Advanced Topics in Liberty

Education for All: Compulsion, the State and Schooling (Spring 2007)

This conference will explore three widespread underlying assumptions concerning the delivery of education, that it is only through (a) compulsory, (b) state-provided, free at the point of delivery, (c) schooling that universal access to educational opportunities can be achieved. Each of these assumptions will be examined in the light of their impact on creating societies of free and responsible individuals, in developing countries in particular, with implications for debates in the developed world too.

Questions that the colloquium will address include: Is (state) compulsion a desirable (and efficient) means of achieving universal access to education, if free societies are the aim? Is state schooling, free at the point of delivery, a desirable (and efficient) means of achieving universal access to education, if free societies are the aim? What is the relationship between schooling and education in a free society.

Discussion Leader

Terence Kealey
University of Buckingham

Dr Terence Kealey has been Vice-Chancellor at the University since April 2001. He is a well-known academic specialising in Clinical Biochemistry.

Dr Kealey received his doctorate from Oxford University in 1982 and worked as the Wellcome Senior Research Fellow in Clinical Science at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Biochemistry, University of Oxford. He then moved to Cambridge University to become a lecturer in the Department of Clinical Biochemistry. He left in 2001 after 13 years to come to Buckingham.

Dr Kealey is known for his book The Economic Laws of Scientific Research and for his journalism and scholarship where he has shown that governments need not fund science or higher education. His argument is that the independent sector can provide wider access and deeper scholarship than the state. Dr Kealey wrote a regular column in the Daily Telegraph until very recently which was thought provoking and often controversial.