Is Jefferson a Founding Father of Democratic Education

This response argues that it is reasonable to consider Thomas Jefferson a proponent of democratic education. It suggests that Jefferson’s education proposals sought to ensure the wide distribution of knowledge and that Jefferson’s legacy remains important to us today. This article is a response to: James Carpenter. (2013). Jefferson and the Ideology of Democratic Schooling. Democracy & Education, 21(2). Article 5. Available online at http://democracyeducationjournal.org/home/vol21/Iss2/5. Carpenter (2013) has written a provocative, important essay on the person whom many Americans invoke as the founding father of democratic education. By placing Jefferson in his time, Carpenter argues, we see him as a republican rather than a democrat. By this, Carpenter means, Jefferson’s focus was on public things— the importance of education for citizens and leaders— rather than on educating for individual liberation in an egalitarian context. Thus, Carpenter concludes, Jefferson’s goals for education and our own are in fact further apart in theory than many Americans recognize. It is interesting to note that in his own time, Jefferson was accused of being a democrat by his Federalist opponents. He was seen as promoting a vision of radical equality that threatened the social order. He was the figurehead of a political party— the DemocraticRepublicans— that helped to legitimize the idea of democracy as an American aspiration. Putting Jefferson back into his context, then, may require seeing him, at least from the perspective of his enemies, as siding with democracy. Carpenter distinguishes democratic education from republican education in part on the assumption that a democracy favors active, participatory citizens in contrast to a republic’s desire for good citizens. This is a problematic distinction for two reasons. First, it is unclear why a democracy would seek active citizens that were not good or— in 18thcentury terms— motivated by virtue. To Carpenter, however, the issue seems to be that republicans favor citizens molded in society’s image. Yet the republican tradition was much more robust than what Carpenter portrays. Republicans hold dear the idea of independent citizens capable of acting according to their own understanding of the common good rather than deferring to others. Moreover, the country’s founders believed that education would provide young people the knowledge, capacities, and ethics required to protect liberty from arbitrary power. In other words, the republican tradition has much to offer contemporary democrats (Brown, 1997; Pettit, 1997). There is some truth to Carpenter’s claim that many Founder Fathers worried that ordinary people were not capable of governing themselves. Previous republics had faltered. The Founders’ classical training and their knowledge of English history convinced them that the success of their new republican experiment would depend on the willingness of citizens to promote the common good. Yet when Carpenter looks for evidence for this fear, he refers largely to Founding Fathers other than Jefferson, most notably Pennsylvanian Benjamin Rush. When he does turn to Jefferson, Carpenter admits that Jefferson’s commitment to locally controlled education in the “ward republic” demonstrated his commitment to an active, participatory citizenry. Rush did fear the people and seek to make them “good.” An advocate of male and female education, Rush famously argued in his essay Of the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic (1798/1987) that “the business of education has acquired a new complexion by the independence of our country” (para. 1). Unlike in a monarchy, Johann N. Neem is associate professor of history at Western Washington University. He is author of Creating a Nation of Joiners (2008). He has written several essays on Jefferson’s thought, including “’To Diffuse Knowledge More Generally Through the Mass of the People’: Thomas Jefferson on Individual Freedom and the Distribution of Knowledge,” which appeared in Light and Liberty: Thomas Jefferson and the Power of Knowledge (2012).