AV #204 - Thomas Jefferson’s Education – schools, purpose of, funded by … then and now

Over 200 years later, we ask the same questions

What has been will be again,
    what has been done will be done again;
    there is nothing new under the sun. 

Ecclesiastes 1:9 

There is no way that the education issues Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Virginians were debating 200 years ago can be relevant to us here in 2020. True?

Prepare to be surprised.

If you read the new work by Alan Taylor, Thomas Jefferson’s Education (W.W. Norton & Co., 2019), time and again you hear echoes of our current discussions. The book centers around Jefferson and his ideas on education from the late 1770s up to his death in 1826, above all his long-time dream to create the University of Virginia. In spite of that distant setting, what our Founding Fathers (Washington, Madison, and Monroe play prominent roles too) were trying to figure out back then sounds remarkably familiar. 

Would we (our new nation then, Colorado today) make public education a priority? And for whom?

How would we pay for it? (Sad to say, even Jefferson was willing to resort to lotteries.) And how much?

And the biggest question of all: what would be the purpose – of schools, of a university, of education itself? Would Jefferson’s university, for example, seek to prepare its students to be good citizens – perhaps effective leaders in the young republic? To that end, would an honor code be beneficial? Or would the (unstated) purpose be to cement the privileges for young men from the upper class, while granting them license to party away much of their time and family wealth?

I hope this attempt to capture a few key issues raised in Taylor’s book will encourage you to ask what speaks to us, 200 years later. The particulars are dated, but several ideas and conflicts ring true today. Some of you will recall that A Nation at Risk—triggering many education reforms—was published in 1984. It helps to know that when our new nation was really at risk, leaders like Thomas Jefferson saw education as fundamental to our survival as a free people. Nothing less.

What’s at stake? Why is education a priority at all?

In his Introduction, Taylor offers this overview: “The revolution created a republic in Virginia, but it seemed fragile as well as precious. The aging generation wanted to train young men to cherish and defend free government. In 1810, Jefferson, explained, ‘The boys of the rising generation are to be the men of the next, and the sole guardians of the principles we deliver over to them’” (3).

For Jefferson, the need to offer a solid education to the young was inextricably linked to the fight for freedom from British tyranny. He wrote to James Madison in 1786: “I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession, unless the mass of people could be informed” (162). And Jefferson wrote to George Washington that same year: “It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people … with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the state to effect, and on a general plan" (162). One can almost imagine him as 

“Nothing's riding on this except the, uh, first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country. Not that any of that matters, but if you guys f*** up again, I'm going to get mad.”   Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, to Woodward and Bernstein, All the President’s Men

Hollywood once portrayed Ben Bradlee (during another impeachment season).  A lot was riding on good schools.

Citizenship, better voting, better policy

It seems clear that Jefferson believed university education was to serve the elite, well-to-do young men, to “train for republican leadership,” those whom, as he wrote, “nature has given minds of the first order” (163). In contrast, he envisioned “local schools” that would be less exclusive: to “enable every common man ‘to read, to judge & vote understandingly on what is passing’” (163). And in this way for “all” (white men) to be “a participator in the government.”

Lack of support – who will pay for public education?

Jefferson’ plans “for educating the common people”—written in the midst of the war with England—made no headway in his home state. Taylor writes: “Never has a failed proposal received more acclaim than Jefferson’s 1779 bill to educate all white children. That program faltered because Virginia’s legislators preferred to keep taxes low rather than invest in schools and teachers” (3).

Twenty years later, with the Revolution won, a national government in place, and Jefferson now Secretary of State under President Washington, Virginia had done little to fulfill those earlier hopes. Jefferson was discouraged to find that the wealthy “were unwilling to incur [the] burthen” of funding “the education of the poor” (164). Would his idea for the schools come at a cost? Yes, but in his view, “a local tax for schools was ‘not more than a thousandth part of what will be paid to [the] kings, priests, and nobles to who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.’” Taylor observes: “Jefferson had hoped that Virginians would invest in education what they had saved by abolishing the church-state establishment. Instead, they preferred to keep their money in their pockets” (165).

During his Presidency, Jefferson found cause to return to this theme. Joel Barlow, a Connecticut legislator, proposed a national university. On the defeat of Barlow’s proposal, “Jefferson consoled him: ‘There is a snail-paced gait for the advance of new ideas on the general mind, under which we must acquiesce. People generally have more feeling for canals & roads than education’” (193).

We read too of a satire by “a reform-minded legislator,” David Watson, faulting Virginians for preferring, as Taylor states, “to buy consumer goods rather than fund education.” “This is the way in our country,” Watson wrote. “Boots, bonnets, and brandy must be had at any price, but learning must shift for itself.”  Virginia’s Governor John Tyler, Sr., was equally dismayed. “In 1808, Tyler denounced Virginia’s ‘eternal war declared against the Arts and Sciences and a determination to pay nothing by way of taxes to the support of Education-the true and solid foundation of a free Government.’ In 1810, Tyler concluded, ‘He who can go back from the assembly and tell his constituents he has saved a penny secures his popularity against the next Election’” (165).

