University of Virginia Library

IV. Jefferson's Schemes of Popular Education

It was not until the close of his Presidential term in
1809, that Jefferson was so completely released from all
official responsibilities that he could fix his mind continuously
on the subject which had enlisted his earnest sympathy
and support so early in his political career. Hardly
had he taken up his residence under the roof of Monticello,
when he once more turns to that subject, and during
the remainder of his long life, it held a place in the very
centre of all his daily thoughts. In no form did these
ponderings find a weightier expression than in his famous
letter to Peter Carr, in 1814. In that letter, he again
laid down the various lines which a system of public instruction,
in his judgment, should follow. Again he
broadly declared, by way of introduction, that every citizen
was entitled to an education commensurate with his
condition and calling in life. How was this to be determined?
By the social station to which he belonged.
The whole community was capable of division into two
classes: (1) the laboring class; and (2) the learned class.
Members of the first would require elementary tuition to
qualify them for the proper performance of their tasks;
members of the second would need it as an indispensable
forerunner to further study. So soon as the primary
school had been left behind, the laboring class were expected
to begin the pursuit of agriculture, or serve apprenticeships
in different handicrafts, while, on the other
hand, the learned class were expected to enter the colleges,
which were to be divided into General Schools and
Professional Schools, representing, respectively, the second

grade, and the third or most advanced grade of instruction.

The entire learned class was to receive their secondary
training in the General Schools, in which the highest
branches of knowledge were to be taught. The round
of studies there was to embrace the languages, mathematics,
and philosophy. Provision was to be made in
the department of languages for lessons in history, both
ancient and modern; and belles-lettres, rhetoric, and oratory
were also to be included in this department as well
as such special tuition as was suited to the needs of the
deaf and dumb. The course in mathematics was to embrace
pure mathematics, physics, chemistry, natural history,
and anatomy and the theory of medicine, while the
course in philosophy should take in ideology, ethics, the
law of nature and nations, government, and political
economy. The Professional Schools,—to which all deciding
to follow a profession were to have access, after
passing through the General Schools,—were to cover as
wide a field as the latter, but on a higher level; they were
to consist of three distinct divisions: (1) department of
fine arts, which was to embrace civil architecture, painting,
sculpture, and the theory of music; (2) department
of military and naval architecture, projectiles, agriculture,
horticulture, technical philosophy, practice of medicine,
materia medica, pharmacy, and surgery; (3) department
of theology and ecclesiastical history, and municipal and
foreign law.

These several departments were designed to offer the
graduate of the General Schools the opportunity to acquire
the necessary knowledge of any one of the following
professional subjects: law, medicine, theology, agriculture,
army and navy architecture, painting, and landscape
gardening. In the school of technical philosophy,

instruction was to be given in the arts of the optician,
metallurgist, founder, cutler, druggist, vintner, distiller,
dyer, bleacher, soapmaker, tanner, powder-maker, saltmaker,
and glass-maker, and in all the other arts pursued
by practical tradesmen. In the same school, there
would be assembled students in geometry, pure mechanics,
statics, hydraulics, navigation, astronomy, optics, pneumatics,
acoustics, physics, chemistry, natural history, botany,
mineralogy and pharmacy. All these branches of
study were to be maintained at the public expense. And
on appointed days, the entire corps of scholars in each
college were to be trained in manual exercises, and in
military evolutions and manoeuvres.

This letter to Peter Carr,—of which we have given
only a meagre synopsis,—contains the most complete description
which Jefferson ever drew up of his plans for
public education. It reveals that his point of view had
not changed in spite of the interval of forty years since
1776, during which his observations and impressions of
scholastic institutions of every sort had been broadened
and ripened by foreign travel. He himself, in a letter
written to Governor Nicholas in 1816, referred to it as
a digest of all the information which he had been able
to gather on the subject upon which it bore; and it will
always possess an uncommon interest as foreshadowing
the courses of instruction which he introduced into the
lecture-rooms of the University of Virginia. In the teeth
of popular hostility, he persisted in pronouncing the local
school, supported by local taxation, to be the only proper
one for elementary tuition; and time and reflection, he
said, had but confirmed his opinion as to the correctness
of the general principle of subdividing the counties into
wards for this purpose.

