Education for Empire

[This is a draft proposal for the RAI's annual graduate conference, Building an American Empire, 1783-1861]

Education for Empire: visions of order and reason in the 1780s

The decade following the 1781 victory at Yorktown was characterised by instability - political, social, and cultural - in the void left by British imperial rule. Institutional reforms culminating in the constitution of 1787 were championed by leaders and thinkers who wished to restore order and hierarchy, to build in America an empire that would both reflect (or perfect) and rival that of Britain. The movement for constitutional reform was thus part of a wider intellectual and cultural persuasion, which gave an important place to ideas and proposals for the future education of Americans.

This paper will look at the works of Noah Webster and Benjamin Rush, two leading Federalist thinkers, who devoted much of their attention to the cause of education. Webster's Grammatical Institute (1783), his Sketches of American Policy (1785), and Rush's Plan for Establishment of Public Schools (1786) form key texts for the Federalist educational vision, which can be compared with Thomas Jefferson's contemporaneous proposals for a public school system.

These ideas should be situated both in their contemporary social and political context, and also in the broad tradition of philosophy of education. The ideas of John Locke, in his widely printed Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), are especially important. For the promoters of America's Enlightenment empire, reason and order were the foundations of glorious ambitions. But building an empire was as much about moulding a people as it was about conquering territory. Federalists' attitudes to education help us reimagine their conception of the new nation's future.