The Founding Fathers, Education, and "The Great Contest"

The American Philosophical Society Prize of 1797

B. Justice, B. Justice, B. Justice

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137271020
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Historia de la educación

Leading historians provide new insights into the founding generation's views on the place of public education in America. This volume explores enduring themes, such as gender, race, religion, and central vs. local control, in seven essays of the 1790s on how to implement public education in the new USA. The original essays are included as well.

C H A P T E R 1

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Introduction

Benjamin Justice

Ready?

[Write] an essay on a system of liberal education, and literary instruction, adapted to the genius of the government, and best calculated to promote the general welfare of the United States; comprehending, also, a plan for instituting and conducting public schools in this country on principles of the most extensive utility.

This was the question posed by the America’s premier scholarly association, American Philosophical Society (APS), in 1795. In a list of seven contest questions on various subjects, the education question came first, and had the largest prize, including $100 (in 1795 dollars) and publication by the APS.¹ The winners were chosen two years later, in 1797.

In today’s English, the question would mean:

Design the best system of education for the United States, appropriate for the wealthy as well as the poor, including secondary and higher education as well as elementary schools, reaching people in remote areas as well as cities, promoting the common good and strengthening our republican form of government.

No easy task in any era.

But these were no ordinary times. The nation’s political leaders were among its finest intellectuals. That group of men had just completed their political revolution, with the states ratifying their Constitution and Bill of Rights. Other revolutions in France and Saint-Domingue (Haiti) upended old regimes and appeared to forge fundamentally new relationships between people and government (inspiring both optimism and fear). Despite their considerable failures to end chattel slavery, honor the land rights of indigenous people, or abolish the subordination of women, the men we refer to as the founding fathers had nevertheless achieved a rare moment in history—applying ancient and modern theories of government to the creation of a new country.

The APS education prize contest captured the excitement and apprehension that the founding fathers felt about that creation. With no king and no state church, writers on both sides of the Atlantic argued that only through the virtue and intelligence of its citizens could the American republic survive; and in federal and state law, governments took measures to encourage the spread of useful knowledge and virtue. They ensured the delivery of mail, protected free speech, encouraged learned societies like the APS and voluntary ones like the Freemasons, formed or reformed colleges and academies, and created funds to subsidize local schooling efforts. In New England, state governments reaffirmed colonial laws that required towns to maintain free elementary schools or pay fines for noncompliance.

How to spread learning across the populace was indeed a problem, if one viewed education as being formal, functional knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic. The very aspects of American society that intellectuals celebrated about America’s republican character made it difficult to educate the masses. America was diverse—culturally, regionally, and religiously. Settlement patterns varied by region, placing many families at significant distance from each other, and from seats of government. Deeply held cultural traditions varied as well, leaving people in different parts of the United States more or less inclined to value formal education. Moreover, distrust of government and hatred of taxes made government-based solutions to public policy challenging, where they were even possible. The rebellion of whiskey distillers that boiled in Western Pennsylvania from 1791 to 1794 reminded citizens and leaders alike that the authority of the new national government was not as well loved as the latter might hope.

There were other problems as well, more serious and intractable, that the florid language of the American Revolution simply ignored, or, in the case of slavery, actually reinforced. Nearly one-fifth of all the people in the United States were enslaved, forming a racial caste whose marking as a separate people followed them even into freedom. (The Constitution considered a slave to be three-fifths of a person when it came to representation in Congress.) Half of Americans were women, covered by patriarchal traditions and laws that made it challenging for them to claim an equal right to education unless they were the fortunate daughters or wives of the middle or upper classes.

Educating the mass of citizens, whether in the positive sense of enhancing the interest of liberty or in the negative sense of social control, or some of both, became a central preoccupation of intellectuals in the 1780s and 1790s. Interest ran across the political spectrum. Even before the war with Great Britain ended, Thomas Jefferson joined John Adams and other leaders in the effort to write grand educational provisions into state law.² Over the course of the 1780s, as America slouched toward a replacement for the Articles of Confederation, the question of education in the republic gained popularity in magazines and newspapers.³ Among these were fully formed, almost utopian plans for systems of mass education through public schooling. Benjamin Rush published essays recommending a statewide system of public education for Pennsylvania, from universal elementary school through college, for girls as well as boys; Noah Webster traveled across the country delivering lectures and selling his new American textbooks, before using his federalist newspaper, American Minerva, as a mouthpiece for educational reform; George Washington urged Congress to found a national university. Alongside a similar university proposal at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison proposed that the federal government be empowered to “encourage, by proper premiums and provisions, the advancement of useful knowledge and discoveries.”⁴

Madison’s educational proposals failed, but the APS picked up the slack, serving as the nation’s leading intellectual institution and even, for a time, the informal library of Congress. Centered in the heart of America’s largest and capital city, Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society was uniquely situated to take a crack at the problem of education. Founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743, the APS sought to encourage and disseminate useful scientific and philosophical information. It was the Age of Associations, when Enlightenment intellectuals across Europe and, to a lesser extent, America, formed clubs and academies to share ideas and discoveries. By the 1790s the APS had become a significant institution in the transatlantic intellectual world, maintaining correspondence with similar institutions all over Europe. For a time, APS facilities were home to portions of the University of Pennsylvania. The membership list boasted the names of leading men of the day, founding fathers and European Enlightenment thinkers from Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Rush to Linnaeus, Lafayette, Talleyrand, Priestley, Condorcet, and Crevecoeur. In their regular meetings, the Society read and discussed contemporary issues in science, government, economics, and philosophy. A core of seven appointed members from various fields met at least once a month, usually joined by others who dropped in.⁵

