Liberty and Prosperity
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Liberty and Prosperity’
Schools inspector Edmond Holmes expressed frustration with those who think that society at large owes them unthinking obedience.
‘Dogma’ is merely a Greek word meaning ‘teaching,’ but the word has acquired a negative connotation, associated with narrow-mindedness and invincible ignorance. However, the jibe is often undeserved. A dogmatist is not the man who believes passionately that other people are dangerously wrong, and sets himself apart from them; as Edmond Holmes said, he is the man who sets himself over them.
John Adams, the second President of the USA, told army officers in Massachusetts that the Constitution he had helped to draw up could not guarantee them liberty.
On October 11th, 1798, President John Adams told officers of a Massachusetts militia brigade that the United States’ historic Constitution (which he had helped to write) was never about centralised Power. Unlike politicians over in Europe, he said, he would not promise to conjure up order out of a selfish, thoughtless and pleasure-seeking society.
Events in Italy and Austria seemed to be bringing the day ever closer when a European democracy would vote herself into oblivion.
The United Kingdom is not a simple democracy; she is a democratic and parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Just as well, thought Irish historian and Unionist MP William Lecky. The kind of democracy they had on the Continent pandered to grievance groups, extremists and slick campaign strategists, and he feared it would soon become a screen for dictatorship.
As William Lecky watched the rapid spread of socialism across the European Continent, he was struck by a powerful sense of déjà vu.
For William Lecky, a contemporary of Karl Marx, ‘Socialism’ meant a politics in which the things that were properly the responsibility of individuals and families were snatched away and dictated by the supposedly wiser Government. Such a politics, he said, was no different to the tyrannies of the past; it merely replaced the arrogance of king or sultan with the arrogance of the politburo.
Edmond Holmes, a former inspector of schools, reported back to the Board of Education on a pioneering system being developed in Italy.
Edmond Holmes resigned from the Board of Education in 1911, after his trenchant critique of fellow Elementary school inspectors leaked out. He took the opportunity to visit Maria Montessori’s pioneering schools in Italy, and prepared a paper for the Board (his experience was still highly valued there) in which he urged them to lose no time in adopting her methods.
Norman Leys complained that policymakers in Africa were interested more in training loyal and industrious workers than in nurturing free peoples.
In 1924, Dr Norman Leys (1875-1944) recorded his alarm at the direction that schools were taking in Kenya (then part of British East Africa), where chiefs’ sons were being indoctrinated for colonial government and everyone else trained for maximum productivity. But an Englishman’s prized liberties, he said, had not come from toiling in the State’s anthills; they had come from wandering in the fields of great literature.