Many of the older States enacted general state school laws early in their history (R. 262). Connecticut continued the general school laws of 1700, 1712, and 1714 unchanged, and in 1795 added $1,200,000, derived from land sales, to a permanent state school endowment fund, created as early as 1750. Vermont enacted a general school law in 1782. Massachusetts and New Hampshire enacted new general school laws, in 1789, which restated and legalized the school development of the preceding hundred and fifty years. All these required the maintenance of schools by the towns for a definite term each year, ordered taxation, and fixed the school studies required by the State. New York, in 1784, created an administrative organization, known as the University of the State of New York, to supervise secondary and higher education throughout the State—an institution clearly modeled after the centralizing ideas of Condorcet, Rolland, and Diderot (p. 477), and very similar to the ideas proposed by Talleyrand and Condorcet and later (1808) embodied in the University of France by Napoleon. In 1795 New York also provided for a state system of elementary education. Georgia created a state system of academies, as early as 1783. Delaware created a state school fund, in 1796, and Virginia enacted an optional school law the same year. North Carolina created a state university, as early as 1795.
THE NEW POLITICAL MOTIVE FOR SCHOOLS. We thus see, in the new United States, the theories of the French revolutionary thinkers and statesmen actually being realized in practice. The constitutional provisions, and even the legislation, often were in advance of what the States, impoverished as they were by the War of Independence, could at once carry out, but they mark the evolution in America of a clearly defined state theory as to education, and the recognition of a need for general education in a government whose actions were so largely influenced by the force of public opinion. The Federal Constitution had extended the right to vote for national officers to all, and the older States soon began to remove their earlier property qualifications for voting and to extend general manhood suffrage to all citizens.
This new development in government by the people, which meant the passing of the rule of a propertied and educated class and the establishment of a real democracy, caused the leading American statesmen to turn early to general education as a necessity for republican safety. In his Farewell Address to the American people, written in 1796, Washington said:
Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.
Jefferson spent the years 1784 to 1789 in Paris, and became a great propagandist in America for French political ideas. Writing to James Madison from France, as early as 1787, he said:
Above all things, I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on this good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due sense of liberty.
[Illustration: FIG. 162. THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743-1826)]
In 1779, then, as a member of the Virginia legislature, Jefferson tried unsuccessfully to secure the passage of a comprehensive bill, after the plan of the French Revolutionary proposals, for the organization of a complete system of public education for Virginia. The essential features of the proposed bill (R. 263) were that every county should be laid off into school districts, five to six miles square, to be known as "hundreds," and in each of these an elementary school was to be established to which any citizen could send his children free of charge for three years, and as much longer as he was willing to pay tuition; that the leading pupil in each school was to be selected annually and sent to one of twenty grammar (secondary) schools to be established and maintained at various points in the State; after two years the leaders in each of these schools were to be selected and further educated free for six years, the less promising being sent home; and at the completion of the grammar- school course, the upper half of the pupils were to be given three years more of free education at the State College of William and Mary, and the other half were to be employed as teachers for the schools of the State. [13]
Though the scheme failed of approval, Jefferson never lost interest in the education of the people for intelligent participation in the functions of government. Writing from Monticello to Colonel Yancey, in 1816, after his retirement from the presidency, he wrote:
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization
it expects what never was and never will be…. There is no safe
deposit (for the functions of government) but with the people
themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information.