Introduction: This morning I had the good fortune and pleasure of reading one of the most inspiring stories a former educator could read and I had to share it with you. It concerns the attempts of John and Abigail Adams to educate their young son John Quincy Adams. David McCullough one of America’s premier historians, as you will see below, thought John Quincy one of the best educated men to inhabit the White House, so his parents did pretty well. Below is the story of sending him off with his father, from the east coast of the United States, during the middle of the winter and the middle of the Revolutionary War, to France for an important part of his education. John Quincy Adams was a child at the time–equivalent to our elementary school children!
Consider Abigail’s courage, her faith, her vision, and her commitment to not only allow, but to encourage this voyage. McCullough includes two truly amazing and inspiring quotations from letters she wrote to her son; one when he had to return to France a second time, and a second letter when she later learned the boy was a little uppity when he came home about his education and opinions. I think you will agree the wisdom of this woman is a wonder to behold. This episode should stand as a model for parents and children alike. I for one am grateful for her incomparable example and this story which is a significant part of our legacy as Americans. God has blessed America! PS: I didn't know they used the word "blockhead" in the Revolutionary period. I nearly fell out of bed laughing when I read it.
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I want to read to you, in conclusion, a letter that John Quincy Adams received from his mother. Little John Adams was taken to Europe by his father when his father sailed out of Massachusetts in the midst of winter, in the midst of war, to serve our country in France. Nobody went to sea in the wintertime, on the North Atlantic, if it could possibly be avoided. And nobody did it trying to cut through the British barricade outside of Boston Harbor because the British ships were sitting out there waiting to capture somebody like John Adams and take him to London and to the Tower, where he would have been hanged as a traitor. But they sent this little ten-year-old boy with his father, risking his life, his mother knowing that she wouldn’t see him for months, maybe years at best. Why? Because she and his father wanted John Quincy to be in association with Franklin and the great political philosophers of France, to learn to speak French, to travel in Europe, to be able to soak it all up. And they risked his life for that—for his education. We have no idea what people were willing to do for education in times past. It’s the one sustaining theme through our whole country—that the next generation will be better educated than we are. John Adams himself is a living example of the transforming miracle of education. His father was able to write his name, we know. His mother was almost certainly illiterate. And because he had a scholarship to Harvard, everything changed for him. He said, ”I discovered books and read forever,“ and he did. And they wanted this for their son.
Well, it was a horrendous voyage. Everything that could have happened to go wrong, went wrong. And when the little boy came back, he said he didn’t ever want to go across the Atlantic again as long as he lived. And then his father was called back, and his mother said you’re going back. And here is what she wrote to him. Now, keep in mind that this is being written to a little kid and listen to how different it is from how we talk to our children in our time. She’s talking as if to a grownup. She’s talking to someone whom they want to bring along quickly because there’s work to do and survival is essential:
These are the times in which genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life or the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.
Now, there are several interesting things going on in that letter. For all the times that she mentions the mind, in the last sentence she says, ”When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.“ In other words, the mind itself isn’t enough. You have to have the heart. Well, of course he went and the history of our country is different because of it. John Quincy Adams, in my view, was the most superbly educated and maybe the most brilliant human being who ever occupied the executive office. He was, in my view, the greatest Secretary of State we’ve ever had. He wrote the Monroe Doctrine, among other things. And he was a wonderful human being and a great writer. Told to keep a diary by his father when he was in Europe, he kept the diary for 65 years. And those diaries are unbelievable. They are essays on all kinds of important, heavy subjects. He never tells you who he had lunch with or what the weather’s like. But if you want to know that, there’s another sort of little Cliff diary that he kept about such things.
Well after the war was over, Abigail went to Europe to be with her husband, particularly when he became our first minister to the court of Saint James. And John Quincy came home from Europe to prepare for Harvard. And he had not been home in Massachusetts very long when Abigail received a letter from her sister saying that John Quincy was a very impressive young man —and of course everybody was quite astonished that he could speak French—but that, alas, he seemed a little overly enamored with himself and with his own opinions and that this was not going over very well in town. So Abigail sat down in a house that still stands on Grosvenor Square in London—it was our first embassy if you will, a little 18th century house—and wrote a letter to John Quincy. And here’s what she said:
If you are conscious to yourself that you possess more knowledge upon some subjects than others of your standing, reflect that you have had greater opportunities of seeing the world and obtaining knowledge of mankind than any of your contemporaries. That you have never wanted a book, but it has been supplied to you. That your whole time has been spent in the company of men of literature and science. How unpardonable would it have been in you to have turned out a blockhead.
How unpardonable it would be for us–with all that we have been given, all the advantages we have, all the continuing opportunities we have to enhance and increase our love of learning–to turn out blockheads or to raise blockheads. What we do in education, what these wonderful teachers and administrators and college presidents and college and university trustees do is the best, most important work there is.(1)
Let’s think together again, soon.
Notes:
1. David McCullough, “Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are,” address to the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar, 15 February 2005, in Imprimis, 34, no. 4 (April 2005), available online at: https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/knowing-history-and-knowing-who-we-are/ See also, David McCullough, The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017, 115-19.
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