Full text: Tristram Hunt’s speech to the Spectator schools conference

Free Schools, For-profit Schools and the Swedish Slide

Thank you. It is, as ever, a great pleasure to speak from the platform of England’s oldest continuously published magazine.

And especially so on education, which has always been one of its uppermost concerns.

Indeed, it was from these pages in November 1711, some seven months after the first edition, that your founder, Joseph Addison, offered one of the most memorable quotes about the nature of education. He said:

“I consider an human soul without education like marble in the quarry, which shews none of its inherent beauties till the skill of the polisher fetches out the colours, makes the surface shine, and discovers every ornamental cloud, spot and vein that runs through the body of it.