Utopia revisited - or is it better the second time around?

This article essays comparisons between nineteenth- and twentieth-century school management and its direction and control by central government. Its starting point is 1816 when Jeremy Bentham presented his utopian vision of a model school, to be managed by a school master exhibiting competences detailed in his Chrestomathic Table. This has similarities to the headteachers’ competences required in the late twentieth century by the government through the Teacher Training Agency. The article presents several areas for comparisons in addition to competences: definitions of effective management, governance and local community influence and the focus on quality assurance. Both periods have seen major changes in educational management and administration but will the lessons learnt from these innovations when first introduced in the nineteenth century be transferred to the late twentieth century

Monte Carlo simulations for Ising spins with spin greater than 1/2 applied to the square and triangular lattices with antiferromagnetic interactions and comparing results using Kawasaki and Glauber dynamics

This paper has a pedagogical introduction. We describe the correct method for performing Monte Carlo simulations of Ising model systems with spin greater than one half. Correct and incorrect procedures are clearly outlined and the consequences of using the incorrect procedure are shown. The difference between Kawasaki and Glauber dynamics is then outlined and both methods are applied to the antiferromagnetic square and triangular lattices for S =1

Not Paul, but Jesus: Volume III

This is the first time that the third volume of Not Paul, but Jesus has been published in any form. The first volume, appearing in 1823, was published under the pseudonym Gamaliel Smith. In the work as a whole, Bentham aimed to drive a wedge between the religion of Jesus and the religion of Paul — between Christianity and Paulism. In this third volume, he focused on sexual morality. This version will eventually be superseded by an authoritative version in the complete edition of Not Paul, but Jesus in the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham

Writings on Australia, I. New Wales

The ‘New Wales’ material written in 1791, which is published here for the first time, constitutes Bentham’s first detailed engagement with Britain’s infant penal colony in New South Wales, which had been established in January 1788. It is also intimately connected to Bentham’s campaign to persuade the British government build his panopticon penitentiary, which he had offered to the Pitt administration in January 1791

Writings on Australia, III. Letter to Lord Pelham

Bentham’s ‘Letter to Lord Pelham’ constitutes perhaps the earliest detailed critique of transportation to New South Wales by a major philosopher of punishment. Bentham arranged the work around what he identified as the ‘five ends of penal justice’, namely (i) example, (ii) reformation, (iii) incapacitation, (iv) compensation, and (v) economy. Drawing extensively on the recently published Account of the English Colony in New South Wales by David Collins, the colony’s first Judge Advocate, Bentham sought to demonstrate both that New South Wales fell short against each of the ‘five ends’, while his panopticon penitentiary would achieve them. ‘Letter to Lord Pelham’ also had a practical purpose. Along with ‘Second Letter to Lord Pelham’ and ‘A Plea for the Constitution’, it was one of the tools with which Bentham hoped to cajole the administration during 1802–3 into proceeding with the establishment of his panopticon penitentiary. In Bentham’s view, from 1791 when he offered the panopticon to the Pitt administration to June 1803 when it was effectively killed-off by the Addington administration, his attempts to bring it to fruition had been beset by wilful delay and obstruction on the part of the administration, despite the panopticon offering potentially unrivalled benefit to the public, and despite its construction having been twice sanctioned by statute. The delays and obstructions he had experienced had by 1803 led Bentham to conclude that the government had acted in the interests of the nobility rather than in the interests of the wider community, and to more or less accept that the panopticon would never be built. One of Bentham’s responses was to begin drafting ‘A Picture of the Treasury’, which was addressed to Pelham and contained a detailed account of his dealings with the Treasury in relation to the panopticon between 1798 and 1801. ‘A Picture of the Treasury’ was a catalogue, as Bentham saw it, of the machinations and deliberate non-functioning of government at the dawn of the nineteenth century, and it was in this work that the ‘Letter to Lord Pelham’ originated, and subsequently enlarged upon

Writings on Australia, II. History of Jeremy Bentham's dealings with Lord Pelham

The ‘History of Jeremy Bentham’s dealings with Lord Pelham’ consists of a series of letters and documents compiled by Bentham. They date from 12 April 1802 to 21 August 1802 and focus on correspondence exchanged between Bentham and Charles Bunbury, who acted as an intermediary between Bentham and Pelham. This material in effect constitutes a history of the beginning of Bentham’s assault on the New South Wales penal colony, and his attempt to use his ‘Letter to Lord Pelham’ to cajole the government into proceeding with his panopticon penitentiary scheme. Along with the correspondence are two marginal contents sheets for a work entitled ‘Panopticon versus New South Wales’. These marginal contents offered a summary of ‘Letter to Lord Pelham’, and included an ‘Introductory Note’ to Pelham, in which Bentham set out his grievances in regard to his treatment over the panopticon. The text also includes Bentham’s account of his interview at the Treasury on 9 July 1801 with John Hiley Addington and Charles Long. While the correspondence has been published previously in the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, it has never before been published in this form. Moreover, the account of the interview and the marginal contents sheets are published here for the first time

Writings on Australia, VI. A Plea for the Constitution

In ‘Letter to Lord Pelham’, Bentham examined New South Wales ‘on the question of policy’, while in ‘A Plea for the Constitution’ he examined ‘the question of law’. In ‘A Plea for the Constitution’ Bentham sought to demonstrate that the colony had been illegally founded, and was accordingly much more circumspect about distributing it than the first two ‘Letters to Lord Pelham’

Writings on Australia, VII. Colonization Company Proposal

The National Colonization Society had been established in 1830, its members having been inspired by Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s plan of ‘systematic colonization’, that is, the emigration of carefully selected free people, funded by the sale of colonial lands, to a colony which would be granted powers of self-government as soon as possible. The Society’s members had initially sought to implement the plan at the Swan River colony, though they failed to secure the necessary government support. Following the discovery of the River Murray in late 1830, they turned their attention to Gulf St Vincent on the south Australian coast, and in May 1831 submitted a proposal to the Colonial Office in which the colony would be one of concentrated settlement and the scheme overseen by a joint-stock company. The Society was required by the Colonial Office to develop further and resubmit its proposal, and did so in August 1831, proposing that, in return for the company being granted a Royal Charter, its directors would bear the entire cost of establishing the colony. On 3 August 1831 the Committee of the National Colonization Society approved the printing of its revised proposal, which was published as Proposal to His Majesty’s Government for Founding a Colony on the Southern Coast of Australia. Over the following ten days from 4 August 1831 Bentham drafted around fifty sheets of manuscript relating to ‘Colonization Company Proposal’, and which effectively constitutes his commentary upon the National Colonization Society’s Proposal