Oxford Review of EducationAquatic Insects

Vol. 37, No. 5, October 2011, pp. 653–667

J. S. Mill on education
Alan Ryan*
Princeton University, USA

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.

The omnipresence of education in Mill’s work

To write about Mill is to write about education. In the opening paragraph of his
Autobiography Mill explains:
I have thought that in an age in which education, and its improvement, are the subject
of more, if not of profounder study than at any former period of English history, it may
be useful that there should be some record of an education which was unusual and
remarkable, and which, whatever else it may have done, has proved how much more
than is commonly supposed may be taught, and well taught, in those early years which,
in the common modes of what is called instruction, are little better than wasted. (Mill,
1874a, p. 25)

In middle age Mill himself became an educational institution. Disraeli sneered

‘here comes the finishing governess’ when Mill entered Parliament in 1865. But,
not only were Mill’s major works such as A system of logic and Principles of political
economy taught in the universities and colleges of Victorian and Edwardian

*249 Corwin Hall, Princeton University, Princeton NJ 08544, USA. Email: ajryan@princeton.
edu

ISSN 0305-4985 (print)/ISSN 1465-3915 (online)/11/050653–15

Ó 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2011.621681
654 A. Ryan

England, Mill and his publisher forewent their profits to sell them in popular edi-
tions at low prices for working class readers.1
Mill’s discussions of education display many of his characteristic rhetorical and
argumentative tropes. As in the passage quoted, his taste for antithesis is given free
rein. On the one hand, there is almost nothing that education cannot achieve,
whether full social and political equality for women, the intellectual and moral ele-
vation of the working class, or fitting India for independence. On the other, con-
temporary education is ‘wretched’, endowments are squandered, and almost
everyone underestimates how much students of all ages might learn, given ambi-
tion and energy. John Dewey was asked whether he was an optimist or a pessimist,
and replied that he was a tremendous optimist about things in general, but a terri-
ble pessimist about everything in particular. There is a good deal of that in Mill:
optimism about what mankind could achieve set against an unsparing assessment
of how far short we fall.
Mill wrote little about education in the ‘classroom’ sense—about schools, uni-
versities, funding, staffing or curricula. The volume of the Collected works devoted
to Law, equality, and education reprints only three essays on education. One dates
from 1834 and is notionally a review of a report on the Prussian education system,
though it largely consists of extracts from George Edward Biber’s savaging of the
National Schools.2 The second (1866) is Mill’s evidence to the Taunton Commis-
sion on ‘middle-class’ schools. The third dates from 1867. This is Mill’s ‘Inaugu-
ral Address’ as Rector of the University of St Andrews. It is, in effect, Mill’s
version of The idea of a University.3 Had the editors of the Collected works included
Mill’s 1833 essay ‘Corporation and Church Property’, and the 1869 essay on
‘Endowments’, the sum total would not be much greater.
The Collected works, though, produce a misleading effect. By education Mill
meant whatever helps to make the human being what he is or what he is not (Mill,
1867, p. 217).4 Mill was everywhere and always alert to, obsessed by, the impact
of a society’s educational level on the functioning of its social, economic and polit-
ical institutions, and equally obsessed by the educational impact of those institu-
tions on the people who lived under them. To take one obvious instance, the
doctrine that underlies Mill’s defence of representative government is that the
goodness of a form of government is to be assessed by the degree to which it
makes the most of the existing moral and intellectual capacities of the citizenry,
and promotes their further development (Mill, 1861, p. 392). This is not quite a
pedagogical view of the political process, but not far from it. It is matched by his
discussions of the justification of the avowedly ‘despotic’ rule of Britain over her
colonies. His argument was that ‘Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in
dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means
justified by actually effecting that end’ (Mill, 1859, p. 16). This is the teacher’s
defence of autocracy in the classroom.
Among Mill’s proposals for the improvement of the political process in
Victorian Britain, second only to his advocacy of votes for women in startling his
readers, was his argument for giving extra votes to the better educated. The case
 J. S. Mill on education 655

