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Addis, Cameron. (2003). Jefferson’s Vision for
Education, 1760-1845. N.Y.: Peter: Lang Publishing, Inc.
Pp xi + 254
$21.95 ISBN 0-8204-5755-8
Reviewed by Aaron Cooley
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
August 23, 2004
Although critics may detail myriad faults in the character of
Thomas Jefferson, even the harshest must concede that
Jefferson’s commitment to expanding educational
enfranchisement stands as one of his greatest strengths.
Jefferson’s insistence on a publicly-funded system of
education and his advocacy for the creation of the University of
Virginia stand as two of his highest achievements. The portrait
drawn by Cameron Addis displays how Jefferson came to
conceptualize education for democracy. This review will attempt
to discuss some of the most salient sections of the work and draw
out its finer points.
One of the strongest arguments that Addis desires to make is
his view that Jefferson sought to separate religion from
education and to use universities to expand learning into other
fields. According to Addis, “Jefferson’s division of
study for the University of Virginia, which stressed the natural
sciences and professional training for law and medicine, were
similar to those drawn up by William Davie for the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1795” (p. 3). These
attempts to alter the nature of higher education in America met
substantial objections.
The tension over the control of education is obviously present
today, but its historical antecedents are worth noting. A central
issue to Jefferson, at the time, focused on overcoming the
anti-intellectualism of the era. Addis mentions that it carried
from Washington, D.C. to Virginia: “John Quincy Adams, the
last eighteenth-century man to occupy the White House, was
ridiculed in the election of 1828 by Andrew Jackson’s
supporters because he advocated a national university in
Washington and wanted to build celestial observatories” (p.
4). Addis goes on to say that “[Jefferson] hoped the
University of Virginia would encourage more sophistication in
future rulers than what he saw around him in politics” (p.
4).
Jefferson’s recognition of what education could do for
individuals and how important it was to democracy places him on
the right side of this issue (and makes him pragmatic progressive
for the time). The following dispute over what the purpose of
education was demonstrates the level to which some scholars held
truly repugnant views. The clash of views came over the
elites’ acceptance and interest in public education. Addis
puts it this way:
The question in the 1780s and 90s was whether
or not republican governments had enough power to mandate school
attendance and taxation on an unwilling population. The elite
were able to afford private education, and they ran the state
governments of the early republic. They had no need for public
education as a means of controlling the working classes. What
forms should education take? Who should be instructed and who
should be in charge of dispensing it? Whatever consensus existed
on education among the revolutionary leaders broke down over the
question of education’s ultimate purpose: to control or to
empower. (pp. 4-5)
Continuing this line of thought, Jefferson was a contrarian
for the era especially when compared to a contemporary such as
“Noah Webster, of dictionary fame, [who] hoped to use
education to inculcate subordination to authority” p. 5).
Jefferson rejected this and asserted the opinion that stressed
education as being vital to democracy and increasing freedom. Of
education, “Jefferson wrote, ‘No other sure
foundation can be devised for the preservation of
freedom’” (p. 5). The obvious caveat of this
statement is his limitation of suffrage—something unlikely
to be absent from any Jeffersonian commentary well into the
future.
Proving that the past is prologue, Jefferson
struggled in his advocacy of raising funds to pay for his public
school system. Today, across the nation, local districts, state
governments, and the federal budget tinker with educational
finance formulas that are inconsistent in funding and in
outcomes. What remains the same from Jefferson’s time to
ours is the fact that those most in need of education to improve
their economic opportunities are the least able to afford it.
Addis puts the historical challenge this way:
the aristocracy of central and eastern Virginia
(Jefferson’s own social class) resisted paying taxes for
middle- and lower class whites when they could afford to send
their own sons to private academies and British or Northern
universities. They had no stake in encouraging upward mobility
among those who could not afford education. (p. 5)
The lesson from this struggle is to follow Jefferson and not
give up on public education—and attempt to make persuasive
arguments focused on stressing the common democratic good
accomplished by expanding educational opportunities.
