Education Quote by Edmund Barton

Barton is doing the politician's favorite trick: turning a messy cultural fight into a clean moral contrast. "Bolstering them up" versus "letting them alone" sounds neutral, even commonsensical, but it smuggles in an argument about what the state owes - and to whom. Denominational schools, in this framing, are not merely different; they are dependents, institutions that require propping up with public money, legal privilege, or administrative accommodation. Public schools, by contrast, are cast as the natural default, the system that can stand on its own if government simply refrains from interference.

The subtext is sharper than the sentence's calm, parliamentary cadence suggests. "Letting them alone" is an ideological pose: it implies that a supposedly hands-off state can still build and maintain a public system while denying that this is also an affirmative choice with winners and losers. Barton's contrast quietly recodes redistribution as favoritism. Aid to denominational education becomes special pleading; investment in public schooling becomes background noise, the air everyone breathes.

Context matters. In Barton's Australia, education wasn't just about pedagogy; it was about sectarian power, especially Protestant-Catholic tensions and the lingering question of whether the new state would be pluralist or homogenizing. The line works because it avoids outright anti-Catholic rhetoric while channeling the same anxiety: that public support for religious schooling would fracture civic unity. It's a compact case for a nation-building schoolhouse, delivered as if it were merely an accounting distinction.