Abstract: Abstract Mill may be said either to have written rather little on education or to have written a very great deal. He himself distinguished between a 'narrow' and a 'wider' sense of education, the former limited to what happens in formal educational settings, the latter embracing all the influences that make us who and what we are. He wrote rather little on the former and a great deal on the latter, ranging from the account of his own education in his Autobiography to his discussion of 'ethology' in System of logic, and his thoughts about the educative effects of political institutions in Representative government. Liberty and The subjection of women are tracts on the role of both wider and narrower education in liberating us from the constraints of custom and securing equality between the sexes. They still have much to say to a 21st-century audience. Notes 1. Mill's Principles were taught in Oxford until 1919, when Alfred Marshall's Principles of economics became the basis of economics teaching in most universities; System of logic was in use in the University of London and elsewhere into the 1930s; although Mill's broader philosophical views were attacked by Idealists of all stripes during his lifetime and afterwards it was a sign of his centrality to intellectual life that he could not be ignored. 2. Review of Sarah Austin's translation of Victor Cousin's report on Prussian education. George Edward Biber (1801–1874) wrote prolifically on educational theory, Christian education and the history of the Church of England. 3. Compare with John Henry Newman (1801–1890) central in the Oxford Movement of the 1840s, converted to Catholicism, created Cardinal in 1879, beatified in 2010; The idea of a university (1852 and 1858) consists of lectures delivered as Rector of the newly established Catholic University of Ireland; it remains the most often quoted discussion of the principles of a liberal education. 4. Collini, Citation1984, p. xlviii re the editing of Mill on education in the Complete works. 5. Two members of the House of Commons for each of the ancient universities dated to a Royal Charter of 1603; all holders of the MA or Doctorate could vote; after 1918, elections were conducted by the Single Transferable Vote system; abolished by the Representation of the People Act of 1948, effected with the General Election of 1950; London University returned one member from 1868 to 1950. 6. Set up in 1855; see Hart, Citation1972, pp. 63–81. 7. Mill set economics exams for Haileybury College, established 1806, the training college for the East India Company whose administrators Mill considered to be meritorious and well trained. 8. Mill first articulated these ideas in The spirit of the age written in instalments for The examiner spring and summer of 1831; left unfinished as the public agenda moved to parliamentary reform. 9. Mill made friends with Gustave d'Eichthal (1804–1886) in 1829, though he was more sceptical by 1831 when Saint-Simonians arrived in England. 10. Auguste Comte (1798–1857), founder of 'Positivism', coined the word 'sociology'; although he was influenced by Comte and sympathetic, Mill's Auguste Comte and positivism (1865) is unsparingly critical. 11. Robert Owen (1771–1858), Utopian Socialist, held that actions flow from character which is made for not by us. In the 1820s, Mill debated with Owenites. 12. Andrew Bell (1757–1832), Anglican clergyman, spent ten years in Madras where he devised the monitorial system (hence, 'Madras schools'); Joseph Lancaster (1778–1838) independently invented the monitorial system in South London; schools based on the system were established in the United States and Canada; under the label 'peer supported learning' it still has a place in American higher education; Coleridge was an enthusiastic supporter although no friend to utilitarianism. 13. F. R. Leavis's association of James Mill's education of his son with Dickens' Gradgrind in Hard Times is a misidentification attributable to Leavis's loathing for 'Benthamism'; it is unlikely that Dickens had read Bentham, who was anyway opposed to rote learning (Fielding,Citation1956). 14. Mill was advised by Edwin Chadwick (1800–1890), Benthamite, responsible with Nassau Senior (1790–1864), for the report on poverty that led to the Poor Law of 1834. 15. Mill mentions Christ's Hospital established 1552 to co-educate, which in 1869 had 1129 boys and 28 girls. (The present author was Almoner of Christ's Hospital in the late 1990s when concerted effort was made to achieve equal numbers.) Mill may have seized on Christ's Hospital because he was a friend of Henry Cole (1808–1882), former pupil there. 16. Henry Sidgwick and Millicent Garret Fawcett (1847–1929), sister of Elizabeth Garret, campaigner for the right of women to practise medicine, supporter of women's rights; her husband Henry Fawcett (1833–1884), MP and economist, was an ally of Mill's in the campaign for female suffrage. In contrast to the USA where Oberlin was founded as co-educational in 1833, even progressive, non-sectarian University College London admitted women students only in 1878. 17. Alexander Bain (1818–1903) Professor of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen, first biographer of both James Mill and J. S. Mill. Mill's delivery must have been deliberate—the address is hardly longer than Isaiah Berlin's inaugural, Two concepts of liberty. 18. The ancient universities were still governed by the Test Acts, repealed 1872; Mill deplored the remaining Anglican monopoly (although when Henry Sidgwick asked whether Mill thought he should resign his fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge because he no longer believed the Thirty-Nine Articles, Mill did not encourage him to throw away his livelihood for a principle; in fact, Trinity behaved decently, and kept Sidgwick as a lecturer until repeal allowed the college to elect him to a fellowship once more).
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 10
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot