Professor Kerry Burch offers an exceptional analysis of Thomas Jefferson's objectives for civic education and his revolutionary thought. Burch makes several links between Jefferson's ideas on generational change and John Dewey and George Counts's reconstructionist thought during the neither early twentieth century. Burch juxtaposes this strain of civic education and identity development with today's neoliberal focus. While neither Jefferson's nor Dewey's nor Counts's educational proposals were ever firmly established in public schools, Burch argues this tradition should be considered given today's neoliberal entrenchment. As he declares, the Jeffersonian notions of “permanent revolution” and “political renewal” provide a moral foundation that supports today's critical civic education in keeping alive what he calls “the mythopoetic Spirit of 76” (pp. 3–4). Burch's narrative offers a three-part strategy thematically identified as “Promise,” “Declension,” and “Renewal” that focuses on Jefferson's revolutionary theory, a “future-oriented trajectory” of change (pp. 7–10).
Burch describes Jefferson's revolutionary theory as “multi-generational” (p. 13). Jefferson supported generational change as described in the Declaration of Independence, which “grants the ‘Right of the People to alter or abolish’ any government that betrays the consent of the people” (p. 14). He believed each generation ought to have the power to change its government, to free itself from the past based on changing circumstances, new knowledge, and generational needs and desires. Probably more than any other founder, Jefferson supported the people's right to change their government and their constitution to pursue their general happiness. Inherent in this Spirit of 76 is a right to dissent and to rebel, to express opposition to traditional standards and institutions that have become obstructive of a society's shared ends and to amend the Constitution through “acts of political creativity” by an informed citizenry (p. 15). Jefferson perceived informed change as necessary and organic if rooted in local democracies. The American Revolution didn't end revolutionary thought for Jefferson; it was just the beginning. Growth requires change and transformation, a theme supported a century later by John Dewey and other social reconstructionists. As Burch asserts, “Acting on our capacities to revise is what enables . . . democratic persons and cultures to actually be democratic [emphasis in original]” (p. 37). Burch correctly identifies a strong connection between Jefferson's plans for schooling and his democratic expectations for local (ward) government, since both were expected to mutually reinforce institutions fulfilling the existential needs of citizens.
Jefferson's “Promise” was resurrected by John Dewey and George Counts in the early twentieth century. In chapter 4, Burch relies on Dewey's distinction between the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian paradigms to highlight how the latter had eclipsed the former and to justify Jeffersonian change and transformation as a viable response to an industrial system that captured the purposes of public schooling and representative government. Burch cites George Counts's 1933 publication, A Call to the Teachers of the Nation, to identify a similar chasm between Jefferson's and Hamilton's respective views of human nature. Counts rejected Hamilton's “‘economic model of individualism,’” which, he believed was “a determinative . . . cause of the Great Depression” (p. 74). This “‘Hamiltonian effect’ distorted and suppress[ed] the nation's democratic potential” (p. 65). Counts, according to Burch, “historicizes the ideal of rugged individualism in order to explain why it was accompanied by a ‘practical denial of social purpose’” (p. 74). Counts links the zenith of Hamilton's corporate paradigm to the 1886 US Supreme Court decision Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, wherein the Court's majority recognized corporations as humans that enjoyed “the same rights as actual persons under the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause” (p. 79), which undermined Jefferson's democratic ideals and confirmed his fears about monopolies. Like Jefferson, Dewey and Counts looked to schools and teachers as institutional possibilities to counter corporate nihilism and to instill democratic-republican virtues.
In part II Burch reminds readers that Jefferson introduced, but failed to ratify, three “interrelated” amendments to the US Constitution intended to limit the power of aristocrats. These included “a prohibition of standing armies,” which Burch links to today's military-industrial complex (p. 94); “freedom from corporate monopolies”; and federal support “for a public establishment of education,” which represent Jefferson's “revolutionary theory” (p. 87).
Like all concentrated power, Jefferson believed that monopolies would undermine representative government. In chapter 7, Burch highlights corporate personhood with his discussion of the contemporary US Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which further erodes representative government (p. 116). Burch includes this contemporary example to make the point that Hamilton's antidemocratic paradigm has again emerged to circumvent a Jeffersonian vision of representative government by “magnify[ing] . . . inequality and corruption” and emphasizing personal interests above public interests (pp. 119–120).
In chapter 8, Burch focuses on Jefferson's failed education amendment, framing it “as a heuristic device” to explore related contemporary phenomena (p. 131). According to Burch, Jefferson not only supported protecting education constitutionally but also limiting federal spending for war. This zero-sum calculation, Burch says, was highlighted by President Dwight Eisenhower and Martin Luther King Jr., who both argued that every military expenditure reduced revenue that could otherwise be used for humanitarian purposes. “Discussions about the nature of this ‘cause and effect’ relationship (high military expenditures = low education expenditures), would likely stimulate students’ capacity for thinking more deeply about the underlying conflicts in value that inform the formation of American identity [emphasis in original]” (p. 131). This could “encourage students to form new questions about the conflicts in power and values pulsating within the national identity formation” (p. 131) and ignite discussions between a Hamiltonian (privatization) and a Jeffersonian (democratic) vision for public education.
Chapter 9 focuses on Jefferson's ideas on revision and moral progress, a right to dissent as part of active citizenship, and Jefferson's revolutionary theory as a “rhetorical device” intended to “channel the philosophical and moral principles of the Spirit of 76” (p. 143). Burch explains the “moral hierarchy” between the Declaration and the Constitution by referring to President Lincoln's “Fragment on the Constitution and Union.” What Lincoln describes, according to Burch, is an “inquiry into the fluid zone of tensions that emerge from this epic and ongoing clash between the nation's democratic moral aspirations [the Declaration], on the one hand, and its existing legal structures [the Constitution, a subordinate legal instrument] on the other,” which “reveal[s] a great deal about the frequently perplexing trajectories of American political and educational history” (p. 152). That is, Lincoln symbolically called the moral Declaration a “golden apple,” and the legal Constitution a “silver frame.” The frame was not intended “‘to conceal or destroy the apple,’ according to Lincoln, ‘but to adorn and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture’” (p. 153). As Burch argues, Jefferson supported an educated citizenry that could recognize unwelcome chasms between the Constitutional text and the Declaration's moral principles.
Chapter 10 discusses “three of Jefferson's most radical moral propositions—the earth belongs to the living, the pursuit of happiness, and the alter and abolish clauses [emphasis in original]” in the Declaration to provide a “conceptual foundation for Chapter 11,” (p. 155) which, taken together, support broad generational change and renovation of both political and cultural institutions.
In the final chapter, Burch proposes alternative curricular changes that include “the need to recover civic [democratic] selfhood” and “the adoption of a constitutional amendment protecting public education,” and support for “ecological literacy” to keep citizens vigilant against misinformation (p. 161). Burch calls on readers to “reclaim . . . the value of Jefferson's revolutionary moral spirit for purposes of democratic transition—in both our education and [our] politics” (p. 189).
