Thomas Jefferson and his views of education

Thomas Jefferson: A Pioneer in Education

JEFFERSON and EDUCATION

Thomas Jefferson's life experiences shaped his views on education. His attitudes towards education -- radical as they were for his time -- were influenced by his unusual life, by the revolutionary times in which he lived, and by his own rather exceptional perspective on the world. Despite the fact that Jefferson was born into privilege, he, nonetheless, sought privilege for all and his visions and objectives have had an enduring effect on the American educational system.

Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743, at Shadwell in Albemarle County, Virginia.

He was the third child of Peter Jefferson and Jane Randolph-Jefferson,

and his early years on the backwoods of colonial Virginia fostered within him a lifelong love for and curiosity about natural life and the people who lived close to it.

While Peter Jefferson would never number among Virginia's biggest landowners, he was nonetheless a socially ascendant planter and slaveholder and a justice of the peace in the powerful county courts of eighteenth century Virginia.

Moreover, on the maternal side, Jefferson's relatives, the Randolphs, ranked among the most prosperous and influential families in colonial America.

Such a background of unusual privilege ensured, among other things, that the young Thomas would enjoy economic benefits, social advantages, and educational opportunities unknown to most other Americans of his day.

Jefferson's early educational experiences were unhappy: he complained about his childhood tutelage under "a superficial Latinist, less instructed in Greek."

In 1757, when Thomas was aged 14 he lost his beloved father, but his formal educational experiences appear to have improved considerably in the years that followed. He transferred to a less distant school that allowed him to return to Shadwell on the weekends, and, his new schoolmaster, the Reverend James Maury, stimulated Thomas' prodigious desire to learn.

Jefferson would attend Rev. Maury's school from 1758 to 1760.

Within that relative brief period, he learned Italian and Greek and developed his lifelong passion for books.

The Educational System in Jefferson's Time

Before the Revolution, schools were for the most part unproductive. Teachers were licensed by the Bishop of London or by the governor on recommendation of the country courts. Fees were arranged between teachers and parents and sometimes the county justices intervened. Obviously, therefore, individuals whose parents could afford it received a higher quality education, whilst those whose parents lacked the financial means suffered and, oftentimes, remained uneducated.

Even for those who could afford it, the educational system was lacking. A few grammar schools and private tutors offered a temporary grounding in Latin and some other subjects for well-to-do Virginians, whilst William and Mary College, for instance, limited in faculty and curriculum, offered likewise in terms of higher education 3 . Elementary schools and grammar schools, and again grammar schools and colleges remained distinct from one another. Both had its own subjects, each remained an entity unto its own, and colleges similarly refrained from preparing the student for a profession (unless it was for the ministry of the Church of England) 4.

Jefferson's Formative Years

During these formative years, Jefferson also picked up some of the hobbies that he would continue to pursue well into adulthood, and that were indispensable for an eighteenth-century Virginian of the "gentlemanly" class.

For example, having already developed all important talents for riding and hunting, at Maury's school he also acquired the gentlemanly art of dancing and satisfied some of his love of music by beginning to acquire the art of the violin.

In 1760, before he had turned 17, Thomas Jefferson began his tertiary studies at the College of William and Mary, where he would remain until 1762.

For the rest of his life, Jefferson would regard the college years as among the most important and life altering experiences in his intellectual development.

At this point, the most important figure in Jefferson's intellectual development was William Small, a Scottish born professor of the sciences whom Jefferson greatly respected as the teacher who stimulated his love for learning and who was most responsible for intellectual maturation.

Dr. Small apparently appreciated the young frontiersman's intellectual capacities and introduced him to "the great spheres of thought."

Small, who was a graduate of Marichal College in Aberdeen, Scotland, introduced his Jeffferson to the works of his heroes, including such prominent Enlightenment figures as John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton.

Although Rev. Maury had stimulated and nurtured Jefferson's lifelong desire for learning, the strict churchman did little to encourage the notions of religious tolerance that played such a prominent role in Jefferson's works and writings.

Instead, it was under Small that Jefferson would be initially exposed to the intriguing world of the Enlightenment - a world in which he would soon play so great a part.

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment, usually traced from the middle of the 17th century or the beginning of the 18th century, was an era in Western history where man was seen as being the pinnacle of creation -- until then it was religion; now humans were seen as independent who could with sufficient will and reason craft their life and destiny. The sciences, art, philosophy, and culture flourished. Skepticism became common, and the world got caught up in a plunge of intellectual and ideological as well as political revolutions.

The authors of the American Declaration of Independence, the United States Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and the Polish-Lithuanian Constitution of May 3, 1791 were all motivated by Enlightenment ideals of the supremacy of man1.

Essentially, at the core of the Enlightenment was skepticism of traditional institutions and customs, and a strong belief in rationality and science. It was for this reason that the Enlightenment was also called the Age of Reason, and Jefferson, no doubt, was impacted by this period that he lived in. His ideas on education, for one, seem to betray that fact. He sought to abolish traditional methods and supplant them with new ideas.

The Scottish Enlightenment was the period in the 18th century when Scotland was overwhelmed with a cultural and intellectual zeal and with a surge of new ideas. David Hume was one of the exemplars of that period.

Thanks to Small's positive influences, Jefferson ultimately would also play crucial roles in extending the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on American education.

The Scottish educational model, which had initially been grounded in a rather distinctive "humanistic Calvinism," minimized the influence of religion over educational affairs, emphasized the innate value of the individual learner, and recommended the diligent and systematic pursuit of intellectual betterment.

Though Jefferson would confront serious challenges in his efforts to reshape American education in line with these "radical" values, the humanistic Calvinist approach would ultimately be widely adopted across the States.

By the time that the Civil War erupted in 1861 -- some 35 years after Jefferson's death - no less than 49 out of the 207 colleges and universities then existent in the country had been founded by Presbyterians (members of a denomination that had originated primarily in Scotland).

Influences on Jefferson's Development

While Jefferson was attending William and Mary College, Dr. William Small also introduced his promising young student to the leading attorney of the province, George Wythe, and to the colonial governor of Virginia, Francis Fauquier.

Wythe and Fauquier would join in Small in having major and enduring influences on Jefferson's intellectual, political, and cultural development.

Through Fauquier, Jefferson extended his political connections and deepened his appreciation for fine music and other social amenities.

From Wythe, he in turn learned about political ideals that reached far beyond selfish or partisan objectives.

After graduating from William and Mary, Jefferson studied law in Wythe's office and was admitted to the bar.

Some years later in 1776, Wythe would sign the great Declaration that his former pupil had composed. Later, in 1779, the then Governor Jefferson installed his former mentor at William and Mary college as the nation's first professor of law.

It was thanks in large part to the influences of Small, Wythe, and others that Jefferson increasingly embraced a radical democratic theory that meshed well with his increased humanitarian approach to education, but that did not mesh well with the conventional Lockean liberal model embraced by most of the other Founding Fathers.

Many of the other Founders were influenced by Locke's view of the human mind at birth is a tabula rasa, and by his notions of environmental determinism which suggested that human life and social institutions were shaped mainly by the natural environment, rather than by culture.

Such presumptions about the human condition in turn led many of the Founders to hold rather atomistic and adversarial view of individuality.

By sharp contrast, Jefferson's ideas about humanity can be seen as resting on four major premises: 1) that humans are largely the products of their social environments; 2) that humans are inherently social beings who are endowed with a moral sense; 3) that this moral sense, or "sense of justice," renders all ethically humans equal; and 4) that humans are developmental beings, all of whom have the capacity to partake of ongoing human progress and grassroots, participatory democracy.

Jefferson's Principles and their Impact on Education

Jefferson's radical beliefs in the inherent moral and developmental capacities of humans, and in their capacities to take part to participatory democracy, in turn reinforced his enduring commitment to an education that would be accessible to all. Jefferson was well aware that democracy could only work properly when the people were both virtuous and enlightened.

From these notions that people were naturally virtuous but not naturally enlightened, but that enlightenment was necessary for democracy, it followed that the society had a vested interest in investing in education to provide enlightenment.

In a letter to the Welsh born philosopher Richard Price dated January 8, 1789, Jefferson observed that "wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their government."

