Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…But on the topic of children, what would Mill say, specifically? I guess he could have talked about it if he wanted to, but I don’t know if he was. In today’s world, we send them to school. They’re there for 8 hours a day. Most of the time, it’s probably wasted, and we just use a lot of coercion on them. We don’t need to. How would he think about this issue? There’s Mill’s own upbringing, which was quite strict and by current standards, oppressive, but apparently extremely effective in making Mill smart. So I think Mill very much thought that kids should be induced to learn the classics, but he also stressed they needed free play of the imagination in a way that he drew from German and also British Romanticism, and he wanted some kind of synthesis of the two. But by current standards, Mill, I think, still would be seen as a meanie toward kids. But he was progressive by the standards of his own day. Do you buy the arguments about aristocratic tutoring for people like Mill? And there’s many other cases like this, but since they were kids, they were taught by one-on-one tutors, and that explains part of their greatness.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.