for plural voting was in part based on the widely perceived need to offset the dan-
gers from the introduction of universal suffrage. That would give the vote to an
uneducated working class which would numerically swamp every other. The
means advocated by Mill to offset the simple weight of numbers were intended to
bring home to everyone the value of education. He agreed that suffrage should be
restricted to the literate, but his further idea that educational attainment should be
acknowledged by conferring additional votes on the better educated was more sur-
prising (Mill, 1861, pp. 470, 473–476). He did not have in mind the kind of privi-
lege that gave the holders of Oxford and Cambridge masters’ or doctoral degrees a
vote for their own, extra, Member of Parliament.5 Mill wanted to encourage intel-
lectual attainment in all social classes: ‘I consider it an absolutely necessary part of
the plurality scheme, that it be open to the poorest individual in the community to
claim its privileges, if he can prove that in spite of all difficulties and obstacles, he
is in point of intelligence, entitled to them’ (Mill, 1861, p. 476).
The same thought animated Mill’s submission to the Northcote-Trevelyan
Committee’s deliberations on the reform of the Home Civil Service.6 A typically
Millian note is struck at the end of his submission where he concedes that ‘It
would be absurd to subject a tide-waiter, a letter-carrier, or a simple copyist to the
same test as the confidential adviser to a Secretary of State,’ but immediately goes
on to say that the tests for applicants for even humble occupations ought not to be
too narrow (Mill, 1855, p. 211). The greater part of his submission was concerned
with senior administrative positions. The reforming tide was running against
patronage appointments, and it was a common complaint that government offices
were misused as a system of outdoor relief for impecunious but well-connected
young men. Mill was strongly opposed to the continuation of a system where aris-
tocratic connections counted for more than competence.7
In his submission to the Northcote-Trevelyan Committee, Mill also deplores
the suggestion that members of the clergy should provide certificates of good char-
acter for candidates for the civil service. In the Inaugural address and Liberty he
denies that religious instruction should play any role in the curriculum: the study
of the facts about religious belief and practice was unexceptionable; the inculcation
of the belief that one or other creed was uniquely right was the business of the sev-
eral churches, not of educational institutions.

Meritocracy and clerisy

Many years earlier, Mill had imbibed Coleridge’s concern for the existence of a
‘clerisy’—a class of the spiritually, intellectually and politically enlightened, who
might give coherence to an incoherent culture, and enlighten a public opinion that
was destined to become increasingly powerful in the new democratising era. Mill
concluded in the 1820s, and believed ever after, that public opinion would rule
the new mass society, no matter what the political institutions were through which
it ruled. If public opinion was destined to rule, the task of the liberal intellectual
was to do what he could to ensure that it was liberal and enlightened, rather than
656 A. Ryan

reactionary and oppressive, or even merely dull and unambitious. The old landed
aristocracy should give way to an aristocracy of merit (Mill, 1831).8 What merit
consisted of was not wholly stable; but this reflected the utopian reach of Mill’s
hopes for the new class rather than incoherence in the ambition itself. Changes of
emphasis also reflected changes in his perception of what dangers needed to be
addressed. In the 1820s and 1830s he thought the public was morally lost, not
knowing quite what to think and whom to believe, whereas by the time he wrote
Liberty, that danger was less salient than the danger of dead-weight uniformity.
Minimally merit was understood as task-oriented competence. Mill unhesitat-
ingly defended the concours system of selection against the existing system of
patronage (Ryan, 1972, pp. 60–62). He went further, however, by distinguishing
the higher policy-making level of the civil service from the executive level, where
competence in following orders and implementing policies was the primary
requirement. The heads of the administrative grade of the civil service should pos-
sess an authority that rested on their concern for the public interest and their
unimpeachable probity, as well as their intelligence and knowledge. His respect for
expertise appeared again when he insisted that it was not the job of parliament to
draft legislation; that required a dispassionate expertise that ‘political men’ did not
possess (Mill, 1861, pp. 428–432). Elsewhere, especially when younger, he dis-
played a hankering after the leadership of those possessed of a poetic sensibility;
poets were to be no longer the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, but the
articulate leaders of public sentiment and thought. He never quite lost the concern
with le pouvoir spirituel that he acquired from the Saint-Simonian missionaries9 and
from Comte.10 But the concern that educated intelligence should be given the
stamp of social approval by being a pre-requisite for the exercise of administrative
power in the Victorian state was straightforward.

Ethology
Mill’s Autobiography—the record of an unusual education—displays some internal
tension. It is both a piece of scientific analysis, in which the author adopts a third-
person stance towards the boy and young man whose upbringing he analyses, and
a Goethean Bildungsroman, where the ‘crisis in my mental history’ is the central
episode. Mill’s account of his transition from being the pupil of ‘men of the eigh-
teenth century’ to becoming his own man mirrors the political drama of the epoch
of the French Revolution: collapse of the ancien re´gime, followed by a period of
upheaval, followed by a new stability. On any reading, however, an interesting
question about education is at the heart of the story. Both teachers and pupils
have been known to wonder how far a student’s attainments are her or his own;
‘is everything I achieve really owed to those who taught me?’ is a not unfamiliar
question. For Mill it was particularly acute, both because of the intensity of the
education he had received from James Mill, and because his mental crisis
coincided with his friendship with disciples of Robert Owen, who held a rigidly
determinist theory of character.11 Knowing that he was widely regarded as a
 J. S. Mill on education 657

‘manufactured man’ who had been ‘made’ by his father and Bentham, Mill was
haunted by the fear that he was trapped in the character they had fashioned for
him. He described this as the spectre of Owenite necessitarianism, the idea that
the educator is omnipotent, and individuals are entirely and unchangeably what
they have been reared to be. Not only in the Autobiography but in the Logic, it is
the ‘Owenite’ threat to the freedom of the will that he discusses (Mill, 1843, VI,
ii, 3, pp. 839–842; 1874a, pp. 134–135). In both works, he provides an answer
that he thinks consistent with universality of causation. In the Autobiography, he
also suggests that his anxiety was short-lived.
Readers who expect Mill’s education to conclude with his rejection of his father
and Bentham, the ‘men of the eighteenth century,’ and a declaration of spiritual
independence might find it surprising that he emanicipated himself from James
Mill only to find a new teacher in Harriet Taylor. That one of the main purposes
of the Autobiography is to explain just this emerges on the first page. Having noted
that ‘in an age of transition of opinions,’ his intellectual development may be of
some interest, he emphasises his
desire to make acknowledgment of the debts which my intellectual and moral develop-
ment owes to other persons; some of them of recognized eminence, others less known
than they deserve to be, and the one to whom most of all is due, one whom the world
had no opportunity of knowing. (Mill, 1874a, pp. 25–26)

Mill never says that he was dependent on Mrs Taylor in the same way as he
unavoidably was on his father, and he plainly was not. There was a good deal of
difference between the teacher–pupil relationship of James and J. S. Mill, and the
marriage of two minds represented by the way he and she learned from each other.
Mill drew a distinction between education in the widest sense of all the influences
that make us who and what we are, and education in the narrower sense of the
instruction we receive in schools and universities, and in his case from his father.
The wider sense is his main concern, and it is all of a piece with his concern
for the formation of character. Mill’s response to Owen’s insistence that a man’s
character was made ‘for him and not by him’ was that we can be agents in our
own remaking. Only a person who wants to refashion his character will actually do
so, and Mill acknowledges like any rational person that we need resources with
which to achieve the remaking. Encouraging and intelligent, but not uncritical,
interlocutors are very effective resources. How valuable a teacher and critic Harriet
Taylor really was is hard to decide. Her influence was enhanced by the fact that
she kept the world very much at bay. Mill’s oldest and closest friends were among
those who thought his praise of his wife was hyperbolic (Mineka and Lindley,
1972, pp. xxiii–xxxiv).
Even if life is a continuous process of education and re-education, some readers
will wonder whether there is meant to be a time when we have finished our educa-
tion. Mill himself invites the question with his rousing peroration at the end of
The subjection of women (Mill, 1869, p. 39). There he insists that nobody wants to
have their affairs managed even by the most benevolent tutor or parent. They want
658 A. Ryan

adult independence. This, of course, is the question at least indirectly answered by

