to influence the content of the education their children receive in public schools, much less to see to it that their children are educated according to their own beliefs.

As for Mill's first argument, that the aim of providing a solid education for all students does not require state-run schools, this seems both obvious and well supported by the empirical evidence. There may be difficulties in defining what counts as a "good education," but public schools face the same difficulties and manage to address them by way of standardized tests, minimum graduation requirements, and the like. What Mill sees and what today's educators often fail to see (or admit) is that education forms the moral character of students, not just their intellectual skills...