Dear Dr. McLeroy,

While reading your essay on equity I paused when I came to this passage:

"This is the way our founding fathers were taught. Henry Grady Weaver described it thus: Before he was sixteen, the philosophy and history of the entire European past had been pounded into his head.  Thus when he was old enough to begin thinking things out for himself, he had in his own mind a storehouse of knowledge, covering thousands of years of human experience. Also, he was drilled in logic and the accurate meaning of words as a protection against fallacies of fancy rhetoric! (The Mainspring of Human Progress, Henry Grady Weaver, 1947,p 192)"
http://dmcleroy.home.att.net/Philosophy/AchievingEquity.htm

I'm always suspicious when I encounter pronouns without antecedents and often look for the source so I might better know what one might be talking about.  I actually found another source for much of what you wrote and am happy to share it with you:

"Democracy" by Rose Wilder Lane

Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams, Madison, and Monroe feared democracy.

They were educated men. Excepting Franklin (self-educated), each one had the education of an English gentleman. That is, the philosophy and the history of the whole European past had been pounded into his head before he was twelve years old. Therefore, when he was old enough to think for himself, he had thousands of years of human experience with every form of Government, to think about.

This knowledge was then regarded as necessary to every man whose birth entitled him to take any part in the government of his country.

They also knew the meaning of every word they used; they knew its Greek, Latin, or Anglo-Saxon root. Until forty years ago, this knowledge was still considered of first importance in American schools. Every pupil, at thirteen and fourteen, learned etymology as he had learned spelling since the age of six, by dogged repetition until the facts were fixed in his mind."

By Dorothy A. Boyd-Rush, Ph.D.

INDIVIDUALS SURROUNDED BY MYSTERY are often described as "intriguing" and "fascinating." Unfortunately, they can also be referred to in less-flattering terms.  Terms like "maddening,"  "frustrating" and "disappointing" immediately come to mind. One such maddening and intriguing individual was Donald Robertson, an 18th-century teacher and schoolmaster in Colonial Virginia. One of his pupils, late in life, reportedly stated that "all that I have been in life I owe largely to that man." That pupil was none other than James Madison, fourth president of the United States and a man not given to making casual compliments.  (color added)

For a man who undoubtedly influenced the lives of many in the school he established in King and Queen County, Va., we know remarkably little about Donald Robertson - beyond the obvious: That he must have been an extraordinary teacher and likely the first to expose the minds of his pupils to the ideas of the Enlightenment, the political questions of the age, the classics and the boundless capabilities of the human spirit.

At the personal level, Robertson was a Scotsman, born in Aberdeen on Sept. 27, 1717, to Charles Robertson and his wife, Isabella McDonald. The father was an ardent supporter of the Stuarts, even participating at the age of 65 years at the disastrous battle of Culloden in 1745. The son did not. He was then married and living in Edinburgh.

Donald Robertson's first wife was Henrietta Maxwell, from an influential family who supported the Hanoverian government rather than the Stuarts during the Jacobite revolts of the 18th century. Probably due to the depressed conditions in Scotland during the 1740s, Donald Robertson set sail for the New World in 1752, shortly before the death of his mother and the death of his wife. Robertson's Latin Bible records not only his date of birth but also the date of his arrival in Virginia, the latter occurring on March 29, 1752. The entries recorded in his Bible are cited in a family history published in 1897 by one of his descendants, William Kyle Anderson, but, unfortunately, the whereabouts of the Bible today is unknown.

After arriving in Virginia, Robertson had no difficulty finding employment. Given that he attended the University of Edinburgh and was very likely a licensed preacher of the gospel, he was immediately hired by Col. John Baylor of New Market, a prominent member of the community in King and Queen County, which was created from New Kent County in 1691. After several years of being a successful tutor, Robertson, in a characteristically entrepreneurial move, decided to establish a private boarding school in the area in which he had been living. Donald Robertson's school was located on a farm overlooking the Mattapony River, about four miles above the present Dunkirk Bridge, where King and Queen County and King William County converge. Nothing remains of the original brick structure. As King and Queen County is one of Virginia's "burnt counties," next to nothing remains of the records associated with any of Robertson's holdings. Both his real and his personal property are largely left to the imagination. Two exceptions include a tax record for 1782 that surfaced in 1961 after being missing since 1864, a record that indicates that Robertson's land holdings in 1782 consisted of 150 acres, and one volume devoted to King and Queen County in the Virginia Colonial Abstracts series that records the sale of 31 slaves after the death of Robertson's wife in 1799."