The Nation Needs Schools
I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.”
- Thomas Jefferson
I imagine the thought that opens this post alighting upon Mr. Jefferson like a candle bursting to life over his head as he looks into a mug of ale at the City Tavern in Philadelphia.
Please, read it again.
It is 1787.
The mug is pewter, probably dented.
Friends and adversaries alike sit around Jefferson, each with one arm thrown over the back of their chair, and all enjoying the camaraderie of common purpose and mutual respect despite deep differences in belief. They have kicked off to the bar after the day's adjournment of the Constitutional Convention a little over two blocks away at Independence Hall. They are well into the evening. Jefferson's wry smile turns broad as that thought rolls into his head, and he chuckles to himself, leading his colleagues to look up from their own mugs of ale or plates of chicken or hard tack or whatever one eats in 1787 to ask what has taken the tall and fair Virginian's fancy.
Those may even be the words. James Madison asks through the slight thickening of the tongue that afflicts all after a few rounds at the City Tavern: "What has taken our tall and fair Virginian friend's fancy? What spirit has you, Dear Sir, other than this Tavern’s Finest?”
This is, of course, impossible. Not to say that the City Tavern was not a real place, or that it was unimportant to the Founders. I would wager a pile of Continentals, or Franklin Dollars, or other relevant historical currency, that we would find more references to that storied Philadelphia watering hole in their diaries and letters than we would find references to the purpose and arrangement of schools in the new nation.
It is impossible because Thomas Jefferson was not at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, but was instead serving as a diplomat in Paris. He wrote that thought in a letter to wool magnate William Jarvis in 1820, well after Jefferson had earned the right to settle back on his laurels and disappear from the obligation of answering letters, or the burden of even thinking about such things as the role of schools in protecting individual liberty. But he would never stop answering or thinking, or contributing to what we take for granted at best, and disastrously overestimate at worst, as a common corpus of philosophy and direction handed down from the opening moves of our nation.
In fact, Jefferson did not see eye-to-eye with Jarvis.
Jarvis had published a book of essays "on the principles and policy of free states," and sent Jefferson a copy.
Whenever I look at correspondence between all of these folks, I wonder what it must have been like to have been a mail carrier between them. Quite difficult, most likely, as all of these old men were sending lots of books to one another. And then sometimes responding in kind, with some other book. Books, and books, and books.
Jefferson did not send a book back to Jarvis, but replied with thanks. He also admitted to not having had a chance to review Jarvis' book in full. He had conducted enough of an examination to take issue with the wording of two passages about the power of the judiciary.
Jefferson's comment about informing the discretion of the people appears near the end of the letter, and is less about the act of informing (that is, public education) and more about the discretion (that is, voting). He was arguing that we must ensure that Supreme Court Justices do not have too much power, since they serve life terms. The people cannot use their discretion to remove Justices through a vote. Jefferson felt it would be better to put energy into preparing the people to be informed enough to serve as a more powerful check against a tyrannical government. Life terms for Justices, he seems to be saying, creates a sort of improper check against the people.
Jarvis swallowed his pride and replied with great appreciation, as one probably must when a former president and the author of the Declaration of Independence takes a few minutes to criticize your book. While Jefferson's is the quote that we remember when we think about purpose of public schooling in America, even though it comes well after the nation’s founding, it is Jarvis who lands just as much on target, if not even more so. Jarvis had no ambition of adding to the ample philosophies that had informed the revolution and the might experiment in nationhood that followed, or guiding "those whose heads have grown gray in the service of their country." Rather, Jarvis was taking the opportunity of a lull in partisanship, a time very unlike our own, to ask everyday people to think about our country's ideals. And, in his preface, "to the school-boy, also, who may take pains to turn over these leaves, I can sincerely express a wish that he may read this book ... with a view of examining how far [its ideas] may be usefully applied, in the discharge of his future duties, as a man and a citizen."
So, informing the discretion, because the exercise of discretion is a duty. Furthermore, that duty to nation intersects with, if it does not completely overlap with, one’s duty as a man.
Not a woman, and not a Black man. A time unlike our own, though marginalization is still a terrible fact today, if less so on paper.
Jefferson was an old man in 1820 when he corresponded with Jarvis. Jefferson would pass away just six years later. As we all know, or should know, he died on July 4, 1826, fifty years after the birth of the nation.
It was the same day that his friend John Adams died.
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William Jarvis sent a copy of his book to John Adams as well. Adams replied with gushing thanks for the trip down memory lane that the book offered him. I usually think of Adams as grumpier than Jefferson, but Jarvis had a different experience of these two old men.
John Adams, who was also absent from the Constitutional Convention, had met Jefferson way back in 1775. They became close friends in Philadelphia through the Revolutionary War, which they both fought exclusively with quill and ink, perhaps among the most lethal weapons of the time. They went on to wield those against one another for several years after the war. The root of their conflict was the transition of power from President Adams to President Jefferson. The transition was, by grand historical standards, quite peaceful, if a little clumsy. The politics of the transition, however, were near fatal to their friendship. Thankfully, by 1812, they had both gone grey in service to their country and had learned, with the help of a mutual friend who was intent on putting them back in touch and a little intervention from Abigail Adams, to see past their disagreements.
Now is as good a time as any to mention that John Adams renewed the correspondence by sending Jefferson—you guessed it—books. Books written by his son, John Quincy Adams. The elder Adams referred to them humbly as “Pieces of Homespun.” His son was no school boy at the time, but was a well-placed statesman who would go on to negotiate the end of the War of 1812, then serve as Secretary of State under Monroe, and also later as President.
