A Matter of Character: America’s Founders, Education, and Virtue

The Founding Fathers stressed the importance of an educated citizenry, based on knowledge and virtue. Biba Kayewich

During the Colonial era, education, especially literacy, was a near-obsession among the European newcomers to America.

There was no government supervision of schools—indeed, there were no official government schools at all. While the well-to-do might hire tutors for their children or enroll them in the few colleges and academies then available, most children acquired the basics of reading, writing, and ciphering at home. They began by learning their ABCs from a horn book, a teaching device made up of paper imprinted with the alphabet, a prayer, and digits mounted on a board and covered with horn, or from Mom scratching out letters in the ashes of the fireplace hearth. With passages already familiar to students, the Bible often served as their first reader. Primers, too, became popular. An inventory dating from 1700 reveals that one Boston bookshop had on hand for sale 11 dozen spellers and 61 dozen primers.

As it turns out, these free-market efforts paid off handsomely. By 1800, for instance, literacy in Massachusetts was more than 90 percent. Moreover, this hodgepodge Colonial system gave us luminaries such as John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington, who, along with the great majority of their contemporaries, believed that an education and the ability to read were absolute necessities for citizens living in the republic that they had founded.

That much is well-known. Neglected, perhaps, is the heavy emphasis placed by the Founders on instructing the young in virtue. For them, the development of character was the central purpose of education.

The Founding Fathers stressed the importance of an educated citizenry, based on knowledge and virtue. Biba Kayewich

‘The Bedrock of a Thriving Republic’

In “Our Sacred Honor: Words of Advice from the Founders in Stories, Letters, Poems, and Speeches,” William Bennett calls our attention to this focus on moral development in his chapter “Education of the Head and Heart.” As we read through the letters of these makers of our American republic, we may have to grapple a bit with the austerity and syntax of their 18th-century prose, but we find their worries—basically, how to raise good kids—match those of many parents and mentors today.

In 1785, for instance, Jefferson wrote to his nephew, 15-year-old Peter Carr, “Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give up the earth itself and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act.” He went on to offer specific advice, such as, “It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth.” In a 1790 letter to his nephew, George Steptoe Washington, who was an unruly student headed off to college, George Washington wrote, “It may be proper to observe that a good moral character is the first essential in a man, and that the habits contracted at your age are generally indelible, and your conduct here may stamp your character through life.”

In her online article “Founding Fathers on Education,” Eleanor Stratton examines such documents as Jefferson’s “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” John Adams’s work on the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, and “The Northwest Ordinance of 1787,” and finds that all these documents stressed the importance of an educated citizenry. Yet Adams, Jefferson, and the makers of the Ordinance all recognized, as Stratton writes of Jefferson, “that knowledge needed to be tied to morality and religion to be truly effective in promoting self-government. His perspective was about forming character and virtue, not merely acquiring facts.” The Founders, concludes Stratton, recognized this education in knowledge and virtues as “the bedrock of a thriving republic.”

The 1st ‘Dear Abby’

Abigail Adams deserves special mention. A bold and strong-willed woman, she—along with her husband—took a very real interest in their children’s character development. Abigail was also an inveterate writer, posting more than 4,300 letters in her lifetime, and she left to posterity a good bit of the advice she dispatched to her children, especially John Quincy. Bennett includes several excerpts from her letters in “Our Sacred Honor.”

When Quincy was 13 and in Europe with his father, for instance, Abigail Adams wrote to her son of the value he could gain from that experience simply by observing others, while reminding him, “Above all things support a virtuous character, and remember that ‘an Honest Man is the Noblest work of God.’” Two years earlier, she wrote to the boy, “Great learning and superior abilities, should you ever possess them, will be of little value and small Estimation, unless Virtue, Honor, Truth and integrity are added to them.”

Many parents will smile when in this same letter she tells him, “The inadvertency and Heedlessness of youth, requires line upon line and precept upon precept.” Abigail then startles us by adding, “I had much rather you should have found your Grave in the ocean you have crossd, or any untimely death crop you in your infant years, rather than see you an immoral profligate or a Graceless child.”

And like many mothers today, Abigail was not above seeking help from others. With four children under the age of 5, she wrote to her good friend Mercy Warren, “to assist a young and almost inexperienced Mother in this Arduous Business, that the tender twigs allotted to my care, may be so cultivated as to do honour to their parents and prove blessings to the riseing generation.” Warren replied that while her own methods and rules of conduct for raising her children were by no means perfect, she believed that even from a young age they must be taught to revere truth, “to fix a sacred regard to Veracity in the bosom of Youth, the surest Guard to Virtue, and the most powerful Barrier against the sallies of Vice through Every future period of Life.”

Takeaways

In America today, we hear a good deal about the poor academic performance in many of our nation’s public schools and lowered standards in our universities. Test scores in reading and mathematics are declining, with critics calling for a variety of reforms.

What we don’t hear is a word about the teaching of virtue, at least not in government schools. With the exception of private academies and homeschoolers, an education in character development, which was so important to the sons and daughters of the American Revolution, vanished decades ago, which may explain many of our nation’s current problems.

Perhaps this indifference is a blessing in disguise, as it leaves parents rather than the state in command of their children’s ethics and morals. And here’s more good news: There’s a library of books and resources about virtues that are available to parents and teachers. Search online for “teaching virtue to children resources,” and find collections such as Bennett’s “The Book of Virtues,” all sorts of guides on character building at home and in the classroom, and dozens of websites offering practical direction along with suggested readings and activities. Parents and grandparents, mentors, and teachers will discover an army of reinforcements waiting to help them inspire moral excellence in their children.

“For no people will tamely surrender their liberties,” Sam Adams wrote to Joseph Warren in 1775, “nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved.”

As parents and teachers plan and prepare for school this fall, keep in mind the words and sentiments of our Founder, and consider making the study and practice of virtue a part of your curriculum.