Jefferson perceived very clearly that the sentiment of

the General Assembly, so soon as it took up the question
of public instruction in earnest, with the establishment of
the Literary Fund in 1810, gave the priority to elementary
education over collegiate and university education, at
the State's expense. Was it possible for the resources of
the Commonwealth to sustain the entire system as urged
by him? If that system was to be kept up, as a whole,
he was precisely right in thinking that the elementary
schools should be maintained by local taxation, and the
general funds of the State reserved for the support of
advanced tuition. And this opinion he again engrafted
in the bill which he was requested by Joseph C. Cabell,
in 1817, to prepare for submission to the General Assembly
during the session of 1817–1818. "If twelve or fifteen
hundred schools," he wrote, "are to be placed under
one general administration, an attention so divided will
amount to a dereliction of them to themselves. It is
surely better then to place each school at once under the
care of those most interested in its conduct. In this
way, the Literary Fund is left untouched to complete at
once the whole system of education by establishing a college
in every district of about eighty miles square, for
the second grade of education; and for the third grade, a
single university, where the sciences shall be taught in
their highest degree." The new bill which he presented
was at first entitled an Act for Establishing Elementary
Schools, but it was subsequently expanded in its scope to
take in numerous colleges and a university, and was then
entitled: A Bill to Establish a System of Public Education.
There is an undertone of pathos in the letter which
he wrote to Cabell when sending on its final draft: "I
wish it to be understood," he said, "that I do not intermeddle
with public affairs. It is my duty, and equally
my wish, to leave them to those who are to feel the benefit
and burden of measures. The interest I feel in the system
of education and wards has seduced me into the part
which I have taken as to them, and still attaches me to
their success. ... There is a time to retire from labor,
and that time has come for me."

This bill differed only in petty details from the bill of
1779, or from the scheme of general education set forth
in the letter to Peter Carr, in 1814. First, a school was
to be established in each ward, in which the children of
that ward alone were to receive instruction during three
years at the common charge. The school-house and the
dwelling-house for the teacher were to be built by the
parents at their own expense. A log cabin was to be
considered sufficient in each instance, since the constant
shifting of the population was certain to render necessary
the frequent removal of both houses to some situation
more convenient for the majority of the pupils in
attendance. A teacher capable of grounding these pupils
in reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography, was to
be employed at a salary of one hundred and fifty dollars
a year, with an allowance of bread and meat for subsistence.
In selecting the instructors, the board of visitors,
who were to have charge of the schools, were always to
give the preference to members of the laboring class, such
as mechanics, overseers, and tillers of the soil; and among
these, the first choice should fall on persons who were
infirm in health, crippled in limb, or advanced in years.

Secondly, the State was to be divided into nine districts,
in each of which a college was to be erected, to
be subject to a board of visitors composed of one member
from each county belonging to that district, and all under
the control of the President and Directors of the Literary
Fund. There was to be built for each college a house
of brick or stone, to contain two rooms in which the recitations

were to be held, and four for each professor's use,
with sixteen dormitories for the accommodation of thirtytwo
pupils. There were to be two instructors, at least;
and they were to be required to teach the Greek, Latin,
French, Spanish, Italian, and German languages, the
higher branches of mathematics, the mensuration of land,
the handling of globes, and the fundamental rules of navigation.
Each professor was to receive five hundred dollars
out of the Literary Fund of the State, with such additions
as should accrue from the tuition fees of the members
of his classes; who were also expected to pay rent for
their apartments and the charges for their board.

Thirdly, a university was to be established in a healthy
and central part of the State; and here all the divisions of
the useful arts were to be taught in their highest branches.
Visitors were to be annually nominated by the President
and Directors of the Literary Fund, now to be known
as the Board of Public Instruction; the site of the new
institution was to be chosen by the first set of these visitors;
but the plan of the buildings was to be furnished, or
at least, approved by the Central Board. The dormitories
were to be so constructed as to admit of additions to
their dimensions as the number of students should increase.
The professors were not to exceed ten in number;
and the fixed salary of each should be one thousand
dollars, to be swelled by the tuition fees of his pupils.
The courses of instruction were to embrace history,
geography, natural philosophy, agriculture, chemistry,
theory of medicine, anatomy, botany, zoology, mineralogy,
geology, pure and mixed mathematics, military and
naval science, ideology, ethics, the law of nature and nations,
municipal and foreign law, the science of civil government,
political economy, languages, rhetoric, belleslettres,
and the fine arts. The visitors were to have the

control of all the buildings; and they were also to appoint
and overlook all officers and agents; select the professors;
and draw up rules for the general discipline of the students
and regulations for their subsistence.

When Jefferson drafted this bill for public education
he was eager for the conversion of Central College into
the University of Virginia; and he went so far as to insert
the name of the former seat of learning in the alternate
column opposite the words that required the choice of a
site for the projected university to be made in a central
and healthy part of the State. He did this with the hope
that the General Assembly would, if the bill were accepted,
authorize the adoption of this secondary clause by
amendment.