The elder Adams and his elderly friend Jefferson rediscovered deep friendship in their correspondence, regarding one another as revolutionary brothers staring down their generation's mortality, celebrating their work of launching a nation, but bemoaning that their work was incomplete. Jefferson, optimistic. Adams, I think, wanting to be. And frantically so, as Adams wrote three or four letters to Jefferson's one.
The fact that their work was incomplete in 1812, was still so at their deaths in 1826, remains incomplete today, and will forever be incomplete, always brings me back to Jefferson's optimism. It is beguiling to imagine that he and others never intended the nation to be finished, that a requirement for optimism in the face of impossibly moving a mountain of human nature was part of the design and the duty—the same duty that Jarvis was describing for school boys.
Jefferson wrote to Adams in 1816 with a stirring declaration of that optimism: "I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern. [My] hopes indeed sometimes fail; but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.”
These two old men spend a lot of correspondence remembering their common friends, who had mostly marched into history. Adams is particularly stricken, declaring on one occasion that there were only six comrades left, as if he were checking them off as they expired.
Historians seem to accept the unverified report that Adams' last words were: "Jefferson survives!" Some hear it as exasperation, as Adams finally conceding some long-raging competition.
I do not.
I believe that John Adams, whose letters sound heavy notes of loneliness alongside those of deep gratitude for his rekindled friendship with Jefferson, was elated that he was not the last of his generation to die, and that his optimistic friend was still alive, tall and fair, in Old Virginia. Adams was among the many, but not the one, to leave the work unfinished.
There is pathos, or dark humor, in the fact that Jefferson had actually died at Monticello earlier in the day. News had not reached—simply could not have reached—all the way to Massachusetts in time. There was no tweet, or "away from my lap desk, the clever form of which I invented and on which I wrote the Declaration, forever" status update, or anything like it.
Once again, a time very unlike our own.
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The City Tavern was one constant through this relationship. It was serving ale back in 1775, when both Adams and Jefferson still had their greatest accomplishments, their unfortunate estrangement, and their beautiful reconciliation ahead of them as they careened toward July 4, 1826. The tavern would remain open in some capacity, on an off, into the 21st century.
It is very possible that Adams and Jefferson first met at the tavern, which Adams, overcoming his stuffy New England mien, would call "the most genteel tavern in America." It is certain that Adams and Jefferson spent time together there, and I cannot imagine anyone but the 1776 headliners William Daniels and Ken Howard sitting in candlelight and tobacco smoke opining on all manner of tensions that, frustratingly, the Congress, the Revolution, the Constitution—none of it—would settle for them in the 18th century, or for us in the 21st century.
The United States, by the hands of these gentlemen, is really nothing more than aggregated agreements on checks and balances to prevent the evils of human nature from spoiling the achievement of collective strength and fulfillment through the preservation of individual liberty. It is a truly noble notion, even though it is severely tarnished by the rejection, enslavement, and murder of millions who did not, and still do not, receive all of the gifts. And, it is a notion birthed by a generation of people who disagreed about a lot of fundamental things, including rejection, enslavement, and murder. For that reason, we are an incomplete nation and perhaps cursed to be incomplete forever. Even at its core, even without the deep sins of our history, the system behind the United States promises less a finished nation than a process for endlessly tinkering toward one. And the Founders did not leave un an inviolable ethic, but rather a frantic weave of differing opinions that knots around key features of agreement in no regular pattern—agreement about things like tyranny, and liberty.
Whether the Founders meant it or not, the system asks all of us to work to improve it day in and day out, facing the horrible knowledge that we will never see it finished. That no one will. And, if we step away from the work or cut any of the corners, terrible and brutal things happen. And, just as the Founders of the 18th century did not see all of the corners that we see today—or even large and expansive plains of modern morality—we must certainly be missing corners (and perhaps also plains) that our descendants will see. They will judge us for our blindness, as surely as we judge our forebears.
Ensuring collective strength by preserving individual liberty—these priorities share a tense border, despite the founding belief that this is the unique and beautiful method and goal of the United States. We move forward acting on these, but we have not reconciled these ideas, particularly in schools. For example, we promote personalization in schools. Indeed, we imagine a radical level of personalization that would bring down the monolithic system that we both decry and, sadly, perpetuate. However, we also fight to ensure belonging, community, school spirit, and all of the other hallmarks of a healthy and unified school culture.
Just as we wonder how individual liberty leads to collective success and identity as a nation, we need to ask how personalization can coexist with belonging in school. And, also, belonging to what? I do not know if the Founders saw all of this tension in either the architecture of the nation or its chief apparatus for informing discretion. That said, I do not think they would be surprised to know that they handed us an unfinished problem. It reminds me of one of those beguiling problems over which mathematicians spend their hours, perhaps even their careers. It is a devil’s puzzle, in that it exposes the limits of mortal progress and asks us to figure out how to make it work, passing lessons and victories from one generation to the next until we finally get it right.
There is spirituality in the prospect. We will never reach the Promised Land. Rather, we each must devote ourselves to, and be content with, the labor of our small contribution to progress. We are deeply imperfect, but we work to improve our nation and ourselves, one through the other, so that individualism and collectivism can coexist. We build a temple together, my single brick and your single brick, but we will never cross its threshold.
We steer our barks, hope in the head and fear astern, avoiding the forebodings of the gloomy as best as we can as they jump out of the mist and into our course.
A nation so conceived needs something for instilling duty, for informing discretion, and for making lifeblood of the Jeffersonian optimism that, without the deliberate effort to bring it forth, would sink out of reach between the lines.
That nation needs schools.