the distinction, drawn by Mill himself at the beginning of his Inaugural address
between the broad, all-inclusive and the narrower senses of education. Mill’s edu-
cation in the narrower sense was more or less complete when he was 14. One
might hope that the education of any of us in the broader sense would be a matter
of lifelong learning. The broader sense of ‘education’ is coterminous with the sub-
ject matter of the discipline that the Logic baptised as ‘ethology or the science of
the formation of character’ (Mill, 1842, p. 869). Whatever influences the intellec-
tual, emotional, political or moral development of the individual is in this broad
sense ‘educational’. Taylor’s impact on Mill was, if the expression is permissible,
ethological rather than instructional.
We should therefore attend to Mill’s concern with, and hopes for, the social
science of ‘ethology’. Mill hoped that ethology would provide a theoretical grasp
of the mechanisms of socialisation, enabling us to control the process more effec-
tively than by unaided intuition. It would thereby facilitate, first, one aspect of
ordinary political socialisation. In the Logic Mill quoted his earlier essay on Cole-
ridge in extenso about the necessary conditions of effective government—one ele-
ment is that the citizens should possess a common sense of national identity (Mill,
1843, pp. 921–924). The issue is the need to reconcile a strong sense of national
identity with the diversity of outlook to which liberals were committed. Mill took
from Alexis de Tocqueville’s description of democratic America the suggestion
that under favourable conditions these two desiderata could be jointly achieved.
Tocqueville had linked the fundamental drives of human nature as he and Mill
understood them to the historical and social conditions in which that human nat-
ure displayed itself in America. In Democracy Tocqueville gestured towards the
thought that this wholly new society needed a new social science to analyse it; Mill
gave the new science a name—ethology—and a description in the Logic.
A related aspect of the role of ethology is that it may illuminate the cultural
conditions of economic and social progress. Mill’s concerns are wide ranging: how
might Ireland be set on the path to rational self-government and prosperity? How
might the Indian sub-continent achieve the same thing? Might an already highly
developed society such as contemporary Great Britain embrace the stationary state
so dreaded by most classical economists, and treat it as an opportunity to measure
well-being, not by tons of steel and coal produced and consumed, but by intangi-
bles such as the spread of industrial self-government, the minimisation of environ-
mental destruction, and the emancipation of women from the burdens of excessive
child-bearing (Mill, 1848, pp. 752–757)? The choices we might make, within the
constraints of physics and political economy could change dramatically if we edu-
cated ourselves to value the right sort of well-being.
Mill regretted that he had been unable to make a greater contribution to the
development of ethology as a social science (Capaldi, 1972). It is difficult to know
what he had hoped for, and what hopes had been dashed. The ‘science of the
formation of character’ covers a lot of territory, and seems to embrace both the
formation of individual character, and therefore child-rearing and education in all
 J. S. Mill on education 659

its aspects—moral, cultural and intellectual, and the formation of ‘national charac-
ter’, a better understanding of which might provide a key to the sorts of progress
with which Mill was so concerned.
It is harder to know what Mill hoped ethology might achieve and what he had
failed to do, in light of his attraction to the historical speculations of the
Saint-Simonians and Comte. He dismissed Comte’s developed system as something
that could ‘only have been invented by a man who had never laughed’ (Mill, 1865,
p. 343). Comte sets out a theory of the three stages of intellectual development, and
this, according to Mill, let in a flood of light on the study of history. But as a good
empiricist Mill could not think that history was governed by laws sui generis that did
not in the last resort rest on individual psychology. For Mill any such holistic theory
of the way in which social, economic, political and intellectual formations give way
to their successors demands decomposition. It must rest on an understanding of
individual human nature and how that first nature is transformed into a second
nature by upbringing.
That introduces the third and most obvious aspect of the importance of ethol-
ogy as a science of socialisation. Utilitarians must be concerned with education for
two reasons. First, if the ultimate end of action is the happiness of those affected
by the action in question, simple effectiveness requires an accurate understanding
of the consequences of our actions, and that can only be acquired by some sort of
educative process. Simple trial and error will teach children a lot, just as it does all
animals. Nonetheless, this is a slow and expensive method of learning, and formal
education is a way to reduce the cost of acquiring the knowledge necessary for
prudent behaviour. The second is moral education. Education is not only about
inculcating in children a proper appreciation of the causal environment in which
they are to pursue the goals they already have, but inducing them to pursue goals
that will ensure both their own happiness and that of everyone with whom they
interact.
This is the point at which ethology intersects with utilitarian ethics, and with
Mill’s ambivalence about the utilitarianism in which he had been reared. Utilitari-
anism presupposes that moral training can ensure that children come to associate
the pursuit of other people’s interests with their own happiness and to associate
failure to pursue other people’s interests with their own unhappiness. This is the
process of giving children a conscience by contriving that they internalise the
approval and disapproval of other people. Mill takes it for granted that dependence
on adults enables the child to acquire the idea that morality depends on an accep-
tance that everyone’s interests should be counted equally, with the perhaps unin-
tended implication that if we were born with a baby’s utter selfishness but the
physical strength of an adult, life might be poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short
for all of us. Moral philosophy, as opposed to moral socialisation, has an educative
role of a different kind. It can affect our conduct much later in the day, when we
reflect on the nature of morality, reconsider which of the convictions we absorbed
as infants we should continue to take seriously, and from which we should try to
free ourselves. Its role should not be under-estimated, since Mill relied on the
660 A. Ryan

