Author: Redactor

The day will come, as we shake our minds free from the old and stupid ideas about coercing each other, that we shall mock as much at the idea of state education as we are now learning to mock at the idea of state religion — when even a municipal organization of education will seem to us as absurd and grotesque an undertaking as a municipal organization of religion.

Auberon Herbert, letter to the editor, Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, as reprinted in The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, 1885.

We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.

[I]n the good town of Newcastle you will not find a dozen men, unless in some way practically connected with school work, who really understand our present code or have given their attention to the many serious questions involved in it. When this divorce between public intelligence and the directing department has existed for some time, the people begin to be accustomed to see a great system in operation in their midst, settled and worked for them in all its main lines by an office, morally, if not physically, some hundreds of miles away, and presently, with very few searchings of heart and very little intelligence exercised, they simply accept it and let themselves and their children be molded by it into — a something that they don’t exactly understand, and about which in the pressure of life they don’t find time to ask many questions. They are stupefied by the system, just because so little is required of them, mentally or practically, as individuals.

Auberon Herbert, letter to the editor, Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, as reprinted in The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, 1885.

As centuries pass by, the mass of works grows endlessly, and one can foresee a time when it will be almost as difficult to educate oneself in a library, as in the universe, and almost as fast to seek a truth subsisting in nature, as lost among an immense number of books; then one would have to undertake, out of necessity, a labor that had been neglected, because the need for it had not been felt.
If we think of the image of literature in times before the invention of printing, we see a small number of men of genius busy creating, and a countless throng of workers busy transcribing. If we anticipate centuries to come, and think of the image of literature once printing, which never rests, has filled huge buildings with books, we will find it once more split into two classes of men. There will be those who read little and immerse themselves in new research or what they take to be new (for if we already are ignorant of part of what is contained in so many books published in all sorts of languages, we will know still far less about what is in those books increased a hundred-, a thousand-fold); the others, workmen incapable of producing anything, will be busy leafing through those books night and day, and separating out what they deem worthy of being anthologized and preserved. Is this prediction not already being fulfilled?

Denis Diderot, “Encyclopédie,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, Vol. 5 (1755), pp. 635–648A.