The Southern South

by Albert Bushnell Hart

Another defect is in the schoolhouses. The Southern towns and cities are coming to follow the example of the West and North in putting up imposing school buildings, though there is no such need for elaborate heating apparatus and ventilation as in the North, and they are in general simpler. The country schoolhouse is in many cases a big, dirty hut, often built of logs, wretchedly furnished, and devoid of the commonest appliances of civilization. There seems to be a feeling throughout the South that schoolhouses cannot be built wholly out of taxation, but the people on the ground must contribute at least a part of the cost. You may find neat and tidy rural schoolhouses, actually painted, but they are far from typical.

Another difficulty is the teachers. The monthly salaries for white teachers in several of the Southern states are high. A Coosa County farmer complains that a teacher in his district is getting $3.50 a day for twenty days in the month, which was more than any farmer in the district could earn. But of course her $70.00 a month would only run while school was in session, which might be five months. In Louisiana rural teachers receive higher salaries than in any other state in the Union, and no commonwealth is making such determined effort to improve its rural schools. In the remoteness of Catahoola Parish may be seen a system of wagonettes to bring children to central graded schools, a reform which goes very slowly in New England.

A further reason for the backwardness of the Southern rural schools is that they are in the hands of county superintendents, whose place until recently has too often been political. Now there is a body of trained superintendents who are giving people object lessons in what can be done even with poor buildings by well-trained teachers. The South is also bending its energies on normal schools, and the result is a growing body of teachers with professional spirit, who expect to make the schools their life work. The state superintendents are also improving in their professional power. The worst Southern rural schools are not too much behind those that Horace Mann found in Massachusetts when he began his work in 1837; the wages of the rural teachers are probably not so low as those in Maine; and the next decade will see a vast improvement in the rural schools throughout the South.

So with the secondary schools, where the number of pupils has astonishingly increased. In 1898 there were in the South 1,107 schools and 72,000 pupils; in 1906 there were 1,685 schools (Texas alone has 321), 5,100 teachers, and 118,000 pupils. A great change has come about in the education of girls. Nearly half the teachers and nearly two thirds of the pupils (70,000) in these schools are women, and that means that in connection with the normal schools, in which there are over 7,000 women students, the South is now training a body of teachers who are going, to make a great change in the education of the next generation. The growth of secondary schools means further that the South is putting an end to a reproach of many years’ standing—namely, that it could not adequately prepare pupils for college.

It was a severe lesson when the trustees of the Carnegie retiring allowance fund in 1906 laid down its principle that no grant would be made to professors in any college which did not come up to the following standard: “An institution to be ranked as a college must have at least six professors giving their entire time to college and university work, a course of four full years in liberal arts and sciences, and should require for admission not less than the usual four years of academic or high school preparation, or its equivalent, in addition to the preacademic or grammar school studies.” To the surprise of the Lower South, it was discovered that only one institution, Tulane University, had insisted on the condition of four years academic or high school preparation. Several other organizations are waking the South up to the need of improvements, such as the Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the Southern states, with nineteen colleges as members; a commission of the Southern Methodist Church; the General Education Board of New York, with its fund of $43,000,000; and the Southern Education Board.

In the South as in the North, there are two types of institutions of higher learning, the endowed (in most cases denominational) and the public. The number of Southern colleges is considerable; 166 out of 493 in the United States—which is not far from the proportion of the population; but only 8 of these institutions have upward of 500 undergraduate students, as against 42 in the rest of the Union; and the total number of undergraduate students in universities, colleges, and technological schools, 25,300, is about a fifth of the total of 122,000 in the United States, while the normal proportion would be a third. The property of the Southern colleges ($99,000,000) is about a fifth of the total college property; the income of $7,300,000 is about a sixth of the whole, the benefactions in 1906 ($2,400,000) about a seventh. That is, in number, wealth, and students, Southern institutions of higher learning represent about the same reduced proportion to the North as in the case of public wealth and public expenditures; that means that an average million of people in the South enjoy less than half the educational advantages possessed by an average million in the Northwest.

This rather favorable proportion does not obtain in women’s education; of the fifteen colleges for women, recognized by the Bureau of Education as of full collegiate rank, only 4 are in the South; they include less than an eighth of the women students, and their property is less than a tenth. The 95 Southern institutions classified as “Colleges for women, Division B” are practically boarding schools of secondary grade, and are balanced by the greater number of Northern girls in high schools; 345,000 against 70,000 Southern high school girls; the 17,000 in private high schools and academies are overbalanced by 35,000 in the North. One of the great needs of the South at present is high-class colleges for girls, which shall turn out a well-grounded and well-trained body of women, interested in public affairs, and shall be a nursery of high school and college teachers.

The Southern denominational colleges are open practically to men only. The normal schools receive both sexes, and 4,000 women are registered in the Southern universities, colleges, and technological schools which are open to both sexes, as against 10,000 men. As the Southern states grow richer, they are giving more attention and more money to their public institutions, but so far few of their advanced institutions take rank alongside the great Northwestern universities. The University of North Carolina has 682 students and an excellent tradition; the University of Texas counts 1,100 men and 400 women, and is in many ways the most flourishing of the Southern institutions. The University of Virginia, though it has an annual grant from the legislature, is practically an endowed institution with 700 students; the University of Georgia has 408 students, though it at one time put forth the whimsical claim that it had the largest attendance in the United States, surpassing Harvard and Columbia, a result made up by adding in day scholars in affiliated schools below the high school grade. The state university funds, including the federal grants, are usually dispersed among two, or even three or four small institutions.

There is a vigorous intellectual movement in the South. The recent graduates, who at one time had a preference for college appointments in their own colleges, are now giving way to a throng of eager young scholars who have enjoyed graduate study in American or foreign universities and hold higher degrees. Wherever you fall in with a body of those men, you are impressed with their good training and their broad outlook. Politics are yearly less forceful in such institutions; and probably never again will there be such an episode as happened in a border state university about ten years ago. A new president discovered after a time that the janitor of the college buildings was not disposed to take instructions from him, whereupon he appealed to the board of trustees to put the man definitely under his control. The trustees held their meeting, at the end of which the janitor appeared with a bundle of blue envelopes, the first of which he offered to the president with the confidential remark, “You’re fired!” The others were addressed to the professors, every one of whom was summarily removed. Having thus gone back to first principles, the trustees elected a new president and a new faculty, including some of the old teachers; strange to say, that university has since become one of the most promising in its section. In all institutions of this kind and in the literary faculties of many colleges is a sprinkling of Northern professors, for the Southern colleges, like the Northern, are more tolerant than they were half a century ago. Most of the young men now receiving appointments in colleges and scientific institutions have studied in other Southern colleges, in the North or in Europe; and in all the learned associations they take their places as well-equipped and productive men.

Professional education has also made great strides in the South. Many of the most promising young men are sent to Northern law and medical schools, not only because of their supposed educational advantages, but because it is thought well for a young man to have a double horizon; but the greater number find instruction in nearby professional schools either established by practitioners or attached to some university. For the medical students the hospitals which are springing up everywhere furnish clinical material. Theological education is less systematized; the older and more settled denominations have good schools, but too many preachers in the back country have no other training than a natural “gift of the gab.” In the agricultural and mechanical colleges, and the engineering departments of the endowed public universities, the South is educating her future engineers and scientific men.