Such well informed or enlightened people could be relied on, "whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice," to set the matters at hand "to rights."

Education, then, was to play the critical role of informing and enlightening the people.

Jefferson would make this argument more completely in his "Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge," which he proposed as part of his efforts to revise Virginia's laws in the late 1770s and early 1780s. At the heart of the bill, which he wrote in 1779 for presentation to the Virginia legislation, was an unprecedented proposal for public schools.

In the preliminary statement for the Bill, Jefferson noted that, "it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing" the slippage into tyranny that has repeatedly occurred "even under the best forms" of government would be "to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large."

This goal of illuminating the minds of the people at large spoke to society's vested interest in a basic education for all. Yet Jefferson also noted society's vested interest in supporting more advanced education for "those person[s], whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue" and who "should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens."

It was these persons who would be trusted to ensure that the "laws are best, and are best administered."

Since widespread "indigence" meant that most potentially qualified persons could not afford their own educations, Jefferson considered it "better that [they] should be sought for and educated at the common expense of all, than that the happiness of all should be confided to the weak or wicked."

In short, education for the citizenry would serve, in Jefferson's radical world-view, as the best defense against tyranny and the surest proponent of democracy.

Jefferson initially envisioned his "Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge" to be part of a public education program that would also include a revision of the charter of the College of William and Mary, together with a bill for the creation of a public library system in Virginia.

He believed that these synthesized measures in combination would create a better informed and better educated citizenry upon which a solid democracy could rest.

Jefferson's Principles and Ideals Regarding Education

The following is a summary of the principles of Jefferson's innovations on education. Jefferson intended that free elementary schools were to be provided to all citizens. Free education of a more advanced nature would be provided to a select group of poor boys, in a process that would take place over several years, through grammar schools that would also, simultaneously, cater to the well-to-do who would, however, pay for this service. Finally, a university education, funded by public taxes, would be provided again for a select few who would, consequently go on to use their education in order to contribute to the state. The university would be implemented in a way that would resonate with Jefferson's ideals, quite different in many ways to the system that was then extant; it would accord to more genuine standards of education and would not only accommodate a select group of poor students but would also accommodate those who could afford to pay6.

Jefferson was a utilitarian. His avowed purpose when it came to education was to teach "all branches of science useful to us, and at this day." 7. Interestingly, for instance, he thought geology to be non-beneficial unless it contained some useful metal that could be produced from it for the nation's productivity. In this way, Jefferson was truly one of America's founding fathers: he epitomized American pragmatism. Over and again, in different ways he stated that: "The main objects of all science are the freedom and happiness of man" 8 "Knowledge is power, knowledge is safety... knowledge is happiness."9

From Jefferson's writings, it was clear that he regarded educations as the most certain means for promoting human happiness, freedom, and democracy, and in this sense he has made a lasting contribution to the American education system and, as he legitimately pointed out, to the country as a whole.

Response to Jefferson's Proposals

At the time when Jefferson composed the Bill in the late 1770s, public schools were non-existent in Virginia.

Moreover, across much of America, higher education was the preserve of private colleges that promoted a largely ecclesiastical curricula.

In such a context, Jefferson's ideas for a more humanistic liberal, publicly supported education were regarded as extremely radical.

Even more unacceptable was his suggestion in line with his general commitment to the separation of church and state for college curricula with less pronounced religious overtones and underpinnings and greater focus on neglected subjects such as civil history, political economy, physics, mathematics, anatomy, medicine, pharmacy, surgery, law, and fine arts.

Following the proposal, the President of Trinity College which would later become Duke University, condemned Jefferson as an "atheistic monster" and warned Methodists to avoid the newly founded University of Carolina.

The Trinity/Duke president also denounced Jefferson's University of Virginia as a "bold enterprise and a deistic daring of enormous proportions."

Yet, Jefferson's thinking on public education went well beyond his convictions regarding the need for a well educated citizenry as the basis of a sound republicanism. For example, he also advanced ideas about the educational subjects that would be necessary for responsible citizenry and for an enjoyable and well rounded life.

