A reader sent me this quote from John Adams. I can’t verify it.
Does anyone have the original source?
“The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.”— John Adams 1785 |
http://www.annenberginstitute.org/VUE/vue32_deleon claims that it is a quote from a letter to John Jebb in 1785. Here’s the letter, dated Sept 10 1785. http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/FOEA-03-01-02-0254
Thank you! Question answered!
I try to be careful and always seek verification for quotes and assertions.
In the age of the Internet, all sorts of frauds and hoaxes get spread around, and the repetition begins to take on the aura of truth.
We must all be wary and seek verification before passing along “facts.”
Diane
There is a wonderful web resource for searchable founding documents http://www.consource.org
I should point out that John Adams while getting further his own education with local lawyers was a schoolteacher here in Worcester, Massachusetts. (And thus we take credit for his being wise enough to include public education when he wrote the state constitution!)
(“while GETTING further…”)
Here a better source for that quote:
“The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, Volume 9, by John Adams, (Little, Brown 1854), pg 540
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Letter from John Adams to John Jebb, September 10, 1785. See Millard Filmore’s Bathtub timpanogos.wordpress.com May 30 post. What he says after that would be called “socialist propaganda” by a large part of the US’s miseducated and highly confused electorate today. But they don’t get that Romney and corporate fascism are King George’s revenge.
Another good quote from Adams can be found in a letter to Mathew Robinson, Jr. dated March 23, 1786. “But before any great things are accomplished, a memorable change must be made in the system of Education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of Society nearer to the higher. The Education of a nation, instead of being confined to a few schools & Universities, for the instruction of the few, must become the National Care and expence, for the information of the Many – it is odd that the Knowledge of Society which interests every man, should be the last to receive improvements.”
The University of Massachusetts, The Washington Post, and five other sources claim that he did.
Although I have doubts about the context and true meaning of the quote, it supposedly comes from The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States (ed. 1854).