Lecture delivered at the Lifelong Learning Seminar, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan

 

On July 4, 2014, the New York Times published a new Declaration of Independence. You may have missed it. Written by Jennifer Barnett, who is described as “Teacher Leader in Residence for the Center for Teaching Quality” in North Carolina, the “Declaration for Teachers” mimics some of Thomas Jefferson’s language—although unlike Jefferson’s declaration which is a logical syllogism, this one consists merely of a series of assertions. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” she bravely begins, “that all teachers are valuable, and that they are endowed by their skill and expertise with a certain inalienable right to lead.” What is more, “Educational systems must be designed to serve students, deriving their power from the consent of teachers. Whenever any school or system forgets its way, it is the right of the teachers to alter or abolish it.” Now, you may have assumed that local citizens governed public schools, and that consent for the establishment and maintenance of your schools came from such practices as school board elections and budget referendums. Well, silly you. “No longer will teachers allow what seems to be in direct object”—I think she means “opposition,” but vocabulary may not be her strongest suit—”to their service dictate what is best for students or their profession.” What we need, rather, are “teacher-powered schools” in which “teacher leadership” is, because it “ought to be,” “the foundation upon which education lies.”

The Center for Teaching Quality receives part of its funding from—you guessed it—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So we know where their money comes from. But you may be asking, ‘Where do such astonishing notions as these come from?’ The answer in this case, and in almost all cases in American public education for the past hundred years, is the Gospel According to John—John Dewey, that is. My religious language is apt because in 1897 Dewey availed of such language himself, titling one of his most influential essays, “My Pedagogic Creed.” There he wrote, “The teacher is engaged, not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life. I believe that every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling; that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of right social growth. I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.” A teacher-leader, indeed, because “education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform,” “the only sure method of social reconstruction.” The true kingdom of God means just such a reconstructed human society, which means that the true God, according to the apostle of “My Pedagogic Creed,” is none other than humanity—as one would expect from one of the co-signers of the original 1933 version of “The Humanist Manifesto.” Previously, the word “humanism” had meant the practice of “the humanities”; a “humanist” was who practiced and taught languages, literature, philosophy, and the other “liberal arts.” The liberal arts composed the heart of the curriculum of the old universities, founded under the aegis of, first, the Catholic Church and then the Protestant churches. But the new humanism rejected the religious framework of the old liberal arts and took upon itself the model of social science, itself modeled on the applied mathematics of engineering and also upon the scientific method of experimentation–in this case, social experimentation.

If Ms. Barnett received her ideas indirectly from John Dewey, where did Dewey get them? Born in Vermont in 1859 (he probably didn’t get them there), Dewey received his Ph. D. at the Johns Hopkins University—as did the other of the two most important first-generation American progressives, Woodrow Wilson. Johns Hopkins was the first American university animated by the principles of German philosophy and modeled upon the German institution of the research university. German philosophy in America derived from the thought of the nineteenth-century philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel put moral and political philosophy on an entirely new foundation, a foundation fundamentally opposed to the philosophic foundation of the American founding.

As you know, the American founders looked to the laws of nature and of nature’s God as the basis of moral and political right. All men are created equal, not in intelligence, character, or physical appearance but in their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those unalienable rights—as distinguished from the supposedly unalienable right of teacher-leaders to run our schools—are what governments are intended to secure. The U. S. Constitution constitutes the American federal government and serves as the supreme law of our land, under the laws of nature and of nature’s God.

Hegel disagreed. He regarded both natural right and the God of the Bible as myths. These myths had served humanity ‘back in their day’—Hegel regarded the teachings of the Bible as superior to the paganisms that they replaced—but ‘that was then and this is now.’ Humanity has outgrown such things.

What is real, not mythological, is history—history defined as the evolution of all matter and all energy toward their apex, toward their purpose—namely, the thoroughgoing domination of the human mind over all of nature. Politically and economically, this will mean a worldwide human society or world state. The role of education and of educators in this scheme is to serve each national state by leading each nation toward this new version of the kingdom of God. Thus the new, scientistic ‘humanism’ will serve a new liberalism—a liberalism defined not in terms of individual liberty or popular self-government but in terms of the liberation of all humanity from the shackles of nature and of the old religions in a fully rational world-state governed by bureaucracies staffed by university-educated experts in scientific administration.

Matter and energy taken together are manifestations of what Hegel calls the “Absolute Spirit.” The Absolute Spirit isn’t ‘holy’ or separate from ‘Creation.’ Rather, what the Bible calls ‘Creation’ or what the philosophers called ‘nature’ is a physical manifestation of the Absolute Spirit, which unfolds dialectically over time. These words that I am speaking, these thoughts that I am expressing, the brain, throat, vocal cords etc. with which I am expressing them, this podium, this room, and all of you are all instances of the Absolute Spirit in its unfolding. The dialectical character of the Absolute Spirit refers to the way in which it expands or grows not smoothly but by generating opposing or contradictory forces (intellectual, moral, physical) which clash and then join together in combination or ‘synthesis.’

