In a lecture at Hillsdale College on John Adams, David McCullough pointed out that when Adams and the other Founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men possess the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” what was meant by “happiness” was not “longer vacations or more material goods,” but, rather, “the enlargement of the human experience through the life of the mind and the life of the spirit.”

Further, McCullough explains, “they knew that the system of government they were setting up wouldn’t work if the people weren’t educated.” As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”