Jefferson's Plan to Educate Virginia, and Why the Legislature Said No

Thomas Jefferson once wrote that of all the bills in his revision of Virginia's laws, the most important was the one for the diffusion of knowledge. Then he watched the legislature vote it down. Think about what that means. The author of the Declaration, the man who could not stop writing about the education of free citizens, drafted a plan for schooling every free child in the state and could not get it past the House of Delegates.

The reason is not a mystery, and it is not flattering to anybody. It was money. Legislators who owned land did not want to raise taxes to teach other people's children, and a plan that sounded wonderful in a preamble sounded expensive on a tax bill. Nothing in that sentence is foreign to anyone who has attended a school board budget hearing. The story is two and a half centuries old and it could have been written last Tuesday.

The bill and the committee

In 1776 the Virginia legislature appointed a committee of five to revise the state's laws, to bring colonial statutes into line with a republic. Jefferson was named to it, along with George Wythe, Edmund Pendleton, George Mason and Thomas Ludwell Lee. Mason declined to act and Lee died before taking part, so the work fell to Jefferson, Wythe and Pendleton. One of their bills became the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, passed in 1786. The Revisal, as it was called, contained 126 bills, and one of them was Bill 79, A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge.

Jefferson drafted it in 1778. The committee's report reached the House of Delegates in June 1779, and the bill failed. He brought it back later in different forms, and a watered-down version passed in 1796 on the condition that county officials would choose whether to put it into effect. For the most part they did not. The legislature of Virginia was not ready to tax itself for schools.

What the preamble said

The preamble is the best part, and it is pure political philosophy. Jefferson began with a claim about power. He wrote that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny, and that the most effectual means of preventing this would be to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large.

Read that twice. It is a claim about how liberty is lost: gradually, and by the people who hold office. The cure Jefferson proposed was not more rules for officials. It was a more informed public. The preamble went on to argue that the people should be taught history so that they could judge the ambitions of men, and so that they could recognize the first appearance of tyranny and resist it.

This is a constitutionalist's sentence, the sentence of a man who thought the real check on government is not the document but the people who can read it. I will not pretend Jefferson was always consistent, and he was a flawed man in many respects, but on this point he was right, and he knew it.

The design: three years, a ladder and a ward

The bill's mechanics are worth knowing, because they show a design philosophy that is remarkable for a time when most children got no formal schooling at all.

Wards of the county. Each county would be divided into districts, which Jefferson called hundreds, and each would have a school. It was a local design from the beginning. The county, not Richmond, would run it, and the elected county officials, called aldermen in the bill, would oversee it. This is important, and I will return to it.

Three years free. Every free child, boys and girls, would receive three years of schooling at public expense. The curriculum was modest and practical: reading, writing and common arithmetic, together with the Greek, Roman, English and American history Jefferson prized. The students were to learn how to read the record of human affairs.

A scholarship ladder. Each year an official overseeing the schools would select the boy of best genius from among those whose parents could not afford more schooling and send him, at public expense, to a grammar school. After a trial of a year or two the best were kept for six years, and then, as Jefferson described it in Query XIV, half were discontinued and the rest went on to three years at the College of William and Mary. It was a system meant to find talent wherever it appeared and give it a chance.

Jefferson explained the purpose in Notes on the State of Virginia, in the passage known as Query XIV. He laid out the plan in detail, and in a line that has become famous he wrote that twenty of the best geniuses would be raked from the rubbish annually, and instructed at public expense. (The remark that the diffusion-of-knowledge bill was "by far the most important bill in our whole code" comes from a different source, his 1786 letter to George Wythe.)

A word about that phrase. It sounds condescending now. It was the language of an eighteenth-century gentleman describing a meritocratic idea, and the idea was a radical one for its time: that talent is not confined to the families who can pay for its development. You can criticize his tone and still admire the goal. And you can note, as every fair reader should, that his plan was limited by the assumptions of his age. It did not extend the ladder to women beyond the first three years, and it did not reach the enslaved. Those are real limits, and they are part of the honest record.

Why the legislature said no

Let me state the other side's case at its strongest, since it was not stupid. A legislator in 1779 had many reasons to hesitate.

The state was at war. Virginia was supplying troops, raising money, and coping with a British invasion that would come to its own soil within two years. A new system of schools was a long-term investment in a moment of emergency.

The tax base was agricultural and the farms were large and widely scattered. A county school was an expensive thing to maintain when the families it served lived miles apart.

