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 he 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 thirty-two 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 vas 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, belles-lettres, 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 he 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 toads, 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."[6]

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."