This rigorous selective process looks very familiar to any one acquainted with the modern French system of free elementary schools, boarding _colléges_ and _lycèes_, and the system of competitive scholarships and fellowships of the French. But it was not fully developed in France before the Third Republic and it was not even dreamed of before the Revolution. Many times the French have been criticized for the undemocratic features of an educational system which reserves secondary education to those who are able to pay and to the small number of children who win scholarships. There is no possibility that this scheme was ever borrowed by Jefferson from any French theorician, and there is, on the contrary, some reason to believe that in France it owes its beginning to the publication of Jefferson's plan in the "Notes on Virginia" printed in Paris and in French in 1786.
The educational structure of the State would not have been complete if Jefferson had not provided for a reorganization of William and Mary College. Such is the purpose of the next bill (Bill LXXX) in the Report of the Committee of Revisors. There he was more ruthless and more radical. After a first section which recounts the foundation of the college and its history, Jefferson concluded that "the said college, thus amply endowed by the public has not answered their expectation, and there is reason to hope, that it would become more useful, if certain articles in its constitution were altered and amended." By one stroke of the pen, Jefferson abolished the school of theology, took the administration out of the hands of the former trustees to place it in the hands of visitors appointed by the Legislature and "not to be restrained in their legislation by the royal prerogatives, or the laws of the kingdom of England, or the canons of the constitution of the English Church, as enjoined in the Charter." The president and faculty were to be dismissed, and six professorships created; to wit, one of moral law and police; one of history, civil and ecclesiastical; one of anatomy and medicine; one of natural philosophy and natural history; one of the ancient languages Oriental and northern; and one of modern languages.--