This lecture has been delivered at Hillsdale College Summer Hostel programs. It is the first of two lectures on American education; the second is on the educational ideas of the Progressive movement.
In order to conduct politics according to a written constitution, it is helpful to have a citizenry that can read. And if they can read a logical syllogism like the Declaration of Independence with understanding, so much the better.
American citizens of the founding generation found themselves in the midst of the Second Great Awakening, the movement that gave us, among other things, the institution of the Sunday school. Many Americans of that generation learned to read in Sunday school. By 1790, almost every male American citizen in New England could read and write, and the vast majority of women could, as well. New Englanders were the most literate population in the world at that time. The literacy rates declines as one headed further south, but estimates are that even in the states with the lowest literacy rates, seventy to seventy-five percent of male citizens could read and write.
This doesn’t mean that the American Founders were satisfied with our schools. The great political revolution or regime which they had undertaken required a new kind of education. One of the most famous founding-generation Americans, Noah Webster—of dictionary fame—complained that American schools lacked what he called “proper books.” There was no shortage of books as such. In fact, schoolboys memorized Demosthenes and Cicero and even debates in the British Parliament, which Webster judged to be “excellent specimens of good sense, polished style and perfect oratory.” But there were two problems: products of “foreign and ancient nations,” these speeches were “not very interesting to children.” What is more, “they cannot be very useful” to American children, who are not Brits, anymore. “Every child in America should be acquainted with his own country;” “know “the history of his own country”; “lisp the praise of liberty”; and learn about “those illustrious heroes and statesmen, who have wrought a revolution in her favor.” The “principal” American textbook, then, should consist of a essays “respecting the settlement and geography of America; the history of the late revolution [Webster was writing in 1788], and of the most remarkable characters and events that distinguished it, and a compendium of the principles of the federal and provincial governments.” “These are interesting objects to every man; they call home the minds of youth and fix them upon the interests of their own country, and they assist in forming attachments to it, as well as in enlarging the understanding.” Webster saw that a child can learn to read by reading about American things; that by calling the children’s minds home to their own town, state, and country citizens will result, men and women ready to think and speak together about governing themselves.
Far from rejecting the wisdom of foreigners—wisdom, after all, is wisdom wherever it comes from—Webster cites “the great Montesquieu,” who teaches “that the laws of education ought to be relative to the principles of the government. In despotic governments, the people should have little or no education, except what tends to inspire them with a servile fear,” because “information is fatal to despotism.” In monarchies—what we would call constitutional or limited monarchies—education should differ depending on which class of citizen the student comes from. In such political communities, each citizen should not only ‘know his place’ but know the things appropriate to that place. There is no point in teaching rhetoric to a shoemaker if the shoemaker lives in a monarchic regime, and so will have no place to exercise his oratorical skills beyond the local tavern. Which could only lead to trouble.
But, Webster continues, now quoting Montesquieu directly, “in a republican government the whole power of education is required.” “Here,” Webster observes, “every class of people should know and love the laws. This knowledge should be diffused by means of schools and newspapers; and an attachment to the laws may be formed by early impressions upon the mind.” Some fifty years later, a young Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln would say almost exactly the same thing in his now-famous Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois.
Webster even insists that “a system of education as gives every citizens an opportunity of acquiring knowledge and fitting himself for places of trust” is one of the two “fundamental articles” of republican regimes; the other is equal opportunity to “acquir[e] what his industry merits”—an opportunity granted when the aristocratic systems of primogeniture and land monopoly are abolished, as indeed they are in the Constitution and the Northwest Ordinance. Education and economic liberty together “are the fundamental articles; the sine qua non of the existence of the American republics.” It would be, he writes, an act of “absurdity” for Americans to copy “the manners and adopt the institutions of Monarchies.”
Although several states, including Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia, have provided for colleges and academies “where people of property may educate their sons,” they have made “no provision… for instructing the poorer rank of people, even in reading and writing.” Thus, while their “constitutions are republican,” their “laws of education are monarchical.” Webster therefore advocates the establishment of public schools.
What is more, “When I speak of a diffusion of Knowledge, I do not mean merely a knowledge of spelling books, and the New Testament. An acquaintance with ethics, and with general principles of law, commerce, money and government, is necessary for the yeomanry of a republican state.” Indeed, “the more generally knowledge is diffused among the substantial yeomanry, the more perfect will be the laws of a republican state” because the citizens will be able to choose good representatives an also take on governing responsibilities themselves, in turn.
With respect to ethics, “The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.” He concludes:
Until such a system shall be adopted and pursued, until the Statesman and Divine shall unite their efforts in forming the human mind, rather than lopping [off] its excrescences, after it has been neglected; until Legislators discover that the only way to make good citizens and subjects, is to nourish them from infancy; and until parents shall be convinced that the worst of men are not the proper teachers to make the best; mankind cannot know to what a degree of perfection society and government may be carried. American affords the fairest opportunities for making the experiment, and opens the most encouraging prospect of success.
