Plan for elementary schools

[Below is my letter to Joseph Cabell, September 9, 1817, to introduce him a bill to establish elementary schools in Virginia (and to serve as a model for other states), enabling the country with a more educated population.]

I promised you that I would put into the form of a bill my plan of establishing the Elementary Schools, without taking a cent from the Literary fund. I have had leisure at this place, to do this, and now send you the result.

If twelve or fifteen hundred schools are to be placed under one general administration, an attention so divided will amount to a dereliction of them to themselves. It is surely better, then, to place each school at once under the care of those most interested in its conduct. In this way the Literary fund is left untouched to complete at once the whole system of education, by establishing a college in every district of about eighty miles square, for the second grade of education, to wit: languages, ancient and modern, and for the third grade a single University, in which the sciences shall be taught in their highest degree.

I should apologize, perhaps, for the style of this bill. I dislike the verbose and intricate style of the English statutes, and in our revised code I endeavored to restore it to the simple one of the ancient statutes, in such original bills as I drew in that work. I suppose the reformation has not been acceptable, as it has been little followed. You, however, can easily correct this bill to the taste of my brother lawyers, by making every other word a "said" or "aforesaid," and saying everything over two or three times, so that nobody but we of the craft can untwist the diction, and find out what it means; and that, too, not so plainly but that we may conscientiously divide one half on each side. Mend it, therefore, in form and substance to the orthodox taste, and make it what it should be; or, if you think it radically wrong, try something else, and let us make a beginning in some way. No matter how wrong, experience will amend it as we go along, and make it effectual in the end.