The bill is significant from another point of view: now
that Jefferson was actively employed in building Central
College, and was looking forward to its transformation
into a great State university, which would need a large
annual appropriation for its support, he appeared to be
less generous and less enlightened in his attitude towards
primary education. Log cabins for schoolhouses and
crippled mechanics for teachers seem to be a rather scant
provision for elementary tuition; and in making such a
suggestion, he plainly had cheapness in view to an extent
that promised little for the real improvement of the class
that needed instruction most. He would hardly have
ventured on this suggestion, had he not apprehended that
an appropriation by the State at large for elementary education
would diminish the chance of obtaining an appropriation
for university education. In 1820, when the
highest branch of his general plan had been adopted, and
the University of Virginia was in the course of erection,
his fear of a shortened State bounty for that institution
returned, and again he deprecated a large outlay for the

primary school. "The inhabitants of each ward," he
wrote to Cabell that year, in repetition of his old scheme,
"meeting together as when they work the roads, building
good log-houses for their school and teacher, and contributing
for his provision rations of pork, beef, and
corn in proportion each of his other taxes, would thus
lodge and feed him without feeling it; and those of them
who were able, paying for the tuition of their own children,
would leave no call on the public fund but for the
tuition fee of here and there an individual pauper, who
would still be fed and lodged with his parents."[4]

There was an additional reason now,—and a highly
characteristic one, too,—why Jefferson advocated the
ward school: it would keep elementary education out of
the hands of fanatical preachers, "who, in the county
elections," he said, "would be universally chosen, and
the predominant sect of the county would possess itself
of all its schools."

But while he appeared to be inclined to favor the
higher institutions at the expense of the dignity and prosperity
of the elementary schools at this particular moment
of his career, he never swerved in his loyalty to his
general plan; and he went so far as to write to Cabell, in
1823, that, were it necessary to give up either the primary
schools or the university, he would rather abandon the
university, "because it was safer to have a whole people
respectably enlightened than a few in a high state of science,
and the many in ignorance." "The last," he added,
"is the most dangerous in which a people can be." He
saw at this time, with regretful clearness, that the resources
of the Literary Fund were not sufficient to support
that entire system of public education which he had
so long urged, and he preferred that the second grade,

composed of the colleges, should be dropped, if any
lopping off had to be done, because the large body of
students who expected to attend these colleges, were the
offspring of parents of some fortune, who could easily afford
to send them to academies of repute already in existence.
But how closely he still had the intermediate
schools in his old scheme at heart was revealed in the
plan which he sent to Cabell in 1824, when it was proposed
to remove the College of William and Mary from
Williamsburg to Richmond. He, as well as Cabell, was
hostile to that step as tending to jeopardize the success
of the University of Virginia, now on the point of throwing
open its doors. It seems that the College of William
and Mary possessed an endowment fund of one hundred
thousand dollars. Now, exclaimed Jefferson, we have an
opportunity of establishing the secondary colleges; let the
General Assembly strip the old institution of its fortune
and distribute it, in the form of endowment funds of
ten thousand dollars each, among the ten colleges which
should be erected in the ten districts into which Virginia
should at once be divided. This would relieve the central
treasury of the tax that would have to be imposed,
should these colleges have to be set up at the State's expense.
The College of William and Mary might be
reserved as one of them; so might Washington College;
and so might Hampden-Sidney College too. Thus out
of one college, there might be created ten, every one of
which would be as useful as the mother of them all, now
reduced to the level of her own numerous offspring.

Cabell threw cold water on the proposition, because, in
his judgment, the pear of public opinion was not ripe for
it; and in addition, the colleges then in existence could
not be effectively insinuated into the projected system.
This, however, was not thought by Jefferson to be essential,

as each district, in order to obtain its share of the
endowment fund, would, he anticipated, be willing to contribute
a site and the buildings for the institution assigned
to it. As the College of William and Mary was not removed
to Richmond, the liberal disposition of its funds
which he rather gratuitously suggested, ceased to be a
practical question. When, for the last time, he brought
forward his general plan for public instruction, he stood
only a little way from the closing year of his long life.
While it may be correctly said of him that he had shown
more energy in pushing that part of his scheme which
looked to the establishment of a university, nevertheless
he made no groundless claim when he asserted, in 1818,
that "a system of general education, which shall reach
every description of our citizens, from the richest to the
poorest, as it was the earliest, so it will be the latest of
all the public concerns in which I shall permit myself to
take an interest." In his advocacy of that system, he
had remained singularly consistent to his original plan,
from 1779, when it was first publicly broached, down to
1825, when it was last brought up. First, there were to
be the elementary schools, which were to be confined to
the hundreds or wards into which every county was to be
divided; secondly, the grammar schools, which were
really classical academies or colleges; and thirdly, a State
university. "But I am not tenacious," he earnestly declared
in 1818, "of the form in which it (public education)
shall be introduced. Be that what it may, our
descendants will be as wise as we are, and will know how
to amend it until it shall suit their circumstances. Give it
to us in any shape, and receive for the inestimable boon
the thanks of the young and the blessings of the old, who
are past all other but prayers for the prosperity of their
country and blessings for those who promote it."