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Few voices from the American past are cited more frequently by the public school establishment as being one of their own than that of Thomas Jefferson. For example, NEA President Bob Chase, in the November 1996 NEA Today, said "Jeffersonians oppose vouchers," and that "Jeffersonians are convinced that public schools that are failing need more community not more competition," without citing a source for these "Jeffersonian" ideas.

One is reminded of an elderly Karl Marx, protesting "I am not a Marxist," as those who spoke in his name misunderstood, misinterpreted or, in some instances, deliberately misrepresented what he said for purposes of their own. So, too, were he still with us today, Jefferson might protest "I am not a Jeffersonian."

One advantage of interpreting those no longer with us is that, within a rather wide range, it is frequently possible to have them say what we would like them to say. Instead of adopting this model of what Jefferson might say, let's review some things he actually said.

Probably the most often cited is his statement that "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."(1) While this can be interpreted to be a support of education this is not a statement about schools. One can be educated without being schooled, as was largely true for the founding fathers, including Jefferson, since there was nothing resembling a public school system in their time, especially in the southern colonies. One can also be schooled without being educated, as is demonstrated by the millions of dropouts and illiterates in the nation today.

In 1814, Jefferson made a clear distinction between the two as he said, "When sobered by experience, I hope our successors will turn their attention to the advantages of education. I mean education on the broad scale, and not that of the petty academies." (2)

It is true that, while Governor of Virginia in 1779 he proposed a school bill that has been called the first plan for a statewide school system in the New World. However, he said the tuition at the 20 secondary schools should be paid for by the students with scholarships for elementary pupils whose families could not afford the cost, and financial aid as well for bright but needy secondary students. This hardly sounds like opposition to vouchers. (3)

His lack of confidence in government was shown by his comment on a 1780 bill to place education in the hands of state officials. He said "If it is believed that these elementary schools will be better managed by the governor and council...or any other general authority of the government, than by the parents within each ward, it is a belief against all experience. Try the principle one step further and amend the bill so as to commit to the governor and council the management of all our farms, our mills, and merchants' stores. No, my friend, the way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to one but to divide it among the many." (4)

In 1781-2, in his Notes on Virginia, Jefferson gave perhaps his most complete school plan. He did propose three years of basic schooling be provided free. But he said this should be done by dividing each county into small districts five or six miles square, called hundreds, in which reading, writing and arithmetic would be taught for three years in a school created, controlled and supported locally.

Like most of his contemporaries, Jefferson believed this amount of formal schooling was sufficient for the great majority of the population as the best education was to be obtained by activity in the society at large.

Jefferson suggested that there be available "to the wealthier part of the people convenient schools, at which their children may be educated." He proposed further that, for those whose parents could not afford further education, each year the best boy - and he did say boy - be chosen to attend one of 20 advanced regional schools where they would be taught Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of numerical arithmetic. "By this means," said the great democrat in one of his less elegant phrases, "twenty of the best geniusses will be raked from the rubbish annually..."

Finally, after six years of further schooling, half of the students would end their education, from whom future grammar school teachers could come, and the other half would study "such sciences as they shall chuse (sic), at William and Mary College." (5)

While it was never adopted, Jefferson was still advocating this plan as the years passed, as he did in a letter to John Adams, October 28, 1813, in which he again reviewed these details. (6)

Participation in this system would be voluntary. For his "Bill for the Establishment of Religious Freedom," in 1786, Jefferson had written, "To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical; even forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern."

He recognized that there might be those who would prefer to have their children educated in some other manner, and even that some few parents might neglect the education of their children. But his abhorrence of government control and manipulation was consistent even in such instances. He declared that "It is better to tolerate that rare instance of a parent's refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings by a forcible transportation and education of the infant against the will of his father." (7)

Furthermore, "I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion." (8)

In this objection to compulsory schooling, Jefferson has ample company, down to the present day. This includes another public school icon, one far more responsible for today's public school system than Jefferson. In 1840 Horace Mann said "the education of the whole people, in a republican government, can never be attained without the consent of the whole people," and that compulsion, "even though it were desirable, is not an instrument. Enlightenment, not coercion, is our resource." (9)

U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding schooling and the First Amendment have raised great controversy, particularly because they didn't really become an issue until the Everson decision in 1947 when the Court discovered problems that had not existed heretofore, and initiated a history of judicial hairsplitting that extends to the present day.

This probably would not have surprised Jefferson but it would have distressed him, because this was something he foresaw, and dreaded, in his own day, as the process was just getting underway.

He said "The great object of my fear is the Federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is engulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them." (10)

In 1816 he came upon a proposal that he thought might be a solution to the dilemma of insuring education without compulsion. He found it in a Spanish proposal that no one "should ever acquire the rights of citizenship until he could read and write." Jefferson added that, "It is impossible sufficiently to estimate the wisdom of this provision." (11)

Wise or not, it remains to be instituted. But clearly, Jefferson favored student grants, parental control of their child's education, and minimal governmental interference in the educational process.

One final general observation. Jefferson was not one to oppose change. In a famous excerpt from a January 30, 1787 letter to James Madison, he said "a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical." He would not be one to defend a static educational system, even one of which he approved.

1. Voices of the American Revolution, The Peoples Bicentennial Commission, NY: Bantam Books, January 1975

2. Op. Cit.

3. PSBA Bulletin, Harrisburg, PA: Pa. School Boards Assn., Sept- Oct. 1976

4. Clarence B. Carson, "Missing Chapters from American History, pp 9-19, Public Education and Indoctrination, Irving-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education Inc., May 1993

5. From Notes on the States of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, Writings, NY: The Library of America, 1984

6. Marvin Meyers, et al, Sources of the American Republic, Vol. 1, Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman & Co., 1967

7. Robert L. Cunningham, Education: Free and Public, Wichita, KS: Center for Independent Education, n.d. (1970?)

8. Quoted, Terrel H. Bell, The Thirteenth Man, NY: The Free Press, 1988

9. Dwight Roper, p. 240, PHI DELTA KAPPAN, Dec. 1977

10 Quoted, Vernon Parrington, "Thomas Jefferson: agrarian reformer," in Allen F. Davis and Harold D. Woodman, Eds., Conflict or Consensus in American History, Boston: D.C. Heath & Co., 1966

11. Letter to Pierre S. Du Pont de Nemours, April 24, 1816, cited, Meyers, op. cit.