After publishing my book, Thomas Jefferson: Uncovering His Unique Philosophy and Vision (2014)—which had three chapters each on Jefferson’s political philosophy, his moral thinking, and his philosophy of education—I realized that I had far from exhausted what could be said on each of the subjects. Thus, I began the first of a trilogy of books on the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson: one on Jefferson’s political philosophy; another on morality and religion, and a third on his educational philosophy. For some reason, I undertook the last first: What would become Thomas Jefferson’s Philosophy of Education: A Utopian Dream (2014).
What occurred to me early on in my research—and I admit to being one of those dinosaurs whose research follows closely what Thomas Jefferson says on a particular subject instead of whimsical deconstruction of what he says—was the peculiar, intimate relationship between Jefferson’s political philosophy and his philosophy of education. The two were bedfellows; they had to be bedfellows. Jefferson recognized that the sort of reforms for which he was arguing in his political philosophy, liberal and robustly so—centered on a relative equal starting position in society for each person, considered free (being able to determine his own path in life), rational (to the degree of being self-sufficing), and moral (each having at birth a moral sense)—were dependent on critical educational reforms. He writes to Gov. David Hall (6 July 1802:
We have no interests nor passions different from those of our fellow citizens. We have the same object, the success of representative government. Nor are we acting for ourselves alone, but for the whole human race. The event of our experiment is to shew whether man can be trusted with self-government. The eyes of suffering humanity are fixed on us with anxiety as their only hope, and on such a theatre for such a cause we must suppress all smaller passions and local considerations. The leaders of federalism say that man can not be trusted with his own government. We must do no act which shall replace them in the direction of the experiment. We must not by any departure from principle, disgust the mass of our fellow citizens who have confided to us this interesting cause.
For the experiment of republicanism to succeed, modifications in education were mandatory. There was no system of education in place in Jefferson’s Virginia and Jefferson was quick to recognize that without educational reform, the political experiment of representative government of and for the people could not succeed.
What was education like in Jeffersonian Virginia?
There were in early Virginia private tutoring and private schools for the brewstered (the wealthy) and wellborn, but nothing much for the general public other than sporadic Sunday-school education which consisted of study of the Bible and some reading and writing, and perhaps some arithmetic. The brewster also had access to William and Mary College, one of the earliest colleges in Colonial America, which was principally indoctrination in Anglicanism. Wealthy Virginians, like Jefferson, had few options for a career: being a planter or perhaps a lawyer, for with the abundancy of land in Virginia and large interest in developing that land, there were numerous court cases concerning property, slaves included.
Consequently, Jefferson, when agreeing to be part of a committee to rewrite the Virginian code of laws in 1776—as if he had little else to do that year!—crafted the 79th of 126 bills: Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge. He argued in the bill for three echelons of education—general or ward-school education for the masses (females included) at the expense of the general public; colleges or grammar schools for the second echelon, and a university, centrally located, at the third level.
Jefferson wished to break Virginia into counties, and counties into wards or “hundreds,” to be roughly 10-by-10 squares of land, or smaller. In each ward, there was to be a general school, centrally located, to teach the most fundamental, useful subjects to enable all citizens to conduct daily affairs, without being cheated. He says in Bill 79:
At [Virginian public] schools shall be taught reading, writing, and common arithmetic.
Hence, general education would lead to self-sufficiency, and self-sufficiency would eliminate any pretext for government encroaching in the personal matters of its citizens. A university, like William and Mary and later Jefferson’s University of Virginia, would educate the greatest geniuses—young men of largest ambition and intelligence with due consideration for moral sensitivity. Education would be elective. Between general education and university-level education, Jefferson proposed “colleges” to teach languages you’re reading history in various foreign languages—e.g., French, and Italian Spanish—as well as dead languages—Ancient Greek in Latin.
The model throughout was liberal. For example, at University of Virginia, students were able to select their own courses, which was unique at the time, and they were encouraged to interact with professors, as did Jefferson throughout his two-year tenure at William and Mary, by having students’ quarters situated between the various 10 pavilions that were to be erected at University of Virginia. In the picture below of Pavilion IV, we see students’ quarters on each side of the pavilion, where a professor would live on the second floor and conduct classes on the first. Yet students at UVa, in their spare time, preferred to frolic, drink, and gamble, instead of learning.
Though he was consistently insistent that there needed to be put into place a system of Virginian education, Jefferson recognized that public education of the general citizenry was of utmost importance. He writes to James Madison (20 Dec. 1787):
And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government, or information to the people. This last is the most certain, and the most legitimate engine of government. Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty. … Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.
The reason was that the brewstered, because of their wealth, would receive whatever education they deemed was needed. Yet that would merely perpetuate government by the “artificial aristoi” or government by birth and wealth—perpetuate the sort of aristocracies at odds with Jeffersonian republicanism. Jefferson, I iterate, ambitiously aimed for all citizens to have a relatively equal starting position—that was in effect the aim of good government—but beyond that, it was up to individuals to situate themselves, not the government to situate citizens.
It is also worth noting that morality and religion were no substantive part of the process. Why?
All persons, thought Jefferson and numerous other moralists of his day (e.g., David Hume, Lord Bolingbroke, Lord Kames, Francis Hutchinson, and Adam Smith), were equipped with a moral sense faculty or moral sensibility of some sort. Thus, there was no more need of teaching morality to youths than there was of teaching hearing to youths.
Jefferson shunned teaching of religion in early life because young minds tended to soak up uncritically that to which they were exposed, and that was dangerous, if only because of the large number of religions and of the vigorous debates between religionists of different persuasions. It is only when the rational faculty is fully formed, he tells nephew Peter Carr (10 Aug. 1787), that one should undertake study of religion. And so, Jefferson says in Notes on Virginia that reading history while young is preferable to study of religion. “Instead, therefore, of putting the Bible and the Testament into the hands of the children at an age when their judgments are not sufficiently matured for religious inquiries, their memories may here be stored with the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European and American history.” The right sort of history also reinforced the lessons of morality, implanted in all by birth, and inclined us to act on what we sensed to be right, and to shun bad actions.
Education, overall, aimed to cultivate the liberal-eudaimonist sentiments—yearning for liberty and for the wellbeing of all other citizens—inhering in all at birth.
Any government funded, and thus government directed, system of schooling is for this reason alone unacceptable as it is subject to the eventual abuse that all State controlled entities inevitably succumb to. No doubt this was not as obviously apparent in the reasonably new nation of Jefferson’s day although the most forward thinking no doubt saw the danger. While the constitution remitted no such authority to the Federal State regarding education, the matter is of such importance that not even individual State or local government direction in this matter should be tolerated but all education strictly and specifically left to private provision.
TJ’s solution to that nodus was dividing and further dividing: nation into states, states into counties; counties into wards; and wards into families. There would be education in a household and the most general education in ward schools, locally funded. Families in wards would be responsible for overseeing ward schools, though the teaching was reading, writing and basic math….