In moral and intellectual life, conflict or contradiction causes individuals and groups to become ‘conscious’ of their opponents and their ideas. In his paradigmatic example of this, Hegel describes the ‘master-slave dialectic.’ Briefly, the cause whereby the Absolute Spirit has differentiated itself into the opposite persons of a master and his slave is that two free men fought, and the loser surrendered his freedom in exchange for a life in bondage, supposing it better to be a live dog than a dead lion. The slave will only recover his freedom if he deliberately risks his life to win his freedom—in Hegel’s vocabulary, to compel the master to ‘recognize’ him as a fellow human being. When that happens, a new epoch in both men’s personal ‘history’ will begin; when that kind of thing happens in a society, a new epoch of national and potentially of world ‘history’ will begin. The laws of ‘History’—now defined as the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit—replace the laws of nature and of nature’s God, which are now seen as inadequate conceptions of the Absolute Spirit. Under this new dispensation, sometimes called ‘historicism,’ human nature is reconceived as evolving, perfecting itself, moving toward the telos, the ‘end’ of history.

In America, Hegel’s ideas became prominent in the middle of the nineteenth century, seen in the school of thought known as the Saint Louis Hegelians. Hegel himself was scarcely a democrat, but in America, as Tocqueville would have predicted, Hegel’s theory became democratized, put into the service of social egalitarianism. German idealism had entered the United States by the 1830s with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his circle, the New England Transcendentalists. The Transcendentalists showed a serious interest in education and in politics, forming an important part of the Abolitionist movement, but they inclined toward individualism and resisted statism. But in 1856 an eccentric Prussian thinker named Henry Conrad Brokmeyer settled in St. Louis after working first as a mechanic, then a businessman in the years after arriving in the United States at the age of 16.  Two years later, he befriended William Torrey Harris, a transplant from New England. Brokmeyer and Harris studied Hegel’s Logic together, founding a philosophic circle propounding, among other notions, that the leading edge of world history was moving from Europe to the United States and establishing its intellectual capital in—where else?—St. Louis, soon to become (as they imagined) the new Athens. The Civil War provided them with what they regarded as proof positive of Hegelianism: a massive dialectical clash, would lead to the introduction of a genuine modern state in the postwar historical ‘synthesis’ of North and South. Brokmeyer went on to a serious political career in Missouri, rising as high as acting Governor of Missouri before failing to win the governorship in the next election and eventually retreating to life in Indian territory farther to the west (did I mention he was eccentric?). Harris enjoyed greater success and a less checkered career,  which included service as head of the U. S. Education Commission beginning in the late 1880s.

Several years after the war they founded the Hegelian Journal of Speculative Philosophy, which published translation of Hegelian and other German philosophic texts along with articles by a number of young American philosophers, including John Dewey. Dewey had come to Hegelianism in the 1880s at the Johns Hopkins University, where his mentor was another Saint Louis Hegelian, George Sylvester Morris. Another graduate student at Hopkins at the time was Woodrow Wilson. Both Dewey and Wilson went on to eminent careers in education: Wilson, with a Ph. D. in the newly-invented field of political science, eventually becoming president of Princeton, and Dewey initially at the University of Michigan as a philosophy professor (Morris arranged for his appointment), then at the University of Chicago (another German-style research university), but then and most strategically at Columbia University, and particularly at its famous Teacher’s College—for decades the most prestigious college for professional educators in the United States.

For Dewey, Wilson, and for the American Progressives generally, the American founding—based upon the old philosophy of liberty, the old liberalism of natural right—was good for its time, but now obsolete. A new liberalism was needed, one based upon historical right or progress and not the unalienable, natural rights of the old Declaration of Independence that the old Constitution was designed to secure. The new, “elastic,’ “organic,” or “living” Constitutional would systematically ‘grow’ the central state, providing employment for university-trained, tenured administrators and public school teachers. Thus the liberal education that formed the minds of the American founders was also obsolete, and must be replaced by a new liberal education for the new liberalism or administrative statism. In the first years of the twentieth century, the professional classes would form the core of the Progressive movement in its major political campaigns, often in alliance with the older but now fading Populist movement. The number of ‘professionals’ surged in those decades, as the shift from a commercial-agricultural to a commercial-industrial economy spawned large national corporations and a population shift into the cities. Both the new corporations and the big cities needed professional administrators, making the Hegelian fondness for bureaucracy much more plausible than it had been in the previous centuries here.

