How deep and fundamental this is, can be best realized by the comparative density of illiteracy already prevailing at the South. Fifty out of every hundred negroes ten years old and over can neither read nor write, and nearly thirteen out of every hundred whites are in the same condition of darkness. In the United States as many as 231 counties report a proportion of twenty per cent of illiterate white men of voting age, and of the total, 210 of these counties are in the South. Now the conditions represented by all these figures—and at best they can only bring the matter vaguely to our conception—in one sense, on account of the magnitude of the work to be done and the difficulties in the way, are of a nature almost to take hope and courage from us. On the other hand, the absolute need of doing the work, the fruits that must follow, and the progress already made are a clarion call to patience, patriotism, faith, and unresting effort.
But before taking up the progress already made, it would be well to remind ourselves once more of some of the causes which have brought about the present state of affairs and render the Southern situation as to popular education a peculiar one. In the first place, there was the all but disheartening poverty due to the collapse of the entire social and industrial system of the South. War, followed by Reconstruction, did the work with ruthless thoroughness. From 1860 to 1880 taxable property at the South suffered a decrease in value of $2,167,000,100, that is, to less than one-half its value at the breaking out of the War. Indeed, in 1870 the one little state of Massachusetts paid considerably over one-half the amount of taxes paid by the entire South. It is clear, then, that for nearly twenty years the South was under the simple yet stern and inexorable compulsion of how to live. In this light, therefore, what it did accomplish in the matter of training its children is to be regarded as a really heroic achievement, and is no occasion of blame because, by comparison, it seems so little. Absolutely, it is worthy of all praise.
It should be remembered, too, that in spite of its poverty, in spite of the fact that its energies have been given to a pressing struggle for its very existence, the South has had to maintain a two-fold system of popular education. It has had to care for the children of its former slaves in separate schools, and bear virtually all the expense. This has both complicated its problem and necessarily limited its educational advancement. But at this time it can be asserted with emphasis, that the South, in spite of certain reactionary eddies in the current of its thinking, will still continue to support Negro schools. Our best thought is fast fixing itself in the unalterable conviction that to keep the black man in ignorance is an injustice to ourselves as well as to him; and, moreover, that expediency itself dictates that he shall neither remain sunken in the night of illiteracy nor mistrained for the sphere of life for which he is, in his present stage of advancement, fitted. Therefore popular education has meant, will continue to mean, with the South a two-fold system of education. And the Southern white man, with his own taxes, is largely to maintain it,—at least for many years to come.
But above everything else, the chief consideration with reference to the whole question of popular education in the South, both as to its needs and difficulties, is that we are dealing with a rural folk and rural conditions. More than eighty-three per cent of the Southern people live in the country,—a pure, wholesome Anglo-Saxon stock of unwasted, if untrained, physical, intellectual and moral qualities. The problem of popular education in villages, towns, and cities is virtually solved. The task therefore is concerned wholly with what we shall do for and with the saving, and in this case, the larger remnant which draws its support from the fields. No democracy ever had better or richer assets from which to recuperate itself, or a more inspiring duty to perform in giving this class opportunity for training and development. But from the very nature of the case the proper performance of this duty is a task of stupendous magnitude, and even an approximate accomplishment of it must wait upon necessarily slow processes. The deep-seated conservatism of the people, the extent to which illiteracy prevails and the narrow poverty in many sections, remote and widely-sundered homes, roads almost impassable at certain seasons of the year, the immediate need of the children in the fields, even if the best of schools were at their doors,—here are conditions which would discourage any but a brave and patient people who believe in the divine right of all to whatever power there is in knowledge and the bounden duty of the state to offer to all its opportunities.
