The Geopolitics of Education in the Early Republic

During a meeting of a Harvard debating society in 1786, John Quincy Adams argued “that the progress of every virtue, and of every amiable Quality in a Nation … is always in Proportion to the progress of civilization.” For that reason “Education,” which taught civility, “is one of the most important subjects that can engage the attention of mankind; a subject on which the welfare of States and Empires … depend.” Recent scholarship has shown that the American founders sought to create a powerful nation that could measure up to standards of European empires, uphold the law of nations, and project sovereignty in a hostile world.  What has gone underexplored is how similar logic was applied to local institutions run by the same Federalist-leaning elites who built the American fiscal-military state. 

 This paper takes Adams’s argument as a point of departure in order to understand how the United States’ quest to become a respectable, treaty-worthy, and civilized nation, shaped local education and, in turn, local conceptions of political authority. Vattel, Pufendorf, and most of the authorities to whom American political elites deferred in their understandings of nationhood, cast education as central to creating a polity that could follow the law of nations.  As such, American education continued to privilege older and more traditional forms of education—what Noah Webster criticized as “monarchical education”—instead of creating new more democratic forms schooling.  By tethering a reactionary educational culture to the success of the nation-state, nationalist elites leveraged the perceived fragility of American independence in order to entrench and legitimize their vision for social order.