Lecture delivered at the Lifelong Learning Seminar, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan
In order to conduct politics according to a written constitution, it’s probably best 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. The American citizens of the founding generation, male and female, found themselves in the midst of the Second Great Awakening, the movement that gave us, among other things, the Sunday school. Many Americans of that generation learned to read in Sunday school. By 1790, almost every male American citizens in New England could read and write, and the vast majority of women could, as well. In fact, New Englanders were the most literate population in the world at that time. The literacy rates declined as one headed further south, but estimates are that even in the states with the lowest literacy rates, 70 to 75 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 change 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 from the British Parliament, which Webster judged to be “excellent specimens of good sense, polished style and perfect oratory.” But there were two problems with them: coming from “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 neither Greeks nor Romans nor even Brits, any more. “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 [America’s] favor.”
The principal American textbook, Webster argued, should consist of a collection of essays “respecting the settlement and geography of America; the history of the late revolution [he was writing in 1788] and the most remarkable characters and events that distinguished it, and a compendium of the principles of the federal and provincial governments.” “These are interesting object 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.”
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 citizens the student comes from. In such monarchic and aristocratic communities, where one’s station at birth largely determines one’s lifelong standing, each citizen should not only ‘know his place’ but know the way of life and purposes appropriate to that place. There is no point in teaching rhetoric to a shoemaker if he 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.
However, Webster continues, now quoting Montesquieu, “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.
Webster even insists that “a system of education as gives every citizen 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 economic 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, written as they were to establish the United States regime as a commercial republic. 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” to copy “the manners and adopt the institutions of Monarchies”—their way of life and their ruling forms.
Although several states had provided for colleges and academies “where people of property may educate their sons,” they have made “no provision… for instructing the poorer ranks of people, even in reading and writing.” 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 the 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 better able to choose good representatives an themselves take on governing responsibilities, in turn.
Montesquieu taught that while the principle of monarchy is fear, the principle of republicanism is virtue. Accordingly, Webster argues, “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 can be carried. America affords the fairest opportunities for making the experiment, and opens the most encouraging prospect of success.” Webster knew that the founding generation of Americans would soon disappear. Simply maintaining the regime they established would prove difficult, but there remained much more for new generations to learn and accomplish. Education beckoned as an open field for them.
Along with the other prominent members of the founding generation who wrote on education, Webster saw a very tight connection between political self-government, republicanism, and the need for moral self-government and certain kinds of learning. Obviously, this learning would include such intellectual fundamentals as spelling and arithmetic and the moral fundamentals seen in the New Testament. But as we see, it would also include the economic and political fundamentals, “the general principles of law, commerce, money, and government,” and a student’s grammar school were not too soon to learn them. Learning these economic and political principles of self-government remains a task for today.
More politically prominent Americans than Webster thought carefully about education in America. I will discuss three of them: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. But behind all of them we see the educational advice of the English philosopher, John Locke, who had such a strong influence on the argument they had made in the Declaration of Independence. So, I’ll begin with a brief look at Locke’s seminal book, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, published in numerous editions beginning in 1693.
The first thing to notice about Locke’s book is its intended audience. Locke does not address the upper aristocracy; indeed, he ridicules the aristocrat as a rather frivolous and useless fellow—”always with his cup at his nose,” a cup that too often contains substances stronger than chocolate, coffee, or tea. 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 which the pampered and idle lords and ladies will never exhibit. Indeed, one of the key features of Great Britain’s rise to dominance of the seas and of commerce would be transition the gentry class made 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 principal 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, saying 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 own 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—which is both resented and, eventually, emulated, inculcating habits of tyrannizing—or mere precept. “Ill patterns are sure to be followed more than good rules.” And even such firmness as this ought to be relaxed as soon as possible, as the father asks his son’s advice on appropriate subjects, especially those concerning the management of the estate. Listen to the boy’s ideas, 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. The habit of ruling and being ruled, government by consent, begins here. And it quickens the child’s maturation, substituting serious concerns for childish ones: “The sooner you treat him as a Man, the sooner he will be one.”
Locke decries the old, “scholastic” education—the Christian Aristotelianism fashionable in most of the schools of his time—but also the abstract and indeed mathematical education favored by that firm anti-Scholastic, Descartes. He wants, above all, a useful education, intended to bring the Young Gentleman to the point where he can “judge right of Men, and manage his Affairs with them.” He wants to inculcate “the knowledge of a Man of Business, a Carriage suitable to his Rank, and to be Eminent and Useful to his Country according to his Station.” Not so much 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.