possibility of a clearer understanding of the nature of morality both to assist us in

making moral progress, and to help us to draw the essential distinction between
‘mere likings and dislikings’ and the moral judgments strictly speaking on which
the argument of Liberty depends.

Education in the narrow sense

Mill drew the distinction between a wider and a narrower sense of ‘education’ on
which we have been relying in his Inaugural address. Almost uniquely in his works
the Address is a discussion of the curriculum of an educational institution. Before
examining his ideas about university, we should explore Mill’s views on the educa-
tion of children. We are faced with a poverty of material on what children should
learn, but many obiter dicta on why and how they should learn it. In the first place,
however terrifying to many readers his account of what he learned, and at what a
pace he learned it, Mill is insistent in the Autobiography that ‘it was not an education
of cram’ (Mill, 1874a, p. 45). It was in essence tutorial instruction adapted to a child
who began his learning at three, and for practical purposes stopped at 14 (Mill,
1874a, p. 44). Since Mill insisted that he was not especially talented, it is likely that
he thought that many children could have benefited from a similar education. It was
not unusual in emphasising classical languages and literature, mathematics, and a
great deal of history. What was more out of the way was the attention paid from
Mill’s 12th year to subjects such as logic and political economy that would ordinarily
be part of a university education, if part of an education at all.
It is important that it was not an education of cram, since the background to
Mill’s education might lead us to fear that it was. Bentham, James Mill and Francis
Place were very taken with the possibilities of mass public education that seemed to
be opened up by the so-called Bell-Lancaster monitorial system of instruction.
Andrew Bell devised the system in the late 1780s when he was employed by the East
India Company in Madras.12 It was very much a case of necessity being the mother
of invention; competent teachers were impossible to find, and he hit on the idea that
the brighter of his pupils could teach their colleagues.
Bentham took a technical interest in the monitorial system. His Chrestomathia
spells out how to construct a school where one trained teacher could instruct as
many as 1,000 pupils in one vast hall, aided by monitors or teaching assistants
drawn from the pupils, who would themselves be encouraged in their efforts by a
system of payment by results (Bentham, 1817). The monitorial system was advo-
cated ‘for the instruction of the poor’, but Bentham and his allies were inclined to
think that it could provide members of any social class with a superior education
to any that they were likely to receive in the chaotic conditions of turn of the
century public schools (Leach, 1899, pp. 418–423). For its first inventors the
monitorial system promised cheapness by minimising the number of trained teach-
ers required, but also promised effectiveness, since the monitors were themselves
monitored by their superiors and their effectiveness as instructors was tested by
the performance of those they were instructing. Advocates of reform in British and
 J. S. Mill on education 661

