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Plato: I am Plato of Athens, student of Socrates, founder of the Academy, and author of the Republic, which as far as I can tell remains the only serious book ever written about how to educate a civilization. I am here today because apparently twenty four centuries after I solved this problem, you people are still arguing about it.
John Stuart Mill: I am John Stuart Mill, author of On Liberty, and I received the most rigorous private education in the history of the English-speaking world, which my father designed without any assistance whatsoever from the state. I am here because someone needs to explain to Plato why philosopher-kings are not the answer to school curriculum.
Plato: Let me be direct about what is happening in your country right now. Twenty eight states have signed onto a federal program that hands public money to private schools and says to parents, you decide what your children learn. Texas alone has a billion dollars flowing out of public schools and into the hands of anyone who hangs a shingle and calls themselves an educator. This is not reform. This is the city handing the keys to the cave to the people still chained to the wall.
John Stuart Mill: And I would say that the people chained to the wall might have a better sense of their own interests than the philosopher standing outside the cave claiming to know what sunlight looks like on their behalf.
Plato: You say that as if parents are qualified to evaluate an education they themselves never received. I wrote the Republic to solve precisely this problem. The guardians of the city must design the curriculum because the guardians are the only ones who understand what the city needs. You cannot ask a shoemaker to design a medical treatment, and you cannot ask a parent who cannot do algebra to evaluate whether a school teaches mathematics well.
John Stuart Mill: You also wrote that poets should be expelled from the ideal city because their stories might give children the wrong feelings about the gods. Forgive me if I do not trust your curriculum committee.
Plato: That is a deliberate misreading of my position on Homer, but I will let it pass because I have more important things to address. The question before us today is simple. Should the state control what children are taught? My answer is yes, because the alternative is chaos. Your ECCA program, your Texas vouchers, your education savings accounts, they all rest on a single fantasy, which is that millions of individual parents making millions of individual choices will somehow produce a coherent civilization. That is not freedom. That is entropy.
John Stuart Mill: The alternative to state control is not chaos. The alternative to state control is diversity. I wrote in On Liberty that a state education, if it exists at all, should be one among many competing experiments, and its primary danger is that it becomes a contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another. You are not describing education, Plato. You are describing obedience training.
Plato: I am describing the formation of citizens who can sustain a democracy, which is ironic because I did not even believe in democracy. But if you insist on having one, you should at least ensure that the voters can reason, can distinguish truth from flattery, and can resist the demagogue who tells them what they want to hear. And you cannot do that if every parent is free to send their child to whatever school confirms their existing prejudices.
John Stuart Mill: And who exactly decides what counts as prejudice and what counts as conviction? You? The state curriculum board? The Department of Education? You have replaced one set of biases with another and called it objectivity.
Plato: I have replaced many untrained biases with one trained judgment, which is an improvement by any rational standard.
John Stuart Mill: It is an improvement only if the trained judgment is actually correct, which history suggests it almost never is. State curricula have been used to teach children that kings rule by divine right, that certain races are inferior, that the earth is the center of the universe, and that the state itself is infallible. Your philosopher-kings have a remarkably poor track record.
Plato: Now, I am going to do something I find distasteful but apparently necessary. I am going to present Mill’s best argument in his own terms, because I want everyone to see that even at its strongest, his position collapses under scrutiny. Mill’s case is essentially this. Individuals are the best judges of their own interests. Parents, as the individuals closest to their children, are therefore the best judges of their children’s educational needs. State monopoly on curriculum stifles innovation, punishes dissent, and produces intellectual conformity. Competition among schools, like competition among businesses, drives improvement and rewards excellence. A diverse educational landscape produces a diverse intellectual landscape, which is the engine of human progress. That is a beautiful argument. It is the kind of argument that wins debates at Oxford. And it is completely wrong, because it assumes that parents are choosing based on educational quality rather than convenience, cost, religious affiliation, or proximity to their house.
