In all the decades prior to the one ushered in by 1910, there was not a state, county, city or school district which had as its purpose the absolute removal of illiteracy. When the startling announcement was made by the census-takers at the beginning of the new decade that five and a half million men and women in the Nation had confessed that they could not read or write, there was nowhere an expression of shame or pity or even of surprise. It was accepted as a thing inevitable—the waste product of an inefficient school system. Even the press, usually alert and looking for unusual conditions to exploit, found nothing worth featuring in these tragic figures.
There was a vagueness and confusion in the public mind as to the term illiteracy and what constituted it, where the boundary line between literacy and illiteracy was fixed. Not one person out of ten in the United States could define illiteracy. Few had thought of it at all or had taken occasion to familiarize themselves with the term. It was such an unfamiliar one that the first Illiteracy Commission had to impress itself, to explain itself—its very name, repeatedly. Forestry commissions and fish and game commissions were familiar enough but one which had as its purpose to redeem men and women from illiteracy was a foreign and unintelligible thing. The public, in general, knew little of the baneful effects of illiteracy on the individual or the community. Searching the files of educational reports we find no addresses on this subject, and on the shelves of the public libraries there was nothing to be found save a few statistical reports in scientific journals. The man who made his mark aroused no more concern than the one who wrote his signature. Nowhere in all history is there a record of more general apathy having settled down on a crying need or a worthy cause.
The example of a few states leading out in the early part of the decade in a crusade against illiteracy without federal oversight or aid, without funds from the state and with but little public sentiment aroused, and the readiness with which state after state recognized the need, sought the remedy and fell into line, is one of the most hopeful chapters in educational history.
The moonlight school has as its avowed purpose the removal of illiteracy. It has its secondary aims and its indirect results, but until illiteracy is banished it must remain devoted to the one idea of redeeming illiterates—of freeing them from their bondage.
This purpose was being fulfilled when the first three illiterates in Rowan County learned to read and write and when the first district banished illiteracy and it is being fulfilled today wherever, through its influence and example, adult illiterates are being emancipated. When the first three illiterates learned to read and write, the representatives of those three classes—the illiterate mother, the man in his prime and the youth with all of life opening out before him—it was an evidence that all illiterates of normal mentality could be redeemed. The first few who learned served to show the possibility, the practicability and the ease with which knowledge could be imparted to all the rest.
To con over the fascinating figures of illiterates redeemed in the various counties of some states in their initial campaigns is an inspiring thing, and is an earnest of what a few more years of effort with more means, trained leaders and better methods will bring about. Leslie County, Kentucky, in its initial campaign in 1915, taught 600 to read and write; Tattnall County, Georgia, emancipated 600 in a campaign of two years. Santa Fé County, New Mexico, taught 1,549, the majority of them being illiterates. All three were pioneering. What more hopeful record of educational progress can one contemplate than is to be found in the report of the Georgia Illiteracy Commission, prepared by its Secretary, State Superintendent M. L. Brittain, a few months after the illiteracy campaign began in that state.
Number of illiterates taught to read and write:
Tellfair County, 500; Washington County, 555; Fulton County, 632; Muscogee County, 638; Bibb County, 665.
One turns to the record in Kentucky to the reports of county school superintendents, and these are some of the figures that give assurance that the moonlight school is fulfilling its purpose.
Number taught to read and write during a period of four years prior to 1920: