LETTER FROM A HOME DEPARTMENT PUPIL
CHAPTER VII
TO WIPE OUT ILLITERACY THE TEACHER’S GOAL
To wipe illiteracy out of the county was the goal set for the following year. First, the school trustees were induced to take a census of the illiterates. When this was completed, an investigation was made of each individual case. Soon we had on record, not only the name and age of every illiterate in the county, but his history as well, his ancestry, his home environment, his family ties, his religious faith, his political belief, his weaknesses, tastes and peculiarities, and the influence or combination of influences through which he might be reached in case the teacher failed with him.
Each teacher was given the list of illiterates in her district and told to go out and cultivate these people, like a good politician, before the moonlight schools began. The citizens of the county were enlisted. The slogan “Each one teach one,” was adopted and most of the people were glad to obey. Doctors were soon teaching their convalescent patients, ministers were teaching members of their flocks, children were teaching their parents, stenographers were teaching waitresses in the small town hotels, and the person in the county without a pupil was considered a very useless sort of individual. The district with an illiterate in it was a district in disrepute, while the child with an illiterate parent felt that he was a child disgraced. A man redeemed from illiteracy became at once a source of pride and admiration to his neighbors, as well as to himself and family, and, like most new converts to a cause, he exceeded the old adherents in loyalty and zeal.
A class of Moonlight School pupils all past 50 years of age.
Some of those who had learned were not only walking evangelists preaching the gospel of “No illiteracy in the county,” but became itinerant teachers, going from district to district giving lessons. Those fresh from their first contact with the printed page imparted what they had learned, meager though it was, with an enthusiasm, that was possible only to the newly-learned. They were successful teachers. They attempted to give lessons in reading and writing only and to create that self-confidence, which, with adult illiterates, was the first battle to be won. They had the advantage, too, of presenting themselves as examples, as living proof that illiterates could learn. Their visits to illiterate homes started the process of learning in most cases, and cleared the way for the teacher who was to follow with more complete and thorough knowledge.
Each and every district was striving to be the first to wipe out illiteracy. One school trustee, who had been campaigning strenuously all week against illiteracy, came in on Saturday and said with determination, “I’ll bet I have illiteracy out of my district before Monday morning. There’s only one illiterate over there, and he’s a tenant on my place; I’m going to run him out over into Fleming County.”