Education Quote by Edmund Barton

Barton is making an argument that sounds procedural, even dull, but it’s actually a political trap set with lawyerly calm: if the state claims the moral authority to educate, it forfeits the right to treat schooling like a private luxury. “Duty” is doing double work here. It’s not a warm civic slogan; it’s a binding obligation. Once the state takes custody of a public good, Barton insists, it can’t outsource the cost to families, churches, or local benefactors without betraying its own premise.

The key move is his blunt naming of what polite reform talk often dodges: “namely, the taxation.” He drags the conversation from aspiration to mechanism, from speeches about children to the invoice. That specificity is the intent. Barton is pre-empting the classic political dodge of endorsing education in principle while balking at the revenue required in practice. He’s also fencing in opponents who might support state schooling only so long as it disciplines citizens, assimilates newcomers, or builds a workforce, but prefer someone else foot the bill.

Context matters: Barton is speaking from a federation-era mindset, when Australia was building national institutions and debating what responsibilities a modern state should actually own. Education, in this framing, isn’t charity. It’s statecraft. His subtext is a warning about legitimacy: a government that mandates schooling without funding it is not merely stingy; it’s asserting power without paying the costs of its own authority.