Transcriber’s Notes:

Larger versions of the photographs can be viewed by clicking on each photo in a web browser.

[Additional Transcriber’s Notes] are at the end.

The spelling match.

MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS
FOR THE EMANCIPATION
OF ADULT ILLITERATES

BY
CORA WILSON STEWART

Chairman Illiteracy Commission, National Education
Association; Chairman Illiteracy Committees:
National Council of Education, and General
Federation Womens’ Clubs.

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 Fifth Avenue

Copyright, 1922,
By E. P. Dutton & Company

All Rights Reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED
STATES OF AMERICA

TO THE VOLUNTEER TEACHERS IN THE MOONLIGHT
SCHOOLS, WHOSE VISION, COURAGE AND SELF-SACRIFICE
MADE IT POSSIBLE TO BLAZE THE
TRAIL FOR THE EMANCIPATION OF
THE NATION’S ILLITERATES, THIS
VOLUME IS GRATEFULLY
DEDICATED

Grateful acknowledgments are made for assistance and helpful suggestions to the following: Mr. Erwin A. Holt, Mrs. Cornelia Steketee Hulst, Dr. J. G. Crabbe, Miss Linda Neville, General William H. Sears, Mr. Everett Dix, and Dr. Louise McDanell Browne.

PREFACE

Many requests have come for a book telling the story of the moonlight schools. Teachers have expressed their need of such a book for their inspiration and guidance, and the general public has evidenced a desire to know more of the dramatic story of the origin, development and goal of these schools.

“I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience,” said Patrick Henry. The crying need of “the lamp of experience” to guide the teachers who are engaged in the fight on illiteracy impels the author to present the experience of years of strenuous campaigning against illiteracy in book form and likewise to show forth the achievements of adults who have passed from the darkness of illiteracy into light through the portals of the moonlight schools.

This book is purposely written in simple language and kept free from technical terms. It is a message to the teachers of every land and would be as easy and accessible to those who have had little preparation for teaching as to those who are experienced and trained. Not for the teacher alone is it written but even those who are not engaged in teaching will find a message, it is hoped, within its covers.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

It has been said that every great movement for freedom originated among mountain people. However true or untrue this may be, the movement to emancipate the illiterates of America originated among the people of the mountains of Kentucky. It is not something that America is doing for the mountain people, but something which they have contributed to the nation and to the world.

This was acknowledged by the United States Commissioner of Education in a bulletin issued in 1913 in which he said,

“I submit herewith, for publication as a Bulletin of the Bureau of Education, a statement showing in some detail the amount of illiteracy in the United States among men, women and children over ten years of age according to the Federal Census of 1910; also a brief statement of an experiment which has been conducted for nearly two years in one of the mountain counties in eastern Kentucky having a large number of illiterates in its population, to ascertain if it were possible to teach these illiterate grown-up men and women and older children to read and write, and whether other men, women and children with very meager education would respond to the opportunity to learn more of the arts of the school. The success of this experiment, made under very difficult circumstances, has been so great as to inspire the hope that, with the cooperation of schools, churches, philanthropic societies, cities, counties, States and the Nation, the great majority of the five and a half million illiterates over ten years of age in the United States may, in a few years, be taught to read and write and something more.”

MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS

Moonlight Schools

CHAPTER I
THE PEOPLE WHO GAVE THE MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS TO THE WORLD

In the mountains of Kentucky there has been buried a treasure of citizenship richer far than all its vast fields of coal, its oil, its timber or mineral wealth. Here lives a people so individual that authors have chosen them as their theme and artists as their subjects to interpret to the world a people with a character distinctive, sturdy, independent and rugged. This is a stock in which great movements can have their origin. No inferior people, no degenerate stock can embrace and demonstrate with enthusiasm new truths. These people are descended from the best ancestry—Virginia and North Carolina—that traces back to England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Theirs was, in the main, an educated ancestry; some of their forefathers read Latin, and some of them Greek. Here and there in the mountain cabin and farm-house may be found an ancient copy of Cæsar, Virgil, Chaucer and other rare old books, useless to the possessors save as relics of the past. They are a people of arrested civilization, who sing the ballads sung in England three hundred years ago and forgotten there now, and who use expressions that belong to the centuries past. Not all by any means, but some of them live lives such as were lived in rural England and in the hills of Scotland two hundred years ago. They have the blood and bearing of a noble people; they are a noble people. Possessed of a high degree of intelligence, they have not degenerated even though deprived for years of educational opportunities, but have preserved the sturdy traits of their Scotch-Irish, English and Welsh ancestors.