According to the democratized Hegelians of the Progressive movement, philosophy, which had once attempted to understand human nature as something fixed and imperfect, must now dedicate itself to social, economic, and political progress aimed at perfecting human societies. Dewey shares with Marx—another disciple of Hegel—a rejection of natural right and an esteem for social egalitarianism. He came to share with Marx an evolutionary form of materialism, moving some distance from Hegel on this point. But he sharply disagrees with Marx, and thus opposed Soviet Communism, on two crucial matters: the regime of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the use of class warfare (an economic form of the ‘dialectic’) as the means of human progress. Rather, according to the Gospel of John Dewey, education via the scientific method is the true vehicle of social change; education should serve not a ‘top-down’ regime of dictatorship but a democratic regime of social experimentation and pluralism.

With Dewey the school is now reconceived as the laboratory of social progress. Children must not compete against one another in school. They should learn by cooperating with one another in group projects. “I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the [human] race,” Dewey wrote in. “My Pedagogic Creed.” “The most formal and technical education in the world cannot safely depart from this general process. It can only organize it; or differentiate it in some particular direction.” Education rightly understood is the handmaiden of ‘history.’

Such participation—along with such direction—begins not with intellectual training but with what we now call ‘hands-on’ projects: cooking, sewing, manual training of various sorts. This program (consistent with Brokmeyer’s example as a philosopher-craftsman) was intended to fuse the mentality of the working class with the mentality of the intellectual class, all in the service of forming one all-encompassing class of citizens who were socially equal, not equal merely in terms of natural rights. The state, as Dewey conceived of it, following Hegel, is an organic unity, an organism, which harmonizes the relations of all social associations within it, including the careful regulation of business. The school is the brain of the social organism that is the state. The teacher thus does indeed become the true leader of human society, along with other professional public administrators who form part of the modern state’s nervous system, the bureaucracy.

To give you an idea of how far Dewey sought to ‘socialize’ human life, going far beyond mere socialism in economics or democracy in politics, I only mention his theory of how children learn. All children are essentially ‘groupish’ organisms. “The only true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself.” When Dewey says that “all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race,” he gives the example of the human infant. It is (he claims) “through the response which is made to the child’s instinctive babblings [that] the child comes to know what the babblings mean.” Now, my own impression is that children already know exactly what their instinctive babblings mean. It is rather for the parents to figure out what the child is babbling about, and then to decide whether the child should get what he wants. It is further for the child then to understand the language in which the parents command, cajole, and teach him. After understanding that language, including the word that forms sentences like, “No! and, after some schooling, “All men are created equal,” the child can then move on to live a meaningful life in the service of the God who created the terms and conditions of life, including the nature governed by His laws. That is the kind of primary education which culminated in the old liberal education seen in the colleges and universities of Europe and America, the education which formed the old liberalism—the liberalism of self-government, of individual and citizen liberty.

But Dewey has other plans.

The key to understanding Dewey’s philosophy is an appreciation of his concept of “growth.” “Growth” combines the organicism of Darwinian biology with the progressivism of contemporary social science. Teachers should never “impose certain ideas” or “form certain habits” in the child. “The only way of securing continuity in the child’s growth” is for the school to “represent life”—initially, the child’s life at home, with its cooking and cleaning and carpentry, but mostly through the teachers who will arrange the social environment of the school and then nudge the child to respond (as Dewey says) “properly” to that environment. And what is “properly”? Nothing other than “a continuing reconstruction of experience…. The process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.” “What we term reason is primarily the law of orderly or effectual action.” Thus “I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform,” because “education is the regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness”; “the art of… giving shape to human powers and adapting then to social service is the supreme art.” If so, then of course the teacher is the supreme artist and the teacher of teachers—Professor Dewey himself—the most supreme of all. But even he is only the agent of History, which is nothing other than “the life and progress of humanity.” If the Absolute Spirit replaces the Holy Spirit, then History replaces Providence. The meaning of “properly” rests on Dewey’s claim that “ultimate moral motives and forces are nothing more or less than social intelligence—the power of observing and comprehending social situations—and social power—trained capacities of social control—at work in the service of social interests and aims.”

Speaking of human sociality, I hope that I am not alone in seeing a certain circularity in Dewey’s moral reasoning. This comes from partial departure from Hegelian historicism, which he takes in an egalitarian direction. In Hegel, the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit has come to an end in his own systematic account of all aspects of human life. There will be no more fundamentally new ideas. In practice, as I’ve noted, the Absolute Spirit will continue to progress towards the World State, a political condition which Hegel’s thought has already prepared. But Dewey denies that there is an ‘end of History,’ but only endless process and alleged progress toward more extensive democracy. He wrote, famously, “The cure for the ills of democracy is… more democracy.” Similarly, the purpose of utility is more utility, as seen in Dewey’s remark that “it is the characteristic use to which a thing is put… which supplies the meaning with which it is identified,” and the meaning shifts with the use). The purpose of education is more education. The purpose of more growth is more growth. And so on. Or, as Dewey quite openly argues, human life is not “a preparatory probation for ‘another life,'” on earth or in Heaven, nor is it a struggle to fulfill the potential of human nature: indeed, “the conception that growth and progress are just approximations to a final unchanging goal is the last infirmity of the mind in its transition from a static to a dynamic understanding of life.” Take that, Hegel. Endless construction and reconstruction is our lot and indeed, as far as Dewey is concerned, our joy.