American school systems who emphasise varieties of payment by results today

sound very like their predecessors of two centuries ago. The system seems to have
fallen out of favour in the 1830s for reasons not very closely connected with the
monitorial system narrowly understood. At least some schools established by the
rival societies seem to have settled for getting the children to memorise answers to
simple questions and to have paid no attention to whether the children understood
what they had learned. Nothing could have been further from what Bentham
hoped for and James Mill practised.13
In the Mill household, one feature of the Bell-Lancaster system was all too visi-
ble. The young Mill was made responsible for the education of his younger sib-
lings. It was in its way a good device for ensuring that he understood what he had
learned from his father, but since the test of whether he had done an adequate
instructional job was the ability of his sister Wilhelmina to answer James Mill’s
questions, it also meant that if she failed to give a proper account of what she had
learned, it was her brother who went to bed without his supper. In that domestic
context, it had another drawback that James Mill recognised when he wrote to
Francis Place that John could have got on a good deal faster if he had not been
held back by Willie.
Although Mill complains in one of the rejected leaves of the draft Autobiography
that he ‘grew up in the absence of love and the presence of fear’, he does not com-
plain about the content of what he learned as a boy, nor about his father’s meth-
ods (Mill, 1874b, p. 612). Not his instructional methods, but his unreasonably
high expectations, and his ‘asperity of temper’, were at fault. James Mill was a dee-
ply passionate man with a very short fuse, but the impression he gave his son was
that he thought strong emotions were a sort of madness. When Mill subsequently
reflected on his ‘mental crisis’ he decided that his education had failed to cultivate
the passive sensibilities that he now saw as an essential complement to the analyti-
cal skills that he never rejected. It is unclear just what James Mill might have been
able to do to provide the emotional education that his son felt he had been
deprived of. The catalogue of books that occupies so much of the early pages of
the Autobiography includes a great deal of poetry, history and drama. Mill observes
that he was too young to get very much out of a good many of the books he read,
but it was not that he was fed a restricted diet. There are some clues to what was
missing, in Mill’s account of his own attempts at dramatic and poetic composition
in his early teens. His father encouraged him, both because some things were bet-
ter expressed in verse than in prose, and because most people over-estimated the
value of verse and being able to compose poetry would impress them.
Let us turn, then, to Mill’s thoughts on education ‘narrowly conceived’. That
everyone should get an education he took for granted. In Liberty he explains in a
bare couple of sentences that parents who bring children into the world incur as a
minimum the duty to ensure that those children do not become a burden on
others, and therefore to see that they are adequately educated to be economically
self-supporting. Anyone who neglects the education of their children violates the
rights of both the children and the rest of society. This doctrine is enunciated in
662 A. Ryan

the Principles of political economy, too (Mill, 1859, pp. 118–119; 1848, pp. 947–
950). Where the parents cannot pay, the state should subsidise the cost; where the
parents can, they should, as he more than once insists when discussing the broad-
gauge subsidies provided by educational endowments. The state must not monop-
olise the provision of education, however; that would threaten the variety and
innovation that Mill was so anxious to protect. Some continental countries forbade
private citizens to set up schools; Mill was emphatic that this was liberticide. The
state’s role was to make parents do their duty, and to exercise a supervisory role to
ensure that schools and teachers are of an adequate quality. In line with the gen-
eral principle adumbrated in the Principles of political economy that the state may do
things that private individuals may do, where its role is not coercive but educative,
the state certainly may and probably should establish model schools that others
may emulate. The state may also play a useful role in setting national examina-
tions, but these must be tests of factual knowledge. The principle for the manage-
ment of public education is familiar from everything Mill writes. There should be
a centralisation of information and ultimate authority, but as much decentralisa-
tion as is consistent with probity and efficiency in provision. The insistence on
variety rather than uniformity was always at war with the belief that there is, or
should be, one best solution; one of Mill’s virtues was awareness of the fact.
The ‘centralising’ Mill is at his most uninhibited in his essay on Cousin’s report
to the French government on the Prussian system (Mill, 1834). He emphasises the
efficiency of the Prussian government, contrasting its ambition with the feebleness
of the British, which only ever reacted to external pressures. The gulf between the
effectiveness of public education in Prussia and the uselessness of what is provided
in England is emphasised in an extract from his essay on ‘Corporation and Church
Property’ (1833). Mill proposes, uncontroversially enough, that the wishes of those
who endow schools and ecclesiastical establishments should be respected for a
decent period, but that the state has every right to intervene if the institutions
affected depart from their original purpose. Oxford and Cambridge feared that a
view like Mill’s might animate the Royal Commission of 1854 that remodelled the
ancient universities. In Mill’s 1834 essay, however, the passage he quotes is an ad
hominem jibe at the public schools of the day. The second interesting part of the
essay is a long extract from Biber’s lectures on Christian education. The ‘Chris-
tian’ aspect is entirely absent from the passages Mill quotes, although we may
assume that Mill’s readers—Biber’s essay appeared in the Monthly Repository, a
Unitarian journal—knew very well what arguments had gone on about religious
instruction in the Bell and Lancasterian schools. The extracts from Biber’s lectures
defy summary; they consist of horror stories that almost two centuries later still
leave a reader torn between laughter and rage. The children whose attainments are
discussed parrot strings of mathematical calculations, without having the least idea
what they are about; they display a facility in spelling long words, about whose
meaning they have no idea whatever. They can engage in complicated turn-taking,
but what looks like the cooperative solution of a mathematical problem is really
the recitation of nonsense syllables as far as the children are concerned.
 J. S. Mill on education 663

