by Motavenda Melchizedek

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Horace Mann (1796-1859) and John Dewey (1859-1952) were powerfully radical visionaries who drew upon the wisdom of the past to empower a better destiny for humanity.  They were voracious readers, prolific writers and profound thinkers who had the courage to step beyond the bounds of consensus reality to help ground more holistic and empowering ideas and structures for education.

Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence (1776), believed that every man should be empowered through education and that the holding of knowledge on a personal level by the members of a society, was vital to its success and political independence.  In a letter to W. Jarvis in 1820, Jefferson wrote, "I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.”  He also believed it wise to breakdown geographic areas into separate districts so that public education could be properly overseen and managed.

The University of Virginia was founded in 1819 by Jefferson who recruited classically trained European teachers with the goal of nourishing the intellect through specialized areas of study such as philosophy and architecture.  He saw the value in the educated literate citizen.  His personal library had over 6000 volumes and over 18,000 of the letters he penned survive today.

Horace Mann, an educational reformer, devoted himself to facilitating the development of a free public school system.  During his tenure as Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, he made great strides in awakening and alerting the public to problems with the existing state of education.  He helped to establish schools for training educators including the first Normal School for Teachers in 1839.  He brought awareness to the population of the value of teachers resulting in increased salaries for them.  He was a strong advocate of free libraries and his efforts to bring in new financial resources to strengthen and improve the school system were highly successful.  Paid school supervisory committees were instituted to help manage and schools.  Educational equipment and texts where improved and fifty new secondary schools were erected during his time in office.  Though he worked on the state level, Mann’s influence reached far beyond those boundaries.  His work led to the first compulsory attendance law in 1852.  He was able to successfully elucidate the connection between taxation for education and the benefits to the taxpayer by drawing a connection to the economic wealth that would result for all to benefit from and he was successful in illuminated for the public how non-religious based education allowed for all to support public schools without conflict of religion. He brought forth revolutionary educational theories by bridging the works on early education by European philosophers such as Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) who coined the term, and created the first, “Kindergarten” literally translated as “children’s garden” in 1837 in Germany.

John Dewey, a philosopher, educator and psychologist, saw clearly the pragmatic value inherent in experiential education.  We can see the legacy of his thinking in exemplified today in experiential educational systems like Outward Bound Wilderness Schools.  He saw that life itself has a lot to teach a soul and that this truth was one ripe with potential.  Through immersion in life experience, one puts knowledge to the test which in turn leads to adaptation and growth in the form of new learning and the building of more knowledge. 

In his seminal article "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" (1896), Dewey brought new thought to the existing theory of learning.  He argued that we are not merely passive receivers in learning but are in fact interactive and effecting and learning from our actual experiences with the environments we encounter.  Humans are capable of and designed for much more than rote learning.  Dewey was a prolific social commentator and in his first major work on education, The School and Society (1899) he wrote, "In a complex society, ability to understand and sympathize with the operations and lot of others is a condition of common purpose which only education can procure."

Perhaps the greatest legacy that Jefferson, Mann and Dewey have left behind for those of us here today, is the luscious view of a learned life lived with great depth of thought and philosophical passion born of education.  An inspiring view to be sure.  And what these great men saw from those deep places where they dared to dwell can not help but move the soul to want to learn more.  The Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., is inscribed with his powerful words: "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man” (from a letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush in 1800).  Shortly before his death, Horace Mann told the graduating class at Antioch College, where he was President, "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity”.   If we can take the lives of these men as examples of courageous living, empowered by education itself, and enter more deeply into life’s experiences to learn and test our own knowledge as Dewey would want, we can each own our place in this world a little more fully.  Education should be tool of empowerment, not a weapon for subjugation and oppression.  These philosophers and educators lived the beauty of the high side of education and in doing so, left their mark in the most vivid of ways.