Later we read of one “young gentleman [who] blamed the state’s neglect of education on ‘the Legislature being composed of ignorant, drunken beasts.’” And Joseph C. Cabell, a leader in the Virginia Senate who worked closely with Jefferson to open the new university, saw “the dilemma” this way: “Virginia needed to enhance education to improve its leaders, but the current ‘half-witted’ legislators lacked the learning to see and solve the problem. Jefferson sadly agreed that the ‘first obstacle to science in this country’ was the political power ‘of those who do not know its value’” (188).

Character, discipline

Could a university reshape its students, as Jefferson hoped, and set them on a more virtuous path?  (Could it then? Can it now? Is the goal even appropriate, in a nonsectarian institution?)

We also read accounts of the misbehavior of students—southern gentlemen?—at the College of William & Mary (which Jefferson himself had attended). How fascinating to learn that those designing the new university in Charlottesville hoped it might take these young white men—from families of slave owners, with all that contributed to their arrogance and brutishness—and instill some self-discipline.

Joseph C. Cabell, that Senate leader so active on Jefferson’s behalf, sought advice. He expressed his fears with this (we hope!) tongue-in-cheek aside: “I am particularly anxious to be informed on the best mode of governing a large mass of students, without the use of the bayonet” (259).

Jefferson himself wrote of the “the spirit of insubordination and self-will which seizes our youth so early in life as to defeat their education, and the too little control exercised by indulgent parents. … The article of discipline,” he added, “is the most difficult in American education.”

Taylor writes that Jefferson “sought to improve the next generation through reformed education. He worried, however, that Virginia’s adolescents were too spoiled by parental indulgence and bad schools to submit to a proper education” (259).

High expectations – or settling for less

INEQUALITY

If there were no banners like that 200 years ago, the idea was certainly in the air.

Taylor writes: “Because a republic empowered common voters, reformers insisted that no republic could survive without better education for its citizens. Yet most common Virginians would settle for basic literacy and numeracy gained in a couple of years at a private grammar school for their children. … the poor could make do without book learning. In sum, most Virginians felt they could sustain a republic without improving the next generation through public funding for primary schools” (166).

A Vermont teacher headed south to teach. “There is no country, I believe,” Elijah Fletcher wrote, in 1810, “where property is more unequally distributed than in Virginia. We can see here and there a stately palace or mansion house; while all around for many miles we behold no other but little smoky huts and log cabins of poor, laborious, ignorant tenants.” He had seen more equal opportunity in his years in Vermont. But in Virginia, he wrote: “The poor have no chance at all for an Education. This is their boasted liberty and Equality!” (166).

And a related matter: recruiting teachers to rural communities. “Teaching at an old field school rarely paid more than $200, half of what a man might make by farming. Most men of able bodies and good minds steered clear of teaching in common schools.… Blaming the poor conditions and low pay of teaching, a Virginian noted, ‘In our country, no man of talents and worth will continue in any calling which is not thought honourable and so treated by the leading men in society’” (168). Ring a bell?

K-12 versus Higher Education

It is striking to see, even then, the debate on which to prioritize – higher education (Jefferson, the university) or the younger grades (as advocated by men like Charles Fenton Mercer). “Mercer favored primary schools as ‘the greatest public benefit.’ He explained, ‘In a republic, it is much more important that the mass of the people should be tolerably well educated, than that a few should be very well educated, because knowledge is power.’ He would support colleges and a university only if there were funds left after fully funding primary schools for common people” (186-187).

Jefferson fought Mercer, with the support of leaders in Richmond who, as Taylor puts it, “scuttled back to the old verities of a small-government, small-tax regime. The Richmond Enquirer preached, ‘The less government has to do with education, the better’” (187-188).

Remedial Education – is creating the university putting the cart before the horse?

Taylor points out a flaw in Jefferson’s approach to “building the state’s education from the top down.” The new university would open but it would have too few students who came prepared for university-level work. “The faculty chairman later lamented, ‘There are many students … who are incapable of writing a sentence in English correctly.’ Jefferson conceded that the students consisted of ‘shameful Latinists … such as we will certainly refuse as soon as we can get … better schools.’” To that, Taylor adds: “But how could Virginia obtain better schools when it would spend so little on them?” (191).

When the University of Virginia first opened in March 1825, Jefferson “praised the students [only 60 of them] as ‘a very fine parcel of young men,’ but conceded that they ‘come in generally most wretchedly prepared.’” Taylor writes: “The University paid a high price for lack of good preparatory schools in Virginia. The Visitors suspended entrance requirements in mathematics and Latin to accept every paying customer…. The lax admissions standards compelled professors to engage in remedial education better suited to an academy” (262).

You walk in the footsteps

To quote “there is nothing new under the sun” is only intended to observe that the education issues of long ago often look familiar. But it would be cynical to suggest we are doing little more than rehashing old debates, and that is not my point. The larger lesson I take from Taylor’s book is how central education was to a great (and yes, flawed) figure like Jefferson. Central to our well-being as a people.

Let us recognize our current and future education leaders, those of you willing to tackle the important questions for our state (and our country) as to how best to educate the next generation, how to pay for it, and what ought to be the true purpose of our public schools: you walk in the footsteps of Thomas Jefferson and others who understood this. You are not alone. You are part of a noble tradition, in your passion and in your commitment, to make education a priority.