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Revisionism has been the historical vogue for well over two decades concerning Jeffersonian scholarship. This movement has been an attempt to neutralize the avowed "hagiographical" scholarship on Jefferson by aiming to offer an all-too-human Thomas Jefferson. The regrettable result has been a depiction, iterated and reiterated uncritically by scholars, of a less-than-human Jefferson, presenting him as an inveterate hypocrite and racist. Thus, Jeffersonian scholarship, as argued here, has become an exercise in useless, fatuous repetition of the same claims that has impeded attempts by serious scholars to gain fresh insights into the mind of one of the greatest Americans.This book offers a stimulating, provocative challenge to the stale revisionist claims on Jefferson concerning his hypocrisy and racism. It will appeal to mavens of Jefferson, as well as scholars intent on moving forward with Jeffersonian scholarship. The book will also appeal to those persons who believe it is time to resituate Jefferson on his little mountain.

"Thomas Jefferson had a profoundly advanced educational vision that went hand in hand with his political philosophy - each of which served the goal of human flourishing. His republicanism marked a break with the conservatism of traditional non-representative governments, characterized by birth and wealth and in neglect of the wants and needs of the people. Instead, Jefferson proposed social reforms which would allow people to express themselves freely, dictate their own course in life, and oversee their elected representatives. His educational vision aimed to instantiate a progressive social climate only dreamed of by utopists such as Thomas More, James Harrington and Louis-Sébastian Mercier. This book offers a critical articulation of the philosophy behind Jefferson's thoughts on education. Divided into three parts, chapters include an analysis of his views on elementary and higher education, an investigation of education for both the moral-sense and rational faculty, and an examination of education as lifelong learning. Jefferson's educational rationale was economic, political and philosophical, and his systemic approach to education conveys a systemic, economic approach to living, with strong affinities to Stoicism. Thomas Jefferson's Philosophy of Education will be key reading for philosophers, historians and postgraduate students of education, the history of education and philosophy"--

That Jefferson execrated Plato in an 1814 letter to friend John Adams. In it, he expresses an unsympathetic, hostile view of Plato's Republic, and the reasons are several. Nonetheless, Plato's views on what makes government fundamentally sound are, at base, remarkably similar to Jefferson's both in substance and sentiment, so much so that it is inconceivable to think that Plato's Republic had little effect on Jefferson's political thinking. That makes his execration of Plato difficult to understand.
This paper is an attempt to show that Jefferson, despite the tenor of his letter to Adams, had much more than a dilettante's grasp of the political content of Plato's major work. Jefferson was very likely quite familiar with the work, since his own political philosophy assimilates key substratal Platonic political principles of good, stable governing. His disavowal of the work and execration of Plato, then, is due to a constellation of other factors: Adams's feelings toward Plato, Jefferson's views on the corruptions of Jesus's teachings, his deep-dyed detestation of metempiricism, his view that Plato was an unoriginal thinker, and strong disagreement with Plato's means to instantiate substratal political principles.

This essay is a reply to James Carpenter's "Thomas Jefferson and the Ideology of Democratic Schooling." In it, I argue that there is an apophatic strain in the essay that calls into question the motivation for the undertaking.

Jefferson's republicanism—a people-first, mostly bottom-up political vision with a moral underpinning—was critically dependent on general education for the citizenry and higher education for those who would govern. This paper contains an analysis of Jefferson's general philosophy of pedagogy by enumerating some of its most fundamental principles, applicable to both elementary and higher education.