School Puts Jefferson's Legacy to Test

[Rose Siding]

BERKELEY — In the end, schoolteacher Marguerite Talley-Hughes simply got tired of repeating a blatant historical lie: Thomas Jefferson, she insists, was not the all-encompassing hero that the textbooks claim.

She points out that the nation's third president and namesake of the Bay Area elementary school where Talley-Hughes teaches was a slave owner who rejected arguments by abolitionists of his day that all people were created equal. Is this the kind of figure, she asks, to hold up to schoolchildren as a modern-day moral icon?

Talley-Hughes doesn't think so. So the African American kindergarten teacher has led a campaign to erase Jefferson's name from the school's facade in favor of a more-deserving historical figure.
...
"Great leaders, many of them, have great flaws," said the corporate lawyer turned stay-at-home dad. "Martin Luther King was a minister and civil rights leader who carried on extramarital affairs. It's not like slavery, but it shows hypocrisy. Jefferson was a slave owner. But he also wrote the Declaration of Independence, the document Abraham Lincoln relied upon when he shifted the focus of the Civil War from keeping the Union intact to the emancipation of slaves."
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In an e-mail to the district, Berkeley High School junior and Jefferson alumnus Daniel Gleick pointed out that the Virginian believed that every American deserved at least an elementary school education. "It could be argued that elementary schools such as Jefferson Elementary exist because of him," he wrote.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-jefferson27mar27,0,6641072.story?coll=la-home-local

I understand and agree with the point that it's important that children be exposed to historical/political figures with whom they can identify. It's ironic that just this Friday, Madison's papers were put online at the Library of Congress:

There is a copy of Jefferson's notes from the Continental Congress of 1776, including his own copy of the Declaration of Independence as Congress amended it. Jefferson's original version had an attack on King George III of England for vetoing attempts to stop the importation of slaves; it was omitted by Congress, to Jefferson's great indignation.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=513&ncid=691&e=4&u=/ap/20050324/ap_on_go_ot/bill_of_rights

Re-naming a school is no big deal. Have at it! But if this student's remark in the article is any indication of the scope of the lesson, this is a very sad thing:

Nicole didn't know much about Jefferson, only that he was a president who owned slaves.