Jefferson on EducationFromThe Diffusion of KnowledgeSect. VI. At every of these schools shall be taught reading, writing and common arithmetick, and the books which shall be used therein for instructing the children to read shall be such as will at the same time make them acquainted with Graecian, Roman, English and American history. At these schools all the free children, male and female, resident within the respective hundred, shall be intitled to receive tuition gratis, for the term of three years, and as much longer, at their private expence, as their parents, guardians or friends, shall think proper.Subject: Quoting Jefferson on Education
Recently someone inquired as to Thomas Jefferson's education ideas. I do not remember the intent or goal which was put forth, but I attach these (well documented) quotes from Mr. Jefferson. Michael Educating the People"I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power."--Thomas Jefferson to W. Jarvis, 1820.
"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the
people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe
depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be
improved to a certain degree."
The information of the people at large can alone make them
the safe as they are the sole depositary of our political
and religious freedom.
The diffusion of information and the arraignment of all abuses
at the bar of public reason, I deem [one of] the essential
principles of our government, and consequently [one of] those
which ought to shape its administration.
Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their
own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a
certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as
a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be
informed to a certain degree.
[The] provision [in the new constitution of Spain] which ... after
a certain epoch, disfranchises every citizen who cannot read and
write ... is the fruitful germ of the improvement of everything
good and the correction of everything imperfect in the present
constitution. This will give you an enlightened people and an
energetic public opinion which will control and enchain the
aristocratic spirit of the government.
No Freedom Without Education"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."--Thomas Jefferson to C. Yancey, 1816.
I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource
most to be relied on for ameliorating the conditions, promoting
the virtue and advancing the happiness of man.
I feel ... an ardent desire to see knowledge so disseminated through
the mass of mankind that it may, at length, reach even the extremes
of society: beggars and kings.
And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy
to the government or information to the people. This last is the most
certain and the most legitimate engine of government. Educate and
inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is
their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve
them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince
them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation
of our liberty.
Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with
their own government.
Whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, the
people, if well informed, may be relied on to set them to rights.
It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but
in the hands of the people themselves, and that, too, of the people
with a certain degree of instruction. This is the business of the
state to effect, and on a general plan.
[I have] a conviction that science is important to the preservation
of our republican government, and that it is also essential to its
protection against foreign power.
The value of science to a republican people, the security it gives
to liberty by enlightening the minds of its citizens, the protection
it affords against foreign power, the virtue it inculcates, the just
emulation of the distinction it confers on nations foremost in it; in
short, its identification with power, morals, order and happiness
(which merits to it premiums of encouragement rather than repressive
taxes), are considerations [that should] always [be] present and [bear]
with their just weight.
Educate Every CitizenA system of general instruction, which shall reach every description of our citizens from the richest to the poorest, as it was the earliest, so will it be the latest of all the public concerns in which I shall permit myself to take an interest.--Thomas Jefferson to J. Cabell, 1818.
It is highly interesting to our country, and it is the duty of its
functionaries, to provide that every citizen in it should receive an
education proportioned to the condition and pursuits of his life.
By... [selecting] the youths of genius from among the classes of the
poor, we hope to avail the State of those talents which nature has
sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without
use if not sought for and cultivated.
Instead of an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger than benefit
to society, to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent,
which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of
society and scattered with equal hand through all its conditions, was
deemed essential to a well-ordered republic.
I do most anxiously wish to see the highest degrees of education given
to the higher degrees of genius and to all degrees of it, so much as may
enable them to read and understand what is going on in the world and to
keep their part of it going on right; for nothing can keep it right but
their own vigilant and distrustful superintendence.
Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be
attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the
most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.
If the children are untaught, their ignorance and vices will in future
life cost us much dearer in their consequences than it would have done
in their correction by a good education.
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.
The reward of esteem, respect and gratitude [is] due to those who
devote their time and efforts to render the youths of every
successive age fit governors for the next.
Training Republican Statesmen
Nor must we omit to mention among the benefits of education the
incalculable advantage of training up able counselors to administer
the affairs of our country in all its departments, legislative,
executive and judiciary, and to bear their proper share in the
councils of our national government: nothing more than education
advancing the prosperity, the power, and the happiness of a nation.
Laws will be wisely formed and honestly administered in proportion
as those who form and administer them are wise and honest; whence
it becomes expedient for promoting the public happiness that those
persons whom nature has endowed with genius and virtue 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; and that they should be called to that charge without
regard to wealth, birth or other accidental condition or circumstance.
But the indigence of the greater number disabling them from so
educating at their own expense those of their children whom nature
has fitly formed and disposed to become useful instruments for the
public, it is better that such should be sought for and educated at
the common expense of all, than that the happiness of all should be
confined to the weak or wicked.
Hope for the Improvement of Mankind
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.
What but education has advanced us beyond the condition of our
indigenous neighbors? And what chains them to their present state
of barbarism and wretchedness but a bigoted veneration for the
supposed superlative wisdom of their fathers and the preposterous
idea that they are to look backward for better things and not
forward, longing, as it should seem, to return to the days of
eating acorns and roots rather than indulge in the degeneracies
of civilization?
[In a republic, according to Montesquieu in Spirit of the Laws, IV,ch.5,] 'virtue may be defined as the love of the laws and of our country. As such love requires a constant preference of public to private interest, it is the source of all private virtue; for they are nothing more than this very preference itself ... Now a government is like everything else: to preserve it we must love it ... Everything, therefore, depends on establishing this love in a republic; and to inspire it ought to be the principal business
of education; but the surest way of instilling it into children is for parents to set them an example.'
Publicly Supported Education
I have indeed two great measures at heart, without which no republic can maintain itself in strength:
Of all the views of this law [for public education], none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe as they are the ultimate guardians of their own liberty.
