Very few people say that. Overwhelmingly the rhetoric one hears is that the purpose of higher education is to get a better job.
Personally, I think it would be great if we educated people to cultivate an engaged citizenry. But if we're going to do that we have to be up-front about it an work on an economic model that supports it. So, for example, you can't have student loans that are predicated on being able to obtain a certain level of income on graduation, and you certainly can't make those loans impossible to discharge even in bankruptcy. If you lie about it, as we have been for decades now, it all unravels sooner or later.
It’s not very fashionable on HN because of the faux-tough utilitarian outlook, sure. I’m the real life, there might be such a thing as over-education, but the US are certainly not there.
You need to keep in mind context. He lived in a time when the overwhelming majority of society was self employed and there was no formalized, let alone compulsory, educational system whatsoever. Looking up the exact history there, the first compulsory education began in 1852 (Jefferson died in 1826 at the age of 83), where children 8 to 14 were required to spend at least 3 months a year in 'schooling', with at least 6 weeks of it being consecutive. [1]
And in the early 19th century near to 100% of Americans lived in rural areas where access to centralized information was minimal. There was no internet, radio, or other means of centralized communication. For that matter, there wasn't even electricity. The closest they'd have had would have been local newspapers. So people without any education would have had very little idea about the world around them.
And obviously I don't mean what's happening half-way around the world, but in their own country, their own rights, and so on. Among the political elite there was a raging battle over federalism vs confederalism, but that would have had very little meaning to the overwhelming majority of Americans. Jefferson won the presidency in 1800 with 45k votes against John Adams' 30k votes, when the country's population was 5,300,000!
Even into the 1950's and early 60's, my dad went to a one-room school, probably until he was around 14 years old. No running water or air conditioning, the job of the first student to arrive in colder months was to start a fire in the stove to heat up the room.
Had he been born a few years earlier, it would have been unlikely for him to even graduate. 1940 was the first year that the graduation rate hit 50%.
Absolutely, although by then electricity, radio, urbanization, and other such things had already radically reshaped the overall character of society to be something much closer to today than of Jefferson's time.
Jefferson, in modern parlance, would probably be a 'pragmatic libertarian.' He envisioned independent self-reliant people, and in fact (like many of the Founding Fathers) was somewhat opposed to 'economically dependent' people, including wage laborers, voting - for fear that their vote could be coerced too easily, and that they might otherwise be irresponsible. That's where things like property ownership came from as a voting requirement.
And a major part of self reliance is an education that is both broad and fundamental which is where the 'pragmatic' part comes in, as I think fundamental libertarianism would view education as exclusively a thing of the private market, whereas Jefferson supported broad and public education precisely as part of this formula to independence.
Personally, I think it would be great if we educated people to cultivate an engaged citizenry. But if we're going to do that we have to be up-front about it an work on an economic model that supports it. So, for example, you can't have student loans that are predicated on being able to obtain a certain level of income on graduation, and you certainly can't make those loans impossible to discharge even in bankruptcy. If you lie about it, as we have been for decades now, it all unravels sooner or later.