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Paternity Test: Franklin vs. Jefferson.
April 29, 2011 11:52 PM

The Penn Gazette - a monthly magazine published by the University of Pennsylvania - carried a fascinating article last October comparing and contrasting the approaches to education policy by two of our most important founding fathers: Thomas Jefferson & Ben Franklin. Entitled "Paternity Test," (download the .pdf) the author, Michael Zuckerman, asks this question:

Between Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, which Founding Father did the most -- by far -- to promote and shape the future of public education in America? [Hint: He also published a periodical with the same name as this one.]

Franklin wrestled conscientiously and creatively with educational issues that perplex and preoccupy us to this day, issues of class, gender, and race about which Jefferson has nothing to tell us except to mark the distance we have traveled from his failures of intelligence and fellow-feeling.

Franklin's mid-18th-century proposals for the education of youth in Pennsylvania were more innovative by far than Jefferson's design for higher learning in Virginia many decades later. As Charles and Mary Beard wrote, in The Rise of American Civilization, Franklin's idea of a university not only "anticipated the most enlightened program evolved by the liberal university of the late nineteenth century" but also "stands out like a beacon light in the long history of human intelligence."

Read this article and you'll never look at Thomas Jefferson the same. For instance, there's this passage:

Jennings Wagoner's Jefferson and Education tells Jefferson's side of the story. But even in Wagoner's sympathetic version of the founding of the University of Virginia, it is impossible to ignore Jefferson's antipathy to the yeomen for whom he sometimes said he spoke. As a member of the board that projected the Albemarle Academy, the first incarnation of the institution that was to become the university, he dismissed out of hand the interests of those he called the "laboring classes." With them and their education, he assured his fellow trustees, "we shall have nothing to do." They would learn to read, write, and cipher and then become farmers or artisans. The academy would concern itself solely with the "learned classes." They would go on to more advanced studies and then enter "the learned professions" or become leaders in "conducting the affairs of the nation."

And these four paragraphs couldn't be more damning:

As Jefferson's ambitions for an academy expanded -- as the Albemarle Academy became Central College became the University of Virginia -- his appetite for public financing grew apace. He enlisted his friend Joseph Cabell to seek the support of the state, and specifically to secure the resources of Virginia's Literary Fund. Cabell reported that the legislature was likely to balk at Jefferson's request, since the Fund was explicitly dedicated to the education of the poor. Jefferson, undeterred, pressed Cabell to press on.

It was in the context of his campaign to raid the Literary Fund that Jefferson helped orchestrate the defeat of the proposal for a public school system in the Commonwealth. By 1817, it was widely believed that the federal government would reimburse the Old Dominion for its expenditures on national defense in the War of 1812. Once past their incredulity, state legislators agreed among themselves to put the promised repayment into the Literary Fund. Together, the money already in the Literary Fund and the windfall from Washington amounted to a million dollars, enough in 1817 to enact a comprehensive scheme of schooling for all the children of the state.

In December 1817, Charles Mercer introduced a bill in the legislature to effect exactly such a scheme. The moment could not have been more propitious for the fulfillment of Jefferson’s decades of dreaming of an enlightened citizenry. Yet Jefferson did all in his power to defeat the bill. When push came to shove, when he had to act rather than revel in rhapsodies of rhetoric, his allegiance lay wholly with his own planter class. Mercer's plan, he fumed, would "exhaust the whole funds" in establishing primary schools and leave nothing for his darling university.

At the one auspicious moment when the system of public education he professed to seek could have been secured, Jefferson resumed his old endeavor to found a university. As he did, he abandoned the cause of public education. He fought for its defeat in the assembly, and he did everything in his power to divert funds designed for commoners to the creation of his college. He was shameless in his assaults on the Literary Fund. He was more shameless still in his determination to seize money appropriated for counties in support of pauper schools. Without a twinge of embarrassment or even of ambivalence, he played the part of Robin Hood in reverse. He stole from the poor to pay for the prerogatives of the rich.

OUCH! Just when you thought you knew everything about our Founding Fathers, how many of us knew this side of Jefferson?

The myth of Jefferson's democratic devotion to the cause of common schooling persists. It is the nature of myths to be invincible, or at any rate to rise invincibly above their contradictions.

In fact, there is a Founding Father who can be invoked as a visionary exponent of popular education. But that Founder is not Jefferson.

Benjamin Franklin's ambitious efforts to educate the masses began with some of his earliest writings:

From his first writings, Franklin chafed at elite assumptions of the intellectual incompetence of commoners. He devoted the earliest of the substantive Silence Dogood Papers in its entirety to a denunciation of Harvard College, where he saw admission determined "by two sturdy porters named Riches and Poverty." The latter "obstinately refused to give entrance to any who had not first gained the favor of the former." And since attendance at the college thus depended on the parents' "purses" rather than the "children's capacities," "the most part" of those who studied there were "little better than dunces and blockheads." They spent their college years learning "little more than how to carry themselves handsomely and enter a room genteelly." They graduated "as great blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited." Franklin's criticism surely reflected the disappointment of his own hopes of a Harvard education. But he got over his exclusion from the company of the "idle" and "ignorant" easily enough. And once he was in a position to promote an education reflective of his own values, he invariably conceived schools that would serve the learning of the low and the middling rather than the pride of the high and the mighty.

This is an incredibly insightful essay; one which will leave your opinion of Franklin and Jefferson forever altered.

We have also posted in our Democracy Essay section, where you can read it in its entirety, as well as download the .pdf.


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