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On the American Founders' Defense of Liberal Education in a Republic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Eugene F. Miller
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Extract

An important strand of the republican tradition warns that liberal education harms republics by promoting aristocracy, breeding an idle and skeptical class of philosophers and undermining the civic virtues on which republics depend. The American Founding generation, in its writings on education, rejected this warning and maintained instead that the open cultivation and wide dissemination of liberal learning is favorable to republican government, if not essential to its very existence. The aristocratic tendencies of liberal education would by mitigated by the diffusion of knowledge. Philosophy would show its usefulness by increasing man's power over nature and multiplying the conveniences of life. The republican virtues would be strengthened by the elucidation of their rational ground.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , January 1984 , pp. 65 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1984

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References

1 From Mill's, “Inaugural Address at St. Andrews,” in James and John Stuart Mill on Education, ed. Cavenagh, F. A. (Cambridge, 1931), p. 132.Google Scholar No one has brought out more clearly than Leo Strauss the many-sidedness of the subject of education and its centrality to political philosophy. Anyone familiar with Strauss's thought and writings will see at once that my essay owes far more to Strauss than footnotes can convey, especially to his chapters on liberal education in Liberalism Ancient and Modem (New York, 1968), pp. 3–25.Google Scholar Also important to my essay at a formative stage was Brann's, EvaParadoxes of Education in a Republic (Chicago, 1979).Google Scholar From this book I learned, among other things, that the writings on education by the American Founding generation are a very rich resource for exploring the relationship of liberal education and republicanism.

2 Quoted from an unpublished and undated essay, in mimeographed form, entitled “Liberal Education and the Common Man.”

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4 The quotations here are from Plutarch, , The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. Dryden, John (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), pp. 428–29.Google Scholar

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6 Ibid. The philosopher quoted here by Rousseau is apparently Seneca.

7 Ibid., p. 50.

8 Ibid., p. 36.

9 de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, ed. Bradley, Phillips (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), 2:244.Google Scholar

10 In Goode, G. Brown, “The Origin of the National Scientific and Educational Institutions of the United States,” Papers of the American Historical Association, 4 (04 1890), part 2, p. 82.Google Scholar Rush's address is reprinted here as Appendix B.

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12 Ibid., p. 127.

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15 Ibid., p. 65. Webster is quoting directly from Montesquieu.

16 Ibid., p. 3.

17 Ibid., pp. 155–56.

18 In Honeywell, Roy J., The Educational Work of Thomas Jefferson (Cambridge, 1931), p. 199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Most of Jefferson's writings on education are reprinted in the Appendices to this volume.

19 Essays on Education in the Early Republic, p. 3.Google Scholar

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21 Smith, Samuel Harrison in Essays on Education in the Early Republic, pp. 188–89.Google Scholar

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35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., p. 179.

38 Ibid., p. 151.

39 Ibid.

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41 Ibid., p. 67.

42 Goldwin, Robert A., “Rights Versus Duties: No Contest,” in Ethics in Hard Times, ed. Caplan, Arthur L. and Callahan, Daniel (New York, 1981), p. 129.Google Scholar

43 Ibid., p. 9. Rush takes note of the regime change in another essay when he insists that education should now be conducted “upon principles very different from what it is in Great Britain and in some respects different from what it was when we were a part of a monarchical empire” (Ibid., p. 27).

44 See Educational Work of Thomas Jefferson, pp. 249–50.Google Scholar

45 Essays on Education in the Early Republic, p. 22.Google Scholar

46 Ibid., pp. 13–14.

47 Ibid., p. 14.

48 Ibid., pp. 14–15.

49 See Ibid., p. 14.

50 Ibid., p. 16.

51 Ibid., p. 9.

52 Ibid., pp. 73–74.

53 Ibid., pp. 8.

54 Goode, , “The Origin of the National Scientific and Educational Institutions in the United States,” p. 90.Google ScholarBarlow's, “Prospectus of a National Institution, to be Established in the United States” (1806)Google Scholar is reprinted here as Appendix C.

55 Ibid., pp. 90–91.

56 Educational Work of Thomas Jefferson, p. 199.Google Scholar