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14 J.C. & U.L. 417 (1987-1988)
Education and the Constitution: The Case of Citizen James Madison

handle is hein.journals/jcolunly14 and id is 455 raw text is: EDUCATION AND THE CONSTITUTION: THE CASE OF CITIZEN JAMES MADISON WILLIAM J. BENNETr UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF EDUCATION To put it bluntly, the constitutional scholar Forrest McDonald has observed, it would be impossible in America today to assemble a group of people with anything near the combined experience, learning, and wisdom that the fifty-five authors of the Constitution took with them to Philadelphia in the summer of 1789.' In the second half of the eighteenth century, American education produced some of the most brilliant and accomplished people that the world has ever seen. And with their schooling, these men were able to craft what William Glad- stone-and a million others-have proclaimed the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.'2 Perhaps we cannot ever hope to match the grandest political achieve- ments of our nation's founders. Still, from their lives and their exam- ples, we can learn much about the value of higher education to the public world of politics and law. A full thirty-five of the Philadelphia delegates had attended college, but none of them suits our study better than James Madison, the principal intelligence behind our Constitution. Even by the standards of his illustrious colleagues, Madison was a deeply learned man. In fact, his schooling so affected his politics that Patrick Henry was once heard to label him a theoretic statesman.3 Henry meant this remark contemptuously. In retrospect, however, it seems a badge of honor-a fitting tribute to an intellectual with a passion for politics, and to a statesman whose passion was ideas. Madison's career is an historical testament to the great things that a college can and should do. Madison left his father's Virginia plantation and arrived at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) in July of 1769. He was eighteen years old and already quite well-educated. He had to be. Just to gain admission to the school, students were expected to be able to render Virgil and Tully's orations into English and to turn English into true and grammatical Latin, and to be so well acquainted with the Greek, as to render any part of the Four Evangelists in that language into Latin or English. Mastery of arithmetic was assumed, as were reading F. McDonald, The Sixteenth Annual Jefferson Lecture (May 6, 1987) (sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities). Gladstone, Kin Beyond the Sea, 127 N. AM. REV. 179, 185 (1878). A. KOCH, MADISON'S ADVICE TO MY COUNTRY 4 (1966).

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