Accordingly, Locke firmly discourages influences that appeal to the imagination—whether imagined fears, which will effeminate the mind—or imagined glories—which will harden its against reason—must be repelled. Poetry, painting—anything that engages the passions by making them seem noble—are to be 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, they wanted schools for large numbers of citizens, not only ‘the few.’ But Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson all share Locke’s esteem for usefulness, for the practical virtues of commerce and citizenship.
In proposing a college for Pennsylvani 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 more copiously than any other writer. Following the philosopher’s lead, Franklin emphasized the need for a “more useful Culture of young Minds” than afforded, for example, by the aristocratic habit of gardening. Along with the obvious choices—mathematics, the English language, 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—a topic Franklin wanted to prepare American students for, some quarter-century before he would sign the Declaration of Independence and nearly forty years before he would sign the U. S. Constitution. The study of history can also lead to discussions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, which in turn lead to debate and therewith 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.”
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; 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 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 independence and the founding of the republican regime change Franklin had long prepared had been 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 bind 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”—the monarchic principle. You will recall that this is precisely the kind of thing Locke wanted to avoid by limiting 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.”
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 further recommends the establishment of a “Committee of Guardians,” which would place the students in apprenticeships. He knows that some students, and especially the children of former slaves, will lack the family ‘connections’ that help young men ‘get ahead’; the Committee of Guardians will act as the guardian of an orphan would, at least when it comes to finding work for his ‘ward.’ Like Locke, Franklin wants useful citizens, but unlike Locke he wants them on American terms, without the rigid class distinctions that Locke need to work within (and to some extent against) in England.
John Adams shared Franklin’s well-known appreciation 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 can never act 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.” The impressive and ever-increasing technological mastery over nature comes power, a virtuosity surely to be abused if virtue does not go with it.
Although necessary, such study and practice will not alone 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 he whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it.” School districts no larger than one square mile should be maintained at public expense. In each school, 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 here combines Locke’s desire to avoid glory-mongering with American republicanism.
Adams’s educational system would have been locally governed. It would also include a 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 an national academy, modeled on those of France, Spain, and Italy, for “correcting, improving, and ascertaining the English language.” In this century, Adams observed, French has succeeded Latin as the lingua franca of Europe, but it hasn’t been universally established and “it is not probable that it 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 could help to ensure that the coming empire of English—what we might call a cultural empire—would 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” as 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 have kept them in subjection by keeping them in ignorance.
Civic education serves as both gateway and guardian for all other kinds. Both ordinary citizens and those best endowed by nature to govern ordinary citizens 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 civil 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 consists 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.” Jefferson silently rejects the claim that God in His Providence has placed everyone in his station. On the contrary, education will be a means of enabling students to go on to find their place, even to make one, as they reach the limits of their natural abilities.
There is a conceptual 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 they 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.” Modern science, too, is a form of experience or experiment. From this system, “twenty of 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,” whereby men “possessing Latin and sometimes Greek, a knowledge of the gloves, and the first six books of Euclid, 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.” If education as Jefferson conceives it ranges more broadly through the arts and literature than Locke and Franklin prefer, nor more than they does he intend education to disable citizens from usefulness.
Like presidents Washington and Adams, as president Jefferson advocated the use of public revenues for 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 project never won favor in Congress, Jefferson’s final act of founding, the establishment of the University of Virginia, was designed to accomplish the same end on the state level. Although public, the university of Jefferson envisioned it was to be very compactly organized. 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 could have needed no administrators, only teachers and students learning together. Architecturally, Jefferson designed the campus to be like a village—very much the liberal-arts equivalent of the Jeffersonian ‘ward republic.’ To Jefferson’s mortification, the University soon fell into exactly the sort of disorder that Locke would have predicted when the young get together without adequate adult supervision. There was a riot on campus, with hapless professors dodging brickbats. After order returned, the board of governors (including Jefferson himself and James Madison) had the ringleaders jailed, others expelled, and offered the student petitioners who had backed the rioters the chance to recant publicly. By the end of his life, less than a year later, Jefferson was satisfied that the University of Virginia was back on track, where it has usually stayed in subsequent generations, at least in matters pertaining to civic order.
In educational matters and in much else, the American founders took much of their orientation from Locke. The emphasis on practicality, on utility, was central to their thought—from a morality aimed at forming commercial-republican citizens to experimental science aimed at forming inventors, architects, and engineers.
Further reading:
Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle: The Learning of Liberty: The Educational Ideas of the American Founders. Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 1993.
John Locke: Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Edited by James L. Axtell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.
Noah Webster: A Collection of Essays and Fugitive Writings: On Moral, Historical, Political and Literary Subjects. Boston: I. Thomas and E. T. Andrews, 1790. Reprinted in 2014.
For the educational writings of Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, see the well-edited one-volume collections of their works published by the Library of America.
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