Their capacity for learning has always been immense and their desire for it has been equally so. Of all the authors who have chosen them as their theme and the artists who have recently begun to present them as a type, none have seemed to catch, or, at least, all have failed to portray, the dominant thing in mountain life, the strongest urge of the mountaineer’s soul—his eager, hungry, insatiable desire for knowledge. It is this which has sent mountain girls and boys walking a hundred miles or more to reach the school where they could work their way through. It is the thing which has caused many a slender mountain maid and many a frail lad to assume the work of a man when by so doing they could earn a little money to provide for a few weeks in school. It is the same desire that has caused many a mountaineer to give his last few acres of land, his labor and his last dollar to found a school where his children and his neighbor’s children might have an opportunity to learn. But, intense as this fervor for education has been, it has had to satisfy itself with looking back to the time when “Gran’pap was an educated man,” and forward to the time when the children and grand-children would have an education. There was a lack of hope for the present and passing generation, a broad gap between the past and the future culture, which seemed to condemn many brilliant minds to an intellectual grave. Many of these people had never been permitted, for reasons all too tragic, to enter school, or if enrolled, they had been stopped at the end of a week, a month or at the close of their first term. There were married folk, who if they could even have overcome their embarrassment and summoned courage in later life to seek a school, would have found none open to them. In a land where people live long, these men and women, thirty, forty and fifty years of age, with, perhaps, a good quarter of a century, and many of them a half century, ahead of them—what must be done with them? Shall they be considered the wasted citizens of a state that cares not to redeem and use them, and of a nation that does not need such character and such brain?

These mountain people now stand at the threshold of a new civilisation, eager and hopeful, anxious to enter in and take their part in the work of the world. They need the world’s help, its best thought, its modern conveniences, but not more than the world needs them. In a day when racial groups weld themselves together in America and seek to advance the welfare of the country from which they came rather than the welfare of the nation which has received them into its bosom, it is comforting to remember that in these mountains of the southern states America has a reservoir of strength and patriotism in the millions of pure Anglo-Saxon Americans.[1] It is a reservoir that should not be kept walled in, nor should it be turned back when it attempts to flow out over the land, but should be developed and permitted to send its strength to every section to carry virility and the very essence of Americanism to communities where these precious things are diluted or dying out.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] From Roosevelt’s “Winning of the West.”

Along the western frontier of the colonies that were so soon to be the United States, on the slopes of the wooded mountains, and in the long, trough-like valleys that lay between the ranges, dwelt a peculiar and characteristically American people.

These frontier folk, the people of the up-country, or back-country who lived near and among the forest-clad mountains, far away from the long settled district of flat coast plain and sluggish tidal river, were known to themselves and to others as backwoodsmen. They all bore a strong likeness to one another in their habits of thought and ways of living and differed markedly from the people of the older and more civilized communities to the eastward.

The backwoodsmen were Americans by birth and by parentage, and of mixed race; but the dominant strain in their blood was that of the Presbyterian Irish—the Scotch-Irish as they were often called. Full credit has been awarded the Roundhead and the Cavalier for their leadership in our history; nor have we been altogether blind to the deeds of the Hollander and the Huguenot; but it is doubtful if we have wholly realized the importance of the part played by that stern and virile people, the Irish, whose preachers taught the creed of Knox and Calvin. These Irish representatives of the Covenanters were in the west almost what the Puritans were in the Northeast, and more than the Cavaliers were in the South. Mingled with the descendants of many other races, they nevertheless, formed the kernel of the distinctively and intensely American stock who were the pioneers of our people in their march westward, the vanguard of the army of fighting settlers, who with axe and rifle won their way from the Alleghenies to the Rio Grande and the Pacific.