Education is here placed among the articles of public care, not that it would be proposed to take its ordinary branches out of the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better all the concerns to which it is equal; but a public institution can alone supply those sciences which, though rarely called for, are yet necessary to complete the circle, all the parts of which contribute to the improvement of the country, and some of them to its preservation.
The present consideration of a national establishment for education, particularly, is rendered proper by this circumstance also, that if Congress, approving the proposition, shall yet think it more eligible to found it on a donation of lands, they have it now in
their power to endow it with those which will be among the earliest to produce the necessary income. The foundation would have the advantage of being independent on war, which may suspend other improvements by requiring for its own purposes the resources
destined for them.
Education for the MassesThe object [of my education bill was] 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.--Thomas Jefferson to M. Correa de Serra, 1817.
The general objects [of a bill to diffuse knowledge more generally through the mass of the people] are to provide an education adapted
to the years, to the capacity, and the condition of every one, and directed to their freedom and happiness.
This [law] on education would [raise] the mass of the people to the high ground of moral respectability necessary to their own safety
and to orderly government, and would [complete] the great object of qualifying them to select the veritable aristoi for the trusts of
government.
The less wealthy people,... by the bill for a general education, would be qualified to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to
exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government; and all this would be effected without the violation of a single natural right
of any one individual citizen.
[The education bill I proposed would] divide every county into wards of five or six miles square;... establish in each ward a free school for reading, writing and common arithmetic;... provide for the annual selection of the best subjects from these schools who might receive at
the public expense a higher degree of education at a district school; and from these district schools ... select a certain number of the most promising subjects to be completed at a University where all the useful sciences should be taught. Worth and genius would thus... [be] sought out from every condition of life, and completely prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts.
This bill on education would [raise] the mass of the people to the high ground of moral respectability necessary to their own safety and to orderly government, and would [complete] the great object of qualifying them to secure the veritable aristoi for the trusts of government to the
exclusion of the pseudalists ... I have great hope that some patriotic spirit will ... call it up and make it the key stone of the arch of our government.
I ... [proposed] three distinct grades of education, reaching all classes.
I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every
county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country, under such regulations as would secure their safe return
in due time.
The tax which will be paid for [the] purpose [of education] is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles
who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.
The truth is that the want of common education with us is not from our poverty, but from the want of an orderly system. More money is now paid
for the education of a part than would be paid for that of the whole if systematically arranged.
In the constitution of Spain as proposed by Cortes, there was a principle entirely new to me: ... that no person born after that day should ever
acquire the rights of citizenship until he could read and write. It is impossible sufficiently to estimate the wisdom of this provision. Of all
those which have been thought of for securing fidelity in the administration of the government, constant reliance to the principles of the constitution,
and progressive amendments with the progressive advances of the human mind or changes in human affairs, it is the most effectual.
The Content of EducationThe objects of ... primary education [which] determine its character and limits [are]: To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business; to enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts in writing; to improve, by reading, his morals and faculties; to understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either; to know his rights; to exercise with order and justice those he retains, to choose with discretion the fiduciary of those he delegates; and to notice their conduct with diligence, with candor and judgment; and in general, to observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed.--Thomas Jefferson: Report for University of Virginia, 1818.
The reading in the first stage, where [the people] will receive their whole education, is proposed ... to be chiefly historical. History by apprising them of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it
will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.
Such a degree of learning [should be] given to every member of the society as will enable him to read, to judge and to vote understandingly on what is passing.
Promote in every order of men the degree of instruction proportioned to their condition and to their views in life.
What are the objects of an useful American [college] education? Classical knowledge, modern languages, chiefly French, Spanish, and Italian;
Mathematics, Natural philosophy, Natural history, Civil history, and Ethics. In Natural philosophy, I mean to include Chemistry and Agriculture,
and in Natural history, to include Botany, as well as the other branches of those departments.
In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.
Freedom [is] the first-born daughter of science.
Science is more important in a republican than in any other government.
Light and liberty go together.
[We should] endeavor to keep [our] attention fixed on the main objects of all science: the freedom and happiness of man. [Thus] will [we] keep ever in view the sole objects of all legitimate government.
The occasion [should be seized] of sowing useful truths among the people which might germinate and become rooted among their political tenets.
Man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do.
The article of discipline is the most difficult in American education. Premature ideas of independence, too little repressed by parents, beget
a spirit of insubordination which is the great obstacle to science with us and a principal cause of its decay since the Revolution.
The consequences of foreign education are alarming to me as an American ... Cast your eye over America. Who are the men of most learning, of most
eloquence, most beloved by their countrymen and most trusted and promoted by them? They are those who have been educated among them and whose manners, morals and habits are perfectly homogeneous with those of the country.
I do not count on any advantage to be derived ... from a familiar acquaintance with the principles of [a] government [which has been] rendered ... a
tyrannical aristocracy, more likely to give ill than good ideas to an American.
[One of] the disadvantages of sending a youth to Europe [for an education is] ... he is fascinated with the privileges of the European aristocrats,
and sees, with abhorrence, the lovely equality which the poor enjoy with the rich in his own country.
Prospects for an Educated Citizenry
Although I do not, with some enthusiasts, believe that the human condition will ever advance to such a state of perfection as that there shall no
longer be pain or vice in the world, yet I believe it susceptible of much improvement, and most of all in matters of government and religion; and
that the diffusion of knowledge among the people is to be the instrument by which it is to be effected.
I do hope that in the present spirit of extending to the great mass of mankind the blessings of instruction, I see a prospect of great advancement
in the happiness of the human race; and that this may proceed to an indefinite, although not to an infinite degree.
No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and happiness ... Preach ... a crusade against ignorance; establish and
improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils [of misgovernment].
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