Rush, Benjamin (1745–1813)

Benjamin Rush was a Founding Father and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Rush contributed widely to the development of the United States as a republic. The scope of his impact and interests included education, medicine, psychiatry, mental illness interventions, the American penal system, and slavery abolition. Whereas Rush is known as a physician in the early republic, he is less familiar as an advocate for public education yet was instrumental in developing a plan for a unified school system in Pennsylvania. The plan called for one university and four colleges throughout the state, an academy in each county, and a free school in each town consisting of at least 100 families. His thoughts on public education were reflected in his plans for a unified educational system.

Raised in Philadelphia, Rush attended the West Nottingham Academy in Maryland and the College of New Jersey, which would later become Princeton University. Having earned a medical degree from the University of Edinburgh, Rush taught chemistry at the College of Philadelphia after having returned to the United States. He eventually founded Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1783, having begun a primary school there 10 years earlier.

Like many of his contemporaries, Rush saw education as a means of preparing Americans for civic life. In Punishment, Prisons, and Patriarchy: Liberty and Power in the Early American Republic, Mark Kann explores the tension Rush felt between his commitment to liberty and his fear that citizens could use liberty as a justification for rebellion. Rush, according to Kann, viewed liberty as the freedom to yield completely to a well-run government. Education was the primary means of indoctrinating a free but submissive populace. This perspective is consistent with Rush Welter's depiction of Benjamin Rush's philosophy of education. In Popular Education and Democratic Thought in America, Welter notes that republican education in the 19th century was meant to inform the citizenry of their rights and freedom, but the Founders did not expect the people to define those liberties beyond their original scope. John Holder offers a more generous view of Rush's intentions for public education. Holder notes that according to Rush, an educated population was more productive, happier, and therefore more likely to be sustained.

Rush saw his plan for public education as a way of connecting the state of Pennsylvania by one system, including a university, which would provide teachers for the colleges, from which teachers for the academies and free schools would come. The academies and free schools would reciprocate with students for the colleges and university. Yet [Page 778]education, particularly higher education, was available primarily to males. Education beyond the early primary grades provided in the free schools was often limited to boys from families who could afford to pay. Furthermore, it was Rush's opinion that anyone serving in government had to have been university trained. The implication of this reality is that those who were financially limited to the free schools would not be qualified to engage in the process of actually governing but would instead always be governed.

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