They did not begin to come to America in any numbers till after the opening of the eighteenth century; but by 1730 they were fairly swarming across the ocean, for the most part in two streams, the larger going to the port of Philadelphia, the smaller to the port of Charleston. Pushing through the long settled lowlands of the seacoast, they at once made their abode at the foot of the mountains, and became the outposts of civilization. From Pennsylvania, whither the great majority had come, they drifted south, along the foothills and down the long valleys, till they met their brethren from Charleston who had pushed up into the Carolina back-country. In this land of hills covered by unbroken forests they took root and flourished, stretching in a broad belt from north to south, a shield of sinewy men thrust in between the people of the seacoast and the red warriors of the wilderness. All through this region they were alike; they had as little kinship with the Cavalier as with the Quaker; the west was won by those who have been rightly called the Roundheads of the south, the same men who, before any others, declared for American independence.

But indeed they were fitted to be Americans from the very start; they were kinsfolk of the Covenanters: they deemed it a religious duty to interpret their own Bible, and held for a divine right the election of their clergy. For generations their whole ecclesiastical and scholastic systems had been fundamentally democratic. In the hard life of the frontier they lost much of their religion, and they had but scant opportunity to give their children the schooling in which they believed; but what few meeting-houses and school-houses there were on the border were theirs.

A single generation, passed under the hard conditions of life in the wilderness, was enough to weld together into one people the representatives of these numerous and widely different races; and the children of the next generation became indistinguishable from one another. Long before the first Continental Congress assembled, the backwoodsmen, whatever their blood, had become Americans, one in speech, thought and character, clutching firmly to the land in which their fathers and grandfathers had lived before them. They had lost all remembrance of Europe and all sympathy with things European; they had become as emphatically products native to the soil as were the tough and supple hickories out of which they fashioned the handles of their long, light axes. Their grim, harsh, narrow lives were yet strangely fascinating and full of adventurous toil and danger; none but natures as strong, as freedom-loving and as full of bold defiance as theirs could have endured existence on the terms which these men found pleasurable. Their iron surroundings made a mould which turned out all alike in the same shape. They resembled one another, and they differed from the rest of the world—even the world of America, and infinitely more the world of Europe—in dress, in customs and in mode of life.

CHAPTER II
THE ORIGIN OF THE MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS

Strange impressions have prevailed in regard to the moonlight schools. Some have imagined them to be schools where children study and play and scamper on the green, like fairies by the moonlight; others have supposed them to be schools where lovers stroll arm-in-arm, quote poetry and tell the old, old story by the light of a witching moon; others, perhaps because these schools originated in the mountains of Kentucky, have speculated upon their being schools where moonshiners, youthful and aged, are instructed in the best method of extracting the juice from the corn, and, at the same time, one so secretive as to prevent government interference.

Moonlight schools were first established in September, 1911. They had their origin in Rowan County, Kentucky. They were designed, primarily, to emancipate from illiteracy all those enslaved in its bondage. They were, also, intended to afford an opportunity to those of limited education who desired to improve their store of knowledge.

These schools grew out of the only condition that can give to any institution permanent and substantial growth—an imperative human need. This need was expressed, not by any theorist or group of theorists but by the illiterates themselves.

When I was Superintendent of Rowan County schools, I acted as voluntary secretary to several illiterate folk—a mistaken kindness—I ought to have been teaching them to read and write. Among these folk there was a mother whose children had all grown up without learning save one daughter who had secured a limited education, and when grown, had drifted away to the city of Chicago, where she profited by that one advantage which the city possessed over the rural district—the night school. She so improved her education and increased her efficiency that she was enabled to engage, profitably, in a small business. Her letters were the only joys that came into that mother’s life and the drafts which they contained were the only means of relieving her needs. Usually she would bring those letters to me, over the hill, seven miles, to read and answer for her. Sometimes she would take them to the neighbors to interpret. Once after an absence of six weeks, an unaccustomed period, she came in one morning fondling a letter. I noticed an unusual thing—the seal was broken.

Anticipating her mission, I inquired, “Have you a letter from your daughter? Shall I read and answer it for you?”