He believed that history would be the most important topic for learning what was required for functioning as a responsible citizen

-- a wise argument that Americans would do well to consider even now. His "Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge" also proposed reading, writing, and common arithmetic as core subjects for the curricula of all the proposed primary schools in Virginia.

Moreover, Jefferson's thinking about education for responsible citizenry and a more fulfilling life even extended into the practices that ought to be avoided. In a letter to Nathaniel Burwell dated March 14, 1818, Jefferson complained that: "A great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels, and the time lost in that reading which should be instructively employed."

He further derided the passion for novels as a "poison [that] infects the mind, & #8230; destroys its tone, and revolts it against wholesome reading."

Novels would, it seem, ultimately have deleterious effects on democracy since they cause "reason and fact, plain and unadorned" to be are "rejected."

Jefferson -- the Enlightenment Figure

Jefferson's radical democratic perspective also apparently reinforced his lifelong desire to educate himself and others about the physical world, and about the true nature of the relationship between humans and their physical environment in America. It has been noted of Jefferson that, despite "the political tempests which raged around him, he never ceased to live the life of an ardent lover of the world of living things."

Elsewhere it has been observed that "Jefferson's scientific interests persisted throughout his long career as governor of Virginia, ambassador to France, Secretary of State, Vice President of the United States, and President."

Indeed, aside from the expected letters discussing the major political issues of his day, Jefferson's vast volume of correspondences is filled with numerous exchanges with leading men of science.

Jefferson is also said to have been "interested in all useful branches of science" -- a fact which, when coupled with his "very broad" conception of utility, meant that "few lines of research that had developed in his day failed to receive some attention from this tireless man."

Jefferson was also an indefatigable botanist.

He had at least one animal species and an entire plant genus named after him: Megalonyx jeffersoni (1822), an extinct species of giant land sloth, and Jeffersonia (1792), a genus of American wildflowers.

The giant sloth was named after him because he had produced earlier descriptions of the creation, while the naming of the wildflower genus honored the fact that "in botany and zoology the information of this gentleman is equaled by that of few persons in the United States."

Yet while Jefferson evinced a lifelong love of the world of living things, his educational efforts in relation to the natural world were closely related in part to the broader political and intellectual tempests that swirled around him. In an age when Locke's environmental determinism "reigned supreme throughout European society," Jefferson realized that, if he was to attract from Europe the classes of settlers who would strengthen American democracy, he also had to challenge certain negative views about the American natural environment and its effects on humans.

Especially influential in this regard were the views of George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), the French naturalist whose ideas were widely held among Europeans during Jefferson's time.

In his highly influential tome, Natural History: General and Particular, Buffon had included a volume that compared and contrasted animals and humans from the Old and New Worlds.

Here, Buffon argued in part that there existed in the Americas "some combination of elements and other physical causes & #8230; that opposes the amplification of animated Nature."

These elements acted as "obstacles to the development, and perhaps to the formation" of large and robust life forms.

Even those life forms "which, from the kindly influences of another climate, have acquired their complete form and expansion, shrink and diminish under a niggardly sky and an unprolific land."

From the perspective of natural determinism, such an environment could scarcely be expected to support the development of human societies an expectation which Buffon reinforced with his discussions of America's "wandering savages, who, instead of using this territory as a master, had no property or empire" and had succeeded in subjecting "neither the animals nor the elements."

In was in part as a response to Comte's "afflicting picture" of natural and human life in the Americas that Thomas Jefferson composed Notes on the State of Virginia the only book he would ever write.

First published in 1781 and revised and enlarged in 1782 and 1783, the book was dedicated in part to disproving a number of Buffon's claims, including: "That the animals common both to the old and new world, are smaller in the latter" and that "those peculiar to the new, are on a smaller scale."

Jefferson responded in part by describing a number of large American species for which there were no Old World equivalents, including "spatula fish of 50lb. weight [and] catfish, of 100lb. weight."

With regards to the question of the suitability of America's physical environment for raising domestic animals, Jefferson noted, among other things, that "[a] large sheep here weighs 100 lb.," and insisted that "the climate of America will preserve the races of domestic animals as large as the European flock from which they are derived."