Mill’s enthusiasm for Prussian solutions waned over the next three decades,
but when he gave evidence to the Taunton Commission in 1866, the concerns so
prominent in Liberty were almost invisible. Most endowed schools provided a poor
education; part of the reason was that schoolmasters were paid a fixed stipend out
of the endowment, and therefore had no interest in either increasing the numbers
of their pupils or teaching them better. Payment by results was the only way to
ensure good teaching. Mill acknowledged that there was a shortage of available
instruction in how as well as what to teach, but his emphasis throughout is on the
need for efficiency, for finding ways of putting educational endowments to more
effective use by amalgamating trusts, establishing large schools, and assembling
groups of schools to provide instruction for all ages.14
Three years later, the essay on ‘Endowments’ strikes a very different note. It is
an example of another of Mill’s antithetical themes, in this case, the importance of
not reforming variety out of existence. Against the suggestion that endowments
should be made unlawful, Mill argues both for the need to protect variety and
novelty, and that the state must keep an eye on the application of endowments to
their proper purposes. He observes that parents generally had no real understand-
ing of what education their children needed, and brushes off the common view
that parents had a natural right to determine the content of their children’s teach-
ing. The uncultivated cannot be judges of cultivation; this is a variation on the
argument about education in the Principles of political economy (Mill, 1869, 1848).
His closing thought was that everything said about the need to educate boys
applied to girls.15 Mill does not make a big issue of this theme, either here, or in
Liberty or in the Inaugural address. The subjection of women, on the other hand, is in
large part a treatise on the role of a bad and misguided education in both the
wider and its narrower senses in persuading the enemies of female emancipation
to believe that women are intellectually inferior to men, ‘naturally’ acquiescent in
their dependent status, ‘naturally’ uninterested in politics, and unfitted to eco-
nomic independence. The remedy is an education of both the wider and the nar-
rower sort that does not rest on a conflation of customary or ‘second’ nature with
women’s true nature. His major target in Subjection was in practical terms the
exclusion of women from higher and professional education, but he ends his essays
on ‘Endowments’ with the broader principle as applicable to education at all lev-
els. The founders of Newnham College, Cambridge were as close to being disci-
ples of Mill as his fastidiousness and their own independence of mind would allow
them to be.16
Only in his Inaugural address as Rector of the University of St Andrew’s did
Mill spell out what he thought university students should study. Alexander Bain,
ordinarily devoted to Mill and subsequently his biographer, complained that the
address was far too long, and also that Mill’s programme for liberal education was
absurdly over-demanding. Two decades would hardly be long enough to get a
degree in Mill’s ideal university.17 Mill’s unrealism was to some extent a reflection
of his father’s success 60 years earlier in persuading his son that his abilities were,
if anything, below the average. It may also have reflected a simple lack of
664 A. Ryan

