0:03
So Peter, this possibility of individuals, even
individuals from poor backgrounds, rising up those levels of Jefferson's pyramid.
Is that why Jefferson expects people in communities to support this?
>> Yeah, and I think really naively,
because you have to ask from a perspective of the rubbish,
or the taxpayer, the same thing, what are they gonna get out of this?
What we get is public subsidy for somebody else, basically.
Well, we get these local schools.
And presumably we need these schools, but do we really?
Most people are literate anyway, that is most white Virginians are literate,
about 70%.
It could be better.
Anybody would acknowledge that.
But what happens, this bill fails and it's because of taxpayer resistance.
It's because well, we started with the idea, hey,
there's a revolution going [LAUGH] on.
He says, excuse me, you want us to take on these new burdens,
at the very time in which we're being mobilized and the militia and
the army and we're making the ultimate sacrifice.
This is too far, too much.
This going to break the old camel's back.
Jefferson knows if you can't sell it during war time it's going to be even
harder thereafter.
1:26
How are you gonna get people who are now suffering the burdens of debt
after the war and the government is starved for money.
And the people don't have I lot of surplus cash.
This has been a big blow to the American economy, and
the Virginia economy in particular.
This has not been a good war, it's been kind of stupid if you wanted to avoid
taxes and continue pursuing happiness in the vulgar sort of way of prosperity.
So, it's not surprising that the system doesn't fly.
In fact it's only after the Commonwealth of Virginia is thoroughly
destroyed during the Civil War but you really can build from the bottom up.
Maybe that's a nice way of thinking about education in Virginia, because not
everybody agreed with Jefferson, that we needed to start all over again.
>> Yeah. >> So, it's not surprising, but
I think what is surprising is interesting and
makes us think a little harder about the problem of Jefferson and education.
It is that this is not, at the end of the day, a great setback for Jefferson.
2:47
Has he abandoned his solicitude for the people.
Does he not care about the rubbish.
>> They're just rubbish now.
>> No and so as he turned away, now he's just pursuing power and
the interests of Virginia and his fellow planters.
No, I think there are a couple of reasons why Jefferson is not so
concerned with schools as such.
One is his fundamental commitment has always been
civic to the health of the Commonwealth.
So there are different ways to approach this and
I think one is through constitutional reform, through politics.
And here, I think, is the most important thing,
is through the continuing political education of the people.
3:31
Through the party political press.
>> We're talking 1790s, early nineteenth century.
>> The 1790s really the formative period in the American republic.
Of course, the new Federalist administration has been kicked off.
George Washington is our president and what happens immediately, and
everybody's deeply upset about this, is rifts within the administration.
That increasingly move into the Legislature, the Congress and
out of doors so that we have something that we can call parties.
And parties are not a good on the face of it.
Because a part is not the whole.
Where is our patriotism, the patriotism is about the whole.
The whole Commonwealth, the whole nation.
But now we've been riven on those these fundamental
ideological foreign policy issues about Britain and France.
The French Revolution.
4:18
But the upside of that division is it means that there is a broad
awareness in the political public that the future of the republic is at risk.
It's as if you're continuing the Revolution by other means.
And the kind of political education that the war itself had given to the people.
It had alerted them to their liberties, and they were vigilant about their rights.
Well, when you're a supporter of Thomas Jefferson.
And you're afraid that Alexander Hamilton, who was the second
coming of the evil Minister Robert Walpole, has got Washington's ear.
And that he's going to establish something very much like an English style
monarchy right here in America.
Well, hey, you've got reasons to be concerned right.
I mean you're going to be alert, you're going to have to read,
because it's gonna be right there in the newspapers, the Aurora.
>> There's a lot of them now.
>> Yeah, they [SOUND] spread like mushrooms.
So think of education and socialization in a broader frame.
It's not just the little red school house that becomes iconic later on,
it's also, well, it's the political cockpit.
It's the struggle over the future of America that keeps people reading.
Those skills of literacy are enhanced that all that communication,
all that information flowing through the whole system.
And Jefferson says, I think we are actually,
in ways that I never could have anticipated we are through the print
public sphere, as we call it, we are educating the people.
He wouldn't see partisan polemics against the administration on behalf of
his political allies, as- >> Propaganda.
>> Propaganda, lies, distortions.
>> That's the truth.
>> It'ss absolutely the truth.
Later he tells William Dwayne, who's the editor of the Aurora in Philadelphia,
one of the great republican papers and one of my favorite quotations.
This is on the run up to the war of 1812 and
there are divisions in the Republican Party cuz it's bad enough that you've
got Federalists but the Republicans starting sniping at each other.
Well he says, the Republicans, they've got to come together, they've got to work
together, solidarity is important, because the Republicans are the nation.
Whoa, they are the people.
So that idea of a big R Republican in a way
is engrafted on the small r republican.
And there is a kind of political education in partisan politics.
And so when Jefferson proclaims himself the beneficiary of
this revolution of 1800, a phrase he uses much later to describe his election.
>> Right.
>> And rise to power in 1801 when he's inaugurated.
He believes that he has, and this is significant,
risen to power on the crest of a mighty wave of public opinion.
This is enlightened public opinion.
So, hey, we thought we needed schools to inculcate virtue.
Because remember the function of the schools was political civic education.
Learn from history about your rights.
Be vigilant, defend them.
And what we have is a massive school house that covers
the nation in the form of the Republican Party.
[MUSIC]
Professor Peter S. OnufThomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor, Emeritus
