Terry--I don't have a direct answer to the question. However, during the time that TJ was writing many free black children were bound out or apprenticed under the normal terms of apprenticeship which usually required some minimal education in the three R's. This changed in 1804 when the assembly dropped the requirement of an education for free children of color when overseers of the poor bound them out. At the same time, it did not prohibit such instruction. See Shep. Statutes vol III p. 123-24. Best regards--Mick
Michael L. Nicholls
Professor of History, Emeritus
Dept. of History
Utah State University
Logan, UT 84322-0710
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On Apr 20, 2015, at 7:37 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
>
> http://wmpeople.wm.edu/site/page/tlmeye/
>
> http://www.ecologyfund.com/ecology/_ecology.html
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> --Groucho Marx, in "Horse Feathers."
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