Thomas Jefferson on Education

While serving in the Virgina legislature Jefferson wasn't just shaping the course of Virgina. There are many ideas that he put in motion, rewriting the legal codes, ensuring property rights and education. In the year 1776 most poor and even middle class children had little or no education, most ended up working trades. Jefferson believed that all should be given basic education and proposed a bill, "Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge," The bill would commit public funds to help educate young people in Virgina whose parents lacked the means to provide for their schooling. Jefferson called it "by far the most important bill in our whole code," and urged it's passage. He urged its passage by asserting that "no other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and hapiness."

Jefferson still believed that higher educations was the responsiblilty of parents and not of the government. Jefferson's goal was to teach children about the rights to maintain and exercise with intelligence their parts of in self-government.

"By that part of our plan which prescribes the selection of the youths of genius from among the classes of the poor, we hope to avail the state of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use if not sought for and cultivated. But of the views of this law none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty."

It should be understood that Jefferson never advocated public schools like those operating in our nation today. The grammar schools would still be funded by donations from those who could pay and allowed poorer kids public funding for grammar(elementary} schools. Jefferson expressed both fear and scorn when contemplating a centralized state authority on education. Jefferson believed that the schools where in better hands of private enterprise than the state. In the current state of affairs with education you can't wonder that if an another idea from 1776 isn't the right course to take.

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