A Jeffersonian Approach to Civic Engagement, Through Civic Education and the Flexibility of the Natural Law

Abstract

A Jeffersonian model of civic education supports robust civic engagement while differing in important respects from prevailing paradigms of community-embedded learning that prioritize activism. Rather than emphasizing participation alone, Jefferson’s approach to the development of civic awareness foregrounds reasoned speech, civil discourse, and the cultivation of practical judgment informed by theoretical understanding. Central to this model is Jefferson’s insistence that civic education is primarily a local and state responsibility, grounded in a broader commitment to self-government. Jefferson’s account reflects an appreciation for human reason as a universal capacity that makes consent and civic deliberation possible. Reason, so understood, provides the foundation for political equality and for an account of human flourishing articulated most clearly in the Declaration of Independence and consistent with core claims of the natural law tradition. This framework supports a conception grounded in metaphysical equality and civic friendship, best expressed within a federal political order, and capable of sustaining what classic sources and contemporary initiatives describe as a “pervasive commitment to diversity—as well as unity”. Further contributing to the novelty of our argument, we show that Jeffersonian natural-law-inflected civic engagement resonates well into the 20th century. Important judicial decisions, educational initiatives, and policy recommendations—including Cook v. McKee, Education for American Democracy (EAD), and the Truman Commission Report—draw upon related concepts of civic formation, consent, and reasoned participation. Jefferson’s emphasis on “reasons in speech,” understood as an essential element of self-government, thus remains a necessary and underappreciated contribution to contemporary debates over civic education and engagement.

1. Introduction

Any discussion of civic engagement begins with the difficulty of agreeing on what is meant by the term, since there are so many definitions in use. Thus, Ekman and Amnå (2012) rightly note that if the term comes to mean “completely different things,” it is a “useless concept” on which to base dialogue about participation, much less with respect to the effectiveness of said dialogue (p. 284). Kaskie et al. (2008), on the other hand, identify civic engagement “as a retirement role” (p. 368), whilst Rudolph and Horibe (2016) define it in terms of “use and production of scientific knowledge” (p. 805). Prentice (2007) further expands the definition beyond “political involvement” to active participation in the public life of a community… with a focus on a common good” (p. 136; quoting Gottlieb and Robinson 2002). This supports her argument for a model of “service learning” toward developing civic engagement (see also Ostrander 2004 and Stanton 2008 for connections to institutions of higher learning). Acknowledging and trying to make sense of the diversity of conceptualizations, Morrow et al. (2023) explore the vastness of the definitional spectrum, from activism to an emphasis on knowledge acquisition (p. 3, 21ff).

One limitation shared by many prevailing paradigms of civic engagement is their insufficient attention to the fact that free speech “potentially involves controversial speech,” as explored by Morrow et al. (2024, p. 11). The authors document the existence of extreme disagreements about civic engagement. Crucially, as they find, “None of the major ways of understanding this term (ibid.) really prioritize speech, often in tense situations and across differences, as a way to bring together fellow citizens” (p. 11). They also do not emphasize self-government in a community of fellow sovereigns as the political goal.

This is where Jeffersonian civic engagement appears as a potentially appealing alternative. While Natural Law, self-government, and education were largely agreed upon amongst most of the Founders, Jefferson’s place amongst them is unique and informative for this discussion. In addition to Jefferson’s position as architect of the Declaration, establishing in part his Natural Law bona fides, there is his singular focus on self-government as the goal of both education and government, along with his thorough plans for this form of education. No other Founder provides this nexus of Natural Law, focus of self-government as the end, and a plan to achieve it. As presented below, it is actually founded on the ability to self-govern in and through situations that require contestation in speech and as carried out in a community (Jefferson to Adams 22 Jan 1821). Such civic engagement requires verbalized ethical conduct among fellow citizens. By this we mean forms of civic conduct that require citizens to articulate the reasons for their positions and to respond to the claims of others as political equals. Doing so encourages a common language through which to negotiate differences. And it is an invitation to civic friendship.

Drawing on Jeffersonian insights, we argue that the active pursuit of justice depends upon citizens understanding their rights and responsibilities as a self-governing people and availing themselves of opportunities to vigorously speak, assemble, and protest based on that understanding. Sources of discussion and debate about civic engagement as varied as the Truman Commission and Jack Miller Center colloquia (Jack Miller Center 2024) agree that this is about more than access to the polls, and that civic education is crucial. As the Truman Commission emphasizes, “democratic citizenship” involves access to education, but as a starting point. Civic education understood in this way is both a practical and a theoretical endeavor, and it is a local and State responsibility. It facilitates knowledge and access to the levers of government at the local, State, and Federal levels—an engagement that is then continually secured by the people through ongoing dialogue, which presumes right and appropriate education. For Jefferson, such education necessitated local and State institutions that delivered civic knowledge to fully functioning, self-governing citizens who could also serve as leaders at the various levels in a federal system. Clay Jenkinson’s Repairing Jefferson’s America: A Guide to Civility and Enlightened Citizenship (Jenkinson 2020) supports our central argument that a Jeffersonian model emphasizes commitment to civility, reason, and the pursuit of common interests as foundational to democratic life. This emphasis distinguishes Jeffersonian civic engagement from accounts that prioritize participation without sustained attention to the educative conditions of self-government.

The educational content Jefferson believed would contribute to robust civil discourse, at the local level, is also not simply a matter of teaching critical thinking, history, languages, or logic. Jefferson saw the positive need for instruction in the Founding documents. And he prescribed this curriculum not as an exercise in civic veneration, but because Jefferson considered of utmost importance the principles animating those original texts. As a whole, they presented a natural law1 ethical framework that equips its citizens with the tools and temperament for civic engagement, and that itself emphasizes the importance of local political speech and involvement.2

Looking to the Declaration of Independence among other texts as a foundation for that system, Jefferson drew on self-evident truths of Natural Law to support democratic citizenship. Specifically, he did so through a notion of mutual equality traditionally expressed in terms of the Imago Dei. For Jefferson, this remained on a real level the “Image of God.” Jefferson, along with John Locke and much of the classical-Christian natural law tradition, understood it as a defining feature of human moral and political agency.

In our conclusions, we offer reflections on the implications of two court cases that are broadly consistent with a Jeffersonian natural law view of education. They highlight the continued power of reasoned speech in local communities to secure civic education bolstered by the Constitution, and as supported by natural law. They also reflect the real need of local communities for actual tools of self-government. Thus, the agreements between the plaintiffs and the State of Rhode Island in Cook v. McKee serve as an excellent example of how individuals, using the courts, can still exercise civic responsibility to shape State and local policy to implement civic learning and engagement. In this case, Rhode Island as a state was prompted to take responsibility for improving the civic education of its citizens. The District Court upheld the view that while vital to a democratic system, education is not a Constitutional right. But this meant that education remained a challenge, even in the early 21st century, for State and local governments to address (prompting the establishment of a taskforce to develop a plan for the implementation of civic education at the local level). Similarly, San Antonio v. Rodriguez saw plaintiffs argue that local funding was discriminatory. The Court held that there is no fundamental right to education in the Constitution, again placing the burden on the State to rectify the proposed inequity. Both Cook v. McKee and San Antonio v. Rodriguez, in this way, are consistent with a natural law Jeffersonian approach to securing civic education and engagement at the State and local levels.

