Full Idea
A genuinely free society must grant to knowledge a two-fold right. 1) the education of both sexes, accessible and compulsory until the coming of age, which then ceases. 2) the spreading of ideas based on exact science, aimed at universal conviction.
Gist of Idea
A free society needs full compuslory education, followed by promotion of exact science
Source
Mikhail Bakunin (Science and the Urgent Revolutionary Task [1870], p.133)
A Reaction
We would now be less confident of a consensus on what 'exact science' tells us, and compulsory education followed by brainwashing (however virtuous) doesn't sound very anarchist. Is philosophical dialectic permitted? I do think free needs truth.
Book Reference
'The Anarchists', ed/tr. Horowitz,Irving L. [Dell 1964], p.133