Dewey teaches that “to an extent characteristic of no other institution, save that of the state itself, the school has the power to modify the social order.” But of course “the selection and prosecution of the detailed ways and means by which the public will is to be executed efficiently must remain largely a matter of specialized and expert service.” Parents and other citizens generally may have a say in determining the ends of education and of judging the results, but otherwise the expert professionals will rule. “Genuine social control means the formation of a certain mental disposition; a way of understanding, objects, events, and acts which enables one to participate effectively in associated activities.” The experts will serve as the facilitator/controllers of children and therefore of society and therefore of the course of history. But why is this not merely purposefulness without a purpose?

All of this leads to an obvious political problem: If the daily rule of experts (albeit in the name of democracy) puts itself at the service of somewhat vague and circular purposes—if what Dewey and his allies called “pragmatism” results in a process of endless social experimentation—then why will this not eventuate in a power-politics of nihilism. This new power-politics would be fought out not so much in parliaments or even on battlefields as in classrooms and school administrators’ offices. Does this not expose the real purpose of historicism-without-an-end-of-History as the exercise of the will to power? The great philosopher of the will to power isn’t the constitutional monarchist, Hegel, or the democrat, Dewey, but Nietzsche.

Filter Hegel through the habits of mind and heart of a democratic society and you get Dewey and Wilson. Filter Nietzsche through the habits of mind and heart of a democratic society and you get the various advocates of ‘postmodernism.’ With postmodernism, modern education, beginning in the universities, re-divided what Dewey and his allies had attempted to unite: vocational and pre-professional training on the one hand—which has become the focus of so many former liberal-arts colleges—and a reconceived liberal arts curriculum dedicated to ‘deconstructing’ the thoughts and careers of your enemies, privileging ‘in’ groups over ‘out’ groups, playing ‘gotcha’ with words, and generally re-inventing illiberal education in the guise of egalitarianism.

All of this operates at far remove from liberty and equality as understood by the Founders—as inherent or natural rights, secured better or worse by political institutions but unaltered by them and given by our Creator and not by governments. It is to that form of equality and liberty that Hillsdale College continues to be dedicated.

 

Further reading:

Dewey was a long-lived and prolific philosopher. In addition to “My Pedagogic Creed” see also Democracy and Education (originally published in 1944), The Public and Its Problems (originally published in 1927), and Individualism Old and New (originally published in 1929). All are still in print. For an excellent summary of Dewey’s political philosophy, see Robert H. Horwitz: “Dewey,” in Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, eds.: The History of Political Philosophy (originally published in 1963, with several subsequent editions).

G. W. F. Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right. H. B. Nisbet trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. See also Steven B. Smith: Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism: Rights in Context (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989).

Lecture delivered at the Lifelong Learning Seminar, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan

 

In order to conduct politics according to a written constitution, it’s probably best to have a citizenry that can read. And if they can read a logical syllogism like the Declaration of Independence with understanding, so much the better. The American citizens of the founding generation, male and female, found themselves in the midst of the Second Great Awakening, the movement that gave us, among other things, the Sunday school. Many Americans of that generation learned to read in Sunday school. By 1790, almost every male American citizens in New England could read and write, and the vast majority of women could, as well. In fact, New Englanders were the most literate population in the world at that time. The literacy rates declined as one headed further south, but estimates are that even in the states with the lowest literacy rates, 70 to 75 percent of male citizens could read and write.

This doesn’t mean that the American Founders were satisfied with our schools. The great political revolution or regime change which they had undertaken required a new kind of education. One of the most famous founding-generation Americans, Noah Webster—of dictionary fame—complained that American schools lacked what he called “proper books.” There was no shortage of books as such. In fact, schoolboys memorized Demosthenes and Cicero and even debates from the British Parliament, which Webster judged to be “excellent specimens of good sense, polished style and perfect oratory.” But there were two problems with them: coming from “foreign and ancient nations,” these speeches were “not very interesting to children.” What is more, “they cannot be very useful” to American children, who are neither Greeks nor Romans nor even Brits, any more. “Every child in America should be acquainted with his own country”; know “the history of his own country”; “lisp the praise of liberty”; and learn about “those illustrious heroes and statesmen, who have wrought a revolution in [America’s] favor.”

