ABSTRACT
That England was in a state of transition and hence of instability and that such instability — political, social and cultural — threatened important priorities relevant to the health of a society has already been indicated in the reactions of Coleridge and J. S. Mill to the educational problems of the age. Both, with somewhat differing stresses, had advocated the need for a 'clerisy' of the educated as a means of stemming the tide of mediocrity-and worse — which seemed inevitable in the wake of democratisation accompanied by certain types of cultural emancipation. Mill's suspicion of power and his faith in reason and persuasion (education) as the sources of amelioration identify what are to become characteristic reactions of the still relatively homogeneous elite.
