The secondary purpose of the moonlight school—to afford an opportunity to the near-illiterate and the half-uneducated—may, when illiteracy is vanquished, become its primary and most practical one. All over the land there are many who dream of completing their education some time, and even the well-educated will not scorn the opportunity to improve. A Kentucky woman of forty who was a graduate of a well-known college, was asked this question, “If you had your choice of all the good things of life, what would it be?” “I’d rather go to school,” she said. She lived in one of the most cultured communities, but she expressed the wish for a moonlight school to be established, saying, “I’d like to review my American history and if nobody will teach the class I’ll teach it myself for the sake of the review.” There are many like this woman who would choose a term in school to every other blessing. While they have paid school taxes and hungered for educational opportunities, the school plant has remained closed for all but six hours of the day during a brief school term in many communities. There are 8,760 hours in a year and the school plant is open only 960 of these hours in some districts, where only six-months schools are conducted, a tremendous waste in the school plant, but a greater one in human intellect and aspirations.
A day school in every community! Once it was a doubtful experiment, but now it is an established institution and forever so. It has come up through trials, tribulations and struggles innumerable. A night school in every community! If it is an educated community, a night school for more education, for culture and specialization; if an illiterate community, for the emancipation of the illiterates and their new birth into the realms of knowledge and power!
The public school should be as liberal in its policy as is in the church. It has no right to say to men and women, “If you embrace me not before a certain age or before a certain hour in the day I will close my doors to you forever.” The hour of a man’s opportunity should be any hour in which he awakens to his need whether it be at the age of six or a hundred and six.
CHAPTER XIV
THE NEED OF MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS
The time has passed when intelligent men dispute the need of everyone to be able to read and write.
There was a time in the dark ages when learning first began to lift its head, that the proud knight boasted that he could not read or write—mere priest-craft much beneath him. Quite late in English history it was held derogatory for the nobility to spell well. These baser arts were for their inferiors. Their attitude was that of Douglas, in Scott’s poem “Marmion,” who exclaimed:
Thanks to Saint Bothan, son of mine,
Save Gawain ne’er could pen a line.