Along with the other prominent members of the founding generation who wrote on education, Webster saw a firm connection between political self-government, republicanism, and the need for moral self-government and certain kinds of learning. These included the intellectual fundamentals, of course, along with the moral fundamentals seen in the New Testament. But they also included the economic and political fundamentals, “the general principles of law, commerce, money, and government.” Glancing at Americans right now, one may be pardoned for thinking that we would be better off if every public school student learned such “general principles” of self-government.
More politically prominent Americans than Webster wrote extensively about education in America. I will discuss three of them: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. But behind them all we see the educational advice of the English philosopher, John Locke, who of course had such a decisive influence on the argument they made in the Declaration of Independence, which those three men drafted. So I shall begin with a brief look at Locke’s seminal book, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, published in numerous editions beginning in 1693 and carefully revised several times by Locke.
The first thing to notice about Locke’s book is its intended audience. Locke does not address the upper aristocracy; on the contrary, he ridicules such men as frivolous and rather useless. The aristocrat, “always with his cup at his nose”—one that often contains liquids stronger than chocolate, coffee, or tea—cannot be depended upon to take intelligent charge of his son’s education. Locke instead addresses the father of “the Young Gentleman,” meaning the gentry class or lower portion of the landed aristocracy. It is in them that Locke sees the kingdom’s continued and future greatness because they show the traits of rationality and industry that the pampered and idle lords and ladies will seldom if ever display. As it happened, one of the key features of Great Britain’s rise to dominance of the seas and of commerce, and not incidentally of its successful transition from monarchism to republicanism in the centuries following Locke, would be the way in which the gentry class made its transition from the mores of feudal, warrior aristocrats to those of what one nineteenth-century writer would call “captains of industry.”
Locke was a home-schooler; his gentry could afford to be. But he also dislikes the boys’ schools: “Children who live together strive for Mastery.” The constant supervision by and contact with adults is far better. The two teachers of the Young Gentleman will be his father and the tutor his father hires. Although Locke doesn’t yield an inch to even the most Calvinist divines in taking a jaundiced view of the nature of children—he says that they love liberty but love “Power and Dominion” even more—he denies the tutor any power to punish them corporally. Even the father should strictly bridle his onw anger while punishing the boy, interspersing calm admonitions between the spanks. Locke recommends this course because he regards the authority of example as more powerful than either coercion or mere precept. The boy will resent being ruled by force and, much worse, eventually may emulate such rule, developing habits of tyrannizing, to which his own nature makes him all too susceptible.
And even such firmness as Locke does recommend ought to be relaxed as soon as possible. The father should ask his son’s advice on appropriate subjects, especially those concerning the management of the estate. Listen to the boy’s idea, and when he comes up with a good one, pretend it’s his very own, and follow it. Such a mild form of freedom actually increases the father’s authority by adding to his son’s esteem for him. This quickens the child’s maturation, substituting serious considerations for childish concerns: “The sooner you treat him as a Man, the sooner he will be one.”
Locke decries the old scholastic education—animated by the Christian Aristotelianism fashionable in most of the schools of his time—but also rejects the abstract and indeed mathematical education that one might derive from the example of that decided anti-Scholastic, René Descartes. Locke wants above all a useful education, intended to prepare the Young Gentleman “to judge right of Men, and manage his Affairs with them.” With them, not over them. He wants to inculcate “the knowledge of a Man of Business, a Carriage suitable to his Rank, and to be Eminent and Useful in his Country according to his Station.” Not so much the aristocrat’s warlike or battlefield courage but courage in the sense of “the quiet Possession of a Man’s self, and an undisturb’d doing his Duty, whatever Evil besets, or Danger lies in his way” is the Lockean way. Locke readies his country for the courage of the stiff upper lip, soon regarded as a national character trait.
Accordingly, Locke discourages influences that appeal to the imagination—whether imagined fear, which will effeminate the mind, or imagined glories, which will harden it against reason. Poetry, painting—anything that engages the passions by making them seem noble–are to be firmly discouraged. If a child has what Locke calls “a Poetick Vein, ’tis to me the strangest thing in the World , that the Father should desire, or suffer it to be cherished, or improved. Methinks the parents should labor to have it stifled, and suppressed, as much as may be…. There are very few instances of those, who have added to their Patrimony by any thing that they have reaped” from the Mounts of Parnassus.”
In the commercial-republican regime of America, Locke’s emphasis on education for one’s social “station”—what Montesquieu would call a “monarchic” bias—hardly got much play, except in some parts of the South, where a gentry class had established itself during colonial times. As did Webster, Americans generally wanted schools for large numbers of citizens, not only for the few. But Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson all share Locke’s esteem for usefulness, for the practical virtues of citizenship and commerce.
