Jefferson and Baldwin: history of illusions about education

History News Network links to an essay in the current Atlantic magazine by the remarkable American historian Annette Gordon Reed. It's at once a review of a new book by another remarkable American historian, Alan Taylor; a sharp analysis of Thomas Jefferson's idea of republican education; and another proof of how deeply slavery warped the slaveholders as well as the enslaved. Being the Atlantic, it also offers links to related articles it has published: such as an essay on Jefferson and slavery the magazine published in 1862.

I try to imagine a Canadian magazine that might even consider attempting some similar treatment of a theme in Canadian history.  Oh, well, we are a small country.

Gordon-Reed's theme, via Taylor, is of Jefferson's dream of building the University of Virginia into a kind of seminary to train Virginia's future leaders in the virtues of study, contemplation, debate, and public service, the kind of education needed to preserve a republic. Being young masters from the slaveholding class, of course, the actual students mostly behaved like complacent entitled assholes, much to Jefferson's frustration and despair.  Gordon-Reed, who is African-American, may have smiled a little as she explored this story as a commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the University of Virginia.

This Jefferson story reminds me of the plight of his near-contemporary, William Warren Baldwin, the gentlemanly reformer of Upper Canada. Baldwin believed in the Law Society of Upper Canada and its college, Osgoode Hall, in the way Jefferson believed in the University of Virginia. "There was no society for which the country should feel so deep an interest as for the Law Society. Without it, whose property was safe? Whose life could be ably defended?" Baldwin declared Osgoode Hall -- in the building of which he was the prime mover -- was designed "not so much for the mere personal accommodation of students and barristers but for the nobler end of elevating the character of the bar and securing by early habits of honorable and gentlemanly conduct the respect and confidence of the public."

Baldwin's law students were not slaveholders' sons, but they proved about as rowdy, entitled, and complacent as Jefferson's. Baldwin was so shocked that he resigned as head of the Law Society and never held public office again.

This being Canada, there are not fifty articles and essays on Baldwin's thoughts about the role of education in shaping and preserving a constitutional monarchy. I crib the quotes above from my own paragraphs in The Law Society of Upper Canada and Ontario's Lawyers (1997), and there isn't a whole lot else accessible on the whole topic. We all do what we can.