And there was an objection of principle, which went deeper than cost. A planter in the Tidewater who already paid for a private tutor for his own children was being asked to pay, through taxes, for the schooling of the children of the poor. He might agree that an educated people was a good thing, and still resent being taxed for it. Jefferson answered that the benefit to the whole society justified it, because an informed citizenry protected everyone's liberty, including the planter's. The planter was not persuaded, or at least not persuaded enough to vote for it.

My own assessment is that the money explanation is correct and incomplete. The cost was the stated reason and the real one. But there was also a temperamental conservatism in a legislature that preferred its existing, church-and-family approach to schooling. Many Virginians educated their children at home, in parish schools or through private teachers, and they did not feel the lack. The plan asked them to build something new, and people resist building what they do not feel they need.

The part he did get: Charlottesville

Here is the postscript that I find the most interesting. Jefferson did not stop. The public schools bill failed, but he spent the last decades of his life on the other end of the ladder, the university. In 1819 the Virginia legislature chartered the University of Virginia, and Jefferson designed the buildings, chose the site, selected the faculty and wrote the curriculum. It opened in 1825, a year before his death. He had it put on his gravestone, alongside the Declaration and the Statute for Religious Freedom, and he left off the presidency.

That order of priorities tells you what he cared about. The man who held the highest office in the land chose three accomplishments for his epitaph, and all three are about conscience and learning.

In a letter to George Wythe in 1786, Jefferson wrote, in the line I most admire, "Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish & improve the law for educating the common people." The tone of the whole of his thinking on the subject is in that sentence: an urgent moral conviction, expressed through law. But the common-people bill never passed in his lifetime in the form he wrote it.

What a decentralized design teaches

This is the part of the essay I most want you to take away. Consider what Jefferson actually proposed. It was not a central education bureau. It was a system of ward schools, run by the county, funded by local taxes, supervised by local officials who were elected by the local people. The state set the framework, and the community ran the school.

In the same period, Jefferson was developing his idea of what he later called the ward republics, a structure of small, local units that would handle the business closest to the citizens, with larger units handling what was beyond their reach. The school bill was an early instance of that thinking. The school belonged to the ward, as the ward belonged to the county, and the county to the commonwealth.

I would draw four lessons from this.

1. The case for schooling is a case about liberty. Jefferson's argument was that an educated people can defend itself. That argument does not depend on any particular curriculum fashion. It is an argument for literacy, history and the habit of judging those in power.
2. Local design is not a weakness. The ward school was meant to be near enough that the parents could watch it. When schools grow so large and distant that no parent can follow them, the founding design has been abandoned, whatever the intentions.
3. The cost of schools is a political question, and it should be asked openly. The Virginia legislature did the honest thing in rejecting the bill on cost grounds. The failure was the proponents' to answer, not by avoiding the cost but by making the case that it was worth paying. Every school budget since has faced the same test.
4. Merit ladders are worth building. The scholarship ladder is the ancestor of the idea that talent should be found and developed wherever it appears. Conservatives who support school choice, charter schools and apprenticeships are working in the same tradition.

The strongest objection to the Jefferson model

A critic will say that a plan which failed is not a model for anything, and that the American common school, when it came, was a state and eventually national system that bore little resemblance to Jefferson's wards. The common school reformers of the nineteenth century, led by Horace Mann in Massachusetts, built a more centralized, state-supervised system, and it produced real gains in literacy.

I accept the history. Mann's schools did good, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the claim that centralization was the only path to literacy is not supported by the record. Many communities had already built their own schools before the state systems took shape. The Northwest Ordinance, covered in Religion, Morality and Knowledge, the Northwest Ordinance's School Clause, is another example of the local approach, and the Madison letter I discuss in Madison's 1822 Letter on Why a Republic Needs Informed Citizens shows that the founding generation held the aim in common even when they disagreed about the means. For a modern look at the question of who holds power over schools, see Who Actually Runs Your School District, Board, Superintendent or State. And to see how the founding-era instinct for decentralized schooling has been revived, look at Microschools Are the One-Room Schoolhouse Reborn, With Modern Rules.

The case in brief

1. Jefferson's Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, drafted in 1778 and offered in 1779, proposed ward schools run by the counties, three years of free schooling for free children, and a ladder of scholarships.
2. Its preamble argued that tyranny grows by slow degrees in the hands of those entrusted with power, and that the cure is to illuminate the minds of the people at large.
3. The legislature declined, chiefly over cost, and he got the university but not the schools.
4. The design was local, small and supervised by the people who used it, which is the opposite of a distant bureaucracy.
5. The lesson is that education is a matter of liberty, that its design should stay near the family, and that its cost should be argued out in the open.

What you can do: read Jefferson's Query XIV in Notes on the State of Virginia in a public domain archive, and bring one question from it to your next school board meeting.