Thomas Jefferson, in presenting his own Constitutional Amendment to secure public education (which never passed), still intended for the bulk of such education to remain in the hands of “private enterprise” (2 December 1806). More importantly, his ultimate plans for education placed the management of such matters in the hands of “wards,” thus creating “little republics” for this purpose not the federal government (24 October 1817). This is consistent with Jefferson’s distrust of a federal government to protect such educational opportunities, which he believed local and State entities were better positioned to defend. Ultimately, as we argue, Jefferson’s end was an active and civically engaged citizenry that was capable of self-government. This telos reinforces his conviction that the habits of self-government must be cultivated closest to the people themselves. Crucially, Jefferson believed that this purpose of the polity was supported by a prescribed natural law education, in its practical and theoretical dimensions, which has helpful implications for our conceptualizations of civic engagement in current debates.

2. Jefferson’s Local and State Education Plan

Let us start with Thomas Jefferson’s insistence on local and state spheres of authority as the proper space in which to carry out civic education, on our way to his natural law conceptualization of civic engagement. Admittedly, Jefferson’s view of the responsibility of education is complex given his pursuit of two policies for a public education system in Virginia, which appear on the surface to be at variance with his anti-Federalist beliefs.

From his plan “Bill for Establishing A System of Public Education,” 24 October 1817, we see him establish three levels of education—primary, college, and University. At the primary level, the emphasis would be on learning to read, write, do math and geography—all at the expense of the local Ward. At the college level, paid for by the Commonwealth or State, a more robust education to include languages, grammar, and higher levels of math and geography. Finally, the University, also paid for by the Commonwealth, students would expand into philosophy, history, literature, law, science, the Law of nature and nations, etc. Jefferson’s system was not just pragmatic, putting the communities that would most benefit from the education in charge of their own destinies, it reflected the civic view of Jefferson that each member of society should be capable of self-government in community with others.

Practically speaking, local education provides the best means of discovering “those talents” which have been “sown as liberally among the poor as rich, and which are lost to their country by the want of means for their cultivation” (Jefferson 24 October 1817). Local government is better than a far-off, centralized body that does not know the individuals. Conant notes that it is easy to “pounce” on some of Jefferson’s characterizations in his discussion of education as “aristocratic” and, at the same time, to argue for Jeffersonian universal education when in reality it was “only free elementary education he had advocated” (Conant 1962, pp. 7–8)3 Jefferson’s inconsistent “attitude toward the relation of the state to education,” no less because of his “and his follower’s” distrust of “centralized government,” (Ibid., pp. 10–11) is properly understood as assigning responsibility to local and State governments rather than to federal authority.

Yes, Jefferson was willing to use the machinery of government to remake universities or establish them. But this is only inconsistent if one views the States as one and the same as the Federal government. Jefferson also believed in scholarships provided for by the state for “his selected few in the residential grammar schools and the university” (Jefferson 18 June 1779).4 But this did not take away from his primary, and overriding, emphasis on the need for local support and control of schools. This distinction is crucial for understanding why Jefferson’s educational proposals do not contradict, but rather presuppose, his commitments to federalism and local self-rule.

Further reinforcing this Jeffersonian view, of a far-off and centralized governmental body not properly authorized to take the lead in civic education and engagement functions, is Jefferson’s take on the family and private enterprise as also contributing in significant ways. Thus, while he advocated for a robust local and at times state role in public education, it is clear from his Sixth Annual Message (2 December 1806) that Jefferson also did not wish to displace the role of private enterprise in this sphere. Indeed, Jefferson locates primary educational authority, or at least the primary right to have children educated, with the parents. This is evident in Jefferson’s preparations for the 1817 bill.

Jefferson sent a copy to Joseph C. Cabell with a letter in which he addressed, in a footnote, the possible concern over fathers’ denying the free education to their children that the bill would provide (Conant 1962, p. 11).5 Wrote Jefferson, “How far does this right and duty extend?—to guard the life of the infant, his property, his instruction, his morals? The Roman father was supreme in all these: we draw the line, but where?—public sentiment does not seem to have traced it precisely” (Ibid.). Despite the ambiguity, Jefferson deems it prudent not to force a father to avail himself of free state education, believing that societal pressures would motivate those more reluctant. Still, referring to the Constitution of Spain, Jefferson did specify that it was possible to increase the motivation towards such education by stripping of citizenship after the age of 15 those who had not received it. Jefferson’s comments suggest that he did not see an encroachment by the state on the family in cases of such incentivization. Thus, Jefferson appears to have been conflicted about the sovereignty of the family with regard to education, but he recognized its important role in addition to that of state and local governments. What is not in question is Jefferson’s supreme distrust of federal power in this area.

Now, Jefferson’s education plans, both the 1779 and the 1817 bills, focus on the commonwealth of Virginia. Jefferson’s vision was that Virginia would be an example for other states. His was not, in other words, a national plan. It is striking that during the time when Jefferson wielded the most political power as President that his plans nowhere surfaced on the national stage except for recommendations to the Congress and the States.6

Of further help in understanding this state (not national) mechanism for education is Jefferson’s desire for a system that allows the greatest capacity for self-government. In his letter to Samuel Kercheval, Jefferson emphasizes his preference for Wards where individuals can “act in person” and “by making every citizen an acting member of the government, & in the offices nearest & most interesting to him, will attach him by his strongest feelings to the independence of his country, and it’s republican constitution” (12 July 1816). Now, while this letter to Kercheval addresses an amendment to the Virginia Constitution, the formation of Wards which he recommends is consistent with the construction of Wards in his 1778 Education Bill, his Draft Bill to Create a Central College (18 November 1814), and subsequent letters to Cabell (2 February 1816) and Wilson Cary Nicholas (2 April 1816). In short, Jefferson’s emphasis on self-government was dependent upon a populace that was educated and governed in person. This is the essence of “Jeffersonian Republican Citizenship.” Education, in this sense, is not preparatory to citizenship; it is constitutive of it.

