Education Quote by Richard Cobden

Cobden isn’t admiring Dutch secular schooling as a fashionable Enlightenment upgrade; he’s using Holland as a blunt, business-minded case study in institutional failure. The line is engineered to puncture a comforting fantasy: that rival religious groups can be smoothly welded into a single, “combined” curriculum if only everyone behaves. “Precisely the same conclusion” does quiet rhetorical bullying. If the Dutch - practical, commercial, historically tolerant - couldn’t make a shared religious program work, then British reformers clinging to the idea are indulging in wishful thinking.

The key verb is “found.” Not argued, not theorized, not philosophically embraced. Found. Cobden frames secular education as the outcome of trial, error, and hard constraints, like a market correction. That’s consistent with his wider politics: reduce friction, increase literacy, keep the state from being a referee in endless sectarian disputes. “Impracticable” is doing moral work while pretending not to. It sidesteps theology entirely and puts religion in the category of unmergeable interests, like competing firms that can’t share a balance sheet without fighting over the numbers.

The subtext is strategic: secular education isn’t anti-religious, it’s anti-deadlock. It’s a bid to move schooling out of the zero-sum arena where every lesson becomes a proxy war over whose doctrine gets state endorsement. Cobden’s move is to recast neutrality as governance, not ideology - a solution chosen because pluralism, left to negotiate itself, doesn’t produce a syllabus; it produces a stalemate.