Jefferson on Public Education: Defying Conventional Wisdom

Tom Shuford:

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson

The Fourth of July is fireworks, festivities and images of a gathering of remarkable men determined "to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them."

For me the Fourth of July is those things and a question: What sort of education produced these men? What schools might produce their like again? There are clues. The author of the Declaration of Independence had much to say about educating the very young.

Thomas Jefferson lobbied the Virginia General Assembly to implement a system of publicly-funded schools. He failed. It would be sixty years before Horace Mann traveled the state of Massachusetts on horseback advocating a system of "common schools" and decades more before most states would follow Massachusetts' lead.

Jefferson's vision for public education is, nonetheless, illuminating and provocative. The main source is his Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1785. Here are some of the key features of his plan — in the original spelling, where quoted:

1. Attendance is voluntary. "It is better to tolerate that rare instance of a parent's refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings by a forcible transportation and education of the infant against the will of his father." (1)
   
   
2. Every child is entitled to three years of instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic.
   
   
3. The reading for the primary school years is mainly history. "The first stage of this education . . . wherein the great mass of the people will receive their instruction, the principal foundations of future order will be laid here. Instead therefore of putting the Bible and Testament into the hands of the children, at an age when their judgments are not sufficiently matured for religious enquiries, their memories may here be stored with the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European, and American history."

   And later in the text, Jefferson writes that "of all the views of this law, none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty. For this purpose the reading in the first stage, where they will receive their whole education, is proposed, as has been said, to be chiefly historical. History by apprising them of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views."
   
   

4. The "best genius in the school of those whose parents are too poor to give them further education" is entitled to a fourth and fifth year at a "grammar school."
   
   
5. Students at grammar schools study "Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of numerical arithmetic."
   
   
6. After a trial period of one or two years, the best student at each grammar school is selected for six years of further instruction. "By this means . . . the best geniusses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expense, so far as the grammar schools go."
   
   
7. After the sixth year, the best half of these go to college. "At the end of six years instruction, one half are to be discontinued (from among whom the grammar schools will probably be supplied with future masters); and the other half, who are to be chosen for the superiority of their parts and disposition, are to be sent and continued three years in the study of such sciences as they shall chuse, at William and Mary college.

Jefferson believed in selection by merit from an early age: "By that part of our plan which prescribes the selection of youths of genius from the classes of the poor, we hope to avail the state of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use, if not sought and cultivated."

Related: Jefferson's last letter, written on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at July 4, 2007 12:00 AM
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