She straightened up with more dignity and more pride than I have ever seen an illiterate assume—with more dignity and more pride than an illiterate could assume as she replied, “No, I kin answer hit fer myself. I’ve larned to read and write!”

“Learned to read and write!” I exclaimed in amazement. “Who was your teacher, and how did you happen to learn?”

“Well, sometimes I jist couldn’t git over here to see you,” she explained, “an’ the cricks would be up ’twixt me an’ the neighbors, or the neighbors would be away from home an’ I couldn’t git a letter answered fer three or four days; an’ anyway hit jist seemed like thar was a wall ’twixt Jane an’ me all the time, an’ I wanted to read with my own eyes what she had writ with her own hand. So, I went to the store an’ bought me a speller, an’ I sot up at night ’til midnight an’ sometimes ’til daylight, an’ I larned to read an’ write.”

To verify her statement, she slowly spelled out the words of that precious letter. Then she sat down, and under my direction, answered it—wrote her first letter—an achievement which pleased her immeasurably, and one that must have pleased the absent Jane still more.

A few days later a middle-aged man came into the office, a man stalwart, intelligent and prepossessing in appearance. While he waited for me to dispatch the business in hand, I handed him two books. He turned the leaves hurriedly, like a child handling its first books, turned them over and looked at the backs and laid them down with a sigh. Knowing the scarcity of interesting books in his locality, I proffered him the loan of them. He shook his head.

“I can’t read or write,” he said. Then the tears came into the eyes of that stalwart man and he added in a tone of longing, “I would give twenty years of my life if I could.”

A short time afterward, I was attending an entertainment in a rural district school. A lad of twenty was the star among the performers. He sang a beautiful ballad, partly borrowed from his English ancestors but mostly original, displaying his rare gift as a composer of song.

When he had finished, I went over and sat down beside him. “Dennis,” I said, “that was a beautiful ballad. It is worthy of publication. Won’t you write a copy for me?”

His countenance, which had lighted up at my approach, suddenly fell, and he answered in a crest-fallen tone, “I would if I could write, but I can’t. Why, I’ve thought up a hundred of ’em that was better’n that, but I’d fergit ’em before anybody come along to set ’em down.”

These were the three incidents that led directly to the establishment of the moonlight schools. I interpreted them to be not merely the call of three individuals, but the call of three different classes; the appeal of illiterate mothers, separated from their absent children farther than sea or land or any other condition than death had power to divide them; the call of middle-aged men, shut out from the world of books, and unable to read the Bible or the newspapers or to cast their votes in secrecy and security; the call of illiterate youths and maidens who possessed rare talents, which if developed might add treasures to the world of art, science, literature and invention.

CHAPTER III
SURPRISES OF THE FIRST SESSION

The opening of the day schools to them was first considered, but the day schools were already crowded with children, and anyway, illiterates, more than any other class, are chained to labor by day. Then came the thought of opening the schools at night, but bad roads with innumerable gullies, high hills and unbridged streams were obstacles to overcome. Besides, the county had been, at one time, a feud county and the people were not accustomed to venturing out much after night. It was decided to have the schools on moonlight nights, and let the moon light them on their way to school.

The teachers of the county were called together and the conditions laid before them. They were asked to volunteer to teach at night those whom the schools of the past had left behind. To their everlasting credit be it said that not one of those teachers expressed a doubt or offered an excuse, but each and every one of them, without a single exception, volunteered to teach at night, after she had taught all day, and to canvass her district in advance to inform the people of the purpose of these schools and to urge them all to attend.

This preliminary canvass was made on Labor Day, September 4, 1911. The teachers of Rowan County celebrated the holiday by going out into the highways and byways to gather in to school all who needed to learn. They went into every farm-house and hovel, inviting both educated and uneducated to attend.

On September 5, the brightest moonlight night, it seemed to me, that the world had ever known, the moonlight schools opened for their first session. We had estimated the number that would attend, and an average of three to each school, one hundred and fifty in the entire county was the maximum set.

We waited with anxious hearts. The teachers had volunteered, the schools had been opened, the people had been invited but would they come? They had all the excuses that any toil-worn people ever had. They had rugged roads to travel, streams without bridges to cross, high hills to climb, children to lead and babes to carry, weariness from the hard day’s toil; but they were not seeking excuses, they were seeking knowledge, and so they came. They came singly or hurrying in groups, they came walking for miles, they came carrying babes in arms, they came bent with age and leaning on canes, they came twelve hundred strong!