In relation to the effect of the American climate on humans, Jefferson rejected, among other things, Buffon's characterization of Native Americans as lacking in bravery. The Indians of North America are brave, Jefferson insisted, "when an enterprise depends on bravery."

Yet the Natives also preferred "the destruction of an enemy by stratagem" as a sensible means of ensuring "the preservation of his own person free from injury."

Jefferson directly addressed his challenge to Buffon. In October 1787, Jefferson sent the Comte a letter along with a selection of various preserved examples of American plant and animal life.

The objective of the package, Jefferson advised, was to "refute assertions by the Comte de Buffon and others that animal and plant life in America was a faint and smaller shadow of European species."

Included in the selection were "the bones & skin of a Moose, the horns of another individual of the same species, the horns of the Caribou, the elk, the deer, the spiked horned buck, & the Roebuck of America."

In this respect, Jefferson had used his largely self pursued science education to defend America's natural and human life from ill-founded criticisms in part, with the ultimate end of ensuring that the country attracted the type of immigrants who, with proper public education, would make good citizens.

Jefferson as Educational Innovator

Jefferson was many things, but, as said before, his formative years inspired him with an enduring interest in education and in leveling differences between rich and poor26. Representative of America's objective, Jefferson, creator of the amendment that famously promised freedom and equality to all, attempted to destroy anything that stood in the way of that freedom. His objectives were to achieve for all citizens, regardless of color, race, and background, freedom of religious faith, freedom of political expression, and freedom from social caste and restrictive constraints of limited finance. As regards education, he sought to destroy the dual systems of schools for well-to-do and for the poor, and to enable the poor to receive the same educational opportunities that the wealthy enjoyed.

In 1818 and 1822, Jefferson crafted these hopes into two famous memoirs:

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. 27

And in 1822 he wrote:

I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource most to be relied on for ameliorating the condition, promoting the virtue, and advancing the happiness of man. 28

Jefferson, in contradiction to the general European experience, looked to the country's greater good rather than to the advantages that the largely affluential and influential minority few might gain. He realized that the selected poor educated at the country's expense would, likely, endeavor to pay the country back in kind. Britain had produced just such a figure in Isaac Newton, and science would later produce another in Faraday. He, Jefferson, believed that the economic sacrifice would be worthwhile and, therefore, his aim was not only to level monetary and social differences but also to produce a mass of geniuses that would have the chance that they would have otherwise lacked to benefit the country:

The object is to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country, for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind, which in proportion to our population shall be the double or treble of what it is in most countries 29.

Another aspect in which Jefferson's ideas on education were novel was the manner in which he associated education with government and believed the two to be inextricably intertwined. As early as 1787, he wrote to Madison his observation that to give "information to the people & #8230; is the most certain and the most legitimate engine of government 30" Similarly, in his first inaugural address he stated that: "The diffusion of information, I deem one of the essential principles of our government and consequently one which ought to shape its administration." 31

Over and again, he reiterated his belief that effective education would help form a more effective government. "My partiality for [the division of counties into wards], " he wrote in 1816, "is not founded in views of education solely, but infinitely more as the means of a better administration of our government, and the eternal preservation of republican principles."32.

Jefferson also realized the impact of education on shaping future leaders and on helping to impede any possible party, institutions or individuals from assuming too much power and becoming too belligerent and unjust in conduct. In 1781, for instance, he wrote that by studying history, students would be facilitated to judge the actions of man, which would, consequently enable them to know ambition under disguise and to defeat it. The educated people, he mentioned, are "the sole depositories of our political and religious freedom."33

Concluding Observations

Regarding Jefferson, it was noted that he "was concerned throughout his life & #8230; with education for everyone irrespective of family, wealth or status."

Jefferson's radical plan for American education was in turn also "part and parcel of his revolutionary political thinking."

Jefferson did not believe that his revolutionary vision for American democracy could be possible without radical education reforms that would guarantee the well-informed and aware citizenry upon which democracy depended. During his lifetime, many of Jefferson's radical proposals for educational reform were rejected and denounced by prominent educators and other public figures. Yet within a half-century of his death in 1826, Jefferson's idea for local elementary schools under local control and supported by local financing had taken hold in various parts of the country.