The APS began awarding its first prize, the Magellanic Premium for discoveries “relating to navigation, astronomy, or natural philosophy,” in 1786. But the idea of sponsoring prize contests was much older, of medieval origins, and had become a staple of various European learned societies, which routinely sponsored essay and scientific contests on a variety of subjects. The most famous precursor to the APS education prize came from an Academy of Lyon essay contest, sponsored by the Abbe Raynal, in 1780. History teachers will appreciate its enduring appeal: “Was the Discovery of America a blessing or a curse to mankind?”⁶

The role of formal education in a republic, as a specific subject, had been a part of Enlightenment conversations in Europe and the United States throughout the eighteenth century as well. In France, the Chalons Academy sponsored a prize essay contest from 1779 to 1781 on the “best plan of education for the people.” Later, from 1797 to 1803, the Class of Moral and Political Sciences of the French National Institute held prize contests on the questions, “What are the most suitable institutions to establish morality in the people?” and “Is emulation a good means of education?” And on the Western side of the Atlantic—in fact, just around the corner from APS headquarters—Mr. Poor’s [Female] Academy in Philadelphia held a contest in 1789 for a premium on the best essay on education.⁷

According to the APS minutes, members hit upon the idea for a major prize contest in 1795, probably as part of an effort to collect and publish their papers, and, as historian Nancy Beadie argues, in possible anticipation of converting the University of Pennsylvania into a national university. That the APS should be interested in education in particular should be no surprise—several of its regular members served as trustees at local schools, taught at the university, or had themselves authored essays on education. Indeed, as the members of the society contemplated a prize question, they sat in a brand new building resting on land granted to them by the state government of Pennsylvania, in recognition of their great contribution of useful knowledge. The prime location of the land—directly across the street from Independence Hall—testified to the importance of learning to the revolutionary generation.

While the education prize of 1797 came first and had the highest cash award, the APS contest also contained other prizes for the best improvement to ship pumps, the most economical method of heating rooms, the easiest way to calculate longitude from lunar observations, the best essay on American vegetable dyes, the best way to prevent peach tree rot, and the best improvement to lamps, especially for lighting streets.⁸ Set in this context, the education prize suggests an understanding of education as being systematic, scientific, simple, and above all, useful. Europeans may have tended to imagine America as a pastoral wonderland, but Americans imagined it as a place where they could conquer nature and bend it to the will of the plow, the spade, the wonders of science, and the principles of good government.⁹ The American Philosophical Society possessed the right blend of resources, motivation, training, naïve optimism, and arrogance to imagine they could create a one best system of education for the United States.

What they were really after, however, was a far bigger prize; and their essay contest was but a small moment in the great contest of Western political thought, conceived in Plato’s Republic, Christianized by Augustin in City of God, and thrust into America by Thomas More’s Utopia: How to perfect the human experience through the creation of ideal social institutions. One of the most influential writers on the subject, Montesquieu, wrote in the Spirit of the Laws (1748) that “the laws of education ought to be in relation to the principles of government.” Having founded their republic as a novo ordu seclorum, a new order for the ages, the founding fathers of the APS hoped to design the best system of education to match it.¹⁰

As with all utopian projects, the dreams implicit in the APS education prize exceeded the reality. The education question did not frame an open competition of new ideas, but instead reflected the pet educational reform agendas of APS members. It had two very distinct parts. The first half of the question dealt with what should be taught: curriculum and possibly pedagogy (as implied by the word “system”). “[Write] an essay on a system of liberal education, and literary instruction, adapted to the genius of the government, and best calculated to promote the general welfare of the United States;[.]” Rather than make their question general, the APS asked for specific types of education, from two very different traditions. The first, “liberal education,” referred to elite education, and required a discussion of college curriculum that, at the time, aroused passionate debate over the role of ancient languages. On the other hand, the phrase “literary instruction” could refer to mass education in basic literacy (reading and writing), or to academy- or college-level curriculum in vernacular literature. Both of these, the question challenged, should reflect and promote the “genius” of the newly minted government and the interest of the nation as a whole.

As a problem, liberal education did not rank with mass education, nor with the challenge of institution-building embedded in the second part of the question. It did reflect a war of words, however, in which Rush and other leading members of the APS were prime protagonists. In postrevolutionary America, a liberal education centered the “dead” languages of Greek and Latin. A liberal education was, to a large degree, synonymous with an academy diploma or college degree, but it was both more and less. It was an education afforded by free time for contemplation—quite literally, it was “liberal” in the sense that in Ancient Athens, it was the education of a free man of means and not a slave (although some women had one too).¹¹ Invoking a “liberal education” entitled a man to be heard on matters of politics and government, as John Dickenson had done famously in the introduction to his popular prerevolutionary tract, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania.¹² For many, a liberal education also implied a certain moral stature—even in the case of a woman.^13...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• Part I  Methods
• Part II  Meanings
• Part III   Materials: Essays from the American Philosophical Society Education Contest, 1795–1797
• Notes on Contributors
• Index