Today, I joined Mr Rena for a discussion of Jefferson's views on education with
the goal of understanding why Jefferson believed education to be so important.
What he thought was the ultimate purpose of education.
And how he proposed Americans should go about educating both themselves,
as well as future generations.
We begin our conversation by discussing Jefferson's Bill for
the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, which he drafted in 1778.
It's telling that Jefferson first put forth a plan for a system of
education in Virginia even before the Revolutionary War had been decided.
Jefferson had an expansive understanding of education as being intimately bound up
with a whole program of revolutionary reforms that was intended to
overturn the hierarchical society that had defined colonial Virginia.
In the place of aristocratic elites who had no qualifications to rule other than
the good fortune of being born into prominent families, Jefferson imagined
that his system of education would bring to the fore natural aristocrats.
Whose genius and talents qualified them to be the leaders of a free republic.
As we note in our discussion, Jefferson's bill was never adopted in Virginia.
But this does not mean that he stopped believing in the need for
an educated citizenry.
While there may not have been a network of publicly supported schools
as this bill had proposed,
Jefferson believed that Virginians were receiving a primary education, a civic
education, by engaging in the burgeoning political culture of the early republic.
Still, Jefferson continued to be concerned about the state of higher
education in Virginia.
And this is the final topic Mr. Onif and I discuss.