Milton and the Education Monopoly

Abstract:In Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church (1659), John Milton calls for the abolition of tithes—compulsory fees collected, in part, to finance the training of ministers at Oxford and Cambridge—on the grounds that they confer a "monopoly" on the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Though the poet was just one among dozens of pamphleteers and thousands of petitioners in the dispute over tithes, his case for abolition is eccentric. Milton frames the monopoly not as a problem of institutions, I will argue, but rather as a problem of ideas. On this account, politics is supposed to establish conditions under which the mind, naturally endowed with the faculty for "true theologie," is free to acquire "Christian knowledge." At the heart of the treatise is a belief that ordinary people are sufficiently capable of self-education that large-scale efforts at social change are unnecessary. Milton's fantasy of untutored erudition sets the polemic apart from the views of his erstwhile allies, with significant consequences for our sense of the poet's republicanism as he turned at last toward epic.