Some time ago I suggested I'd write something on Jefferson and education. Finally the time has been found. The question to be asked by those serious about education is what kind of education is fit for a free man. This is sometimes called "liberal education," i.e., an education conducive to liberty.
Leo Strauss once defined liberal education as "experience in things beautiful." Like Alexis de Tocqueville, Strauss worried that democracy has a tendency toward the mediocre. A liberal education should thus remind the citizens of the democracy that there are higher, more beautiful things than satisfying immediate interest or pleasure. One of Strauss's students and later a colleague, Herbert Storing, argued that for most people Strauss's version liberal education is either beyond their capacity or of little use. For them, the truly liberal eduction may be one that teaches them a marketable skill so they can provide for themselves. Being economically independent, they are now capable of being free men. It is not incidental that Storing was a great admirer of Booker Washington. So what makes one free? Is it freedom from economic dependency? Or is it the ability to see the world as it truly is and have some appreciation for what is highest in humanity?
Jefferson, I think, sought to harmonize the two rival definitions. One looks to his "Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia" as an example. Regarding primary education, Jefferson believes it should have the following ends:
[1] To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business;
[2] To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts, in writing;
[3] To improve, by reading, his morals and faculties;
[4] To understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either;
[5] 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;
[6] And, in general, to observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed.
The "primary" education for citizens should include both the skills needed to provide for one's self (arithmetic and literacy, for example), but also, through reading, education should "improve...his morals" and help him "understand his duties to his neighbors and country." This is the education of a gentlemen. He should be morally decent, have good manners, be patriotic, and be able to provide for himself. One is not free if one cannot control one's passions and appetites, nor is one free if one is dependent on others for one's well-being.
Here are Jefferson's goals for higher education:
[1] To form the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend;
[2] To expound the principles and structure of government, the laws which regulate the intercourse of nations, those formed municipally for our own government, and a sound spirit of legislation, which, banishing all arbitrary and unnecessary restraint on individual action, shall leave us free to do whatever does not violate the equal rights of another;
[3] To harmonize and promote the interests of agriculture, manufactures and commerce, and by well informed views of political economy to give a free scope to the public industry;
[4] To develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order;
[5] To enlighten them with mathematical and physical sciences, which advance the arts, and administer to the health, the subsistence, and comforts of human life;
[6] And, generally, to form them to habits of reflection and correct action, rendering them examples of virtue to others, and of happiness within themselves….
Once again, we see a combination of practicality and refinement. University educated citizens are the leaders of society. Thus they need to know the higher theories of the political, mathematical, and physical sciences (including agriculture), but also but also they should "cultivate their morals" and their education should help them be "examples of virtue to others." This, I believe, suggests "experience in things beautiful," the liberation from vulgarity that Strauss saw as the cornerstone of liberal education.
Jefferson did not think a free republic could exist without an educated citizenry. Citizens need to know their rights, know the basis of their rights, need to be able to get information on their own (thus the necessity of literacy), and need to be able to tell good arguments from bad. Thus Jefferson wrote to George Wythe, "Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people." To Edward Carrington he wrote that "the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army" against government oppression, and thus we must maintain our efforts at educating the citizenry. If we do not "you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves."
I leave it to the readers to look at their local schools and ask, "Is this an education fit for a free citizen?"
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