You need to keep in mind context. He lived in a time when the overwhelming majority of society was self employed and there was no formalized, let alone compulsory, educational system whatsoever. Looking up the exact history there, the first compulsory education began in 1852 (Jefferson died in 1826 at the age of 83), where children 8 to 14 were required to spend at least 3 months a year in 'schooling', with at least 6 weeks of it being consecutive. [1]

And in the early 19th century near to 100% of Americans lived in rural areas where access to centralized information was minimal. There was no internet, radio, or other means of centralized communication. For that matter, there wasn't even electricity. The closest they'd have had would have been local newspapers. So people without any education would have had very little idea about the world around them.

And obviously I don't mean what's happening half-way around the world, but in their own country, their own rights, and so on. Among the political elite there was a raging battle over federalism vs confederalism, but that would have had very little meaning to the overwhelming majority of Americans. Jefferson won the presidency in 1800 with 45k votes against John Adams' 30k votes, when the country's population was 5,300,000!

[1] - https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/history-publ...