And as I may have noted before, the concept of state-supported education was a primary part of The Rights of Man as laid out by Thomas Paine. As Headmaster Hood suggests, this was a response to Edmund Burke and others objecting to universal, or near-universal, suffrage as a state’s sure road to ruin.
In fact, much of colonial America’s unease with British rule can be traced to the way in which property ownership, taxation, and the franchise interacted to produce something rather radical: A large electorate.
So come down where you will, but on either side there is quite a bit of tradition. And since Russell Kirk teaches us that tradition is 4/5ths of conservatism, at least for us monads — well, there you go.
