Taylor [is] a terrific writer ... thought-provoking ... One of the strongest impressions to come out of Taylor’s book is the sheer vicious loutishness of the planters’ sons who were the university’s earliest students ... Taylor tells this university story with cool skill and a very discerning eye for personal detail. The standard national hagiography surrounding Jefferson won’t be much troubled by the inept fantasist who comes across in these pages, but readers will be fascinated to make the acquaintance of men like Rice and Cocke in Taylor’s gripping and judicious portraits.
Jefferson’s 'noble aspirations' for the university he cherished as his most significant legacy became, as Taylor forcefully demonstrates, 'entangled' in the inequalities and injustices of his society ... Taylor would have us recognize that we, not our children or grandchildren, bear responsibility for our world. And Taylor has an important message as well for a university community still haunted by Jefferson’s shadow: 'There is more to celebrate,' he insists, 'in what the University has become than in how it began.' Those beginnings, as Thomas Jefferson’s Education makes clear, were in every aspect inseparable from the distorting and poisonous influence of the slave society Jefferson hoped his university would transform. Taylor’s book might well have been titled 'Thomas Jefferson’s Delusions.'
Improving Virginia’s system of education, Jefferson believed, was the foundation upon which progress would be built, and the foundation had to be laid properly ... his main mission was planning for a university that would rival the great universities in the North ... In Thomas Jefferson’s Education, Alan Taylor...probes that ambitious mission in clear prose and with great insight and erudition. He explains why Jefferson found those educational choices so intolerable, what he planned to do about the situation, and how his concerns and plans mapped onto a growing sectional conflict that would eventually lead to the breakup of the Union that Jefferson had helped create.
... unsparing ... Mr. Taylor seems to hold Jefferson somehow responsible for all this. His sour portrait of the 'philosopher,' as he sometimes refers to Jefferson, reflects the current disdain among the intelligentsia for a man who, until the past couple of decades, was widely admired. Mr. Taylor’s Jefferson is a vain and preening poseur ... Mr. Taylor does a splendid job of documenting the sordid goings-on at William & Mary and the University of Virginia, establishing how saturated in slavery they both were. The irony is that the enslaved men, women and children whose mistreatment he appropriately finds appalling seem to have so little independent identity in his book. They have no agency, as academics might say. They exist almost exclusively as victims whose presence in any story—and he has rich ones to tell—is to reveal the venal and sadistic nature of their oppressors.
Taylor exhibits his comprehensive knowledge of Virginia in this period, and, along the way, he wittily skewers what had formerly been Virginia’s leading institution of higher education, the College of William & Mary ... A complex but fascinating story.
... engrossing and disturbing ... How [Jefferson] dealt with his vision for a preeminent institution of higher learning exclusively for young white men, with structures from his complex architectural designs built by enslaved people, makes for compelling reading ... This absorbing narrative offers crucial insights into Jefferson’s thinking as he pursued his vision for what he hoped would be a better future for his state.
Unfortunately, this sprawling work veers off course into tangents about Jefferson’s life that have little to do with education and would have benefited from analysis about the effects of this legacy on the present condition of education in the state ... Recommended only for readers of Jeffersonian history and those curious about the history of the University of Virginia and College of William & Mary.
The narrative bogs down a bit at the end with the history of the university, but Taylor is a master historian, and he delivers a highly illuminating account in which 'Jefferson’s social context in Virginia looms even larger than his unique personality and career achievements.' Furthermore, the author plumbs the depths of his subject’s objectives, faults, and ideals ... A book that refreshingly adds real substance to the abundant literature on Jefferson.
