Welcome to George H. Smith's Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute, narrated by James Foster. Critics of State Education Part 1 Joseph Priestley The distinguished historian Bernard Balin, writing in 1960, argued that books on the history of American education had become a form of initiation for those in the teaching profession, a means to illustrate the purportedly glorious achievements of public schools. Such texts were the patristic literature of a powerful academic ecclesia and the entire field displayed the exaggeration of weakness and extravagance of emphasis that are the typical results of sustained inbreeding. This situation changed dramatically during the 1970s which saw an outpouring of revisionist studies on the history of education by Michael Katz, David Tyack, Clarence Carrier, Paul Violas, Colin Greer, and others. Some of the most important of these revisionist works, such as those by Joel Spring and E.G. West, were written from a libertarian perspective. This new wave of historians demolished the rosy picture of state schooling drawn by conventional historians such as Elwood Cumberley, which depicted the victory of state schooling in America as a triumph of humanitarian reform over the reactionary critics of state education. The revisionists presented a different perspective. The battle for tax-supported compulsory schooling was a recurring story of political power, social control, and the growth of a powerful unresponsive bureaucracy. Revisionists argued that the welfare of children, such as teaching literacy skills, was a relatively minor concern of those reformers who pushed for increased state intervention in education. Instead, 19th-century reformers had various social goals foremost in mind, such as Americanizing immigrants, Christianizing Catholics, teaching a proper respect for government and inculcating the values of the status quo. Revisionist works on the history of education are of uneven value, to say the least. Some blame the problems of American education on capitalism, that ever popular boogeyman of restless intellectuals. For example, in schooling in Capitalist America, 1976, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis throw everything except the proverbial kitchen sink at the feet of capitalism, including drugs, suicide, mental instability, personal insecurity, predatory sexuality, depression, loneliness, bigotry, and hatred. This is alarming news indeed, but it is at least good to know that such problems do not exist in non-capitalistic societies. Only academics could get away with this kind of Marxian claptrap. Even among the better revisionist works, we find a troubling omission. Most pay scant attention, if any, to the libertarian critics of state schooling who flourished during the 18th and 19th centuries. Yet these advocates of free market education, or voluntariists as they called themselves in 19th century Britain, predicted that governmental control of education would result in precisely those problems that revisionists later complained about. Voluntariists received little attention in traditional histories of education. Some of the most important figures were never mentioned at all, and to the extent they were discussed, they were portrayed in a highly unfavorable light. Those voluntariists who warned against the pitfalls of state education and who desired an educational free market instead were summarily dismissed as doctrinaire advocates of laissez-faire, who stubbornly resisted social improvement, especially for the lower classes. All this despite the fact that many voluntariists were innovators in education. They were frequently the educational progressives of their day, so to speak, who established and supported schools funded by voluntary means that were free to those who could not afford to pay. The most important voluntariist of the 18th century was the Englishman Joseph Priestley, 1733-1804, an accomplished and highly regarded amateur scientist who is best known for his discovery of oxygen. He also invented soda water. Priestley, a minister who called himself a liberal Unitarian, was one of the most remarkable polymaths of the 18th century. A friend of Benjamin Franklin and other leading scientists, Priestley wrote over 150 books on an astonishing range of subjects, including philosophy, science, theology, grammar, European history, the history of Christianity, and new methods of education. Priestley also wrote one of the finest and most consistent libertarian tracks of the 18th century, an essay on the first principles of government, 1771, which included a previously published piece remarks on Dr. Brown's Code of Education. It is here that we find Priestley's trenchant criticism of state education. Dr. John Brown was a popular author who wrote several books bemoaning the supposed decadence of English culture. In Thoughts on Civil Liberty, Brown repeatedly invoked the Spartan model of uniform state education as a remedy for England's problems. Priestley, who believed that diversity and competition are essential preconditions of progress, most notably the progress of knowledge, would have none of this. Sparta was the worst government we read of in the ancient world, a government which secured to a man the fewest of his natural rights and of which a man who had a taste for life would least of all choose to be a member. Priestley continued, while the arts of life were improving in all the neighboring nations, Sparta continued the nearest to her pristine barbarity, and in the space of near a thousand years, which includes the whole period in which letters and the arts were the most cultivated in the rest of Greece, produced no one poet, orator, historian, or artist of any kind. The convulsions of Athens where life was in some measure enjoyed and faculties of body and mind had their proper exercise and gratification were, in my opinion, far preferable to the savage uniformity of Sparta. Priestley understood that there must exist some fixed rules in every society, but as an advocate of limited government, he maintained that governmental institutions, which ultimately rely on force, should be kept to the minimum required to maintain the tolerable order of society. Within this legal framework, all