The principal American textbook, Webster argued, should consist of a collection of essays “respecting the settlement and geography of America; the history of the late revolution [he was writing in 1788] and the most remarkable characters and events that distinguished it, and a compendium of the principles of the federal and provincial governments.” “These are interesting object to every man; they call home the minds of youth and fix them upon the interests of their own country, and they assist in forming attachments to it, as well as in enlarging the understanding.”

Far from rejecting the wisdom of foreigners—wisdom, after all, is wisdom wherever it comes from—Webster cites “the great Montesquieu,” who teaches “that the laws of education ought to be relative to the principles of the government. In despotic governments, the people should have little or no education, except what tends to inspire them with a servile fear,” because “information is fatal to despotism.” In monarchies (what we would call constitutional or limited monarchies) education should differ depending on which class of citizens the student comes from. In such monarchic and aristocratic communities, where one’s station at birth largely determines one’s lifelong standing, each citizen should not only ‘know his place’ but know the way of life and purposes appropriate to that place. There is no point in teaching rhetoric to a shoemaker if he lives in a monarchic regime, and so will have no place to exercise his oratorical skills beyond the local tavern. Which could only lead to trouble.

However, Webster continues, now quoting Montesquieu, “in a republican government the whole power of education is required.” “Here,” Webster observes, “every class of people should know and love the laws. This knowledge should be diffused by means of schools and newspapers; and an attachment to the laws may be formed by early impressions upon the mind.” Some fifty years later, a young Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln would say almost exactly the same thing in his now-famous address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield.

Webster even insists that “a system of education as gives every citizen an opportunity of acquiring knowledge and fitting himself for places of trust” is one of the two “fundamental articles” of republican regimes. The other is equal economic opportunity to “acquir[e] what his industry merits”—an opportunity granted when the aristocratic systems of primogeniture and land monopoly are abolished, as indeed they are in the Constitution and the Northwest Ordinance, written as they were to establish the United States regime as a commercial republic. Education and economic liberty together “are the fundamental articles; the sine qua non of the existence of the American republics.” It would be, he writes, an act of “absurdity” to copy “the manners and adopt the institutions of Monarchies”—their way of life and their ruling forms.

Although several states had provided for colleges and academies “where people of property may educate their sons,” they have made “no provision… for instructing the poorer ranks of people, even in reading and writing.” While their “constitutions are republican,” their “laws of education are monarchical.” Webster therefore advocates the establishment of public schools.

What is more, “When I speak of a diffusion of knowledge, I do not mean merely a knowledge of spelling books, and the New Testament. An acquaintance with ethics, and with the general principles of law, commerce, money and government, is necessary for the yeomanry of a republican state.” Indeed, “the more generally knowledge is diffused among the substantial yeomanry, the more perfect will be the laws of a republican state” because the citizens will be better able to choose good representatives an themselves take on governing responsibilities, in turn.

Montesquieu taught that while the principle of monarchy is fear, the principle of republicanism is virtue. Accordingly, Webster argues, “The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.” He concludes: “Until such a system shall be adopted and pursued; until the Statesman and Divine shall unite their efforts in forming the human mind, rather than lopping [off] its excrescences, after it has been neglected; until Legislators discover that the only way to make good citizens and subjects, is to nourish them from infancy; and until parents shall be convinced that the worst of men are not the proper teachers to make the best; mankind cannot know to what a degree of perfection society and government can be carried. America affords the fairest opportunities for making the experiment, and opens the most encouraging prospect of success.” Webster knew that the founding generation of Americans would soon disappear. Simply maintaining the regime they established would prove difficult, but there remained much more for new generations to learn and accomplish. Education beckoned as an open field for them.

Along with the other prominent members of the founding generation who wrote on education, Webster saw a very tight connection between political self-government, republicanism, and the need for moral self-government and certain kinds of learning. Obviously, this learning would include such intellectual fundamentals as spelling and arithmetic and the moral fundamentals seen in the New Testament. But as we see, it would also include the economic and political fundamentals, “the general principles of law, commerce, money, and government,” and a student’s grammar school were not too soon to learn them. Learning these economic and political principles of self-government remains a task for today.

More politically prominent Americans than Webster thought carefully about education in America. I will discuss three of them: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. But behind all of them we see the educational advice of the English philosopher, John Locke, who had such a strong influence on the argument they had made in the Declaration of Independence. So, I’ll begin with a brief look at Locke’s seminal book, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, published in numerous editions beginning in 1693.

