Critics of State Education by George H. Smith & Marilyn Moore

Author:George H. Smith & Marilyn Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: CATO Institute
Published: 2017-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

9

“On the Non-Interference of the Government with Popular Education”

Edward Miall

Crosby-Hall Lectures on Education (London: John Snow, 1848)

Edward Miall (1809–1881) was a leader in the movement to disestablish the Church of England. An uncompromising defender of the separation of church and state, he later argued along similar lines for the separation of school and state. Miall and Edward Baines, Jr., were the most prominent defenders of educational Voluntaryism in England. (It should be remembered that the label “Voluntaryist” was originally embraced by advocates of church-state separation; only later, beginning in 1843, was this label used by those Dissenters who also called for the separation of school and state.)

After graduating Wymondley Theological Institution in Stevenage (in the county of Hertfordshire), Miall was ordained an Independent (i.e., Congregational) minister in 1831. He briefly held the pastorate of the congregation in Ware before moving, in 1834, to the Bond Street Chapel in Leicester. As a youth Baines had rejoiced at the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts—laws that barred Nonconformists from holding any civil or political offices; he later called this development “the commencement of a new era for the advancement of religious liberty.” And shortly after becoming a minister in Leicester, Miall was heartened by a declaration by some Nottingham Dissenters that called for the separation of church and state, and by the quick endorsement of this call for “religious liberty” by other Nonconformist groups in towns throughout England and Scotland. Around this time, according to his son, Miall’s mind was “burning” with ideas about the violation of conscience entailed by a state church. In 1838, in a village near Leicester, Baines delivered a speech, “The Two Portraits, or Christianity and the Compulsory System Contrasted.” In this speech we see Miall’s utter contempt for any state interference in matters of conscience—an argument that he later developed, in considerable detail, against any state interference in education.

Ignorant of the rights of conscience, [a state church] profanely tramples them into the dust. Its appeals are made, not to the sympathies of men, but to the arm of magistracy. Its power ultimately resides, not in its own intrinsic charms, but in those darkest dens of bigotry and oppression, Ecclesiastical Courts. It drowns the sweet voice of heavenly truth in the din of its own vociferous clamour for support. Its apparatus is all grinding and destructive. Its means and appliances all smell of the earth, earthy. Backed by this obtrusive and scowling champion, Christianity is compelled to bear the curse of the oppressed and the jeer of the infidel; is taunted as the child of priestcraft, and the deceiving mistress only of fools. Such are, have been, and ever will be the lamentable results of legislative intermeddling with religion.

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