social institutions, including religious, commercial, and educational activities, should be left free to develop spontaneously. It is an universal maxim that the more liberty is given to everything which is in a state of growth, the more perfect it will become. In the preface to his history and present state of electricity, 1767, Priestley maintained that the history of science provides the best example of the progress of human knowledge. It is here that we see the human understanding to its greatest advantage, grasping the noblest objects and increasing its own powers by acquiring to itself the powers of nature and directing them to the accomplishments of its own views, whereby the security and happiness of mankind are daily improved. Like many Enlightenment thinkers, Priestley believed that knowledge would continue to progress indefinitely so long as proper conditions were maintained. But unlike those many Enlightenment thinkers who recommended state education, Priestley regarded educational freedom as essential to progress. As he put in an essay on the first principles of government, if we argue from the analogy of education to other arts, which are most similar to it, we can never expect to see human nature, about which it is employed, brought to perfection. But in consequence of indulging unbounded liberty and even caprice in conducting it, from new and seemingly irregular methods of education, perhaps something extraordinary and uncommonly great, may spring. At least there would be a fair chance of such productions, and if something odd and eccentric should now and then arise from this unbounded liberty of education, the various business of human life may afford proper spheres for such eccentric geniuses. Priestley continued with another attack on the Spartan model. His preference for the Athenian model of free market education is clear. Education, taken in its most extensive sense, is properly that which makes the man. One method of education, therefore, would only produce one kind of man, but the greater excellence of human nature consists in the variety of which it is capable. Instead then of endeavouring by uniform and fixed systems of education to keep mankind always the same, let us give free scope to everything which may bid fair for introducing more variety. The various character of the Athenians was certainly preferable to the uniform character of the Spartans, or to any uniform national character whatever. Is it not universally considered as an advantage to England that it contains so great a variety of original characters? And is it not on this account preferred to France, Spain, or Italy? Uniformity is the characteristic of the brute creation. Priestley's opposition to state education was based on more than abstract theory. In Priestley's day the established educational institutions of Oxford and Cambridge had degenerated to the point where they incurred severe criticisms by some leading British intellectuals. In his Memoirs of My Life and Writings, Edward Gibbon, author of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, one of the greatest historical works ever written, noted that he spent fourteen months at Magdalen College, one of the constituent colleges at the University of Oxford. They proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life. According to Gibbon at Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have for these many years given up altogether even the pretense of teaching. Incredible as the fact may appear, I must rest my belief on the positive and impartial evidence of a master of moral and political wisdom who had himself resided at Oxford. Dr. Adam Smith assigns as the cause of their indolence that instead of being paid by voluntary contributions which would urge them to increase the number and to deserve the gratitude of their pupils, the Oxford professors are secure in the enjoyment of a fixed stipend without the necessity of labour or the apprehension of control. As academic tenure caused Oxford and Cambridge to stagnate, competitive Scottish universities developed into the most renowned universities in Europe, attracting many of the best professors and students from Europe and America. In England, dissenters or non-conformists, that is, Protestants who refused to subscribe to the thirty-nine articles of the Anglican Church, were banned from attending Oxford and Cambridge. This proved to be a blessing in disguise given the torpid condition of those universities. Dissenters established their own schools known as dissenting academies and these private institutions became the most innovative schools in England, often teaching the latest developments in science. The irony of educational outlaws surpassing established universities in educational quality was not lost on Joseph Priestley, who taught at Warrington Academy in Liverpool for six years, beginning in 1761. As Priestley wrote in a letter to the English Prime Minister, shutting the doors of the universities against us and keeping the means of learning to yourselves, you may think to keep us in ignorance and so less capable to give you disturbance, but, though ignominously and unjustly excluded from the seats of learning and driven to the expedient of providing at a great expense for scientific education among ourselves, we have had this advantage, that our institutions being formed in a more enlightened age are more liberal and therefore better calculated to answer the purpose of a truly liberal education. Thus, while your universities are pools of stagnant water secured by dams and mounds, ours are like rivers which, taking their natural course, fertilize a whole country. In my first libertarianism.org essay, I discussed how the libertarian appeal to liberty of conscience was extended to spheres other than religion. This is what we find in Priestley's call for educational freedom. As he wrote in familiar letters addressed to the inhabitants of Birmingham, 1790, I see no reason why any one man should be compelled to pay for the religion of another man, any more than for his instruction in grammar, philosophy, or anything else. Thank you for listening to Excursions. To learn more about libertarian philosophy and history, visit www.Libertarianism.org.


Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with an expert on the front lines of COVID-19. So nice to have you today, Frances Dubey from Zen Graphene. How are you? Hi, Tracy. I'm great. How have you been? Well, I'll tell you, we're going to start by just talking. I know COVID-19, it's impacted all of us. Let's talk about how Zen Graphene has been utilizing your technology to basically not only be on the front lines of COVID-19, but help us all get back to work sooner. Thanks, Tracy, for that. Yeah, we've been working hard at this since March, basically when our lab opened, we've been focused on this solution to the problem. How can we get better protection for our frontline workers? How can we improve HVAC filters? And we've come up with a coding now that can be applied to masks and filter membranes to pretty much deactivate the COVID-19 virus. We've had work done on this and it's been proven at 99% plus efficacy through the impact facility, which is a BSL level three lab in London, Ontario. So we know it works really well. We know it's got staying power because we had data at 35 days and we're going to keep working on that longevity study. And we know that after 35 days, this is still 99% effective at killing the COVID-19 virus. So we're very excited by this project. We're looking now at other opportunities to scale up our production. We've had calls from over two dozen enterprises across the world. Multiple countries are interested in this. So the demand is there. I mean, we're in the middle of this pandemic. So everybody's looking for a way to have a leg up on this situation we're in as a world. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Francis. We look forward to seeing what you guys announce next. Thank you so much. The next few months will be very exciting.


I have this new oven thermometer. You can tell it's an oven thermometer because it says oven thermometer here on the label. What this is all about is I did try to order an oven thermometer of AliExpress and they sent me this instead and unfortunately despite proof that what they had sent me was in fact a multimeter they refused to refund me. So it only cost about three francs. So I thought it would be interesting or at least amusing just take a look at this and see how bad a three franc multimeter or as the manual says sunlight tester actually is. So what do you get? Well it's a fairly shoddy analog multimeter with fixed probes that are actually commendably pointy. That glare is in a very annoying place. A nice big analog meter. This rotary dial selects functions. You've got DC voltmeter. I don't know what that is. It says DC volts null. AC voltmeter off a capacitance and resistance meter. I'm not quite sure how that works. I could always look up the manual but I can't be bothered. The construction is a fairly shoddy single box held together by one screw. So let me just take the screw out well. Not much. Though interestingly the retaining strap which should be here was inside. That was very strange. In terms of actual components the battery is supposed to go here. Battery does not appear to be present. I'm not very surprised the battery is probably the single most valuable thing here but that means that the capacitance and resistance meter wouldn't work. There is a fuse. If you use this on anything where the fuse might blow you're in a world of pain. It says 5 amps 250 volts. Whether that's true or not I don't know. There is a single PCB held in by clips that shows the meter motion. It's not actually showing up on camera. You can see the coil there. The meter might be possibly useful. This is the potentiometer for the resistance adjustment. And there is all the works of an analog multimeter. Not a lot really. The way it will work is that this switch element this rotates moving these copper contacts. The copper contacts will then bridge these circular tracks and close particular circuits. That will connect the probe's output here through an assortment of resistors to the meter itself. To measure current it will just put the meter in series. With this to measure voltage it will put a big resistor across these and then measure the current through that resistor. So what is there here that we can actually salvage? Probably not very much. The most valuable bit is probably the box which may make a reasonable project box. But let me just disconnect the power wires. The power for these meters is used by the capacitance and the resistance meter. Oh sorry those weren't the power wires that was the meter itself. The power wires connect to here I believe. Yeah that's that three volt label in a second. This is connected to the lower terminal. If you notice these two terminals the top one is labeled plus and the bottom one is labeled minus and the red wire is connected to minus. So that frees up the PCB from the actual box itself. Let's just get that out of the way. So yeah that is in fact the negative connection. You see it is labeled minus here in the battery compartment. But they have used a red wire instead of a black wire which is very naughty. So if I'm actually going to use this again I do not want that. So let's just take these wires off put them back on the other way round. Because having miscolored wires like that means that the next person to use this box is invariably going to hook the wires up the wrong way round and explode something. So let's take a look at this PCB. Well we've got a couple of resistors on the back. Three in fact and a few bits of wire though I suspect that the most interesting bit is going to be the these probes. Because they are actually commendably sharp. It does say here 1000 volts. But if you try to put a thousand volts across these then I think you deserve everything that's coming to you. So can I desolder these? Yeah they are not actually far from done very well. They are multi-strand copper. I think copper. They might they might be something else like tin aluminium. But they did desolder reasonably well so I suspect they are actually thin and shoddy copper. But they will actually come in useful. I can easily put some like banana plugs on these and use them as oscilloscope probes. So that will come in a little bit handy. There's the potentiometer which it says is a 10k either log or linear I don't know. That will come off and go into a parts draw. That came off far too easily. I don't think that was actually soldered down properly. You can actually see from these pads here that the solder only goes part way around the pad. It's supposed to like cover it. So we have a pot. The fuse holder might come in handy. I think I've actually got a number of these but these are actually soldered down reasonably well. So these will be a pig to take off or not. I think that's very thin metal and it's not actually soaking up much heat. So what can I actually do with this? Well the two interesting bits are the meter which is like a perfectly serviceable if very cheap moving needle meter with a commendably big screen I have to say. And the and this switch now it would actually be fairly straightforward to isolate the various tracks here and use this as a selector switch. It's got a decent number of positions. It would just be a matter of either scratching off the track or more likely just removing and discarding some of these surface mount components which would then isolate the tracks. For example this position here connects together these two pads and these two pads. So removing this here and then connecting a like ground to this would actually allow me to easily select various things. The obvious thing to do is just feed all these into a microcontroller. In terms of the inner and outer rings the outer ring is just simple single positions. So I'm just looking at this where there is nothing. That's the off position isn't it? Off is here so the board must go in this way around. So in that position none of these contacts are actually touching copper anywhere. For the inner tracks we've actually got four pairs of contacts so that these two, these two, these two and these two. So the inner two right the inner two is simple power on off so the only position where they are not connected is in the off position. Right in fact it goes this way around. Okay so you've got off on this side so these things are actually connected down to the resistance section. So this ring has probably got to do with enabling the resistance meter circuitry. Interesting that there's a track here. Ah right it connects these two together so this will be some kind of common signal likewise here that is then connected to one of these other things. Now you notice there is in fact a connection across there. I would need to actually sit down and map all this but I can imagine this being of use. The inner two rings can be used to power up a microcontroller. The outer two rings for selecting one of several GPIOs maybe although there's enough of these wiring and GPIO up to each one will be a waste. You'd want to use some kind of port multiplier. Anyway enough of that. What can we do with the meter? Ha drop proof it says. I'm sure that this hard plastic thing is drop proof in much the same way that Faberge eggs are drop proof. Let's take a look at this meter. This is a standard moving coil meter. It's part of a whole world of analog electronics I'm not really very good at but there's this moving coil here around a magnet. Current is induced in the coil that causes torque against the magnet. The needle is fastened to the coil. Now as far as I'm aware these things measure current not voltage and they're also very delicate so they measure small amounts of current and if you put too much through it the coil burns out and is now useless. So I want a source of low current electricity to try this with and turns out multimeters are a very good source of this. In resistance mode which I see this has been left on I hope the battery hasn't gone flat it will generate a current limited voltage that does seem to be working and this is used to it measures the voltage drop and that's used to measure the resistance whatever you connect it to so there we go. You can see the coil move or less. So the tiny amount of current this thing is producing is getting most of a full deflection so I need to figure out how much that is. Here I have my real multimeter hooked up in series to this so by connecting this one up this by the way was my old multimeter before I went to this digital one I see a current of about 40 microamps that's not a lot. So if I want to work the meter from something that takes say five volts I need to make sure that the current going through the meter at five volts doesn't go above about 50 microamps. So time to do some maths. Simple resistive devices like this meter are governed by Ohm's law which is v equals i r saying that the voltage dropped across a resistor is equal to the current times the resistance. We actually want to know the resistance given the voltage and the current so if we write it like this v i r in a triangle this gives a really easy way to reform this into other things. We want to know the resistance we have the voltage and the current so that is r equals v over i so our voltage target voltage is about five volts and our current is 50 microamps so that should be a fairly simple division. Pulling out the calculator it's five divided by 50 e minus six is 100,000 ohms or 100 k so if we put a 100 k resistor in series with the meter and then apply five volts across that we should get a current of 50 microamps which should be enough to move the needle. I've soldered on a 100 k resistor in series of meter from my stash and hooked it up to my bench power supply it's currently set to 20 millivolts let's turn this on nothing happens which is good so let's crank the voltage up let's turn that up to up there it's moving that's one volt okay this means we're running roughly the right range so two volts three volts four volts five volts excellent and we are seeing more or less full deflection five four three two one zero moving very slowly good i'm quite relieved i was a little worried that i'd get my math wrong and burn the meter out so that's great the reason i've done this is it has occurs to me that this might actually make quite a nice little project box we have the selector switch and we figured out that the PCB here can be used both as an on-off switch and to detect individual settings and we have the meter which works nicely at five volts inside we've got a battery compartment for two double A batteries giving three volts there's actually quite a lot of spare space it's moderately thick the meter here seems to be the highest part of it there's in fact a special little meter lid here to protect the moving parts but there's space here including these two little standoffs and space around here on which a PCB can be put a small one there's this thing here which was used for the zero ohm calibration this plugs into this pot that goes through from underneath and this could be very easily swapped out for a shaft encoder thing i've got one there's plenty of space for putting more buttons on and so on but it occurs to me that if i've wanted to build a meter for something this would be a very useful box for doing it on for example a wi-fi signal strength tester select channel here and it displays it on the analog meter i would want to change the label this plastic lid should just clip on like so and this reveals in a nice bit of detail the actual meter you can see here's the needle attached to the coil it's all very delicate this thing here is used for adjusting zero position there's a thing here that drops a pin into that slot and you can then move it backwards and forwards and that will recalibrate the meter i'm not going to fiddle with that the label here is under this so replacing it would be a little bit fraught because you end up having to remove part of the meter which as i said is very delicate but it would be easy enough just to stick a label on top here obviously under the needle so i think that this is going to go into a draw in case i ever have a project that wants a meter because it's going to actually go back on again yes it does because i think this could be quite useful if i can figure out how it all goes back together again of course that way up and so i think i will keep my nice new oven thermometer it will come in useful if ever i need a project that involves making a meter of some description because it is a meter it's got all the user interface bits there's a decent amount of space inside that's even this compartment here which could be used to put more stuff in i can imagine like a 3d printed thing that goes here with sockets in it i don't know at all what i would actually do with it at this point but it'll go into the parts box to come in useful at some point in the future anyway i hope you've enjoyed this rather shambolic tour through the innards of a very cheap multimeter i should add this is get essentially the same thing except slightly better made it will be a single pcb meter adjustment pot probes there's nothing particularly exotic about this these could well have worked perfectly well as a cheap multimeter but i've already got one and i have a much better but still quite cheap multimeter so i hope you enjoyed this video as always please let me know what you think in the comments