In His Own Words: Jefferson and Education

Featured

Dec 5

"If the condition of man is to be progressively ameliorated, as we fondly hope and believe, education is to be the chief instrument in effecting it."
—Thomas Jefferson to M.A. Jullien, 1818.

For better or worse, education can shape who we are, and Thomas Jefferson knew that. In the midst of the American Revolution, he determined that the Commonwealth of Virginia should have a system of education, one that offered learning opportunities to more children.

My high school students were positive, however, that Jefferson believed in education for everyone. After studying William Hogelund’s Declaration: The Nine Tumultuous Weeks When America Became Independent, May 1-July 4, 1776, they saw Jefferson as a type of unsung hero for his hand in drafting the Declaration at such a young age. They also saw fit to laud him as the first American for equal rights in education. Surely they had heard that somewhere.

It sounded like a generalization to me, but my recollection was rusty. Had Jefferson fought for such rights? In Virginia, he had served for years in the House of Delegates and as governor for a time before becoming President. What had Thomas Jefferson said in all of his many letters? Did his view change over time?

Of the three bills he wrote, “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” (1779), is both the one he favored and the one that is most well known. In it, Jefferson states that education would produce the most responsible citizens, and more importantly, it could help Americans avoid tyranny in the future.

 . . . it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this [tyranny] would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts, which history exhibiteth, that, possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes . . .

To that end, the proposal for education in Virginia was carefully crafted in local districts, but it was just that—a plan. In this early proposal, Jefferson had put forth that three aldermen would be elected for each county. They would divide the counties by districts based on the numbers of children and determine a central location to build a school. The aldermen would appoint an overseer, hire a schoolmaster, a steward, and servants for each district and ensure that “Latin and Greek languages, English grammar, geography, and the higher part of numerical arithmetick” were taught for free to male and female students for three years.

Following that time, parents or guardians would pay tuition. The schools would be visited twice a year by William and Mary College “visiters” [sic], and student scholars would be examined. Upon examination, some students would be asked to leave, and others would be recommended as scholarship recipients for advanced study.

But learning opportunities at the time of the first bill and in the decades that followed were not equal opportunities. Jefferson never intended his Virginia plan to be equitable, nor should we throw our modern understandings upon the world of the colonies. If, for instance, I looked at his letters to his daughter Martha about her education, I might conclude that he saw her in a lesser light with fewer capabilities than a son because her schooling centered only on music, art, French lessons, and reading. But that view would be outside of its historical context, something I am keen for my students to recognize.

Jefferson’s 1779 bill was a viable plan, but a decentralized one. Much of the control for these district schools landed in the hands of the families as they directly elected leaders and appointed teachers for their own schools. The power lay with the people, rather than with government control. Tuition monies would help, but state legislators knew that the required taxes would be too much to ask of their constituents, especially in Virginia’s many rural areas. Raising taxes to pay for a communal effort to educate the state’s children was not acceptable, thus Jefferson’s bill was not adopted.

Jefferson was not dissuaded. Seven years later in his letter to George Wythe in August of 1786, Jefferson states,

Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils, and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.

And Jefferson’s aim was clear: education could help preserve the republican government. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1782), he writes, "Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree." The phrase to a certain degree appears troublesome to our contemporary minds, but in his letter to Peter Carr dated September 7, 1814, Jefferson clarifies his point. He believed that “every citizen should receive an education proportioned to the condition and pursuits of his life.” A conditional statement, Jefferson did not demand equal education, but rather confined it to the needs and ambitions of the individual, let alone considering societal structures of the time.

As the years passed, Jefferson did not change his mind. An education system was needed to preserve a free society, and the state and federal governments should not manage it. In his letter to his protégé Joseph C. Cabell of February 2, 1816, Jefferson maintained his stance—“What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or the aristocrats of a Venetian Senate.”

In my search for answers to my students’ claim, I can say that it would be inaccurate to label Jefferson as a forerunner to public education in the United States, whether the “new” public education of the 1830s or as we know it today. It is abundantly clear that Jefferson consistently warned against plans where state or federal officials were to control local district schools.

In his 1817 “Bill for Establishing Elementary Schools,” he said “they would be badly managed, depraved by abuses,” and would soon exhaust available funds. That governmental authority could manage schools better than the parents within each ward, he says “is a belief against all experience.” When Charles Mercer’s 1817 plan for public schools came forward in the Virginia Assembly, it passed in Virginia’s lower house but was defeated in the senate. Once again, acting as Jefferson would, Joseph Cabell opposed the Mercer plan primarily because it gave power to a state board of education, something Jefferson and Cabell were loath to do.

By 1818, Jefferson wrote to Cabell, extending his idea of education to include both rich and poor children, particularly free education for those too poor to pay. Jefferson’s ideals had indeed expanded, though I never found evidence favoring compulsory education.

I’m no Jefferson scholar, but in my research ramble, I found much to like about Jefferson and his thinking, especially in his letters. Deeply educated himself, he studied countless subjects, ideas, and languages throughout his lifetime. He offered advice and moral instruction, speaking of the abiding need of developing a person’s character. He knew education would not only bring progress to the fledgling United States, but that it was also foundational to its citizenry. Education was both a means and an end because Jefferson saw learning as a moral effort that could indeed improve the condition of man and thus society.