Government gets the dunce’s cap for broken promises on education

THERE is a story doing the rounds about Alexander Tyler, a history professor at the University of Edinburgh in the 1780s who assessed the collapse of the Athenian Republic.

“Democracy is always temporary in name,” he concluded. “A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasure,” he argued. “From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by dictatorship.”

Check out Tyler — the 18th century history professor at the University of Edinburgh — on the internet and you will get more than 188,000 hits. His theory has certainly gained enormous credibility, but the story is really one of those great urban legends. There was an Alexander Fraser Tyler at the University of Edinburgh at the time, but he did not write about the Athenian Republic.