Public Education Revealed In John Stuart Mill's On Liberty

In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill speaks on matters concerning the “struggle between authority and liberty” and determining how the government should be balanced with the will of the common people. To aid these balances, Mill lays out indisputable freedoms for everyone including freedoms of thought and speech. He stresses that these freedoms are justified as long as they abstain from harm onto other people, but words have been known to hurt or offend. Hateful and unpopular thoughts can be ignored by common people just as they can say and believe whatever they wish to, but in the creation of laws that do affect everyone, leaders cannot discriminate against hearing any sort of opinion because doing so would increase the possibility of tyranny against a minority of any kind Mill wants to prevent. Every single opinion, no matter how unpopular, deserves to be heard by people of power, for even a thought of the unpopular or the minority could provide a shred of truth when leaders make decisions to better a majority of lives.

In the utilitarian pursuit of obtaining all ideas to reach a conclusion that best represents

Public education is run by the government and thus cannot tell people what they should think. But one thing missing from schools may be teaching what other options of thinking one could explore. Mill believes that government run education limits the diversity of thought among people growing up and that more private schools should aim to teach differing views of matters. Not only would teaching opposing views of philosophers, politicians, and religions allow students to choose their own paths, but would further encourage people to create their own belief systems. As Mill states again, “unmeasured vituperation, enforced on the side of the prevailing opinion, deters people from expressing contrary opinion” and transversely listening to