P.S. One more interesting datum: I was just looking at the letter Robert Pleasants wrote Jefferson in 1797, in which he notes-- by way of regretting that it did not apply to slaves--that the much-watered-down version of Jefferson's Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge that the legislature had finally passed in December 1796 included free black children: "those of Colour are not exempted from the benifit of such schools" (see http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-29-02-0230 ). It may be suggested that this aspect would not have been included in this Act had it not been understood to have been part of Jefferson's original bill.
(And P.P.S.: In my previous post I think I dated the Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge to 1779. My mistake: it was drafted in 1778).
--Jurretta Heckscher
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"I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter."
On Apr 20, 2015, at 9:37 AM, Terry Meyers wrote:
> In Jefferson’s 1779 proposal for a system of public education in Virginia, the most rudimentary schooling is allowed for “free children”:
>
> At every of these schools shall be taught reading, writing, and common arithmetick, and the books which shall be used therein for instructing the children to read shall be such as will at the same time make them acquainted with Græcian, Roman, English, and American history. At these schools all the free children, male and female, resident within the respective hundred, shall be intitled to receive tuition gratis, for the term of three years, and as much longer, at their private expence, as their parents, guardians or friends, shall think proper.
>
> “Free children” clearly excludes enslaved black children.
>
> Does it include free black children?
>
> Notes on the State of Virginia may or may not illuminate my question. There Jefferson allows for emancipated blacks possibly to "continue with their parents to a certain age, then be brought up, at the public expence, to tillage, arts or sciences, according to their geniusses, till the females should be eighteen, and the males twenty-one years of age.”
>
> I know Jefferson’s scathing and racist views of blacks and their intellectual potential, but in thinking about the impact of the Bray School affiliated with William and Mary from 1760, I was struck by the notion that Jefferson would have known of the College’s involvement in religious education for free and enslaved black children. I wondered whether that school might have encouraged him to imagine at least a modicum of education to free black children in 1779.
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> Terry L.. Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg Virginia 23187 757-221-3932
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> http://wmpeople.wm.edu/site/page/tlmeye/
>
> http://www.ecologyfund.com/ecology/_ecology.html
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> Have we got a college? Have we got a football team?....Well, we can't afford both. Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.
> --Groucho Marx, in "Horse Feathers."
>
> ______________________________________
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