Welcome to Friday Flashpoint where I analyze and expose important historical and social developments impacting America’s place in the world.
I’ll begin this week with a question and a Founding Father’s notes:
What is universal public education for? I wonder how John Adams might answer.
Back in 1765 as Americans were angered by the Stamp Act, 29 year old John Adams thought about liberty in society and the prerequisites for achieving it:
Liberty, that has been compelled to skulk about in Corners of the Earth, and been everlastingly persecuted by the great, the rich, the noble, the Reverend, the proud, the Lazy, the Ambitious, avaricious, and Revengeful, who have from the beginning constituted almost all the sons of Adam. Liberty, that complication of real Honor, Piety, Virtue, Dignity, and Glory, which has never been enjoyed, in its full Perfection, by more than ten or twelve Millions of Men at any Time, since the Creation, will reign in America, over hundreds and Thousands of Millions at a Time.
In future ages, when the Bones and sinews that now direct this Pen, shall become indistinguishable from the rest of Mother Earth, and perhaps incorporate into some Plant or other Animal, Man shall make his true Figure, upon this Continent, He shall make that great and happy Figure among Intellectual and sensible reigns that his great Creator intended he should in other Countries before his Ruin was effected by the Lust of Tyrants.
When science, Literature, Civility, Politeness, Humanity,…Christian grace and Virtue shall be well understood by all Men, when…one shall not be able to deceive a Thousand and two because 10,000 of their Souls and Bodies then will be the Era of human Happiness.
Knowledge monopolized, or in the Possession of a few, is a Curse to Mankind. We should dispense it among all Ranks. We should educate our children. Equality should be preserved in knowledge.
Property monopolized or in the Possession of a few is a Curse to Mankind. We should preserve not an Absolute Equality.—this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant Riches.
—from John Adam’s May-August 1765 notes for what became “A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law”
As Adams developed his thoughts before publishing the final version of his work, he went on to argue that self-government was unlikely to last if the people remained uneducated. They would be vulnerable to those who hoarded knowledge just as today we recognize the dangers of hoarding vast wealth.
We can follow his logic. Knowledge, and the discipline to obtain knowledge made people into better individuals, and those disciplined individuals who, learned civics and social graces, made for better neighbors. Neighbors could be also thought of as collaborators in liberty. To the extent they were decadent and degenerate, your society was decadent and degenerate.
What this meant was that the moral health and education of others was a concern for you. To Adams, this mindset was an inheritance of the original New England settlers who brought to their region the Protestant Reformation’s emphasis on individual literacy that gave the common people the ability to read the Bible in their own language. Once they could do that, they could and did read the histories, and works of philosophy, and participate in the making of the laws that governed them.
Almost a century later, Abraham Lincoln argued that for free men to oppose the power of the slaveholders who threatened to destroy the economy by replacing the labor of free men with slavery also required supporting the education of free men:
“Free Labor argues that, as the Author of man makes every individual with one head and one pair of hands, it was probably intended that heads and hands should cooperate as friends; and that that particular head, should direct and control that particular pair of hands. As each man has one mouth to be fed, and one pair of hands to furnish food, it was probably intended that that particular pair of hands should feed that particular mouth -- that each head is the natural guardian, director, and protector of the hands and mouth inseparably connected with it; and that being so, every head should be cultivated, and improved, by whatever will add to its capacity for performing its charge. In one word Free Labor insists on universal education.” Abraham Lincoln’s address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, 1859
For thousands of years, civilizations produced laborers without public education. If all you want is workers to be managed you do not need the full spectrum of learning. However, if the public mandates and funds education its aim should be to have schools that support communities in raising individuals who will be mature and competent enough to join the messy and complicated world of democracy where they will share the burdens of self-government. Without knowledge of the liberal arts the people are easier to deceive using old tricks they would otherwise recognize.
As we head back to school in the coming weeks, let’s endeavor to remember why Americans concluded that education was worth investing in.
To help a free people stay free.