Concluding the introduction Addis quotes the
inscription on the Jefferson Memorial that is well worth
remembering, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,
in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never
will be” (p. 6). Prophetic, frightening or possibly both,
Jefferson’s vision for education and democracy, embodied in
this notion, was instrumental in defining the values that led to
public education in America.
Having already touched on the revolutionary
attitude that some thinkers had at the time, we can come to
understand vision that Jefferson was interested in implementing.
The revolutionary spirit’s distaste for external, detached
authority carried into Jefferson’s curriculum: “[He]
planned to drop the Bible in favor of the secular histories of
Greece, Rome, England, and America . . . Jefferson hoped that
exposure to history would alert students to various forms of
tyranny (monarchial and spiritual) and encourage their resistance
to it” (p. 15).
These ideas that seem so central to the intellectual passions
of Jefferson did not arise in a vacuum. From Addis, we come to
find out that Jefferson’s work in education was connected
to that of others of his era. Addis relays that,
“Williamsburg judge St. George Tucker (1752-1827) either
planted the notion of a state-subsidized university in
Jefferson’s mind, or was influenced by Jefferson” (p.
11). Jefferson would go on to attempt to legislate several ideas
incubated by Tucker. It is noteworthy that Addis also suggest
that these ideas could have come from another source. He states:
“Jefferson’s plan for public education arguably came
from Scotland. Scottish thinkers advocated the subordination of
theological training to more general instruction, the dividing up
of schools into various grade levels, and the funding of
education through public, rather than private, donations”
(p. 18). Clearly, Jefferson’s views were a composite drawn
from many sources.
The deeper, more philosophical inspiration for
Jefferson’s ideas came from the work of John Locke,
especially A Letter Concerning Toleration. Although
Jefferson admired Locke’s writing, he thought it did not go
far enough. Addis describes their differences in this way:
“Though he appreciated Locke’s ideas on
representative government, Jefferson differed from Locke in two
ways: he advocated public, not private, education; and he wanted
to extend religious toleration to everyone” (p. 20). Here,
we can see an instance of the intersection of political theory
and how such grand ideas are meted out in the social world. In
Addis’ mind, the following point is essential:
“Jefferson’s American extension of Locke helped set a
new precedent in Western history; one where religious freedom was
not just bestowed reluctantly from above as a privilege, but a
natural right that should not be violated in any way” (p.
20). As with many of these points, the corollaries to the present
are strong, since public schools still struggle with disputes
surrounding religious freedom.
Addis also identifies what he sees as the societal
outcome of Jefferson’s ideals and it is not as egalitarian
as one might have hoped. Addis states: “Jefferson believed
that an aristocracy was necessary for the ‘instruction, the
trusts, and government of society,’ but the status should
be earned rather than inherited, in order to separate the
‘wheat from the chaff’” (p. 12). Several pages
later, Addis reiterates the point: “The 1779 education bill
embodied Jefferson’s views on politics and religion. It was
a vehicle intended to create a natural, rather than an
artificial, white male aristocracy” (p. 16). The harshness
of the time certainly comes through; unfortunately, it seems that
many present-day policymakers and think-tank pundits would
embrace this type of statement without reservation.
Addis concludes the first chapter summing up
and reiterating Jefferson’s ideas in the following
terms:
Jefferson’s model for education was shaped like a
pyramid, with a broad base at the bottom to encourage
egalitarianism and opportunity. The pyramid shape would serve as
a catalyst for upward social mobility—the way to create a
natural, rather than hereditary, aristocracy. (p. 32)
From this point through the conclusion of the work, Addis
takes a turn away from directly speaking to Jefferson’s
vision and moves to the more focused historical research on the
early part of the founding of the University of Virginia.