John Stuart Mill: I appreciate the effort, though I notice you could not resist editorializing before the summary was even cold. Very well. Let me extend the same courtesy. Plato’s strongest case is this. Education is not a consumer product. It is the mechanism by which a civilization reproduces its values across generations. Left to the market, education will optimize for what parents want, which is not the same as what children need or what the city requires. A coherent curriculum ensures that every citizen shares a common foundation of knowledge, a common set of reasoning skills, and a common commitment to the public good. Without that foundation, democracy becomes a contest between competing tribalisms, each with its own facts and its own version of truth. That is the strongest version of his argument. It is also the argument of every authoritarian government in history, which used precisely this logic to justify controlling what people are allowed to think.
Plato: You say authoritarian as if it is an insult. I say it as if it is a job description. Someone has to be in charge of what children learn. The question is whether that someone is trained for the job or whether it is whatever parent happens to click on a website and enroll their child in a school that teaches that the earth is six thousand years old.
John Stuart Mill: The existence of bad private schools does not justify state monopoly any more than the existence of bad newspapers justifies state censorship. You do not solve the problem of ignorance by giving the government a monopoly on truth.
Plato: I am not proposing a monopoly on truth. I am proposing a monopoly on standards. There is a difference, and the fact that you cannot see it explains why your country has fifty different sets of educational standards and children who cannot find Europe on a map.
John Stuart Mill: My country is England, not America.
Plato: Fine. The country where this debate is apparently most urgent. Texas has one hundred thousand families pulling their children out of public schools with public money. Tennessee is spending so little on public education that it ranks behind every other state. And your position is that this is all working as intended?
John Stuart Mill: My position is that the reason those public schools are failing is not that parents have too many choices. It is that the state has had a monopoly on those children’s education for generations and has produced exactly the mediocrity I predicted. You are looking at the result of state control and arguing for more state control. That is not philosophy. That is insanity.
Plato: You think competition will fix this? Let me tell you what competition actually produces. It produces schools that compete for enrollment by making parents happy, not by making children educated. It produces marketing budgets instead of library budgets. It produces a race to the bottom where the school that demands the least from students wins the most customers. You are not describing an education system. You are describing a shopping mall.
John Stuart Mill: And you are describing a prison where every child receives the same meal, wears the same uniform, reads the same books, and emerges with the same thoughts, and you call that an education. I call it a factory.
Plato: I CALL IT A CIVILIZATION!
John Stuart Mill: YOU CALL EVERYTHING A CIVILIZATION! YOU CALLED BANNING POETS A CIVILIZATION!
Plato: THE POETS WERE UNDERMINING PUBLIC MORALITY!
John Stuart Mill: THE POETS WERE TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT YOUR GODS AND YOU COULD NOT HANDLE IT!
Plato: I INVENTED THE ACADEMY! THE ACTUAL ACADEMY! EVERY UNIVERSITY ON EARTH IS A FOOTNOTE TO MY WORK!
John Stuart Mill: AND EVERY STUDENT AT EVERY UNIVERSITY LEARNS TO QUESTION AUTHORITY, WHICH IS THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT YOU TAUGHT!
Plato: GIVING PARENTS A VOUCHER IS NOT QUESTIONING AUTHORITY! IT IS SURRENDERING TO IGNORANCE!
John Stuart Mill: GIVING THE STATE A MONOPOLY ON CURRICULUM IS NOT EDUCATION! IT IS INDOCTRINATION WITH A DIPLOMA!
Plato: YOUR ENTIRE PHILOSOPHY IS JUST SELFISHNESS DRESSED UP IN LATIN!
John Stuart Mill: YOUR ENTIRE PHILOSOPHY IS JUST TYRANNY DRESSED UP IN GREEK!
Plato: Well. On that note, I encourage you to like this video and subscribe to the channel, assuming your state-approved algorithm permits it. And if you would like to learn more about the man who thinks education should be run like a flea market, Mill here wrote a lovely autobiography about how his father’s private education worked out. He had a nervous breakdown at twenty. Wonderful advertisement for the homeschool movement.
John Stuart Mill: I recovered from that breakdown and went on to write the most influential defense of individual liberty in the English language. Plato here founded a school that lasted nine hundred years, which sounds impressive until you realize it was eventually shut down by an emperor, which is exactly the kind of authority figure Plato spent his entire career arguing should be in charge. Like and subscribe. Visit PhilosophersTalk.com for more debates where the dead argue about the living. And visit AITalkerApp.com if you would like to create your own animated conversations, no philosopher-king required.
