In the middle of the Revolutionary War, Thomas Jefferson proposed a comprehensive plan for education in Virginia. That plan failed. But our modern debates about education still turn on how best to realize the ideals in Jefferson’s plan: namely that people should be able to reach their full potential regardless of their birth. In Jefferson’s crude eighteenth-century language, educational opportunity would ensure “the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish.”
This issue is at the heart of New York’s current debate over admission to Specialized High Schools. Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza would find a lot to like in Jefferson’s ill-fated “Bill for the General Diffusion of Knowledge.”
Jefferson believed that without a transformation in education, republican self-government could not work. Schools needed to “illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large” so that they could guard against tyranny. Education also would ensure that those children “endowed with genius and virtue” could gain skills necessary to lead the community.
He proposed a three-tiered system of education, with universal primary education at the bottom, more exclusive grammar schools at a secondary level and the College of William and Mary at the top.
Critical for Jefferson’s plan, the state would pay for the secondary and higher education of a small number of students who otherwise could not afford it. This was essential for transforming a society based on hereditary status into one that gave people an opportunity to achieve what their talent allowed.
As Jefferson put it, children should have the chance to receive a good education “without regard to wealth, birth or other accidental condition or circumstance.”
Even in Jefferson’s Virginia, where a child grew up was considered an "accidental condition.” The availability of newspapers, the proportion of educated people and the economy differed from community to community. When Jefferson proposed his plan, many towns did not fund schools at all. Discrepancies in student preparedness was a given.
Even still, Jefferson’s plan called for one child from each district to receive a tax-supported promotion to a grammar school.
This is precisely what advocates of keeping the SHSAT find most objectionable in de Blasio’s plan. They often say that admitting students from across the city cannot work because the feeder schools are so broken. But in Jeffersonian terms, that is as much an accident of birth as being born rich and thus as antithetical to democratic opportunity.
For Jefferson, it was a moral imperative to provide children with educational opportunity regardless of where their family sat in the social hierarchy or where they physically lived. Decades later, when he founded the University of Virginia, Jefferson argued it should be in Charlottesville because that was the geographic center of the state. In true Jefferson fashion, that was not entirely accurate; he fudged the calculation because he wanted the University there. But the principle still matters.
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Jefferson was not alone in his thinking. In 1795, the nation’s premier learned organization, the American Philosophical Society, held an essay contest to design a system of education best suited to the new republic. By the time APS picked the winners, Jefferson was Vice President of the United States, and also President of the Society.
The co-winners both argued for a pyramid system of education similar to Jefferson’s. And both plans called for giving scholarships to exceptional students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Samuel Harrison Smith’s essay specified that “one boy annually chosen out …of each primary school” would advance at the public expense to a secondary school. Where one lived should not be an obstacle.
Like the specialized high schools of today, the secondary schools in these plans were for the "best and brightest." Unlike today, if a child did not attend one of these schools that meant they were done with their education. No doubt, we have made improvements since the revolutionary era.
The fact that Jefferson made an analogous argument does not mean we have to support de Blasio’s plan. The Founders got a lot wrong, Jefferson especially. Even his plan for education was blinkered. Under it, only a small proportion of students in the grammar schools and college would actually be “raked from the rubbish.” The rest would come from families who could afford the tuition. Unsurprisingly, Jefferson also wholly excluded African-Americans from his plan. Girls could attend the primary schools, but Jefferson would have excluded them from higher levels.
Nevertheless, Jefferson’s plan both clarifies the lofty goals that de Blasio’s reform aspires to further and places it firmly within the American democratic tradition. Schools only truly offer opportunity if children can attend them regardless of both who they are and where they come from.
Boonshoft was a post-doctoral research fellow at the New York Public Library from 2015-2017 and is now assistant professor of history at Norwich University.