Although, quite erudite and drawn from primary sources, these
chapters will be of less interest to a reader primarily
interested in philosophy of education and political theory. Such
a reader could feel somewhat misled by the title of the volume.
That said, several passages are worth quoting for their humor and
as anecdotes of an era when student-faculty relations were truly
strained.
The most telling instance of Jefferson’s
educational vision (that of not being able to live up to early
policy implementation) occurred in the design and layout of the
facilities. Addis describes it as:
The code of self-imposed discipline he envisioned and the
architecture he designed for interaction between faculty and
students led to unrest within months of UVA’s opening. It
was Jefferson’s precocious seriousness and intellect which
had allowed him to hobnob with professors, lawyers, and governors
as a teenager. That experience could be encouraged by
architecture but was hard to replicate on a mass scale. (p.
118)
Here we see that visionaries cannot control the consequences
of their ideas; the driven attitude that Jefferson thought would
be in all of the students simply was not there. In short, the
administrative Jefferson was not rousing success by any stretch
and the conditions for educating the students became a matter of
personal safety first and education second. Consider the
following: “students threw dangerous projectiles at the
professors when they wished . . . It was not uncommon for a boy
to attack a professor in the classroom . . . Professor Gessner
Harrison, Edgar Allan Poe’s professor of languages and
literature, was horsewhipped by two students as others stood
around and watched” (p. 122). Such events are surely not
what Jefferson had envisioned as the preparation of the leaders
of the fledgling republic—however considering the
injustices of the time one should not be surprised by such
brutality.
Moving to the conclusion of the volume, we see
that Addis notes a change in the way Jefferson had focused his
efforts to expand education in Virginia. Namely, he moved from
working towards developing a strong public school system to
developing strong universities (e.g. United States Military
Academy and the University of Virginia). Addis comments that
“[Jefferson’s] biggest impact was in higher education
and religious freedom, not primary schools” (p. 147).
Addis is pessimistic about the way in which the
early University of Virginia achieved what Jefferson had hoped.
Addis states: “Jefferson’s academic village was more
a throwback to Virginia’s aristocratic roots than a vehicle
of democracy. It sustained rather than curtailed aristocratic
privilege, subverting the egalitarian spirit of Jefferson’s
1779 education bill” (p. 147).
Having taken praise back from Jefferson, Addis
ends the work with the following laudatory remarks:
“Jefferson enjoyed success establishing the University of
Virginia partly because of his brilliance in orchestrating other
people’s ideas, and partly because of good luck” (p.
148). Further, Addis adds:
If one envisions Jefferson’s original
plan in the shape of a pyramid, he sacrificed the base to insure
the success of the tip. Nonetheless, the spirit of
Jefferson’s message that all children, not just a select
few, could be educated. That was the idea that inspired John
Dewey as he argued for more democratized education around the
turn of the century. Historian William Freehling wrote that,
despite his later compromise on slavery, Jefferson’s early
opposition to that institution contributed to forces that
restricted its spread and led to its eventual dissolution.
Jefferson’s contribution to education followed a similar
pattern. He started off idealistic, then worked against his own
vision, but the mythological Jefferson helped inspire the
establishment of public schools later on (p. 149).
This review showcases that even in the field of
education, Jefferson’s legacy is conflicted. We can
champion him for some efforts and abhor him for others. In the
end, it seems most worthy and pragmatic to appreciate his
progressive spirit for the time—the revolutionary spirit he
embodied—and to fight the battles of today focused on
continuing to expand educational opportunities. If Jefferson was
right, we only have the future of our democracy at stake.
About the Reviewer
Aaron Cooley
holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has mentored, tutored, and taught students in
a range of diverse educational settings and previously worked at the North
Carolina General Assembly. Aaron is dedicated to improving the educational and
economic opportunities of all Americans through innovative ideas in public
policy. His writing has appeared in Essays in Education, Education Review,
Educational Theory, Educational Studies, Journal of Popular
Culture, and the Political Studies Review.
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