ABSTRACT
Contemporary liberal-democratic states have in essence a choice between three roles in the promotion of education. The first is to require that parents ensure their children are in situations deemed educational either for a given number of years or until certain stipulated levels of attainment have been achieved, but to refrain from providing education except when non-governmental provision is unavailable. This is comparable to policies most contemporary liberal democracies pursue in respect of children’s physical welfare: parents are vulnerable to prosecution for neglect unless they feed their children, but the State does not act as baker or butcher or fishmonger. Priority to parents was the position of John Stuart Mill, who deprecated the idea that ‘the whole or any part of the education of the people should be in State hands’ and explained:
If the government would make up its mind to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. It 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…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. (Mill, 1910, p. 161)
The second is to provide as well as require education but to leave matters of curriculum, pedagogy and accreditation of standards largely to professional experts. Power over education swung to the experts in several English-speaking countries during the 1970s and 1980s, until alleged weaknesses in their
prescriptions led to renewed governmental restrictions on professional autonomy. The third is for governments to control curriculum, pedagogy and accreditation in the light of their own perceptions of national needs. Mass education was developed first in Prussia and the Netherlands under close State direction. Twentieth century totalitarian states intensified this control to previously unknown degrees but even in contemporary liberal democracies powerful and influential groups are attracted, at least when a favourable ministry is in office, to extensive governmental control over education.
