-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Susan Kern, Thomas Jefferson's Education, Journal of American History, Volume 107, Issue 4, March 2021, Page 995, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaaa488
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Studies of Thomas Jefferson and education usually begin with his writings about education and explore them as Western philosophy, civics, or architectural prophecy. In Thomas Jefferson's Education Alan Taylor never fully parses Jefferson's “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” (1778), his curricular reforms for the College of William & Mary, or comprehensively outlines Jefferson's farsighted principles about pedagogy and buildings that he hoped would define the University of Virginia. This tale begins and ends with students behaving badly. In between, Taylor explores the circumstances that thwarted Jefferson's vision for educational institutions. This Jefferson reluctantly competes for the attention of adolescent males amid the desperate, fading fortunes of Virginia in an adolescent nation.
Jefferson's vision of a system of public education faced constant resistance from a public loath to fund it. Virginia's rural population made public grammar schools impractical, and universities required wealth and served the elite. The second front of his battle mired in the unstable structure of slave society that made for incorrigible white boys and young men whose entitlements made them resistant to academic instruction and defiant to tutors or professors who tried correcting their behavior. Young Virginians were quick to fight, duel, whip, rape, or vandalize, and relied on honor codes that prevented them from testifying against each other. We meet here the ghosts of Edmund Morgan's rowdy republicanism from American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), coupled with Bertram Wyatt-Brown's codes of honor and rule of violence that defined southern culture. Jefferson is indicted here for his inaction in ending slavery and the persistent ill behavior of white males is his sentence.
