"The Evolving Federal Role in Education: An Introductory Essay" (Excerpt)

A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

-James Madison, August 4, 1822

As much as the Founders strongly believed that the survival of representative democracy would depend on an educated citizenry, they made no provision in the Constitution for any federal role in educating the people. The closest the Constitutional Convention came to delegating any educational role to the federal government was an amendment offered by James Madison (Va.) and Charles Pinckney (S.C.) to insert in the list of powers vested in Congress a power “to establish an University, in which no preferences or distinctions should be allowed on account of religion.”

Madison’s notes on the convention indicate that James Wilson (Pa.) supported the amendment but that Governeur Morris (Pa.) argued against it on grounds that it was “not necessary” because “the exclusive power at the Seat of Government will reach the object.” The amendment was rejected, 4 states to 7, with Connecticut divided.1

Notwithstanding Morris’s assertion of an inherent federal power to establish a national university “at the seat of government,” it was generally thought by the delegates that those powers not specifically delegated to Congress would be left to the states and the people–something explicitly enunciated in the Bill of Rights’ Tenth Amendment.2

In the epigraph to this essay, Madison is responding to a “circular” from Kentucky Lieutenant Governor William T. Barry regarding Kentucky’s new law to fund public education. Barry was apparently heading a committee in his state to determine how best the funds should be applied to the new educational system and was seeking advice and knowledge on how other states were doing it. Madison responded by applauding “the liberal appropriations made by the legislature of Kentucky for a general system of education,” and by enclosing “extracts from the laws of Virginia on that subject,” though he added that he doubted they would give much aid “as they have yet been imperfectly carried into execution.”3

The Virginia experience to which Madison alluded is perhaps best summarized by the author of the Virginia education laws himself, Thomas Jefferson. In his autobiography Jefferson notes that in November 1776 he was appointed to a five-member committee of the state legislature to revise Virginia’s laws. The committee labored over the next three years and made its report in June 1779. The committee decided that “a systematical plan of general education should be proposed,” as Jefferson describes it in his autobiography, “and I was requested to undertake it.”4

Jefferson subsequently prepared three bills for the state law revision, proposing three distinct grades “reaching all classes.” First, “elementary schools for all children generally, rich and poor.” Second, colleges for a middle degree of instruction, and third, “an ultimate grade for teaching the sciences generally, and in their highest degree.” The elementary education bill proposed to divide every county into wards of “a proper size and population for a school in which reading, writing, and common arithmetic should be taught.” Moreover, the bill would divide the state into 24 districts, each of which would have a school for classical learning, grammar, geography, and the higher branches of numerical arithmetic.5

It was not until 1796 that all three bills were taken up by the legislature, and only the one for elementary schools was enacted. However, a provision was inserted in the bill “which completely defeated it.” The bill left it to the court of each county to determine whether it should be carried into execution. The bill provided that educational expenses should be paid in a manner proportional to everyone’s general tax rate. This would have thrown the education of the poor on the backs of the wealthy, as Jefferson explained it, and “the justices, being of the more wealthy class, were unwilling to incur that burden.” Consequently, the law was “not suffered to commence in a single county.”6

Perhaps it was this experience that caused Jefferson as president (1801 to 1809) to hint at the possibility of Federal aid to education, though in the context of the ongoing debate on the need for a constitutional amendment to permit Congress to undertake so-called “internal improvements.” In his second inaugural, Jefferson proposed that any surplus from the “revenue on the consumption of foreign articles,” after being applied to paying “our public debts,” be divided between a “just repartition among the states, and a corresponding amendment of the constitution...in time of peace, to rivers, canals, roads, arts, manufactures, education, and other great objects within each state [emphases added].”7 In modern parlance, Jefferson was proposing a combination of general revenue-sharing and block grants to the states for carrying out specified projects. He would get neither from Congress.

1. “Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 as Reported by James Madison,” Documents Illustrative of the Formation of the Union of the American States (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1927), 725.

2. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution reads: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

3. Letter to William T. Barry, August 4, 1822, James Madison, Writings, Jack N. Rakove, editor (New York: The Library of America, 1999), 790-98.

4. Thomas Jefferson, “The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson,” The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Adrienne Koch and William Peden, editors (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1944), 49.

5. Ibid, 50.

6. Ibid.

7. Thomas Jefferson, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1895, The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 340.