They came carrying babes in arms.

There were overgrown boys who had dropped out of school at an early age and had been ashamed to re-enter the day school and be classified with the tiny tots. These came to catch up again. There were maidens who had been deprived of education, through isolation, invalidism or some other cause, but who felt that there was something better for them in life than ignorance. There were women who had married in childhood, practically, as is so much the wont of mountain girls—but who all their lives had craved that which they knew to be their inherent right—their mental development. By their sides were their husbands, men who had been humiliated when they had made their mark in the presence of the educated and when forced to ask the election officers to cast a vote for them for the candidates of their choice. There were middle-aged men who had seen a hundred golden opportunities pass them by because of the handicap of illiteracy, whose mineral, timber and material stores, as well as their time and labor, were in the control of the educated men, making them but beggars, as it were, on the bounty of those whom they enriched. There were women whose children had all grown up and vanished from the home, some of them into the far West, and when the spoken word and the hand-clasp had ceased there could be no heart-to-heart communication, for the third person as an interpreter between mother and child is but a poor medium at best. These and other folk—some half educated and some more—made up these schools.

“Just to learn to read my Bible!” was the cry of many a patriarch and many a withered dame.

“Just to write my children with my own hand, and to read their letters with my own eyes!” was the cry of the mother’s heart.

“Just to escape from the shame of making my mark!” was the appeal of the middle-aged man.

“Just to have a chance with the other folk—to be something and to do something in the world!” was the expressed desire of youth and maid.

Young men and women whose chance had come.

The youngest student was aged eighteen, the oldest eighty-six. It was a scene to bring tears to the eyes, but surely one to make the heart rejoice, to see those hoary-headed old people and those robust young people seated at their desks studying together, or standing in a row in class to spell, or lined up at the blackboard to solve problems or to write.

Many of them learned to write their names the first evening, and such rejoicing as there was over this event! One old man on the shady side of fifty shouted for joy when he learned to write his name. “Glory to God!” he shouted, “I’ll never have to make my mark any more!”

Some were so intoxicated with joy that they wrote their names in frenzied delight on trees, fences, barns, barrel staves and every available scrap of paper; and those who possessed even meager savings, drew the money out of its hiding place and deposited it in the bank, wrote their checks and signed their names with pride. Soon letters began to go from hands that had never written, before, to loved ones in other counties and in far distant states, and usually the first letter of each student came to the County School Superintendent. In a movement full of romance and heroism, there is no incident more romantic or more delightful to record than the fact that the first three letters that ever came out of the moonlight schools came in this order: the first, from a mother who had children absent in the West; the second, from the man who “would give twenty years of his life if he could read and write”; and the third from the boy who would forget his ballads “before anybody come along to set ’em down.” This answered the anxious question in our hearts as to whether the moonlight schools had met the need of those who had made the appeal.

CHAPTER IV
PIONEER METHODS IN DEALING WITH ILLITERATES

There were no readers in print for adult illiterates, so a little weekly newspaper was published as a reading text.

Can we win?

Can we win what?

Can we win the prize?

Yes, we can win.

See us try.

And see us win!

This was the first lesson. It consisted of simple words, much repetition and a content that related to the activity of the reader, all of which, in a first lesson are essential. The lesson referred to a contest between the moonlight schools, and the element of rivalry thus introduced heightened the interest and produced a style of reading that rang with the emphasis of a challenge. There was attained immediately what had been striven for in the day schools with only indifferent success—natural expression in reading.

In the later lessons there was a sentence which read, “The best people on earth live in Rowan County.” Provincial though this may seem to some and flattery to others, it had the desired effect of keeping the interest at white heat, as perhaps a sentence like—“Foreign birds wear pretty feathers” could not have done. One old man read the sentence and openly expressed his approval. He leaned back in his seat and with a hearty laugh exclaimed, “That’s the truth!”

