In 1819 the founding of the University of Virginia crowned Jefferson's efforts for education by the State. This institution, the Declaration of Independence, and the statute for religious freedom in Virginia stand to- day as the three enduring monuments to his memory. [14]
Other of the early American statesmen expressed similar views as to the
importance of general education by the State. John Jay, first Chief
Justice of the United States, in a letter to his friend, Dr. Benjamin
Rush, wrote:
I consider knowledge to be the soul of a Republic, and as the weak and the wicked are generally in alliance, as much care should be taken to diminish the number of the former as of the latter. Education is the way to do this, and nothing should be left undone to afford all ranks of people the means of obtaining a proper degree of it at a cheap and easy rate.
James Madison, fourth President of the United States, wrote:
A satisfactory plan for primary education is certainly a vital desideratum in our republics.
A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or, perhaps, both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
John Adams, with true New England thoroughness, expressed the new motive for education still more forcibly when he wrote:
The instruction of the people in every kind of knowledge that can be of use to them in the practice of their moral duties as men, citizens, and Christians, and of their political and civil duties as members of society and freemen, ought to be the care of the public, and of all who have any share in the conduct of its affairs, in a manner that never yet has been practiced in any age or nation. The education here intended is not merely that of the children of the rich and noble, but of every rank and class of people, down to the lowest and poorest. It is not too much to say that schools for the education of all should be placed at convenient distances and maintained at the public expense. The revenues of the State would be applied infinitely better, more charitably, wisely, usefully, and therefore politically in this way than even in maintaining the poor. This would be the best way of preventing the existence of the poor….
Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially of the lower classes of people, are so extremely wise and useful that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.
Having founded, as Lincoln so well said later at Gettysburg, "on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," and having built a constitutional form of government based on that equality, it in time became evident to those who thought at all on the question that that liberty and political equality could not be preserved without the general education of all. A new motive for education was thus created and gradually formulated in the United States, as well as in revolutionary France, and the nature of the school instruction of the youth of the State came in time to be colored through and through by this new political motive. The necessary schools, though, did not come at once. On the contrary, the struggle to establish these necessary schools it will be our purpose to trace in subsequent chapters, but before doing so we wish first to point out how the rise of a political theory for education led to the development of a theory as to the nature of the educational process which exercised a far-reaching influence on all subsequent evolution of schools and teaching.