By Debates over the purpose of education rarely stay rooted in educational principles. Researchers and publications, The Daily Economy included, often scrutinize test results, fight over funding formulas, blame this faction or the other, or argue there is too much or too little something in the classroom. All those questions matter. They also detract from a more fundamental one, especially in this American anniversary year.
What kind of public education did the American Founders believe a free republic required?
Unconventional Education and America’s Founding, edited by Nasiyah Isra-Ul at the Foundation for Economic Education, arrives at an opportune moment because it approaches that question historically, instead of politically. Putting aside whether homeschoolers should get tax credits or if public charters improve math scores, the book asks what an educated public meant to at least a few architects of the American experiment.
True to its purpose, the text is available free of charge for individual enlightenment.
Contributed chapters are devoted to individual founding figures, with an emphasis on the educational development — very decidedly not the schooling — of John Adams, James Forten, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Mercy Otis Warren, Benjamin Banneker, and Abigail Adams and her children.
Educating the Founding Generation
Among these narratives of pre-industrial learners, selection and survivorship bias are impossible to ignore. Their learning was sought and chosen, rather than required or received. A majority of Americans at the time did not have the luxury of even an eighth-grade education. We cannot entirely credit Alexander Hamilton’s reading about self-determination, then, with his willingness to chart his own course — he was already a rare young man to have scrounged for books and devoured those lofty ideas in the first place. And Hamilton (essay by Denise Lever), as an orphan immigrant to New York, had a very different education than Washington and Jefferson (essays by Nasiyah Isra-Ul and Angel Sobrino). Their leisure to study Locke and Plutarch was, as customary for men of their station, purchased with inherited wealth of land and human beings. In the libraries afforded them by productive plantations, they read histories of failed states and studied enduring philosophies of human flourishing, and cooked up a new nation.
John Adams (essay by Kelsy Achtenberg) frustrated his father by avoiding his studies and the structure of formal schooling. He begged to be apprenticed to a farmer before discovering a love of antiquity. His independent obsession with Greece not only had him wrestling with big concepts of judgment, virtue, and personal growth, but reflecting on the characteristics of stable, balanced, peaceful governments. A schoolmaster fueled this passion, but the very action of having sculpted and chosen his education, rather than passively receiving it, shaped the character of a man who would persuade so many others to shoulder the risk and responsibilities of independence.
A clear pattern emerges through these historical biographies. Education in the colonial period was conducted close to home. Families taught children. Churches operated schools. Private academies flourished. Young people learned trades through apprenticeships, including strict and dangerous ones. Reading societies, tutors, self-directed study, and local associations all contributed to a young person’s education. Many students attended a patchwork of schools as their needs changed. Children studied the bible, the almanac, the atlas, and the apothecary. No single institution claimed exclusive responsibility for producing good citizens.
That arrangement likely looks haphazard to the modern reader. But it reflects the same Enlightenment individuality and distrust of central authority that sculpted our constitutional order. The best protection against public manipulation, in other words, is competing institutions and discourse communities. Educational pluralism was considered ordinary to the Founders, not exceptional.
Education Is Much Bigger Than Schooling
No wonder parents squabble at school board meetings: they are arguing for control over which voices will play in their own children’s heads for decades to come. But we only get to this point if we choose to surrender so much education to government schools, and limit what counts as “education” to what government schools choose to measure. For much of American history, education pursued many ends at once: literacy, craftsmanship, moral formation, natural sciences, civic responsibility, practical judgment, and intellectual curiosity. Standardization gradually narrowed those aims into measurable outputs. And even those outputs haven’t measured up.
Even if a student is willing to learn, and someone is available to teach him, he may not absorb even half of what is offered for his consumption. If our current public educational setting is proof of anything, it is that sitting in a room with a qualified teacher for 20,000 hours is no practical guarantee of literacy, much less preparation for citizenship. And preparation for citizenship is allegedly the purpose of subsidized education.
Perhaps Jefferson best captures what we imagine the American public school system to provide. The self-taught genius wanted to offer the same advantages to all, for all:
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. . . . An amendment of our constitution must here come in aid of public education. The influence over government must be shared among all the people.
If Unconventional Education has a weakness, it may be the relative rarity of quotes from the primary sources whose stories it tells. As editor of The Daily Economy, I routinely counsel writers to reduce block quotes, which readers tend to gloss over (Did you skip the quoted paragraph just above this one? Be honest). But the depth of original sources matters.
The rich personal letters, journals, and public writings of the featured autodidacts, no doubt consulted by the contributing authors, are not shared with readers. John Adams wrote “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people,” and precious few of Phillis Wheatley’s words are familiar to us. In bringing us the stories of their exceptional educations, the book’s contributors may overestimate the reader’s familiarity with the influence and contributions of its subjects as adults.
School Choice Was the Default
Modern debates often treat educational pluralism, as a recent or radical policy idea. Unconventional Education clearly shows it is neither. America’s educational diversity, the liberty to learn, preceded the republic itself, and in fact contributed to its founding principles. The Constitution, with its limits on government, emerged from a society already accustomed to solving educational challenges through families, private initiatives, local institutions, and voluntary cooperation.
The question Unconventional Education asks us to consider reaches beyond vouchers, charter schools, homeschooling, or education savings accounts. It asks more, even, than whether today’s schools are succeeding or failing to prepare a populace to govern itself. And it asks virtually nothing of the government.
Instead, the model of education presented as formative for the American character is a responsibility that lies in each of us. We can be the conduit for civic virtues, instead of asking overworked schoolteachers to hold that sacred duty for all of us. We are too quick to shift responsibility for students’ education onto government schools. Unconventional Education should kindle many ideas of how to engage with the development of young people around us.
We can slow down, bend down, and explain our tools to the little boy from across the road when he wanders into the garage. Volunteer at Junior Achievement or an after-school club or your niece’s community theater. Coach. Mentor. Reclaim pride in the knowledge transfer, skills practice, and moral formation of the next generation, who, after all, will guide the future.
The education of our youth is far too big, and too important, a task to be left to a black box full of harried strangers on the other end of a bus ride. But the core failure, Unconventional Education argues, is how much we’ve relied on schools to do. Perhaps because most parents, too, are products of that system that cultivates learned helplessness and intellectual dependency, we feel unequal to the task of teaching our own. What we learned, then, is the one thing the Founding generation would have abhorred most: a cocoon of simple ignorance, civil indifference, and the illusion of consent.
There is no one right way to educate young people. But when individuals retain meaningful authority over their choices, as this book’s many examples show us, both the process and the contents of that study serve as practice for responsible, informed citizenship. Independent thinking, by nature, can’t be force-fed. It must be earned.