Yes, Jefferson distrusted consolidated or unchecked state power and even, as discussed above, suggested that the family and private enterprises enjoy preeminence over local government. But he was willing to temper those principles, in a pragmatic spirit, to secure what he believed was a threat to the republic. Jefferson believed that the education of the citizenry was the key to shoring up the defense against that threat. As the guardians of liberty, the people were required to stay informed, in order to serve as a proper safeguard against an arbitrary or overzealous centralized government. This combination of principle and pragmatic adjustment, in the end, allows us to understand Jefferson’s plan for local and state education.

None of this is to suggest that Jefferson’s principled plans were not challenged by the realities of a largely frontier population, as well as the notion of “educating one group of children at public expense for longer… than all the others.” His bills never passed the State legislature, but one can see the pragmatic adjustments to them, which Jefferson supported, in the facets of how they changed in the intervening years. For example, the appointment of visitors in the 1817 bill, called overseers in the earlier bill, are appointed by judges. In the 1779 bill, they are appointed by the Alderman. In his autobiography, Jefferson noted that the earlier bill went down to defeat in large part because of the requirement that the wealthy support the education of the poor. Even with the additional power over selection of visitors in the hands of judges, who were mostly wealthy (Jefferson 2011, p. 43), the bill did not pass.

Jefferson’s deference to the home reflects the natural law concept embodied in federalism. The home is the beginning element of the city, prior in moral significance to political authority, and oriented in harmony with “civic order” (Augustine of Hippo 1954, p. 226). That civic order and life is established locally.

3. Local and State Education: A Natural Law Prescription

How do these institutional and local dynamics of state and local education point to a Jeffersonian conception of natural law? Even more specifically, how do they direct us towards an understanding of natural law that privileges the Imago Dei? The answer, we suggest, lies in the following: local and state government allows for the use of a faculty considered uniquely human in the tradition, whose anthropological importance is underscored in Jefferson’s own writings and reflections on a Creator. This is reason. To actively think and deliberate together for the sake of human flourishing is the natural law account (in its various forms and permutations)—even if Jefferson is not typically associated with it. Importantly, for Jefferson, it is not just that local and state government allows for the application of this dialogic potential; that potential is inconceivable in any other sphere of sovereignty because we cannot, in actuality, meaningfully sustain the kind of reciprocal reasoning required for self-government with those who are thousands of miles away, the pretensions of our technocratic elites notwithstanding. The natural law realization of man, for Jefferson, positively requires a system of shared and overlapping sovereignties, wherein states and localities retain real power.

But why local and not a far-off centralized government? Two points about Jefferson’s ontology and anthropology are worth considering at this stage of the argument, in a manner that reinforces the specifics of his plans for state and local education towards civic participation, as discussed in the previous section. The first is Jefferson’s general consistency with a natural law framework. The second is his privileging of the concept of the Imago Dei, prevalent in several accounts of natural law, in a way that further supports the ongoing value of decentralized approaches to the teaching of civic engagement. Together, these considerations link Jefferson’s educational federalism to a broader natural law anthropology rather than to mere administrative convenience.

First, Jefferson is increasingly identifiable as a natural law thinker. Kody Cooper and Justin Dyer’s recent book is currently the best intervention into relevant debates, as it meticulously places the third President in conversation with the Stoics, Thomas Aquinas, and champions of liberty in colonial America who unmistakably relied on natural law categories to press their case. Pushing back on conventional views that it is not possible to read Jefferson as a natural law theorist because of his purported atheism, materialism, and life-long commitment to the greater project of Enlightenment, the authors show how a minimalist framework is still, in the end, recognizable as a form of natural law reasoning. Jefferson is aptly characterized in this way to the extent that he accepted the existence of a first cause, never doubted the reality of purposes embedded in human nature, and recognized the centrality of speech both to these purposes and to their articulation. A minimalist framework of natural law has also been advanced by Cook (2024), who links the Jeffersonian conceptualization of norms in nature to new as opposed to old natural law thinking, to the more pluralistic vision of Finnis, Grisez, and George rather than that of Rob Koons (O’Brien and Koons 2014, p. 55ff).

Second, going even beyond Cooper and Dyer, we show that Jefferson privileges to a greater extent than they allow a natural law notion of Imago Dei, understood in a specific way. What is the Imago Dei? While Jefferson’s understanding of the Imago Dei diverges from orthodox Christian theology, it nevertheless preserves a core anthropological claim central to many natural law traditions. Of course, in Christian theology the Imago Dei is captured fully in the divine person of Jesus Christ, who assumed human flesh in order to serve as the perfect mediator between God and man. For Jefferson, whose doubts about the transcendental divinity of Christ are well known and evident even after only a casual reading of his correspondence with John Adams (11 April 1823), reveal an understanding of the Imago Dei which corresponds more closely to the faculty of reason, participation in which allows human beings to reflect an attribute of God and to participate in creative activity that reflects his power. The “word of God” in John 1, for Jefferson, is not primarily the second person of the Trinity, but reason.

But where Jefferson retains a respect for the fleshly nature of the Imago Dei is in his insistence that reason alone is not enough. Despite his antitrinitarian beliefs, Jefferson’s heavily edited version of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures titled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, were the result of his belief that Jesus, “the most venerated reformer of human errors” (Letter to Adams 11 April 1823) provided a model for reason in community. Jesus gathered people “under the bonds of love, charity, peace, common wants and common aids” (Jefferson’s 1803 Syllabus). What must be communicated is reason, not via epistolary exchanges or messages delivered across half a Continent, but instead verbalized and vocalized, in the fleshly immediacy of citizens who can hear and speak with each other and exchange reasons in speech—with the aid of technological mediation, perhaps, but not wholly as a result of technological mediation that would take away the need for in-person dialogue and deliberation.

In this way, Jeffersonian sovereignty is refined and limited through delegation, through its connection to the Imago Dei, and through its interaction with fellow citizen-sovereigns. With human reason bearing the trace or impression of a higher rational order, a federal system is best—one in which there is maximization of opportunities for speech that matters, in its connection to actual policies resulting from the choices of citizens who have experienced persuasion. Thus, when we look at our natural movement toward community or society, natural law affirms that it is right to organize in order to govern and to do so through reasoned speech. This is civil discourse. It facilitates sustainable structures of authority, which are based not on power and oppression but on reason-giving. It points us in the direction of a sustainable model of sovereignty in our day, which is best exerted where mutual sovereigns must interact, in the flesh and face-to-face—and where those they have agreed to represent them must interact in the same manner. Thus, Jefferson’s model, based in natural law, demands an educated citizenry. It is an education whose curriculum contains both the development of critical thinking, reason, and how to actuate that reason using the levers of government. Federalism provides the levers of civic engagement, while Natural Law provides the common language upon which mutual sovereigns may discourse. This discourse produces civic friendship, even amongst those who disagree publicly. Federalism, on this account, is not merely a constitutional arrangement but a moral ecology within which natural law reasoning becomes politically effective.

Jefferson understood this, and his use of Natural Law in making recommendations for public policy as a result of in-person non-technologically mediated exchanges of reasons in speech, also supports civic friendship. Jefferson’s triumph in penning the Virginia Act for Religious Freedom depicts his openness to a deep civic friendship based on the ability of free minds to reasonably discourse and disagree. Jefferson wrote, “Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishment… are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion” (Code of Virginia, Preamble). Primary, for Jefferson, is the power of reasons in speech rather than state coercion. As Jefferson further argues “all men” are “free to profess, and by argument maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities” (Ibid., § 57–1). This view of freedom of religion, which prioritizes the power of reasons in speech as opposed to governmental force, is fully consistent with the voluntary basis of true civic friendship.

This civic friendship fosters the common good, because where there is no friendship individuals merely seek their own good at the expense of the common good (Aquinas 2015, I.11.77f). Friendship assumes a plurality of individual goods which “friends” moderate for the sake of unity—friendship. Divisions are not pluralism. In fact, the tyrant fears friendship and will seek to sow “discords” so as to prevent them (Ibid., I.4.27).7 Friendship, or civic friendship, is the foundation of ethical action for Jefferson for “Man was destined for society” (10 August 1787). Invoking Natural Law in his “Opinion on the Treaties with France,” Jefferson wrote “The Moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature, accompany them into a state of society” and this Jefferson argues obligates the same between societies of whom the individuals constitute (28 April 1793). Natural Law provides both language for civic discourse as well as principles upon which individuals can develop civic friendship. Rather than limit discourse, and Jefferson would approve, Natural Law opens access to civic discourse and thus to greater civic engagement. But for this to take place, civic education must be provided for as an ethical priority of self-governing equals primarily at the local level, in little republics. This was Jefferson’s plan–an enlightened citizenry who understood both the ethical responsibility of self-government as citizens, and the need for civic engagement in community with other citizens for the common good.

Recall Jefferson’s characterization: local republics, where individuals can speak into the levers of government “in person”, are better equipped to secure the “happiness” of the people than a national government removed from the people in a distant location. Referencing once again the importance of governance in serving the “common good,” Finnis (2011) notes that this is “the primary value of that notion of constitutional government” (272). Jefferson understood this in his use of natural law in making public policy recommendations, but more importantly, he voiced the natural law concept of “the people” as a local phenomenon. Civic friendship characterizes the relationship between households who interact locally for mutual good. This civic affection and mutual esteem is necessarily local, in keeping with both classical/Christian natural law and the American political system as the Founders broadly would have understood it. These civic bonds assume a plurality of individual goods, which “friends” moderate for the sake of unity—friendship. Civic friendship, so understood, is neither sentiment nor consensus but the sustained practice of reasoned disagreement among equals.

4. Natural Law Citizenship and a Civically Engaged People

Of course, this natural law justification of local and state government, local and state education, also supports a robust notion of citizenship. To repeat, those inhabiting a shared political project exchange reasons about ways to secure justice or advance the common good. The experience of doing so binds them together, regardless of whether full consensus is achieved. Deliberating together in the flesh and locally about matters that directly affect shared interests results in both citizenship and, as Jefferson recognized, possibilities of civic friendship. Where the previous section emphasized the anthropological foundations of natural law, this section turns to its civic and political implications for citizenship and peoplehood.

These citizens, as formed and shaped by state and local government and the ward system, will not always display the most dazzling virtues, but they may—and one cannot dismiss Jefferson’s premise for such a “scheme,” which was also to develop individuals of “genius and virtue” without the means to educate themselves “at the common expense of all” (Jefferson Education Plans 1779 and 1817). Dewey (1940) may have seen Jefferson as “our first great democrat;” (pp. 2–3) others have found in him a republican champion of anti-federalism.8 On our account, Jefferson is a civic educator and early proponent of civic engagement, willing to leave the bulk of civic pedagogy to states, wards, and localities, even as he is content not to ask too insistently about the source of more Machiavellian virtues, which may be needed in doubling the size of the early Nation through Westward expansion, to take just one example.

Yet another way to approach this dynamic is through the Jeffersonian understanding of “the people.” As it turns out, what made the American conception of citizenship unique from other revolutionary movements was the establishment of “the people,” not the “traditional constituted bodies,” as the locus of power (Butts 1988). The foundation for the establishment of a sovereign people in the American experiment, as penned by Jefferson, is as follows: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”9 This foundation of equality, as it turns out, is the people understood in its mutual sovereignty. Only mutual “sovereigns”10 can consent to be governed.11 And discussion of this specific authority of the people founded on equality is what would precipitate the eventual eclipse of the Articles of Confederation, which had rested authority in the States, in favor of the Constitution, which located authority in a significantly expanded national, popular power.12

To the question, what kind of “people,” then, Jefferson could answer: in education, it was “the people,” citizens organized into wards and counties; in politics, the body of citizens constituted through local, State and Federal elections. Because Jefferson was suspicious of a strong centralized government and held that the best government was that which governed least, he believed the locus of power for citizens should be at a maximum the State. There is equality of moral standing across local, state, and federal spheres of government; these different spheres of political authority also recognize a diversity of human talents and giftings, differently suited to the challenges of maintaining an empire of liberty that makes room for local reasoned interactions between citizens. To these ends, Jeffersonian Federalism emphasizes local and State level government involvement, direct representation in the House, and voting at all levels (Jefferson 13 June 1776). Herein lies the foundation for Jeffersonian citizenship, which is dependent upon local involvement up and across the federal system.13

What is more, Jefferson’s natural law account naturally leads to federalism, because it recognizes the primacy of local citizenship, which exercises this equality in the form of civic friendship amongst fellow sovereigns. Within that framework, it makes citizenship possible, because each person is not only responsible for their own actions but also accountable to their community for those actions as well. The development of the individual citizen’s reasoning faculties combined with a healthy “moral sense” directed at community and civic interactions are critical to achieving this political model which is best characterized by self-government.14 And, civic education was and is an essential element to helping to shape reason and “moral sense,” by which Jefferson understood the cultivated capacity to recognize obligations to others in shared civic life.

Jefferson said as much in his letter to Madison, where he communicated his pleasure regarding the plans for the Constitution (20 December 1787). Education of the common people Jefferson believed, “we may rely… for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.” This is the primary goal of his overall educational plan for developing the self-governing individual, that in addition to improving his “morals and faculties” he would “observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed. To instruct the mass of our citizens in these, their rights, interests and duties, as men and citizens,” (Jefferson 2011, p. 459). Caldwell (1943) confirms that Jefferson’s natural law foundation undergirded his overall legal philosophy. Principal among those he lists, is the right and responsibility of every man to self-government (p. 197).15 Education was critical to that endeavor, in which Jefferson himself emphasized the importance of reading in Natural Law.16 The Truman administration seemed to agree as it relied on Jefferson’s work in the report of the Commission. The Commission parts with Jefferson, however, when it suggests that the concept of community be expanded to the United States where local communities lack the financial capacity (Committee on Civil Rights 1947, II.2.16). While Jefferson was an advocate for a national university (Jefferson 21 December 1806), his plans for education placed the burden on local wards, counties, and the commonwealth—not the nation.

This people, potentially educated in different ways across the diverse spheres of governance in a federal system, is not a Schmittian sovereign. For Carl Schmitt, if the sovereign is he who declares the exception, a people can certainly play the part. Volcanic eruptions of collective will, popular assertions of the friend-enemy distinction, and the nationalist determinations of a spirited populace are all of interest in the current populist era. But they do not represent the engaged citizenry of Jeffersonian natural law.

Neither is Jefferson’s a Rawlsian popular sovereign. Discussion and reasoned dialogue, as outlined in the previous section, are certainly important. But the principles of fairness, reciprocity, and sociability are not simply internal for Jefferson. They are not just features of language, attempting to contradict which involves one in inconsistency.

Instead, Jeffersonian natural law and the kind of reason displayed by the engaged popular sovereign points to objective standards, which structure and improve civic conversation even as they remain external to it. These standards, for Jefferson, find their origin in the Creator invoked in the Declaration. They ground human equality in the Imago Dei, and they locate that image of God in the use of reason with respect to purposes and human flourishing that is a foundation of the cosmos.

Revisiting Cook v. McKee, students alleged “that the State had deprived them of their rights under the U.S. Constitution” in that it failed to prepare them to be “capable citizens.” In particular, cited was a lack of requirements for said education, testing on civics, and a “lack of opportunities for extracurricular experiences” in civics. The Rhode Island District Court dismissed the case on the grounds that the Constitution does not guarantee that as a right, a decision which the plaintiffs appealed to the First Circuit Court of Appeal. The decision of the District Court was subsequently upheld, and both courts were complimentary of the students’ desire for said education. However, the plaintiffs decided not to pursue Supreme Court review in light of Rhode Island’s decision to establish a Commission on educational requirements to establish civic education for the state. Amongst the topics that the established commission would teach going forward were the sources of Natural Rights which influenced the development of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution—specifically natural law influences. Additionally, students in Rhode Island would learn how those sources influenced the development of the rule of law. Now, not all movements for a change in the system are local.17 In this respect, the case illustrates not merely a demand for education, but a claim about what citizenship itself requires in a constitutional republic that the courts ultimately, and arguably on Jeffersonian grounds, rejected.

Overall, given both his anthropology and understanding of the people in a natural law framework, it is not surprising that Jefferson would “connect freedom and responsibility with republican citizenship” (Carpenter 2013, p. 3).18 Turning to the EAD, we are reminded that even though the Constitution guarantees a Republic to every State, the definition of what a republican form of government is, was not even agreed upon by the Founders—though all agreed on some kind of federalism (Cooper and Dyer 2022, pp. 28–29; Beer 1993, pp. 30–33).19 Rather than undermine principles of republicanism, this historical diversity of opinion on such a crucial definition—that of “the people”—itself confirms the need for civic education, civic discourse, and civic friendship. Unifying principles, with plenty of space for flexible application, is exactly what Jefferson’s natural law provides. Thus, Jefferson’s vision of self-government as the end-goal of an ethical political structure overlaps with contemporary models of “civic engagement,” but it offers significant improvement by inspiring more discourse and engagement through reasoned speech. For Jefferson, education is the key to maintaining a civically engaged citizenry that is capable of self-government, which is best actualized at the local level.

As it turns out, the differences among anti-Federalists, Federalists, and Democratic-Republicans in colonial America and the early Republic were not based on the absence of natural law thinking per se. There was a broad commitment on nearly everyone’s part to the reality and political significance of a classical-Christian natural law framework. It is only at the turn of the 20th century that we see the discarding of natural law thinking in favor of non-teleological accounts of nature. This is part and parcel of a “pivot” in the United States, acknowledged as a rejection of the Founding-era Constitution (Marini 2017, p. 115; Watson 2020, p. 158; Pestritto 2005, p. 5) in favor of a Wilsonian Darwinism (Wilson 1913). This pivot away from natural law contributed to the erosion of commitments to local and state authority (Watson 2020, p. 21) as well as a commitment to civic education that included a focus on the founding documents. A pivot to the end-goal of Jeffersonian citizenship characterized by self-government can be achieved through civic education.

5. Human Reason Activated by Post-Secondary Civic Education

Under the Truman administration, two formally distinct but thematically convergent reports were compiled which spoke to the deficit of and need for “democratic citizenship,” implicitly tying the remedy back to practical education that recapitulates specific natural law verities. Thus, The President’s Commission on Higher Education (13 July 1946) and To Secure These Rights (Committee on Civil Rights 1947) sought to “examine higher education” and make recommendations for legislation “for the protection of the civil rights of the people of the United States” respectively. While the latter spoke of “every mature person” having “an equal voice in government (Committee on Civil Rights 1947, p. 7), the former connected that right to the instrument of education, which “is necessary to give effect to the equality prescribed by law” (Department of State 1946, p. 5).

The Commission addressed how education was necessary to strengthen civic knowledge and participation, even without a national mandate to provide such access. Indeed, protection of access to the instruments of government for all “mature and responsible” people, according to the Commission, required not just “technical or professional training in one field of work or another” but the nurturing of “that human wholeness and civic conscience which the cooperative activities of citizenship require” (Ibid., p. 48). This, we show, constitutes an implicit opening to natural law reasoning. It recognizes the whole person. It does not insist on a nationalization of civic education (K-12 would remain, and to this day remains, primarily a state and local responsibility more than 60 years after the publication of the report). Implicitly, this can be seen as pointing to natural law for the reasons sketched out above, which support a localized Jeffersonian natural law approach to civic education. This produces “mature and responsible” citizens, even as the report does not explicitly recognize either an Imago Dei or an exchange-of-reasons-in-community-natural-law rationale.

Long before the current moment in post-secondary civic education, R. Freeman Butts also called attention to the importance of civics in public schools, though, as we presently show, with the same omission or missed opportunity as the Truman Report. Further, Butts saw Jefferson’s unique “republican education”, also advocated by the Founders, as critical to self-government (Butts 1950, p. 407ff). In his understanding of this necessity, Butts first defined and outlined the history of citizenship. Citizenship, and for our purposes the unique American version of republican citizenship, he traced to the Greek city-states and the Roman Republic of the fifth and first centuries as well as to Europe and America (Ibid.), which found fruit through the Enlightenment revolutionary movements in the 18th Century which emphasized local politics and the power of the people.20 Then, Butts (1988) noted, “Citizenship education has a better chance of succeeding in public schools if they emphasize the civic values that bind us together and that we share in common no matter what religious, ethnic, or cultural ties may legitimately divide us” (Chapter Three, para. Four). These are statements with which Thomas Jefferson would agree, even though Butts does not refer explicitly to Jefferson in the discussion of different views of civic education.

Now, whatever curriculum is agreed upon to develop civic knowledge, it must also be general enough to succeed in uniting a populace while not losing the fundamentals of republican democracy and balancing the rigorous discourse of civic engagement. This is embodied in the EAD’s commitment to “Civic goals” which foster “a pervasive commitment to diversity—as well as unity…” (Aquinas n.d., I–II, q94; EAD 2024, p. 28). But how can one combine diversity and unity in a public education setting? To that end, Butts (1988) further wrote that, “what is still missing is a broad scale effort to develop a coherent, persuasive and scholarly-based conception of citizenship upon which further long-range programs of civic education can rest” (Chapter Three, par. Three).21 Butts, as a historian, educator, philosopher, and “citizen diplomat,” provides cross-discipline expertise on the subject of civic education, whose research continues to have relevance to educational philosophy and diplomacy efforts (Allison 2014, p. 2).

Strikingly, neither Butts nor EAD, despite implicitly adopting Jeffersonian prescriptions, recognize the potential of a natural law framework to articulate diversity within an overarching framework of unity, or to develop that coherent, persuasive and scholarly-based conception of citizenship. What remains absent is not a concern for unity, but a metaphysical account capable of explaining why unity amid diversity is morally binding. But if Butts wrote in one moment, another is upon us. Focusing on both secondary and post-secondary civic education, as Butts did, may make it harder to set forth general natural law recommendations. To the extent that the current movement of civic renewal is more exclusively focused on higher education, incorporating a Jeffersonian natural law framework, towards which Butts seemed to be moving, is more achievable.

An understanding of this basis for equality, too, has been altogether lacking across the vast majority of contemporary civic engagement programs. Consistent with Anderson (2015) and Cooper and Dyer (2022), and Petrusek (2023) the Declaration articulates a creational providential metaphysic which we argue Jefferson held in his construction of the document. More directly, this is consistent with a “complimentary” link between Thomist and Jeffersonian “self-evident universals” in Sandoz (1999, p. 37ff). This metaphysical reality is no more clear than in Jefferson’s letter to John Manners (12 June 1817) that these “self-evident universals,” to invoke Sandoz, are not at the whim of human reason which Jefferson argues in speaking of the right of expatriation, “the evidence of this natural right, like that of our right to life, liberty, the use of our faculties, the pursuit of happiness, is not left to the feeble and sophistical investigations of reason but is impressed on the sense of every man. we do not claim these under the Charter of kings or legislators; but under the king of kings.” Here we see a Thomist natural law pedigree operative within Jefferson’s theological and political thinking, which begins with an understanding of a metaphysical foundation for rights, laws, and human equality.

But in his correspondence with Thomas Law, Jefferson agrees with Law’s conclusions on the link between education and natural law ethics, “man is actuated very much by education which exercises the brain—Thus as printing disseminates moral sensations arising from novel circumstances, the human race is more & more spiritualized or operated upon by divine moral laws as violations of right are more execrated” (Jefferson to Law 1814).

This is what makes the current moment in post-secondary civic education so striking. Starting with the first and bi-partisan founding of the School for Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University in 2017, eight additional states from Florida, to North Carolina, to Texas and others have legislatively mandated the setting up of centers or schools of civic education at which, from an interdisciplinary perspective, it is possible for students to think through the prerequisites of citizenship, immerse themselves in the heritage of American constitutional democracy through meditation on its seminal texts, and ask about needed virtues of leadership by reflecting on exemplars of statesmanship. With the Department of Education now also funding these kinds of institutes, it is a fertile moment when the new field of civic thought is coming into its own with financial and intellectual support at the highest levels. It may hearken back to another fertile moment at the end of the 19th century when Progressives supported the founding of new disciplines (economics, administration, and sociology) to support the new civil servants needed for envisioned projects of reform (Leonard 2017). And, unlike the end of the 19th century, the post-World-War II period of the Truman Report, or the late 20th century—when “civic engagement” prioritized activism over traditional learning (Kabala and Morrow) or when Freeman Butts called repeatedly for increased attention to the importance of civics—it is quite conceivable to imagine Jeffersonian-natural-law civic instruction at all of these recent centers.

What follows is a brief description of a few of the institutes in question. To emphasize, the kind of civic education they make possible, for the first time in almost a century, is consistent with Jeffersonian natural law. This is not to suggest, as we show in the next section, that further refinements to the model are not possible, reflecting natural law as discussed in this article even more deeply. The different centers across the states as exemplifying civic possibilities do not yet constitute a Jeffersonian natural law model, but they reopen institutional space in which it can be pursued. The existence of these centers is itself worth noting and acknowledging as a milestone in America’s civic self-understanding and imagination. We also include a few examples of private institutes, not because they illustrate the Jeffersonian ideal of state and local, public education strictly speaking—but because they have clearly enough been incubators of several ideas that have led to, and they have assisted with the conceptualization of, legislative mandates and state action to establish public alternatives.

The following examples are not exhaustive. They are also not uniform in orientation. In some cases, their future is not yet 100% certain. But they illustrate the breadth of institutional openness to renewed civic education grounded in constitutional reflection.

Thus, at Arizona State University, the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL) was founded in 2017 as the original state-mandated institute at a public university (Arizona State n.d.). Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership offers undergraduates a major (the BA in “Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership”) and graduate students a degree option (the MA in “Classical Liberal Education and Civic Leadership”).

At the University of Texas at Austin, the School of Civic Leadership was established in 2023 through a legislative mandate (University of Texas at Austin n.d.). This dynamic school of leadership offers undergraduates both a major (“Civics Honors”) and a minor (both in “Civics” and “Philosophy, Politics, and Economics”). The founding Dean, Justin Dyer, remains committed to natural law teaching and scholarship.

At the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, the Institute of American Civics was launched in 2023 in the Baker School for Public Policy and Policy Affairs as a result of action by the Tennessee state legislature. The Institute of American Civics, under the leadership of Josh Dunn, is pioneering new and experiential ways to understand the importance of civic knowledge (University of Tennessee n.d.).

At the Ohio State University, the Chase Center was instituted in 2023 with the support of the Ohio State legislature (Ohio State University n.d.). The Chase Center prioritizes research that addresses low civic literacy. Led by Lee Strang, the high-level theoretical inquiries associated with the Center welcome natural law approaches, stressing the value of understanding the habits and dispositions that can lead to greater civic knowledge. Ohio, as an example of 10th Amendment power activated in the direction of civic education, also and especially seems to stand out for its proliferation of mandated centers and initiatives: Toledo, Cleveland State, Miami (OH), and Wright State are all poised to play an outsized role in civic education and engagement discussions.

At the University of Florida-Gainesville Hamilton School, the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education was established in 2022 (University of Florida n.d.). It was supported by a transfer of $3 million from the Florida State legislature (Florida Department of Education n.d.). Of the schools and institutes identified in our list, the Hamilton School offers the most distinctively pro-Western-civilization focus in its encouragement of free inquiry in a framework of civic and classical pedagogy. Florida also features the Florida State University Institute for Governance and Civics (Florida n.d.). While its culture is subtly but significantly different from that of the Hamilton School, the two are certainly reimagining interdisciplinary conversations that draw on political science, history, and the law along similar lines.

The center at Utah Valley University, established by state law in 2021 (HB 327), also deserves a special mention (Utah n.d.). In addition to the shared and expected emphasis with other institutes on teaching the American founding, constitutionalism, and political philosophy at the Civic Thought and Leadership Initiative, housed in the Center for Constitutional Studies, Utah Valley University has also recently added a graduate degree: the MA in Constitutional Government, Civics, and Law. Of further interest, Utah Valley University has played a leading role in expanding civic education initiatives beyond its campus, through the training of hundreds of K-12 teachers who bring these insights to high schools across the state. Led by Matthew Brogdon (Center for Constitutional Studies) and Robert Burton (Civic Thought and Leadership Initiative), the associated programs stand in coming years to make an even greater civic impact.

And centers are forming at the University of South Carolina and West Virginia University, among others. At USC, the Center for American Civic Leadership and Public Discourse will reside in the McCausland College of Arts and Sciences (USC n.d.). With Christopher Tollefsen as interim executive director, it intends explicitly to promote civil discourse not just as an ideal, but as an effective mode of overcoming ongoing polarization. In West Virginia, the Washington Center for Civics, Culture, and Statesmanship is drawing attention as even more singularly focused, in important ways, on civic aims and purposes (West Virginia n.d.). Whereas the USC initiative originated in action taken by the USC board, the Washington Center derives from a state law (HB 3297), with the Governor of West Virginia unambiguously responsible for putting in place the director. Guardrails with respect to indoctrination and an insistence on fact-based pedagogy leave little gray area, further speaking to the diversity of approaches across the states when it comes to the direct application of governmental power to reshape the civic academic landscape in public university education.

In addition to these examples, it is essential to mention several initiatives at private universities, at various levels of formalization and institutional history. While centers at private universities do not speak in the same way to the dynamic of Jeffersonian recommendations and natural law prescriptions, in at least one—perhaps founding—case they have played vital roles in the incubation, dissemination, and conceptualization of different strategies across academia. Thus, while they are themselves not extensions of public legal authority, the changes including the civic centers that are springing up across public universities would likely have been inconceivable without the intellectual work carried out by individuals in the private spaces. Together, partnerships of scholars at private and public universities have driven many of the ongoing civic reforms at public universities and will likely continue to do so.

Thus, at Yale University the Center for Civic Thought was organized on campus in 2025 (Yale University n.d.). The Yale Center for Civic Thought supports student fellowship opportunities like “coffeehouse” meetings every Monday on challenging topics that extend the conversation from the Yale community to civic participants.

At the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual was established in 2000 (University of Colorado n.d.). The center enables undergraduates pursuing paths in political science, criminal justice, and sociology to attain a richer and more meaningful intellectual experience, reflecting on the right ordering of the individual, government, and communities in the context of America’s constitutional tradition.

Finally, for the purposes of this discussion, we note that at Princeton University, the James Madison Program (JMP) in American Ideals and Institutions was founded in 2000 (Princeton University n.d.). It has served as a beacon for principles of free speech, scholarly integrity, and thoughtful reflection on American public and constitutional law in academia. It has very much played the foundational and incubating role mentioned above. Indeed, the new USC center—as is also true of a number of others—is modeled explicitly on the James Madison Program at Princeton. To emphasize, all of these centers are spaces in which the teaching of Jeffersonian natural law civics is welcome and acceptable.

A Jeffersonian approach to education, whose purpose was in part to produce and protect democracy, must include greater understanding on the part of American citizens about the nature of American Federalism and its overlapping jurisdictions between local, State, and Federal entities. Despite efforts to suggest otherwise, civic engagement, consistent with a Jeffersonian understanding of natural law and important Supreme Court precedents, is best delivered and managed at the state and local levels. Whatever one’s normative preferences, state and local government remains the sphere of political activity in which most citizens can pick up the practical knowledge that is essential to civic engagement, however defined; this is also consistent with natural law. This is why the current movement of civic and educational renewal, spearheaded by several of the institutes above with the support of state (not national) government and state legislative mandates, carries such significance. To reiterate: civic education and engagement at the state level is a reflection of self-government; and it is constitutive of both an individual and a people’s capacity for self-government. Many of the civic-education initiatives above find support in a specific Jeffersonian and natural law model of education. Additionally, they speak to necessary elements of citizenship in a federal context. This section does not argue that the above civic-education initiatives all fully instantiate Jeffersonian natural law. Rather, the point is that they make such an approach institutionally thinkable again.

6. Further Alignment of the Civic Institutes with Jeffersonian Natural Law

To better align contemporary civic education with a Jeffersonian approach, we are advocating for a bottom-up understanding of republicanism, or an understanding of what Jefferson described as a “gradation of authorities” in his letter to Joseph C. Cabell (2 February 1816). To quote Jefferson,

And I do believe that if the Almighty has not decreed that man shall never be free, (and it is a blasphemy to believe it), that the secret will be found to be in the making himself the depository of the powers respecting himself, so far as he is competent to them, and delegating only what is beyond his competence by a synthetical process to higher and higher orders of functionaries, so as to trust fewer and fewer powers in proportion as the trustees become more and more oligarchical.

Daniel J. Elazar affirms Jefferson’s “gradation of authorities” in describing the Federalism of the U.S. system of government and its necessity for developing democratic self-government (Elazar 1994, p. 290). The U.S. “System of systems” is not only necessary for developing self-government; an understanding of the unique local authorities within States also needs to be a part of civic education. Civic education that omits this layered structure risks abstracting self-government from the institutional contexts in which it is actually practiced.

In our list of good civic institutes mentioned previously, there is not yet a single one that clearly prioritizes state level history of political thought. While a number of them discuss concepts of state and federal systems generally, there is a distinct lack of specificity in local political history, which they could easily remedy. We look at two possible institutes for how they might incorporate some kind of education in local politics.

At Clemson University’s Snow institute (Clemson n.d.), for instance, students could study the—appropriately contextualized, interpreted, and debated—thought of John Calhoun.22 While he was an advocate for slavery as a “positive good” (Calhoun 1837, February 6), his role in shaping South Carolina politics and his involvement in all levels of government would provide an excellent foundation for local civics education. Calhoun can still be partly appreciated and selectively appropriated for his defense of the US Senate as protecting unpopular positions and numerical minorities, and his support for South Carolina’s state government—where the state legislature balanced low-country planter interests with upcountry small farmers—can be read along analogous lines. Especially if Calhoun were studied alongside opponents in South Carolina of secession such as James Petigru or William Henry Trescot, the principle of cultivating a healthy civic respect for one’s state and the history of its institutions—one consistent with a thoughtful and at times even critical spirit that nevertheless does not become rejectionist—could be upheld. Engaging such figures critically, rather than uncritically, is itself a core civic skill consistent with Jeffersonian commitments to reasoned judgment. In Colorado, William Gilpin’s influence in “taming” the territory through development of local and state systems makes him an excellent focus of study. Other options might include the personal histories of leading ranchers, business leaders, and union activists (see The Ludlow Massacre of 1915). It would not require a whole curriculum to achieve some movement in this direction, and the benefits to civics education would not only align with Jeffersonian ideals–but provide a more educated citizen, which will sustain a better government for the people. Of the centers we have mentioned, Utah Valley University already trains high school teachers in principles of federalism, including at times with special attention to the history and institutions of Utah itself. This is not necessarily a heavy curricular lift, and it could be taken up by multiple civic institutes growing or emerging across the states to bring civic education more in line with the Jeffersonian natural law vision. The point of these suggestions is not to prescribe uniform curricula, but to illustrate how Jeffersonian natural law provides criteria for evaluating and improving civic education.

7. Conclusions

We have argued that the problem of ensuring justice for a citizenry and equitable power sharing between competing interests in a democratic republic is fundamentally one of civic education and engagement. While civic education should be a local and State responsibility, it should facilitate knowledge and access to the levers of government at the local, State, and Federal levels as well—an engagement that is secured by the people through such education. Civic engagement requires civic knowledge in order to keep secure civil discourse through which the levers of government are engaged for the sake of collective action and mutual happiness.

Citizens of a democratic republic must be informed, and they must be engaged at the local level—because local republics are better equipped to secure the “happiness” of the people. This knowledge extends beyond an awareness of how the levers of Federalism work to developing a language capable of engaging those levers and one’s fellow citizens—reasons in speech. Institutions of higher learning are uniquely positioned to provide both civic knowledge and civic engagement, which is why Jefferson was so concerned about having an educated populace and training for future leaders. Kabala and Cook (2022) argue for both a general education for the populace and the development of Jefferson’s “natural aristoi” as an organic result of this kind of education (pp. 20–21).

What is also organic to this discussion, though left untouched, is the great need for teachers trained by the University to bring this education to elementary and on to High School institutions. But this education must be more than merely letters and science, which the Founders and, up until recently, the representatives of the people understood. The Declaration of Independence establishes that ethical system in its Natural Law framework. As a system, the Natural Law establishes boundaries for interhuman exchange, centered around civic friendship flowing from human equality based on the Imago Dei. Reasons in speech, rather than activism alone, are a defining characteristic of such relations. The natural law provides a language from which to advocate and educate for those boundaries, and yet it is flexible enough to provide for what Morrow et al. (2023) refer to as an “in between” (p. 2) or what Rawls might describe as an “overlapping consensus” (Rawls 1999, Loc 6969), and what Seiple referred to as covenantal pluralism (Seiple 2018). Reasons in speech is the natural outcome of the development of such language, through which civic friends can agree, disagree, and reason face-to-face.

We have further argued that the education required to develop a robust civil discourse is not simply a matter of teaching critical thinking, history, languages, or logic. From Jefferson’s attempts at universal education to John Locke’s writings on education, to the Commission under Truman there is a consensus that in addition to what many call classical training, there is a need for the teaching of the Founding documents, teaching of natural law, and training in ethics. We have argued for an ethical system based upon Natural Law, utilizing the Declaration of Independence as a foundation for that system with its self-evident truths about human equality as a reflection of Natural Law concepts. Natural law provides an ethical system around which competing interests may find some consensus, because we are mutually equal, which is the basis for civic friendship. That friendship occurs most effectively locally, not across vast distances or from a centralized government.

The debate over Natural Law provides a clear example of how important “maximum generosity” is to the discussion, as hyperbole and ad hominem arguments undermine any possible discourse. Truman’s Commission sought to provide this generosity by vesting peace in the “intellectual and moral union of mankind” (p. 15). This union is based upon “faith in each other” (p. 50); but that faith need not come from the same source “or be authoritarian in origin… Some persons will find satisfactory basis… in the democratic creed itself, some in philosophy, some in religion” (p. 50). We must examine both how we are organizing our educational system for civic knowledge and how we are engaged civically if this American experiment is to endure. The Declaration of Independence vests both the authority and trust of those endeavors to “the people,” citizens who have been delegated that responsibility by their Creator.

Finally, we have argued that for a system of education to properly secure a people’s liberty, the people must be educated and entrusted with that education’s organization and management at the State and local levels. The Jeffersonian educational model is built upon these principles. Jefferson’s intent was that the bulk of such education would remain in the hands of “private enterprise” at the local level (2 December 1806). More importantly, his ultimate plans for education placed the management of such matters in the hands of “wards,” not the federal government (24 October 1817), all situated within the authority of the family, governed by the moors of a civic-minded and educated citizenry.

This education, if it is to produce and protect democracy, must include greater understanding on the part of American citizens about the nature of American Federalism and its overlapping jurisdictions between local, State, and Federal entities. Despite efforts to suggest otherwise, civic engagement, consistent with a Jeffersonian understanding of natural law and important Supreme Court precedents, is best delivered and managed at the state and local levels. Whatever one’s normative preferences, state and local government remain the sphere of political activity in which most citizens can pick up the practical knowledge that is essential to civic engagement, however defined; this is also consistent with natural law.

In governance, the common good is best realized and protected by federalism, which is Jeffersonian in its local focus on the people as the source of power, rather than a government and policies imposed on the people from afar. “Little republics” constitute the Jeffersonian model of federalism, where the people “would better manage than the larger republics of the county or state” (28 October 1813). And this management is accomplished through civic discourse, what Jefferson described as “free argument and debate” (18 June 1779) or reason in speech. Whether wards, cities, or counties are to maintain the power of the people, and secure justice for those people, government must become more local, a state wherein that kind of speech and civic friendship are best learned, protected, and practiced.