Jefferson And Education

From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian comes a brilliant, absorbing study of Thomas Jefferson’s campaign to save Virginia through education. By turns entertaining and tragic, this beautifully written history reveals the origins of a great university in the dilemmas of Virginia slavery. It offers an incisive portrait of Thomas Jefferson set against a social fabric of planters in decline, enslaved black families torn apart by sales, and a hair-trigger code of male honor. A man of “deft evasions” who was both courtly and withdrawn, Jefferson sought control of his family and state from his lofty perch at Monticello. Never quite the egalitarian we wish him to be, he advocated emancipation but shrank from implementing it, entrusting that reform to the next generation. Devoted to the education of his granddaughters, he nevertheless accepted their subordination in a masculine culture. During the revolution, he proposed to educate all white children in Virginia, but later in life he narrowed his goal to building an elite university. In 1819 Jefferson’s intensive drive for state support of a new university succeeded. His intention was a university to educate the sons of Virginia’s wealthy planters, lawyers, and merchants, who might then democratize the state and in time rid it of slavery. But the university’s students, having absorbed the traditional vices of the Virginia gentry, preferred to practice and defend them. Opening in 1825, the university nearly collapsed as unruly students abused one another, the enslaved servants, and the faculty. Jefferson’s hopes of developing an enlightened leadership for the state were disappointed, and Virginia hardened its commitment to slavery in the coming years. The university was born with the flaws of a slave society. Instead, it was Jefferson’s beloved granddaughters who carried forward his faith in education by becoming dedicated teachers of a new generation of women.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1962.

The Next Step in TJEd.Often cited by the DeMilles as their favorite work to date, this inspirational manual picks up where the primer/overview work, A Thomas Jefferson Education leaves off. It develops in depth not only the philosophy but also the nuts-and-bolts application of each individual Phase, the critical Transitions between Phases and the "big-picture" vision to begin with the end in mind. Those who master the content in this book leave behind the question, "But how do you actually DO it?" A Crisis of Leadership The world's problems can be summed up in just a few words: lack of leadership. While the world is in desperate need of leaders, very few people have the tools to become one. Oliver and Rachel DeMille's Leadership Education: The Phases of Learning is the manual that every person who aspires to be an effective leader, or to raise one, needs. Principled decision-making, the cultivation of character, studying the classics, and using critical thinking skills are just a few of the lost educational virtues of today restored by this book. An in-depth look at the philosophy and phases of education is indispensable when creating leaders. This book will help any family find the direction they are looking for when pursuing leadership education. This book teaches not only the theories behind Thomas Jefferson Education but also the practical application of these theories for you and your children, with great detail on the features of Thomas Jefferson Education-modeled home, parenting, family, education, leadership and life's mission. As we apply the philosophy contained in Leadership Education: The Phases of Learning we will transform not only our families and our classrooms, but the world.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be," wrote Thomas Jefferson, the nation's first "education president." Spurred by this conviction that the new United States would survive only if it encouraged education at all levels, Jefferson struggled unsuccessfully for four decades to establish a system of publicly supported elementary and secondary schools. The book explores Jefferson's efforts to advance publicly supported education, beginning in Virginia with the first bill he introduced promoting "the more general diffusion of knowledge," and continuing with national initiatives, including the founding of the United States Military Academy at West Point. The book concludes with what Jefferson called "the hobby of my old age" the establishment of the University of Virginia, where he designed the buildings, selected the faculty, planned the curriculum, and served at first rector. Written by Jennings L. Wagoner, Jr., a professor of the history of education in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.

This volume offers a view of Leadership Education from many angles, from the education of toddlers to advanced adult learning.

Though limited to white males, public education was a progressive idea for its time. All his bills failed. Even though Jefferson's own machinations stymied bills for a statewide system in the 1810s, the "hobby of his old age," the University of Virginia, opened in 1825.