Kuyper on education

A good friend alerted me to this quotation from one of Abraham Kuyper's parliamentary speeches delivered in his last months as Prime Minister of the Netherlands:

FEBRUARY 1, 1905 

Mr. Van Houten and I appear to disagree very little on the meaning of justice, but not on what freedom means. His freedom leads only to state tyranny. He wants the government to operate schools that teach young people to practice critical thinking even if it goes against their faith. In other words, it is to be a school that satisfies Mr. Van Houten and his like-minded friends and with which all who think like him are content. That school, he says, must be financed from the public treasury, hence must receive favored treatment, because that is the only real school. Everybody else has full freedom to establish other schools, provided they do not ask for money from the public treasury. You are entirely free, but you will have to pay for it yourself. Thus the honorable member first takes [through taxes] from the purse of those who do not support public education the money needed tor the government schools that he supports, and when the nonsupporters have spent all they could on education he says to them: "Now that I have pumped you dry you are welcome to establish schools with your own money." 

That is not what I understand by freedom. As a minister of the Crown I refuse to endorse for one minute the view that one citizen can claim more rights than another. I do not wish in the least to abridge the rights of Mr. Van Houten and his adherents. I desire no special privilege for myself and my adherents. But what has to stop in this land is that there is a political party that says: we and our adherents are entitled to all the benefits of the public treasury, and those who do not agree with us will just have to wander about in the wilderness and live off wild honey and grasshoppers. That leads to dividing our people into two parts: one part that lives off the state, the lucky ones, and another part that is deprived, left out. There must be equality in the country, both for those who hold to the Christian and for those who hold to the modernist worldview.

Abraham Kuyper, "Speeches as Prime Minister in Parliament," On Education, Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology (Bellingham, Washington: Lexham Press, 2019), 285-286.

Kuyper would eventually succeed in securing a more equitable funding scheme for education in 1917, only three years before his death. 

Addendum: Perhaps Kuyper had an influence on the writer of this clever sketch from the classic BBC comedy, Yes, Prime Minister: