Five Men,
Five Educations

There was no single founding-era education. There were several, running side by side in the same generation, shaped entirely by family wealth, geography, the death of a father, or simple luck. Five accounts survive in the founders' own words or their own handwriting. This episode lays them side by side.

Adams's own autobiography, written decades later and fully preserved at the Massachusetts Historical Society, describes a childhood education that very nearly went nowhere. His first schoolmaster, Joseph Cleverly, he later called "the most indolent Man I ever knew," and Adams responded by losing interest in books entirely, spending his time flying kites and sailing toy boats instead. His father's response is recorded almost word for word: rather than argue, he took young John to cut thatch on the family farm for a full day of hard, muddy labor, then asked at night whether he still wanted to be a farmer. Adams said yes. His father sent him back to school anyway.

When his schoolmaster refused to advance him in arithmetic, Adams taught himself from a copy of Cocker's at home, alone, and passed every other student in the class without a teacher. He eventually moved to a private tutor, Mr. Marsh, under whom he finally "began to study in Earnest." The entrance examination at Harvard was conducted live and in person, by the college president and four tutors, one of whom handed Adams an English passage and required him to translate it into Latin on the spot, with no dictionary and no preparation.

Franklin's father intended him for the clergy and sent him to grammar school at eight. The plan collapsed on cost. After roughly two years of formal education, ten-year-old Franklin was brought home to work in his father's candle and soap shop. At twelve he was indentured to his older brother James, a printer, for a term running until he turned twenty-one.

The apprenticeship, not the schoolroom, became Franklin's real education. It gave him access to books, and he read them obsessively, often staying up most of the night. By his own account in his autobiography, this self-directed reading, not any classroom, was where his actual education happened. He left his brother's shop at seventeen and arrived in Philadelphia essentially self-made, with no further formal instruction of any kind for the rest of his life.

Washington's father died when George was eleven. His two older half-brothers had attended grammar school in England; George did not, because the money that had funded their education was gone. He may have studied under private tutors, or at a small local school, or both, the record is genuinely uncertain. What is certain, because it survives, is what he was actually taught: his own school exercise books, two volumes covering roughly 1745 to 1747, are held at the Library of Congress and fully digitized page by page.

There is no Latin or Greek in them. There is geometry, trigonometry, land measurement, calculation of interest, and geography. One page is a survey of his brother's field, captioned and signed by the teenage Washington himself. His formal education ended around age fifteen. He never attended college, unlike Adams at Harvard or Jefferson at William and Mary, a fact some of his fellow founders were not shy about noting, and one Washington himself appears to have remained quietly self-conscious about for the rest of his life.

The actual page. Washington's own compass rose and property survey, drawn and signed by his fifteen-year-old hand on February 27, 1747/8. No Latin. No Greek. Geometry, measurement, and a signature.
View the full manuscript at the Library of Congress →

Jefferson's formal education ran on a more conventional gentry track than Washington's: English school at five, Latin at nine under a teacher he later called "but a superficial Latinist," then two years under Reverend James Maury, whom Jefferson considered "a correct classical scholar." At sixteen he entered the College of William and Mary, where the decisive figure was not a clergyman but a Scottish mathematics professor, William Small.

Small's method was not built on recitation and memorization, the dominant technique of the era. By Jefferson's own account, Small made him his daily companion outside the classroom and taught him through ongoing conversation, what Jefferson elsewhere called his introduction to the broader system of science and Enlightenment thought. Jefferson's own words about Small, written decades later in his autobiography, are unambiguous about how much it mattered.

Jefferson's own account of Small was written decades later, in 1821. What survives from the years themselves is his Literary Commonplace Book, kept from around age fifteen through his twenties, copied extracts of poetry and philosophy in his own youthful hand, among the earliest surviving records of his thought.

The actual page. A spread from Jefferson's Literary Commonplace Book, his own hand, copying out the philosophy and poetry he judged worth remembering.
View the full manuscript at the Library of Congress →

Madison began at eleven under Donald Robertson, a Scottish-trained schoolmaster running a boarding school in King and Queen County, Virginia, studying Latin, ancient history, arithmetic, algebra, and geometry for five years. Writing decades later, in his eighties, Madison credited Robertson directly for nearly everything he became.

After further tutoring at home, Madison chose the College of New Jersey, now Princeton, over William and Mary, partly because his family worried the Virginia climate would harm his fragile health. The irony is documented: at Princeton, Madison drove himself so hard, completing what was normally a four-year course of study in roughly two years, sleeping as little as possible to maximize study time, that he genuinely broke his health and was too ill to attend his own commencement.

What survives from those actual years is a copybook, "A Brief System of Logick," 122 pages in Madison's own youthful hand, written either at Robertson's school or in his early years at Princeton. The notebook itself is damaged, torn along one edge, the paper worn thin in places, but his handwriting is still sharp and legible across the page.

The actual page. The opening of Madison's "A Brief System of Logick": "Logick or Dialectick [is] the art of reasoning that is of discovering truth or Error & demonstrating them to yourself or to others by discourse." Worn and torn, 260 years on, still in his hand.
View the full manuscript at the Library of Congress →

This episode does not cover the system itself, the recitation bench, the schoolmaster's legal authority, the regional differences in discipline between Puritan and Quaker schools. That story is told elsewhere in this season. This episode covers what that system actually produced, in five specific, documented lives, in their own words and in their own hands.