David Davis
The idea for this essay has been fermenting gently here for some time. But it was earlier today when I passed the local 6th Form College, idly scanning the slanting groups of lounging youths and wenches, as you do, for any who I might recognise in a professional capacity. It is also pleasant to note that a high number of them were smoking quite openly while sitting on the front wall of the college, in contravention of the strictures of the Head Teacheress. The prospects locally for liberty might thereby be enhanced.
Libertarians would all or nearly all agree that a principal weapon of the Enlightenment, and a major guarantor of widespread and well-understood individual liberty (and liberties) which operates properly in very large and complex civilisations, must be education. The ability to understand _how to learn_, coupled with how to think critically, must be based on a sound classical liberal grounding.
Now then: these days, the British State enjoins us all to want at least “50%” of “young people” to enter higher education. We are told that this is a good thing: it is good for “skills”, whatever those might be: it is good “for Britain to be able to compete on a world stage in the global market of whatever, in our modern young technological society”: it is “good for employers”: no doubt it is also good for “children, young people and hard-working-families”. I can only guess that the State wants also to generate as many significant taxpayers as it can too, and sees the pressganging of students into (very many) universities as a way of churning out such people faster than they fall off the conveyor-belt of near-death “NHS terminal care pathways”.
To bring this about, the Enemy Class – knowing in its heart where it came from and wanting to propagate by a cloning process as well as sex, has conspired to magic out of thin air many, many Universities: this was where originally one, then two, then after some centuries about 20 more, existed. I cannot tell how many there now are in the UK – probably more than 100 for sure, perhaps more.
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