How Progressives Transformed Edmund Burke into a Supporter of Public Education

Burke never said that ‘education is the cheap defense of nations.’

‘E ducation is the cheap defense of nations.” This statement graces old books of aphorisms and is engraved on more than one public-school building. It is a kind of creed for public education.

It intends to say that a nation need not focus on robust police forces, standing armies, and heavy-handed judicial systems for peace and security. A simple investment in public education will protect the nation from faction, enthusiasm, and violence.

Edmund Burke, Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher, is given attribution for these words, for example, here and here. Burke is best known for his Reflections on the Revolution in France, where he disapproved of radical reform, triggering debates with Thomas Paine and others.

It is thus perplexing to hear that Burke came to endorse public education. At the time, neither England nor Ireland could lay claim to a state-supported education system. To call for one would have been radical in a way that seems at odds with Burke’s intellectual reputation.

The explanation for the puzzling quotation is simple: Burke never wrote it, never intimated it, and I dare say never thought it. He wrote something much different.

A correction is in order, and it reveals a troubling behavior in public discourse and even in scholarship. Big-government advocates usurp small-government thinkers to their causes, and intellectual history becomes homogenized.

The Original Burke

The passage comes in Reflections. Burke writes, “The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprize is gone!”

Not quite the same thing, is it? One might even question whether this is the source, but at least one editor agrees with me that it is.

Here it is in context:

The age of chivalry is gone.—That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprize is gone!

The passage has nothing to do with learning to read and write, and certainly not with the government production of such learning.

It has to do with culture. Burke is lamenting the loss of cultural institutions at the hands of the revolutionaries of “light and reason.” Dignity, grace, trust, and loyalty — these persisted in French institutions until the revolution. Such traits were a cultural inheritance that encouraged gentleness in the social order and in governance. Right or wrong, this is a truly Burkean position.

Initial commentators understood him in this light. They described his cheap defense of nations as something along the lines of the blessings of chivalry, nobility, military honors, national feeling, titular distinctions, or possibly the engrossment or existence of a standing army.

They also understood that this adherence to tradition was antithetical to state-run education.

Indeed, Burke warned of “philosophical fanatics” and “partizans” in the schools. He feared the ruin of religion and “a most dangerous shock to the state.” He predicted school officials “supporting their power, and destroying their enemies.”

How, then, did Burke become the adopted champion of public education?

The New Burke

Thomas Chalmers was a Scottish minister and academic who was one of the most influential reformers of his time. He expanded the spiritual and educational outreach of the Church of Scotland, and he ultimately played a central role in the schism that led to the Free Church of Scotland in 1843.

He was also a bit of a charlatan — or at least a politician.

Chalmers invents the new quote in Burke’s name on August 4, 1827. He was addressing the University Commissioners of Scotland, trying to win greater investment into education. He ends his argument by showing that even the conservative Edmund Burke would agree to the venture.

Chalmers must have pleased himself with this invention. In his continued advocacy, he repeats it — in 1832, then again in 1835 and 1838. His praise for Burke also grows. Burke ends up writing “one of the weightiest of those sentences, or oracular sayings, which have ever fallen from any of the seers or sages of our land.”

The false version starting popping up everywhere. Not just in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, but also in Philadelphia, Boston, and Macon, Ga. Burke is no longer the mad “Quixote” and “trumpeter” of conservatism, but now a “splendid man” in Ohio, an “eminent writer” in Baltimore, and the “oracular Burke” in Edinburgh.

By 1835, Chalmers is the first to call this invention a “memorable aphorism.” Others follow suit. By 1852, it appears in books of famous quotes and aphorisms. Through combinations of deceit and ignorance, Burke was transformed into an honorary ambassador for public education.

A Parallel

Did Chalmers simply make a mistake that others were all too eager to accept? Likely not. The case of Adam Smith on education draws a parallel.

It turns out that Chalmers attempted the same transformation of Adam Smith. He had originally seen Smith as opposed to state involvement in education, and then in 1827 (the same year he transformed Burke) he suddenly saw Smith’s critical assessment of endowed schools as designed to promote government funding of schooling — “at the expense of the dereliction of his own favourite principle.”

Chalmers did not succeed in affecting the narrative of Smith, who remained largely viewed as an advocate for charitable solutions and private schooling throughout the 19th century. But Progressive Era scholars and their intellectual inheritors would take up Chalmers’s playbook. We now have a large body of literature that ignores or downplays Smith’s compelling criticism of public education, avoids tracing its obvious philosophical roots, and conceals or perverts his final adjudication for charity and private solutions.

Let the True Burke Get His Say

In 1839, Lord Brougham wrote of the fake aphorism that Burke “crystallized this drop of truth, and sent it out to remain in men’s memories for ever.” The aphorism has, indeed, enjoyed a long and adventurous afterlife. It “trends” wherever and whenever education reform is being argued — in Australia, Japan, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, and so forth. Behold the new diaspora of Burke!

In the process, the fabulous Burke is also ever-evolving. Education/popular instruction/public schools/religious education/Christianity is the cheap/best/chief/cheapest defense of nations/a democratic nation/commonwealth. Take your pick! The honest details have never mattered.

After so much abuse, it seems appropriate to let the true Burke get his say. “Barbarism with regard to science and literature, unskillfulness with regard to arts and manufactures” — this strong language indicates what he actually felt would come from public education.

Today, we live in a world where educated people — in the search of cheap forms of persuasion — readily ascribe to an author words he never wrote and thoughts he never had. Is it fair to call this educated behavior barbaric and unskillful? If so, then there really was an “oracular Burke.” And, to make things perfectly clear, Burke believed that “the moment that Government appears at market, all the principles of market will be subverted.”