In proposing a college for Pennsylvania in 1749, Benjamin Franklin cited “the great Mr. Locke” and his “much esteemed” treatise on education. Nor is this idle praise; in his extensive footnotes to the proposal, Franklin quotes Locke far more extensively than any other writer. Following Locke’s lead, Franklin emphasized the need for a “more useful Culture of young Minds” than that seen (for example) in the aristocratic pastime of gardening. Along with the obvious curricular choices—mathematics, English, geography, morality—Franklin insists on the study of history broadly understood. Not only will reading histories teach political oratory, but it will also teach “the necessity of a Publick Religion”—specifically, Christianity—and the “advantages” of constitutions. Franklin wanted to prepare American students for thinking about constitutions some quarter-century before he signed the Declaration of Independence, and nearly forty years before he sat in the Philadelphia Convention. The study of history can also lead to discussions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, which in turn lead to debate and therefore to reasoning. Finally, “natural history” and the “history of commerce” can complement one another, if the study of nature leads to improved techniques of agriculture. Tellingly, Franklin includes no separate study of theology, contenting himself with saying in a footnote, “To have in View the Glory and Service of God, as some express themselves, is only the same Thing in other Words” for “Doing Good to Men,” thereby “imitat[ing] His Beneficence.”
Notice that Franklin does not follow Locke in insisting on private tutoring. He is proposing a college. “Youth will come out of this School fitted for learning any Business, Calling or Profession, except such wherein Languages are required [theology, for example]; and tho’ unacquainted with any ancient or foreign tongue, they will be Masters of their own, which is of more immediate and general Use.” Time Europeans spend learning foreign languages will thereby accrue to “such a Foundation of Knowledge and Ability, as, properly improved, may qualify them to pass thro’ and execute the several offices of civil Life, with Advantage and Reputation to themselves and Country.”
After the independence and republican regime change Franklin had long prepared was realized, he took a particular interest in the schooling of freed slaves. As early as 1763, on a visit to a Sunday school for black children, he concluded that “their Apprehension seems as quick, their Memory as strong, and their Docility in every Respect equal to that of white Children. You will wonder perhaps that I should ever doubt it, and I will not undertake to justify all my Prejudices, nor to account for them.” In a public address in 1789, Franklin called for a “national policy” of slave emancipation. “Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils.” The “galling chains, that bond his body, do also fetter his intellectual faculties, and impair the social affections of his heart” because he who is treated like “a mere machine” finds his reason “suspended” and his conscience stifled, having been “chiefly governed by the passion of fear.” Recall that this is precisely the thing Locke wanted to avoid when criticizing the use of corporal punishment—the very punishment that a slave finds himself subjected to not only in childhood but throughout his life. “Under such circumstances, freedom may often prove a misfortune to himself, and prejudicial to society.” Corporal punishment instills fear, and fear, Montesquieu teaches, animates despotism.
Therefore, “Attention to emancipated black people, it is… to be hoped, will become a branch of our national policy,” “a serious duty incumbent upon us.” “to instruct to advise, to qualify those, who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty, to promote in them habits of industry, to furnish them with employments suited to their age, sex, talents, and other circumstances, and to procure their children an education calculated for their future situation in life; these are the great outlines of the plan which we have adopted, and which we conceive will essentially promote the public good, and the happiness of these our hitherto too much neglected fellow-creatures.” As with whites, the education of black students will be preeminently useful, with an insistence on “a deep impression of the most important and generally acknowledged moral and religious principles.” Franklin proposes a “Committee of Guardians” which would place the students in apprenticeships. Like Locke, Franklin wants useful citizens, but unlike Locke he wants them on American, republican terms—without the rigid class distinctions that Locke needed to work with (and to some extent around and against) in England.
John Adams shared Franklin’s well-known esteem for modern science: “Man,” he wrote, “by the Exercise of his Reason can invent Engines and Instruments, to take advantage of the Powers of Nature, and accomplish the most astonishing Designs.” He also saw that this conquest of nature promised both great good and evil. Education for boys and girls alike must therefore include education in philanthropy, patriotism, and “the art of self-government, without which they never can act as a wise part in the government of societies, great or small.” “The study and practice of the exalted virtues of the Christian system… will happily tend to subdue the turbulent passions of men.”
Although necessary, such study and practice will not only suffice. “There is no simple connection between knowledge and virtue,” Adams observed, and that goes for the knowledge of Christian virtue as well as the knowledge of modern science. This is true partly because social elites often devise means to “keep the people in ignorance, and… to conceal truth and propagate falsehood,” sometimes in the name of high moral principles. Educators may deceive, even as they claim to educate.
