The Education of the Founding Fathers

In the Laws, Plato describes education as the formation of proper affections ordered to reason, and this necessarily takes place within and is oriented toward the political reality of human life in community. It is the training ground of the affections so that pleasure and pain, love and hatred, come into harmony with reason. This harmony of affections and reason is both publicly defined and upheld by law, and is the virtue that defines a society. This political reality of education is because it always shapes civilization as it transmits unto future generations religion, law, institutions, and shared ways of life. The American Founders understood, along with Plato, that education is the formation of citizens for a particular political and moral order. Education is inevitably political. It is only a question of which social and civilizational ends the education will serve.

During Washington’s administration, there was talk of establishing a “national university” in D.C. Men like Washington and Hamilton repeatedly called for such an institution, and their reasons for doing so makes explicit what many today would deny: education is a principal instrument for forming a people who will sustain and carry on a particular political order. The problem of ‘woke’ and communist education is not that it is political, it is that such changes in education are set to radically change the people and political community of America. Not to mention their proposed alternative political order is wicked.

Writing to Hamilton, Washington described a proper liberal education “generally as one of the surest means of enlightening and giving just ways of thinking to our citizens.” But his concerns, and thus desire for a national university, were not merely academic excellence. The “highest importance” of such institutions are the fact that in the “juvenal period of life, friendships are formed, and habits established that will stick by one.” With a national university, which would bring young men together from across the States, a shared national character would be formed. By assembling such men together, “who, in all probability, will be at the head of the councils of this country in a more advanced stage,” they would become more united and thus seek peace and harmony across the Union.

He desired such university education for the young men who would become future governors, lawyers, physicians, educators, ministers, and businessmen — men of office and of public leadership. And such cultural leaders, from around the Union being formed together, would bring greater unity and harmony between the States. This is, to be blunt, an explicitly political end of education. Though the States had been brought together by the shared experience of the war, such experiences are forgotten, and once forgotten, old prejudices would return. Only through educational formation, the enculturation of our youth, could a people be brought together.

The liberal arts are the arts that liberate the mind and soul from servile tutelage, and lead the student to know, judge, deliberate, and rule himself and society around him freely.

In this same letter, Washington notes that the House of Delegates resolved that “the migration of American youth to foreign countries, for the completion of their education, exposes them to the danger of imbibing political prejudices disadvantageous to their own republican forms of government, and ought therefore to be rendered unnecessary and avoided.” Education, they assumed, carries political assumptions with it. To be educated under a foreign regime was to risk being formed for the wrong kind of citizenship.

Benjamin Rush, a true educational theorist of the Founding era, also understood that political stability rests on early formation of the affections. In his essay on education in a republic, he writes that “an education in our own is to be preferred to an education in a foreign country,” because “the principle of patriotism stands in need of the reinforcement of prejudice,” and those prejudices are “formed in the first one and twenty years of our lives.” Rush was unembarrassed by the word. Rightly ordered prejudice — trained loyalty and affection — was a necessary precondition for rational republican deliberation.

Rush also saw education as the means of forging a unified people out of multiplicity. In a nation composed of thirteen States, he argued “our schools of learning… will render the mass of the people more homogenous and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government.” Education was not about maximizing individual expression but about shaping a people who could live together under shared laws and folkways. And at the foundation of this was the Christian religion, for “without this, there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.”

Rush’s vision of republican education was to shape men who would lead their nation, “where every citizen is liable to be a soldier and a legislator,” and not just become passive residents. A properly republican and virtuous education prepared men not merely to vote every four years, but to govern, fight, deliberate, and sacrifice. His discussion of the role of education for women reinforces this civilizational orientation, as he argues that women must be instructed in “the principles of liberty and government,” because “the opinions and conduct of men are often regulated by the women,” and because “the first impressions upon the minds of children are generally derived from the women.” Mothers are the first political educators and shapers of the republic.

The liberal arts are the arts that liberate the mind and soul from servile tutelage, and lead the student to know, judge, deliberate, and rule himself and society around him freely. They are ordered towards wisdom and not mere pragmatic utility. For this reason, the liberal arts have always been understood as especially fitting for those who will lead — those who are to be prepared for office, those in position to shape the laws, institutions, economy, and shared ways of life for a given society. If all education is political in its shaping of the polis, the liberal arts are those particular arts suited for the leaders — the rulers — of the polis. It is for this vision of civilizational renewal that New Saint Andrews College exists: to graduate leaders who shape culture living faithfully under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.