The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

CHAPTER XXI

WHITE EDUCATION

“The most progressive nations have now definitely come to the conclusion that there is no mode of increasing industrial and commercial efficiency so effective as universal education sufficiently prolonged to effect permanent improvement in the observing and reasoning powers of the children.” So said that primate of American education, President Eliot, in an address at Tuskegee, Ala. Though speaking before an audience chiefly composed of colored people, he was laying down a general principle, for he goes on to say that in the Southern states “for both whites and blacks the school time is too short; a large proportion of the children leave school at too early an age; well-trained teachers are lacking; and the range and variety of accessible instruction are too small. Hence a large proportion of both the white race and the black race in the South are in urgent need of better facilities for education.”

This is one point of view; at the other extremity stand such men as a Southern editor who has recently written, “As an educational influence the investment of $100,000 in a cotton mill is worth ten times the $100,000 given a Southern college.” What does the South as a whole think on this question of education? What are its needs? What has it so far done? What is it prepared to do? How does education affect the race question?

Throughout the South there has been and still persists an excellent tradition of reading and of education among the classes which may be presumed to afford such advantages for their children. Classical allusions and quotations from Scripture and Shakespeare are still recognized by all well-educated men. Some of the few fine old plantation houses contain elegantly appointed libraries, stopping short, however, at the year 1836, or whenever the owner died. The city of Charleston has better bookstores than the city of Albany. Probably more people in North Carolina can comment on Shakespeare than in Maine; and the man who can read Horace without a pony and quote Greek without looking at the book is a public character. Besides this admiration for an old-fashioned learning that is now passing, the South feels a genuine and lively interest in what goes on in the world. The present generation of fairly well-to-do people travel more, see more, read more that is written in their own time, think more than did their fathers and grandfathers. They feel a genuine interest in education, put intelligent thought on methods, show respect for the colleges, are willing to spend money on schools.

Like England in the Eighteenth Century the South abounded in readers of good literature, while the land was full of ignorance. Though in early Virginia suggestions were made for free common schools, and Thomas Jefferson strenuously advocated them, though in the forties and fifties several Southern states had elaborate paper systems of schools, outside the large cities there were no graded schools open to all white children such as were familiar in the North after 1840. Even New Orleans waited for good school buildings till the fortunate bequest of McDonogh; as for free rural schools, not a single Southern state had organized and set in operation a system before the Civil War. From the first the sparse settlement of the South, the presence of the Negro, and the lack of that commercial connection with the rest of the world which so arouses the human mind, made it difficult and perhaps impossible to found a system of general popular education in that region.

For the higher education of the dominant class much more was done. Beginning with William and Mary in 1692—the first colonial college except Harvard—many colleges were established. The first state university was North Carolina, founded in 1790; the first American university of the German type was the University of Virginia, which began operations in 1825; the first institution to introduce coeducation was Blount College, which, about 1800, conferred the degree of A.B. upon a woman. But for various reasons there never were money enough, students enough, and trained educators enough to man the Southern colleges that were founded; and secondary schools to feed the colleges were lacking. The girls had a few boarding schools, some of which were called colleges by courtesy, but their education was superficial. Many students who could afford it found their way to Northern colleges, and that is why John C. Calhoun, the apostle of slavery, was a Yale graduate, and Barnwell Rhett, the protagonist of secession, was a graduate of Harvard.

After the Civil War came a dismal period, when some of the old universities were closed for want of means and of professors who could take the oath of allegiance. The training of the children of the best families at that period has been thus described by one who experienced it: “The schools that I attended—may God forgive the young women who one after another taught the children of the sparsely settled neighborhood—were farces and frauds. There was no public school.... We lived in sort of a secluded training place for Southern gentlemen.... We never saw a newspaper.... The professor of mathematics—so a rumor ran—was a freethinker. He was said to have read Darwin and become an evolutionist. But the report was not generally believed; for, it was argued, even if he had read Darwin, a man of his great intellect would instantly see the fallacy of that doctrine and discard it.”

One of the few benefits conferred by the Reconstruction governments was a system of general public schools nominally open to every child in city or country; but just as the education of Negroes and Poor Whites was beginning, the schools were separated for the two races, and the Negroes were cut off from Southern white teachers. To start the new system there was no tradition of public school training and management, little sense of public duty in laying sufficient taxes, and the South was very poor. Hence it was about 1885 before the South put into operation a general educational system, supported by public taxation. The most recent statistics available (for 1906) show over 6,000,000 common school pupils in the South, besides 380,000 pupils in private schools, 118,000 pupils in public high schools, and 34,000 more in private secondary schools; 38,000 students in public and private universities, colleges and schools of technology. Every Southern state has now worked out some system of both rural and urban public schools, and several of them have a sizable State school fund which is distributed among the districts. The ordinary type of rural school is practically the district school of the North over again. City schools are graded in the usual fashion. Most states have a State Superintendent of Education, and the more progressive communities like Louisiana are introducing county superintendents with power to compel good schools. Surely with so many people and so much money, all must be happy in the South. It is an educational army, with common school infantry, secondary school cavalry, and in the institutions of higher learning the heavy artillery and the big guns. Yet it is an army in which every division, brigade, and regiment is divided into two camps, in which spear clashes on shield, for hardly anything in the South so brings out into relief the race question as the problem of education, and especially of negro education.

The Reconstruction governments made no provision for public high schools, but the growth of towns and cities in the South and the need of preparatory schools for the colleges, and the public sense of the value of secondary education, have compelled the founding of a great number of such schools, both for girls and boys. Normal schools have also developed till there are 45 with over 10,000 students. The colleges are also flourishing; and of professional schools the South has more than 160, with above 12,000 students.