The first thing to notice about Locke’s book is its intended audience. Locke does not address the upper aristocracy; indeed, he ridicules the aristocrat as a rather frivolous and useless fellow—”always with his cup at his nose,” a cup that too often contains substances stronger than chocolate, coffee, or tea. Locke instead addresses the father of “the young gentleman,” meaning the gentry class or lower portion of the landed aristocracy. It is in them that Locke sees the kingdom’s continued and future greatness because they show the traits of rationality and industry which the pampered and idle lords and ladies will never exhibit. Indeed, one of the key features of Great Britain’s rise to dominance of the seas and of commerce would be transition the gentry class made from the mores of feudal, warrior-aristocrats to those of what one nineteenth-century writer would call “captains of industry.”

Locke was a home-schooler; his gentry could afford to be. But he also dislikes the boys’ schools: “Children who live together strive for Mastery.” The constant supervision by and contact with adults is far better. The two principal teachers of the Young Gentleman will be his father and the tutor his father hires. Although Locke doesn’t yield an inch to even the most Calvinist divines in taking a jaundiced view of the nature of children, saying that they love liberty but love “Power and Dominion” even more, he denies the tutor any power to punish them corporally. Even the father should strictly bridle his own anger while punishing the boy, interspersing calm admonitions between the spanks. Locke recommends this course because he regards the authority of example as more powerful than either coercion—which is both resented and, eventually, emulated, inculcating habits of tyrannizing—or mere precept. “Ill patterns are sure to be followed more than good rules.” And even such firmness as this ought to be relaxed as soon as possible, as the father asks his son’s advice on appropriate subjects, especially those concerning the management of the estate. Listen to the boy’s ideas, and when he comes up with a good one, pretend it’s his very own, and follow it. Such a mild form of freedom actually increases the father’s authority by adding to his son’s esteem for him. The habit of ruling and being ruled, government by consent, begins here. And it quickens the child’s maturation, substituting serious concerns for childish ones: “The sooner you treat him as a Man, the sooner he will be one.”

Locke decries the old, “scholastic” education—the Christian Aristotelianism fashionable in most of the schools of his time—but also the abstract and indeed mathematical education favored by that firm anti-Scholastic, Descartes. He wants, above all, a useful education, intended to bring the Young Gentleman to the point where he can “judge right of Men, and manage his Affairs with them.” He wants to inculcate “the knowledge of a Man of Business, a Carriage suitable to his Rank, and to be Eminent and Useful to his Country according to his Station.” Not so much warlike or battlefield courage but courage in the sense of “the quiet Possession of a Man’s self, and an undisturb’d doing his Duty, whatever Evil besets, or Danger lies in his way” is the Lockean way.

Accordingly, Locke firmly discourages influences that appeal to the imagination—whether imagined fears, which will effeminate the mind—or imagined glories—which will harden its against reason—must be repelled. Poetry, painting—anything that engages the passions by making them seem noble—are to be discouraged. If a child has what Locke calls “a Poetick Vein, ’tis to me the strangest thing in the World, that the Father should desire, or suffer it to be cherished, or improved. Methinks the parents should labor to have it stifled, and suppressed, as much as may be…. There are very few instances of those, who have added to their Patrimony by any thing that they have reaped” from the Mounts of Parnassus.

In the commercial-republican regime of America, Locke’s emphasis on education for one’s social “station”—what Montesquieu would call a “monarchic” bias—hardly got much play, except in some parts of the South, where a gentry class had established itself during colonial times. As did Webster, they wanted schools for large numbers of citizens, not only ‘the few.’ But Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson all share Locke’s esteem for usefulness, for the practical virtues of commerce and citizenship.

In proposing a college for Pennsylvani in 1749, Benjamin Franklin cited “the great Mr. Locke” and his “much-esteemed” treatise on education. Nor is this idle praise; in his extensive footnotes to the proposal, Franklin quotes Locke more copiously than any other writer. Following the philosopher’s lead, Franklin emphasized the need for a “more useful Culture of young Minds” than afforded, for example, by the aristocratic habit of gardening. Along with the obvious choices—mathematics, the English language, geography, morality—Franklin insists on the study of history broadly understood. Not only will reading histories teach political oratory, but it will also teach “the necessity of a Publick Religion”—specifically, Christianity—and the “advantages” of constitutions—a topic Franklin wanted to prepare American students for, some quarter-century before he would sign the Declaration of Independence and nearly forty years before he would sign the U. S. Constitution. The study of history can also lead to discussions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, which in turn lead to debate and therewith to reasoning. Finally, “natural history” and the “history of commerce” can complement one another, if the study of nature leads to improved techniques of agriculture. Tellingly, Franklin includes no separate study of theology, contenting himself with saying in a footnote, “To have in View the Glory and Service of God, as some express themselves, is only the same Thing in other Words” for “Doing Good to Men,” thereby “imitat[ing] His Beneficence.”

