Jefferson: Education for Citizenship

5-2c Jefferson: education for citizenship

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States, expressed his educational philosophy in his “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” introduced in the Virginia legislature in 1779. Jefferson was also the principal founder of the University of Virginia.8 Education’s major purpose, Jefferson stated, was to promote a republican society of literate and well-informed citizens. Committed to separation of church and state, he believed that the state, not the churches, had the primary educational role. State-sponsored schools, not private ones, would be funded by public taxes.9

Jefferson’s bill, though not passed, raised important issues for the new nation. For example, it promoted state-established public schools and sought to provide both equity and excellence in education. It would have subdivided Virginia’s counties into districts. The bill stipulated that free children, both girls and boys, could attend an elementary school in each district, where they would study reading, writing, arithmetic, and history. The state would pay for the first three years of a student’s attendance. Jefferson’s proposal also would have established twenty grammar schools throughout the state to provide secondary education to boys. In these grammar schools, students would study Latin, Greek, English, geography, and higher mathematics.

Jefferson’s bill anticipated the idea of academic merit scholarships. In each district school, the most academically able male student who could not afford to pay tuition

8For a discussion of Jefferson on education, see Gutek, An Historical Introduction to American Education, pp. 47–51. Also, see R. B. Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Maurizio Valsania, Nature’s Man: Thomas Jefferson’s Philosophical Anthropology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013). 9Julius P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), pp. 526–533.

1750 1760

1751 Publishes Experiments and Observations on Electricity 1769 Elected president of American Philosophical Society

1775 Pennsylvania delegate to Continental Congress

1776 Signs Declaration of Independence

1778 As uS Minister to France negotiates Franco-American Treaty of Alliance

1770 1780 1790

1790 Death 1787 Pennsylvania delegate to Constitutional Convention

1782 With John Adams and John Jay negotiates Treaty of Paris ending war with great Britain