acquaintance with students in their late teens and early 20s. Among the things he
did was to explain why students should read his System of logic: students needed to
understand not only and perhaps not primarily the factual results of the natural
and social sciences but above all the methodological principles underlying all sci-
entific inquiry. On the more narrowly pedagogical front, Mill insisted on keeping
the classics in the centre of a liberal education. This went along with the view that
teaching modern foreign languages was not a task a university should engage in.
Whether Mill really considered that the poetry of Pushkin was no part of a liberal
education or thought that any schoolboy could teach himself Russian it is impossi-
ble to guess.
Many years before, he had complained that the treatment of Plato in the
ancient universities was excessively literary and insufficiently philosophical. When
he reprinted his earlier essays he acknowledged that much that he had said was no
longer true. Oxford and Cambridge had been reformed as they needed to be by
the Royal Commission of 1854.18 In particular, they took ancient philosophy and
political theory seriously. Mill, however, was looking at the future, and arguing
that it would be a mistake to give up the classics in an attempt to found higher
education on the natural sciences rather than the humanities. Mill tried to pre-
empt the argument between T. H. Huxley (for the sciences) and Matthew Arnold
(a defence of literature) with the question ‘why not both?’ No doubt the response
prompts Bain’s complaint that Mill’s curriculum needed two decades, not four
years.
There is more to it than that, though. Mill’s argument for the classics had a
slightly shaky foundation, but a clear purpose. The shakiness of the foundation
was that Mill wanted to argue both that the classics offer us a chance to see our-
selves in a different context and that they confront us with the real otherness of
our predecessors. In the background was Mill’s passion for Athenian democracy.
He was unusual in much preferring Athens to Rome, and in lining up the argu-
ment as the politics of autonomous self-governing citizens versus the carefully
managed, legalistic oligarchy of the Romans (Urbinati, 2002).
Mill’s fear that his own education had been lacking in the cultivation of the
passive sensibilities is perhaps heard in his insistence that in addition to the sci-
ences and the humanities, space must be found for the fine arts. It is not an area
in which Mill showed to advantage on a public platform—his problem, perhaps, is
an excess of earnestness. Instead of doing as either Arnold or Newman would have
done and offering a few persuasive examples of fiction, drama, poetry or painting
for lack of an encounter with which a student’s life would be thinner or duller, he
falls back on the obvious but not very relevant fact that many songs have had an
impact on politics and history. Those who have never had to address a Scottish
university in the role of Rector should perhaps say nothing about the choice of
‘Scots wha hae’ as a telling example. Mill, of course, knew very well what he could
have said, but it may be that the man who could not read Shelley aloud, because
of the emotions aroused, thought himself obliged to rein in his deeper feelings
about the importance of an aesthetic education. The same is perhaps true of his
 J. S. Mill on education 665

unexceptionable but predictable views on moral education; the familiar insistence

that no sect could use the university to instil an orthodoxy does not lead on to any
suggestions about the positive moral training a university might do. One must not
complain; the upsurge of the desire to cross class barriers and do something
directly for the disadvantaged which led to such ventures as the University Settle-
ments in the East End of London was a dozen years in the future.
Wrenching Mill’s Address out of its historical context is not fruitful. The 21st-
century reader may be amused by the certainty with which Mill insists that it is no
part of a university’s task to provide professional education. But the 19th-century
notion of what constituted a member of a profession, and what doctors, lawyers
and clergy needed to know then, is dramatically far from the understanding of
such a reader. Take the example of Harvard: what Mill would have recognised as
a university is the College of Arts and Sciences which enrols about 6,000 under-
graduates and half as many graduates. But beyond that, graduate programmes in
public health, medicine, nursing, education, divinity, law and business bring the
total to around 20,000 enrolled students; beyond them there are students in
continuing education. The University Mill addressed had around 150 students, all
undergraduates, and a dozen professors. If this essay has occasionally seemed to
complain that Mill said too little about ‘narrow education’, that is to say what and
how students are to be taught in schools and universities, it seems right to redress
the balance in a last sentence. Mill was a great philosopher and political theorist, a
liberal, a feminist and a reformer; not only did he write a great deal about educa-
tion in its broader sense, reading him today is as important an educational experi-
ence as a century and a half ago (Skorupski, 2008).

Notes
1. Mill’s Principles were taught in Oxford until 1919, when Alfred Marshall’s Principles of eco-
nomics 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 edu-
cation 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, 1984, 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, 1972, pp. 63–81.
666 A. Ryan

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 scep-
tical 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) indepen-
dently 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 unli-
kely that Dickens had read Bentham, who was anyway opposed to rote learning (Field-
ing,1956).
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, cam-
paigner for the right of women to practise medicine, supporter of women’s rights; her hus-
band 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-edu-
cational 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 biogra-
pher 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).

Notes on contributor

Alan Ryan teaches at Princeton and is Emeritus Professor of Political Theory at

the University of Oxford. He has written extensively on J.S. Mill, Bertrand
Russell and John Dewey, and is the author of Liberal anxieties and liberal
education (1998).
 J. S. Mill on education 667

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