We must not chip away at society

Lindsay Paterson visits the spiritual home of US democracy - and believes it could teach Scotland some very valuable lessons A couple of weeks ago I visited the University of Virginia. More than any other academic institution in America, it embodies the democratic aspirations of the revolution against British rule.

It was founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, and the most eloquent of the revolutionary leaders on the educational underpinnings of democracy. He designed campus buildings that are unrivalled in their Grecian elegance. So much care did he take over the planning of these and the surrounding spaces that he even specified how the gardens were to be laid out, for his was a thoroughly rural vision. He believed he was creating a model for society of a scholarly utopia in which students and teachers would live beside each other in a community of learning.

The university is now one of the most distinguished public colleges in the USA, but it has always been more than an academic island. Jefferson intended it to lie at the apex of a system of public education for the state of Virginia that would closely follow the patterns established in Scotland in the century and a half following the Protestant Reformation in 1560. There was to be a school in every parish and a high school in every town, and rigorous academic selection would send the brightest boys up through this system to his new university. All this, Jefferson believed, was needed by a democracy dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. "Education", he wrote, "renders the people the safe guardians of their own liberty".

Although Jefferson did not live to see his educational scheme fully implemented, the subsequent evolution of his dream is the key to what is good and what is bad about American democracy today. And, by contrast, it reveals also what remains good in the European tradition from which the revolutionaries were breaking away.

Despite enormous changes in the interim, US democracy at its best is based essentially on Jefferson's aspirations. It remains an attempt to found governance on civil society from the bottom up - and civil society itself is meant to acquire its strength from education.

Of course, Jefferson was of his time: his educational scheme had no more place for women and blacks than his democracy. But he wished it could, even while owning slaves - reluctantly - and having children with one of them.

Martin Luther King harked back to Jefferson in his own famous dream of 1963. And King's statue stands beside Jefferson's in the Capitol in Washington. The persisting ideal of a system of government founded on the virtue of the people rather than in the wisdom of rulers is embodied in the inscription over the doors of the US Department of Justice: "Justice in the life and conduct of the state is possible only as it first resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens".

As we construct a new democracy in Scotland, we have a lot to learn from this tradition. The Scottish parliament committees which scrutinise the Executive were in part inspired by the workings of the US Senate and House of Representatives - the forums where the real work of US federal democracy happens.

The Scottish parliament itself is the outcome of decades of campaigning by civil society. The Scottish civic institutions kept alive an ethic of social responsibility during the years when Scottish voting preferences were frustrated by the Westminster parliamentary majority.

As in the USA, Scottish democracy has depended on its civil society. Right back through the period of the Union with England, Scots would have agreed with a sentiment expressed in 1835 by another US educational reformer, Frances Wayland: "A government derives its authority from society, of which it is the agent".

And yet something was lost in Jefferson's arcadian anarchy: the central state. The tradition he articulated gave rise to such a suspicion of federal action that successive US governments have baulked at the necessary reforms to deal with social divisions. President Clinton famously failed to introduce even a bare minimum of public health care.

The comically ill-informed Republican candidate for president this year, George W Bush, is currently running a series of advertisements which denigrate the Canadian public health service as inefficient - even though US private health care is about the most wasteful in the world - and is proposing yet more tax cuts even while promising extra spending on defence and education.

To European eyes, American cities need drastic public intervention to rescue their infrastructure; the American poor (who are overwhelmingly black or Hispanic) need public resources to enable them to follow the educational route which Jefferson mapped out; and corporate America needs to be reined in by tight public regulation so citizens can be protected without having to file massively expensive lawsuits. The optimism of the film Erin Brockovich - where one enterprising lone parent defeats a multi-million-dollar utility company - is, sadly, not typical.

SO as I came back to our fledging new democracy in Scotland (and to the tedious denigration of our politicians in parts of the press), the one thing that struck me above all was the need to hang on to our belief in state action. The contrast with America has often been expressed as having to do with attitudes to society: individual- istic hedonism versus European solidarity. But that is inaccurate. The Jeffersonian tradition is real and alive: in the USA, society is believed to reside in the bonds individuals form with each other, and that belief does have a lot to its credit and a lot to teach us.

The real difference is in the agencies which Europeans trust to safeguard and develop their solidarity. On the whole, Europe does not have the social divisions and gross inequalities of power that are all too evident in the USA, and nor does it have such manipulation of government by large corporations. That is largely because we have believed for a century that the state can empower citizens. We must keep this faith in the state, big government and - yes - politicians. Without these, Jeffersonian democracy, like the very civility on which it is based, is in deep danger.

Lindsay Paterson is professor of educational policy at Edinburgh University

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