Response

A state has responsibility for the welfare—in Mill's terms, the happiness—of its citizens, adults, and children. This passage is part of Mill's long argument for a particular strategy by which, he believes, the welfare of adults in a society may best be promoted: tolerating eccentricity and oddity in thought and lifestyle. This passage argues for what Mill takes to be an "unspeakably important" part of that strategy: encouraging diversity in education. I will sketch Mill's general strategy for promoting adult welfare—the creation of a marketplace of ideas and lifestyles. Next, I will think about the place of diversity of education within that strategy. And finally, I will consider whether Mill's strategy for promoting adult welfare also promotes children's welfare. That last question is important for the overall evaluation of Mill's proposal: given that the state is responsible for both adults and children, it is not enough for a political argument to show that a strategy works only to the advantage of adults.

Mill's argument for state tolerance of oddity and eccentricity provides the context for the passage we are considering. I take Mill to be arguing that, in a state in which people are permitted to lead eccentric lives, so long as their eccentricity does not harm others, adult citizens will be able to see and evaluate the consequences of a wide variety of choices about fundamental ways of living. They will be able to shop in a marketplace of lifestyles. If citizens are familiar with a wide range of lifestyles, they gain, according to Mill, two important advantages: (1) they make informed choices about which way of living is likeliest to promote their happiness, and (2) they adopt their chosen way of life wholeheartedly and enthusiastically, confident that it is their choice and not a way of life they have fallen into by historical accident. Both (1) and (2) make it more likely, on Mill's view, that adult citizens will achieve happiness. He also thinks that people who choose their lives will make a greater contribution to the vigor and health of the society than those who accept unthinkingly some normal or traditional pattern of thought and action.

In the passage we are considering, Mill claims that diversity of education is unspeakably important for the kind of social diversity he advocates. One might question this: surely, in the United States, public education is overwhelmingly favored by all sorts of incentives, and citizens who go through public education emerge quite different from each other, in part because of the influence of parents and churches and peer groups operating after school and on weekends. One wants to ask, how much—and what kind of—diversity is enough to make it likely that adult citizens will secure the advantages of the marketplace? I think it is plausible to answer, in Mill's spirit, that acceptable diversity must include representatives of various ways of life who have been part of those ways of life for many years, through many changes in circumstance. It would surely be difficult to evaluate a way of life based solely on the proclamations of recent converts or adults who came to it late in their lives. One needs to know how well this way of life wears, how well it stands up to the challenges and trials that all human beings face, and also how it stamps the developed character of its adherents over time.

So, for a plausible marketplace of lifestyles to exist, one might argue, one needs representation from people who have grown up in those lifestyles, who have given them a fair trial. One might argue that only those who have been educated in schools that favored and supported a given lifestyle would be able to represent it in that way: school surely occupies an enormous piece of a child's formative life, and, in our culture, comes ever more...