In fact, students are back at 1994 levels; but then again, they didn’t have very far to fall.
Madison’s Early Education
Wolverton has written extensively on Madison, including a biography for the National Center for Constitutional Studies and a work entitled What Degree of Madness? that dissects the statesman’s Federalist Paper 46. He pinpointed Madison’s early education as a pivotal moment in his political career. It was an educational format that Wolverton has long performed: tutoring.Madison’s childhood teacher was a man by the name of Donald Robertson. He had come to Virginia from Scotland, where he had received an excellent education. Noting the lack of opportunity for a classical liberal education in Virginia, Robertson opened his own school.
The Robertson School continued for 15 years, and during this time, he taught numerous future founders, including George Rogers Clark, a Revolutionary War hero; John Taylor of Caroline, a future U.S. Senator; James Innes, war hero and future attorney general of Virginia; Robert Brooke, future governor of Virginia; John Tyler, the future president; and, of course, Madison.
A Robertson-esque Education
Students of Robertson were given a classical liberal education, which included learning law, philosophy, chemistry, mathematics, Latin, and Greek. Wolverton suggests that there’s no reason why students today can’t receive the same education. He noted that receiving it is actually easier today than it was in the late 18th century.“We can read the stuff that Donald Robertson taught these kids, and we can get a little closer to being like those kids ourselves,” he said.
“We shouldn’t be celebrating our Founding Fathers only; we should be emulating our Founding Fathers,” he said. “That includes putting the stuff in our heads that they put in their heads.”
Drink From the Source
Wolverton warns about what he calls “drinking downstream.” He recommends reading straight from the source rather than reading distilled versions of history. One of the worst culprits of distilled history is the history textbooks in schools, he said.“I read some of these American history textbooks, and I’m like, ‘Whoa. There’s been some horses doing some stuff in that water,’” he said. “We are blessed enough to live in a time where you can get on Google and you can read from the source. Read the source material. You can read it for free ... in English. It’s not like you have to do what Madison did when he wanted to read a history of the world that happened to be written in Italian. He had to learn Italian.”
Regarding those textbooks, Wolverton decries the distorted and polluted versions of American and world history taught in schools. More than this, however, is his opinion of how citizens, conservatives specifically, are advocates for the free market, except in education.
“People complain that history teachers aren’t that good, and it’s true, but that’s because they don’t have to be. There’s no competition,” he said. “Whereas me, if I don’t teach in a way that people find useful and beneficial to their children, I don’t get hired. In everything else, conservatives believe that the free market makes for a better product. When it comes to education, we don’t get behind that. They think, ‘Hey, it’s okay to have a socialist education system.’
Historiographical Coroner
Wolverton alluded to Madison as a type of historiographical coroner, using source material to examine “the lifeless bodies of the former self-governing republics” and identify “what disease killed them so that he could inoculate the American republic from dying of those same diseases.”“Why can’t we teach that in school? Here’s what they did wrong. Here’s what ultimately killed them,” he said. “Instead of reading some rubbish textbook that was written by somebody who was taught to be a teacher rather than a historian, why don’t we just have a packet of these readings? That’s what I do with my students.”
Wolverton, through his personal tutoring and now online classes, has been striving to replicate a Robertson-esque educational format so that today’s students―youth and adult―can experience what he terms “a Founders’ education.”
“I don’t do homework. The founders didn’t do homework. I don’t do tests. The test is going to be, did we restore our liberty?” he said. “I’ll give you a test after you turn about 80, and we’ll see if we restored our liberty. If we did, you all get As. If not, you all get Fs.”