What did George Washington say about education?

Education was, I confess, among the subjects nearest to my heart throughout my public life — and I made no secret of it. My deepest concern was this: that young Americans were being sent abroad for their schooling, returning with habits and political sympathies ill-suited to a republic. As I wrote to the Commissioners of the Federal City, “It has always been a source of serious reflection and sincere regret with me, that the youth of the United States should be sent to foreign countries for the purpose of education”. Such young men, their minds not yet settled, risked imbibing principles unfriendly to republican government before they were capable of judging their own. But beyond that danger, I saw a positive opportunity. A national university, situated in the federal city, could draw youth from every part of the union together. The effect, in my estimation, would be nothing less than the softening of sectional prejudice. I observed what the war had accomplished in this respect — seven years of shared arms did more to dissolve local jealousies than a century of ordinary commerce might have done. A university could repeat that work in peacetime, as I noted in a letter later incorporated into my Farewell Address preparations: “the Youth, or young men from different parts of the United States would be assembled together, & would by degrees discover that there was not that cause for those jealousies & prejudices which one part of the union had imbibed against another part”. So seriously did I hold this view that in my Last Will and Testament I bequeathed fifty shares in the Potomac Company expressly toward the endowment of such an institution, expressing my ardent wish to see it “do away local attachments and State prejudices, as far as the nature of things would, or indeed ought to admit, from our National Councils”. Education, in short, was not merely a private benefit — it was a foundation of national unity.