However, neither the pressure of poverty, nor the double burden of caring for two races in separate schools, nor the special difficulty growing out of the peculiar nature of conditions, nor the huge magnitude of the task, has daunted courage or enfeebled effort. On every hand there are inspiring marks of progress, and results prophetic of greater advances yet to follow. In the first place, the last six or eight years have been a period of quite remarkable educational agitation throughout the entire South. Every kind of leadership has been systematically at work to quicken the conscience and stir the sentiment of the people on this subject. Pulpit, press, organized philanthropy, and civil authority have combined with professional educators in a campaign whose rallying-cry has been the uplifting of democracy through the power of the schoolhouse. The general result is an interest both wide and intelligent, an awakened conscience, and an aroused sentiment throughout all this Southern land, all of which tends to put behind special and definite efforts of improvement an irresistible public opinion. The South is therefore keenly realizing its sense of civic obligation and its duty to its own future, and when the South once sees its duty and that rich vein of sentimentality, which lies at the basis of its temperament, is once touched, there will be no turning back. And surely it has now seen its duty and its sentimentality is thoroughly alive to all that popular education means to the child of to-day and the state of to-morrow.
For this condition we have to thank, not only the church, the press, and organized philanthropy, but a strikingly courageous and far-sighted political leadership, which the situation has called forth,—men, for example, like Governor Frazier of Tennessee, Governor Aycock of North Carolina, Governor Heyward of South Carolina, and Governor Montague of Virginia, men who have convincingly fought for the inalienable right of every child to be trained by the state at public expense. To their influence must also be added the skilled patriotic service of such State Superintendents of Public Instruction as Mynders, Martin, MacMahan, Merritt, Whitefield and Joyner,—men who seemed to regard their office as peculiarly the most sacred of all trusts committed by a people to public servants. The people have listened to such as these when they might have turned deaf ears to voices from any other source.
Too much importance cannot be attached to the sentiment which has been thus created in the last half-dozen years. It was the necessary step in the preparation for more definite things. Its immediate value has been in the awakening of people to such an extent that they will not only put their children in school but will also tax themselves for educational purposes. General and local taxation, as a result, has been increasing at a significant rate. Indeed, some of the Southern states are now giving a larger proportion of their income from taxes to the use of education than the states of the North and West. They are everywhere building better schoolhouses, furnishing better equipment, and demanding better trained teachers. Consolidation of schools, free transportation, longer terms, expert supervision, the removal of educational matters from the blight of political influence, are the things which now make the educational atmosphere fairly electric with reform, and the next few years will show a growth that will please even the most ardent optimist.
This general agitation has thus connected with it certain definite aims and methods of educational policy, which have already taken shape and are bearing fruit. Not the least important among them has been the effort to secure, above everything, trained teachers. Many of the states have either established Normal Schools for this purpose or have added to their Universities departments of Education. But it has been felt that even these were not sufficient to meet the demands for a trained teaching force. Hence in some of the states, in Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, for example, summer schools with an attendance of from four to six hundred have been running for a number of years, and at Knoxville the great Summer School has been drawing from all over the South a choice body of teachers to the number of two thousand, and offering them the best instruction to be had, North or South. To the influence of these general schools is to be added that of the County Institutes, which of themselves have been an inestimable source of power. All have stood for an intelligent knowledge of the situation, for the missionary spirit of propaganda, for a broader and more accurate scholarship on the part of the teacher, for the application of expert, up-to-date methods of instruction and organization, and for the raising of the teacher’s work to the dignity of a great profession. The significance of all this is that this movement for popular education is laying its foundations in wisdom in that it sees that the teacher himself must first be taught.
And the work has already begun to tell to a degree that can even now be measured. In the last score of years Virginia has reduced its ratio of white illiteracy by 7 per cent, Georgia and Mississippi by 8, Kentucky by 10, Alabama by 11, North Carolina and Florida, by 12, Tennessee by 13, and Arkansas by 14 per cent. These figures are eloquent of present progress and inspiringly suggestive of the future. Democracy is really caring for its own. It is told that a famous German teacher of the Reformation once stepped into his schoolroom and greeted his pupils with these words: “Hail, reverend pastors, doctors, superintendents, judges, chancellors, magistrates, professors.” Some there were who laughed at him as a joker and mocker. But he was wiser than they, and in his wisdom was the prophet of that true democracy which sees not merely the child in the school, but the future man in the state. The South therefore views in this way the progress already made and realizes that what it now does and will do with its children in the schools of the people is the true measure of its own life in the coming years.