Franklin does not follow Locke in insisting on private tutoring. He is proposing a college. “Youth will come out of this School fitted for learning any Business, Calling or Profession, except such wherein Languages are required; and tho’ unacquainted with any ancient or foreign tongue, they will be Masters of their own, which is of more immediate and general Use.” Time Europeans spend learning foreign languages will accrue to “such a Foundation of Knowledge and Ability, as, properly improved, may qualify them to pass thro’ and execute the several offices of civil Life, with Advantage and Reputation to themselves and Country.”

After independence and the founding of the republican regime change Franklin had long prepared had been realized, he took a particular interest in the schooling of freed slaves. As early as 1763, on a visit to a Sunday school for black children, he concluded that “their Apprehension seems as quick, their Memory as strong, and their Docility in every Respect equal to that of white Children. You will wonder perhaps that I should ever doubt it, and I will not undertake to justify all my Prejudices, nor to account for them.” In a public address in 1789, Franklin called for a “national policy” of slave emancipation. “Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care may sometimes open a source of serious evils.” The “galling chains, that bind his body, do also fetter his intellectual faculties, and impair the social affections of his heart” because he who is treated like “a mere machine” finds his reason “suspended” and his conscience stifled, having been “chiefly governed by the passion of fear”—the monarchic principle. You will recall that this is precisely the kind of thing Locke wanted to avoid by limiting the use of corporal punishment—the very punishment that a slave finds himself subjected to, not only in childhood but throughout his life. “Under such circumstances, freedom may often prove a misfortune to himself, and prejudicial to society.”

Therefore, “Attention to emancipated black people, it is… to be hoped, will become a branch of our national policy,” a “serious duty incumbent upon us.” To instruct, to advise, to qualify those, who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty, to promote in them habits of industry, to furnish them with employments suited to their age, sex, talents, and other circumstances, and to procure their children an education calculated for their future situation in life; these are the great outlines of the… plan which we have adopted, and which we conceive will essentially promote the public good, and the happiness of these our hitherto too much neglected fellow creatures.” As with whites, the education of black students will be preeminently useful, with an insistence on “a deep impression of the most important and generally acknowledged moral and religious principles.” Franklin further recommends the establishment of a “Committee of Guardians,” which would place the students in apprenticeships. He knows that some students, and especially the children of former slaves, will lack the family ‘connections’ that help young men ‘get ahead’; the Committee of Guardians will act as the guardian of an orphan would, at least when it comes to finding work for his ‘ward.’ Like Locke, Franklin wants useful citizens, but unlike Locke he wants them on American terms, without the rigid class distinctions that Locke need to work within (and to some extent against) in England.

John Adams shared Franklin’s well-known appreciation for modern science: “Man,” he wrote, “by the Exercise of his Reason can invent Engines and Instruments, to take advantage of the Powers of Nature, and accomplish the most astonishing Designs.” He also saw that this conquest of nature promised both great good and evil. Education for boys and girls alike must therefore include education in philanthropy, patriotism, and “the art of self-government, without which they can never act a wise part in the government of societies, great or small”; “the study and practice of the exalted virtues of the Christian system… will happily tend to subdue the turbulent passions of men.” The impressive and ever-increasing technological mastery over nature comes power, a virtuosity surely to be abused if virtue does not go with it.

Although necessary, such study and practice will not alone suffice. “There is no simple connection between knowledge and virtue,” Adams observed, and that goes for the knowledge of Christian virtue as well as the knowledge of modern science. This is true partly because social elites often devise means to “keep the people in ignorance, and… to conceal truth and propagate falsehood,” sometimes in the name of high moral principles. Educators may deceive, even as they claim to educate.

These reservations notwithstanding, Adams thought that much more might be done toward improving the character of the American people through education. Education is “more indispensable, and must be more general, under a free government than any other,” inasmuch as the governing element in any regime must be educated, and in the American regime the people are sovereign. Education must therefore be redefined in terms of self-government: “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of he whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it.” School districts no larger than one square mile should be maintained at public expense. In each school, the children must not be taught to “adore their generals, admirals, bishops, and statesmen.” Don’t adore Washington but “the nation which educated him. Why? Recalling a lesson of ancient Greek history, Adams remarks, “If Thebes owes its liberty and glory to Epaminondas, she will lose both when he dies. But if the knowledge, the principles, the virtues, and the capacities of the Theban nation produced an Epaminondas, her liberties will remain when he is no more.” Adams here combines Locke’s desire to avoid glory-mongering with American republicanism.

Adams’s educational system would have been locally governed. It would also include a national institution. Republics cultivate eloquence; inasmuch as “it is not to be disputed that the form of government has an influence upon language, and language in its turn influences not only the form of government, but the temper, the sentiments, and manners of the people,” Congress should frame an national academy, modeled on those of France, Spain, and Italy, for “correcting, improving, and ascertaining the English language.” In this century, Adams observed, French has succeeded Latin as the lingua franca of Europe, but it hasn’t been universally established and “it is not probable that it will” be. “English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French in the present age,” thanks to “the increasing population of America” and “the influence of England in the world.” An American Academy could help to ensure that the coming empire of English—what we might call a cultural empire—would speak well, in order to govern itself well. Speaking well, with precision and vigor, itself exemplifies self-government.

Finally, no consideration of the educational ideas of the American Founders would be complete without considering the Sage of Monticello. Thomas Jefferson endorsed the Enlightenment project of “diffusion of knowledge among the people” as the “sure foundation” of liberty and happiness. He considered prerevolutionary France an object lesson of how a benevolent and amiable people “surrounded by so many blessings from nature, are yet loaded with misery by kings, nobles, and priests,” who have kept them in subjection by keeping them in ignorance.

Civic education serves as both gateway and guardian for all other kinds. Both ordinary citizens and those best endowed by nature to govern ordinary citizens should partake of it. Political history will show the people, “possessed… of the experience of other ages and countries,” to “know ambition under all its shapes,” and so be “prompt[ed] to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.” Beyond civil education, a liberal education will render the best-endowed citizens “worthy to receive, and also to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.”

Specifically, in Virginia Jefferson advocated the establishment of public school districts, “wherein the great mass of the people will receive their instruction” in Greek, Roman, modern European, and American history and in “the first elements of morality”—which consists of instruction in “how to work out their own greatest happiness, by showing them that it does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed them, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.” Jefferson silently rejects the claim that God in His Providence has placed everyone in his station. On the contrary, education will be a means of enabling students to go on to find their place, even to make one, as they reach the limits of their natural abilities.

There is a conceptual link between these two tracks of instruction, between history and morality. The link is experience. Historical study provides students with a far wider range of experience than they could ever attain if they were “confined to real life.” The better students, and also the wealthier ones, will go on to instruction in Greek and Latin; “I do not pretend that language is science,” but it is “the instrument for the attainment of science.” Modern science, too, is a form of experience or experiment. From this system, “twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually,” statewide, and “half of these will be sent to William and Mary College to be liberally educated.” A liberal education as the culmination of an education for self-government should not be confused with dilettantism, the product of “self-learning and self-sufficiency,” whereby men “possessing Latin and sometimes Greek, a knowledge of the gloves, and the first six books of Euclid, imagine and communicate this as the sum of science,” sending graduates into the world “with just taste enough of learning to be alienated from industrious pursuits, and not enough to do service in the ranks of science.” If education as Jefferson conceives it ranges more broadly through the arts and literature than Locke and Franklin prefer, nor more than they does he intend education to disable citizens from usefulness.

Like presidents Washington and Adams, as president Jefferson advocated the use of public revenues for a national university. Although the “ordinary branches” of education are not to be removed from “the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better all the concerns to which it is equal,” the most advanced sciences need public support. While this project never won favor in Congress, Jefferson’s final act of founding, the establishment of the University of Virginia, was designed to accomplish the same end on the state level. Although public, the university of Jefferson envisioned it was to be very compactly organized. There were to be no divisions among the students—no ‘freshmen’ or ‘seniors’—and the courses of study were to be entirely elective. That is, Jefferson’s university was to maximize both equality and liberty. Self-government at the University of Virginia could have needed no administrators, only teachers and students learning together. Architecturally, Jefferson designed the campus to be like a village—very much the liberal-arts equivalent of the Jeffersonian ‘ward republic.’ To Jefferson’s mortification, the University soon fell into exactly the sort of disorder that Locke would have predicted when the young get together without adequate adult supervision. There was a riot on campus, with hapless professors dodging brickbats. After order returned, the board of governors (including Jefferson himself and James Madison) had the ringleaders jailed, others expelled, and offered the student petitioners who had backed the rioters the chance to recant publicly. By the end of his life, less than a year later, Jefferson was satisfied that the University of Virginia was back on track, where it has usually stayed in subsequent generations, at least in matters pertaining to civic order.

In educational matters and in much else, the American founders took much of their orientation from Locke. The emphasis on practicality, on utility, was central to their thought—from a morality aimed at forming commercial-republican citizens to experimental science aimed at forming inventors, architects, and engineers.

 

Further reading:

Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle: The Learning of Liberty: The Educational Ideas of the American Founders. Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 1993.

John Locke: Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Edited by James L. Axtell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.

Noah Webster: A Collection of Essays and Fugitive Writings: On Moral, Historical, Political and Literary Subjects. Boston: I. Thomas and E. T. Andrews, 1790. Reprinted in 2014.

For the educational writings of Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, see the well-edited one-volume collections of their works published by the Library of America.