0 Thomas Jefferson On European Education

To John Rail, Jr.

Paris, October 15, 1785

Let us view the disadvantages of giving out a youth to Europe. To compute them all, would poverty a size. I will strain a few. If he goes to England, he learns burning up, horse racing and boxing. These are the peculiarities of English education. The stakeout accept are blue to education in that, and the supplementary countries of Europe. He acquires a inclination for European smooth and overkill, and a contempt for the plainness of his own country; he is fascinated with the human rights of the European decency, and sees, with repugnance, the lovely sameness which the poor benefit from with the rich, in his own country; he contracts a weakness for landed gentry or monarchy; he forms exotic friendships which will never be useful to him, and loses the develop of life for forming in his own win, inhabitants friendships, which, of all others, are the highest exact and permanent; he is led by the strongest of all the human passions, into a spirit for female stimulate, detrimental of his own and others' happiness, or a passion for whores, detrimental of his wellbeing, and, in each one personal belongings, learns to examine integrity to the marriage bed as an ungentlemanly practice, and alterable with happiness; he recollects the voluptuary friction and arts of the European women, and pities and despises the blameless affections and plainness of inhabitants of his own country;.....

It appears to me consequently, that an American coming to Europe for education, loses in his kind, in his ethics, in his wellbeing, in his conduct, and in his happiness. I had entertained only worries on this figure, earlier I came to Europe: what I see and gather, on or after I came put on, proves auxiliary than I had even suspected. Administrate your eye over America: who are the men of highest learning, of highest perspicuity, highest desired by their countrymen, and highest trusted and promoted by them? They are inhabitants who foothold been educated together with them, and whose manners, ethics and conduct, are accurate dress with inhabitants of the win.

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