The educative effects of travel and intercourse with other people are making themselves felt. In ante-bellum times few Southerners traveled widely, except the comparatively small number of the richer young men who found their way to Northern colleges, or abroad. Until ten years ago it was difficult to hold Southern conventions and gatherings of intellectual men of kindred aims because people could not afford to travel. Now there is more circulation, more knowledge of the world, more willingness to see in what respects the South lags behind, a greater spirit of coöperation between Southern states, and with some people of other sections. The norms of common schools, secondary schools, and higher institutions are now laid down on about the same principles as in the North, and it remains to develop them, to make paper systems actual, to get more of the school children registered, more of the registered children in attendance, more months of school for those who attend, better teachers for the longer sessions, new buildings to accommodate the larger numbers, more students to fill the little colleges and to enlarge the universities. White education in the South is in a progressive and hopeful condition.
In the means of education outside of schools and colleges the South is still much behind the richer North, and still more behind foreign countries. Museums and picture galleries are few, aside from private collections in Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, and New Orleans. The fine old paintings that one sees in clubs and public buildings come from an earlier age, for there are few Southern artists. Nevertheless, the architectural standard is quite as high as in the North, and the tradition of wide spaces and colonnades persists. In its public buildings the South is in general superior to the North; even in remote county seats one may find buildings old and new of classic proportions, dignified and stately.
The South has been poor in collections of books, but all the larger Universities have fair libraries, and the cities have public libraries, and the numerous gifts of Carnegie have stimulated this form of public education. Several Southern cities, as, for example, Galveston, have endowed institutions for lecture courses on the general plan of the Lowell courses in Boston.
The South has never been highly productive in literature, and too much of the Southern writing bears evidence of a purpose of speaking for the South or in a Southern fashion. A considerable part of the books written by Southerners are about the South in one way or another; there is a sense of sectional obligation. This is the less necessary for a region from which have sprung Poe, one of the world’s acknowledged literary delights, and Lanier. There is a school of Southern writers, of whom the late Joel Chandler Harris is a type, who have found broader themes of life about them and have given to the world the delightful flavor of a passing and romantic epoch. The principal literary work of the South is now in its newspapers.
Another intellectual force is found in the Southern historical societies, of which there is one in almost every state. They have shown a lively interest in saving the records of the early history of the South and in preserving its memorials from destruction. There are also two or three literary periodicals of distinct literary merit, in which one finds an expression of the newest and most modern South.
In every direction, then, the white people of the South are alert. The schools are fair and improving, the community is awake to the need of educating all the children, even in the remote country; and though the taxes for education are still very light, there is a disposition to increase them. In Texas, for example, where there is a state tax, the people have by constitutional amendment authorized all school districts to double that amount by local taxation. If the Whites were the only people to be educated, and if education were the panacea, if it brought assurance of good government, the Southern question would in due time take care of itself.
The most hopeful sign of intellectual progress is the association of those most interested for the promotion of their common ends; such is the Coöperative Education Association of Virginia which holds annual meetings and general conferences for education. These meetings are means of attracting public attention to the problems and of suggesting the solution.
For many years education of the Whites in the South has been aided from the North, first, through considerable gifts for the education of the Mountain Whites, and second through more sparing aid to colleges for Whites in the lowlands. Recently, however, the attention of wealthy Northern givers has been turned to the importance of uplifting the whole white Southern community, and after several annual visits to the South under the patronage of Mr. Robert C. Ogden, of New York, a Southern Education Board was formed, the purpose of which is to rouse people to the need of improving their education; following it is the General Education Board, which makes small gifts to educational institutions usually on the stipulation that they shall raise a conditional amount varying from an equal sum to a sum three times as great. This is the more necessary as there are only two or three institutions in the South that have anything like an adequate endowment. Tulane University in New Orleans has a property of several millions, and the University of Virginia has recently raised a new million outright, but the South has no large body of people with superfluous funds and its giving turns habitually rather in the direction of church construction and foreign mission work than to educational institutions. Of $1,400,000 given to the University of Virginia during thirty years, $900,000 came from Northerners and $270,000 more from foreigners living in the South.
Of late, voices have been raised for some kind of Federal aid to Southern education on the plea that where there is the greatest intellectual destitution there is the most need for money. The appeal is contrary to the usual instincts of the South in matters of federal and state relations, and is strongly opposed by part of the Southern press, particularly the Manufacturers’ Record, which has waged a campaign against even the private gifts made through the General Education Board.