Hello. Today we look at the two most prominent late 18th century champions of state systems of free public primary schools, Thomas Jefferson and Dr. Benjamin Rush. Though their arguments fell largely on deaf ears among their contemporaries, a later generation of education reformers, notably Horace Mann of Massachusetts, would take up their cause with greater success in the middle decades of the 19th century. Thomas Jefferson of Virginia was the author of the Declaration of Independence, a political leader of the American Revolution, the new nation's ambassador to France, and from 1801 to 1809, the nation's third president. As president, Jefferson oversaw the purchase of the enormous Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, which enlarged the nation's size by fully one-third. After his presidency, was the founder and architect of the University of Virginia, Mr. Jefferson's university. In 1779, during the Revolutionary War with England, Jefferson, as the wartime governor of Virginia, drafted a bill for the more general diffusion of knowledge to the Virginia legislature, a detailed proposal for a state system of public schools. Jefferson declared that the education of the masses in state-supported schools was the republic's surest guarantee against tyranny. In 1783, Jefferson, in Notes on the State of Virginia, reiterated his call for a state system of public schools. According to his plan, Virginia taxpayers would provide primary education to all free children of the state. It would be tuition-free for three years, and include a curriculum of reading, writing, basic arithmetic, and some English, Greco-Roman and American history. Parents or guardians who desired an education of longer duration for their children would have to pay for it out of their own pockets. In his proposal, and it was nothing more than a proposal, Jefferson called for a division of each county into small districts of five or six square miles, each of which would support a primary school. He also assigned each county in Virgina to one of 20 regional groupings, each of which was to maintain a grammar school. Every year, the overseer of schools in each district would select one poor child of exemplary promise to attend the regional grammar school with tuition and all expenses paid. Jefferson envisioned the grammar school operating as a strict meritocracy as far as poor children and the state purse were concerned. After the first year at the grammar school, one-third of these poor children would be discontinued. After the second year, the remainder would be culled, save one. The scholar designated the best and brightest would have the choice to continue at the school for another four years free of charge. Jefferson called this process raking the rubbish heap. Each year, half of the top-performing poor students would be selected for William and Mary College in Williamsburg with tuition and all expenses paid by the state. Jefferson's contemporary, Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, was America's most famous medical doctor, as well as a member of the Continental Congress, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a leader in Pennsylvania's ratification of the U.S. Constitution. In 1786, Rush called for the establishment of free primary schools in each township or in each district of 100 families, where children will be taught to read and write in both English and German, and, and they would be taught arithmetic. Rush also envisioned four taxpayer-supported colleges and a state university to be established in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania's original capital, with some tuition charges at the collegiate levels. Rush argued vigorously that education is a public good. The practical benefits of an educated populace would accrue to every citizen of the state, even, as he put it, these states of orphans, bachelors, and people who had no children. Virtue and knowledge are in everyone's self interests, he declaimed. Imagine better agricultural practices, improved manufacturing, better financial management, fewer locks on doors, fewer pillories and whipping posts and jails, all of which are expensive. Expounding an argument one hears in political debates even today in tax-stingy Pennsylvania, Rush concluded, I believe it could be proved that the expenses of confining, trying and executing criminals amount every year in most of the counties to more money than would be sufficient to maintain all the schools that would be necessary in each county. [MUSIC]
