Saturday, June 5, 2004 The evidence shows ... that the majority of people in the first half of the nineteenth century did become literate (in the technical sense) largely by their own efforts. Moreover, if the government played any role at all in this sphere it was one of saboteur! As long as the first few years of the nineteenth century it was a subject for government complaint that the ordinary people had become literate. For the government feared that too many people were developing the "wrong" uses of literacy by belonging to secret "corresponding societies" and by reading seditious pamphlets. Far from subsidising literacy, the early nineteenth-century English governments placed severe taxes on paper in order to discourage the exercise of the public's reading and writing abilities. -- E.G. West, Education and the State [1965]

FFF Blog (Updated Today) Freedom Biographies Immigration Project Upcoming FFF Appearances

Drug War News Economy News Gun Control News Law News

FREEDOM BIOGRAPHY: E.G. WEST Edwin George West: [1922-2001] AIMS Obituary -- Professor Edwin G. West E.G. West Centre The Spread of Education before Compulsion: Britain and America in the Nineteenth Century by E.G. West Independent Institute Education With and Without the State by E.G. West School Choices The Rise of the State in Education [PDF] by E.G. West E.G. West Centre The Public School System and the Deterioration of Choice, Efficiency, and Free Exercise [PDF] by E.G. West E.G. West Centre E.G. West Curriculum Vitae [PDF] E.G. West Centre FFF NEEDS YOUR SUPPORT Our Media-Outreach Campaign by Jacob G. Hornberger Future of Freedom Foundation PREVIOUS BIOGRAPHIES Juan Bautista Alberdi Benjamin M. Anderson Frederic Bastiat William Blackstone Peter Thomas Bauer Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk John Bright James M. Buchanan Richard Cobden Ralph Waldo Emerson John T. Flynn Milton Friedman Garet Garrett F.A. Harper Friedrich A. Hayek Henry Hazlitt Patrick Henry David Hume W.H. Hutt John Jay Thomas Jefferson William Stanley Jevons Israel M. Kirzner Rose Wilder Lane John Locke Bernard de Mandeville Clarence Manion George Mason H.L. Mencken Carl Menger John Stuart Mill Ludwig von Mises Albert J. Nock Edmund A. Opitz Thomas Paine Ron Paul Ayn Rand Leonard E. Read David Ricardo Murray N. Rothbard Julian Simon Adam Smith Lysander Spooner William Graham Sumner Henry David Thoreau Marie-Ésprit Léon Walras George Washington Max Weber

Upcoming FFF Appearances June 11, (Friday) Jacob G. Hornberger 8:00 a.m. EST, WFAD 1490 AM, Middlebury, Vermont June 17, (Thursday) Jacob G. Hornberger 8:35 p.m. EST, KBND 1110, Bend, Oregon June 22, (Tuesday) Jacob G. Hornberger 10:15 a.m. EST, KOMY 1340 AM, Santa Cruz, California June 29, (Tuesday) Jacob G. Hornberger 7:30 p.m. EST, KID 590 AM, Idaho Falls, Idaho Subscribe & Support Subscribe to FFF Email Update. Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe email. Donate to FFF Contact Us The Future of Freedom Foundation 11350 Random Hills Road Suite 800 Fairfax VA 22030 Tel. (703) 934-6101 Fax (703) 352-8678 E-mail: fff@fff.org www.fff.org © 2003 The Future of Freedom Foundation. All rights reserved.