These reservations notwithstanding, Adams thought that much more might be done toward improving the character of the American people through education. Education is “more indispensable, and must be more general, under a free government than any other,” inasmuch as the governing element in any regime must be educated, and in the American regime the people are sovereign. Education must therefore be redefined in terms of self-government: “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it.” School districts no larger than one square mile must be maintained at public expense. In each school (and here Adams departs from Webster) the children must not be taught to “adore their generals, admirals, bishops, and statesmen.” Don’t adore Washington but “the nation which educated him.” Why? Recalling a lesson of ancient Greek history, Adams remarks, “If Thebes owes its liberty and glory to Epaminondas, she will lose both when he dies. But if the knowledge, the principles, the virtues, and the capacities of the Theban nation produced an Epaminondas, her liberties will remain when he is no more.”
Adams’s educational system would have been locally governed, but it would include one national institution. Republics cultivate eloquence. Inasmuch as “it is not to be disputed that the form of government has an influence upon language, and language in its turn influences not only the form of government, but the temper, the sentiments, and manners of the people,” Congress should frame a national academy, modeled on those in France, Spain, and Italy, for “correcting, improving, and ascertaining the English language.” In this century, Adams observed, French has succeeded Latin as the main language of Europe; yet it has not been universally established and “it is not probable that will” be. “English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French in the present age,” thanks to “the increasing population of America” and “the influence of England in the world.” An American Academy would help to ensure that the coming empire of English—we would call it a cultural empire—will speak well, in order to govern itself well. Speaking well, with precision and vigor, itself exemplifies self-government.
Finally, no consideration of the educational ideas of the American Founders would be complete without considering the Sage of Monticello. Thomas Jefferson endorsed the Enlightenment project of “diffusion of knowledge among the people,” which he called “the sure foundation” of liberty and happiness. He considered prerevolutionary France an object lesson of how a benevolent and amiable people “surrounded by so many blessings from nature, are yet loaded with misery by kings, nobles, and priests,” who kept them in subjection by keeping them in ignorance.
Civic education serves as both gateway to and guardian of all other kinds. Ordinary citizens and those best endowed by nature to govern ordinary citizens as their representatives should partake of it. Political history will show the people, “possessed… of the experience of other ages and countries,” to “know ambition under all its shapes,” and so be “prompt[ed] to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.” Beyond civic education, a liberal education will render the best-endowed citizens “worthy to receive, and also to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.”
Specifically, in Virginia Jefferson advocated the establishment of public school districts “wherein the great mass of the people will receive their instruction” in Greek, Roman, modern European, and American history and in “the first elements of morality,” which consist of instruction in “how to work out their own greatest happiness, by showing them that it does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed them, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.”
There is a link between these two tracks of instruction, between history and morality. The link is experience. Historical study provides students with a far wider range of experience than they could ever attain if students were “confined to real life.” The better students, and also the wealthier ones, will go on to instruction in Greek and Latin; “I do not pretend that language is science,” but it is “the instrument for the attainment of science,” and in Jefferson’s day scientists conducted much of their business in Greek and Latin. From this system, “twenty o the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually,” statewide, and “half of these will be sent to William and Mary College to be liberally educated.” A liberal education as the culmination of an education for self-government should not be confused with dilettantism, the product of “self-learning and self-sufficiency.” Such autodidacticism leads men “possessing Latin and sometimes Greek, a knowledge of the globes, and the first six books of Euclid, to imagine and communicate this as the sum of science,” sending graduates into the world “with just taste enough of learning to be alienated from industrious pursuits and not enough to do service in the ranks of science”. No more than Locke and Franklin does Jefferson intend education to disable citizens from usefulness, even if the public education he has in mind is broader than theirs.
Jefferson advocated not the founding of a national academy but a national university. Although the “ordinary branches” of education are not to be removed from “the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better all the concerns to which it is equal,” the most advanced sciences need public support. While this did not occur, Jefferson’s final project, the founding of the University of Virginia, was designed to accomplish the same end on the state level. Although public, the university as Jefferson envisioned it was to be very compactly organized, with a minimum of bureaucracy. There were to be no divisions among the students—no ‘freshmen’ or ‘seniors’—and the courses of study were to be entirely elective. That is, Jefferson’s university was to maximize both equality and liberty. Self-government at the University of Virginia would have needed few or no administrators, only teachers and students learning together. Architecturally, Jefferson designed the campus to resemble a village, very much the educational equivalent of the Jeffersonian ‘ward republic.’
When considering the plans of all these writers, their shades of difference notwithstanding, we are left with a sense of the way in which they conceived the purposes of education, the ways of educating, the subjects taught as congruent with the regime they were intent on establishing: a democratic and commercial republic designed to secure the unalienable rights of Americans. When the American Progressives planned an educational system fit for their new republic, they thought no less coherently.
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