Continuing the lesson, he found a little further along a sentence that read like this, “The man who does not learn to read and write is not a good citizen and would not fight for his country if it needed him.”

This was published before the World War when a vast number of illiterate soldiers were called into the American Army, and is a statement disproved, of course; for illiterate soldiers are courageous and as patriotic as their understanding will permit. But the sentence provoked students to their best possible work. The old man who had exulted in being one of those “best people on earth,” became very thoughtful after reading it, and then resumed his study with grim determination, for to a Kentuckian there is no accusation so humiliating as the one that he, under any circumstances will not fight. To a Kentucky mountaineer it is ignominy complete.

The little newspaper had a fourfold purpose: to enable adults to learn to read without the humiliation of reading from a child’s primer with its lessons on kittens, dolls and toys; to give them a sense of dignity in being, from their very first lesson, readers of a newspaper; to stimulate their curiosity through news of their neighbor’s movements and community occurrences and compel them to complete in quick succession the sentences that followed; to arouse them through news of educational and civic improvements in other districts to make like progress in their own.

News items such as “Bill Smith is building a new barn” and “John Brown has moved to Kansas” caused them quickly to master the next sentence to see what the next neighbor was doing and we found that curiosity was not confined altogether to the women.

“They are building new steps to the school-house at Slab Camp and putting up hemstitched curtains” was the item that caused Bull Fork moonlight school to build new steps, put up hemstitched curtains and paint the school-house besides.

Other elementary subjects were taught by the question and answer method—sometimes called the Socratic method. Only the minimum essentials were included in the course. For instance, the student might not be able to master American history in one short session; he could not learn the principal events of each President’s term, the dates of battles, and the flounderings of the various political parties, but he could at least learn a limited number of important facts that every American citizen should know.

The ignorance of some people, even native-born Americans, about American history, shows that a few basic facts taught them would be a blessed act of enlightenment. An illiterate old man speaking at a patriotic meeting was heard to say, “Uncle Sam, our President of the United States, is a grand old man.” Another during the early stages of the World War declared, “The United States ought to go over and help France. He helped us when we needed it and now we ought to help him.”

The drills in history attempted nothing more ambitious in the beginning session than to clear up such wrong impressions, to open up the subject to the students, and to give them a few essential facts that would stand out or, if further advancement were possible, might be the skeleton on which a thorough course could be hung.

Drills in such facts as by whom America was discovered, by whom it was inhabited and by whom settled; the story of how our independence was won; the name and nature of our first President, may have been history in homeopathic doses, but was eagerly swallowed and was wholesome knowledge for people who knew nothing of the subject. Such cluttering-up facts as the battles we have fought, the number we have killed and mutilated, the traitors we have had, the mistakes we have made in passing and then repealing bad laws, the long struggle to overcome certain glaring evils and to secure certain needed reforms, may well be omitted from a course which requires the utmost condensation.

The drills were elective. Besides history they included civics, English, health and sanitation, geography, home economics, agriculture, horticulture and good roads. Four were to be chosen from these, the four most suitable to the district’s needs.

Arithmetic was a popular study.

English was one of the most popular drills, as well as one most needed. The letter “g,” so often ignored by illiterates, in “ing” was reinstated to its proper dignity and use through drills on such words as “reading,” “writing,” “spelling,” “talking,” “singing,” “cooking,” “sewing” and others with a similar ending. Words commonly mispronounced in the community were made the subject of a drill. Such words as “seed,” “crick,” “kiver,” “git,” “hit,” “hyeard,” “tuk,” “fust,” “haint” and “skeered,” were pronounced repeatedly until the right habit was formed, and the most glaring monstrosities of pronunciation were weeded out. A language conscience was created where none had existed before, and a beginning was thus made toward improving bad English—a beginning which, though but a pathway blazed, was expected to lead out into the broad highway of better, if not perfect, speech. This was long before the crusade for better speech in America was inaugurated with its “National Better Speech Week.”

It was surprising how readily these grown folk mastered certain subjects. Despite the fears of some educators that violence was being done to psychology in the attempt to teach them, the grown folk learned, and learned with ease. One eminent psychologist, who early gave encouragement to the movement, wrote me saying,—“In the moonlight schools you are demonstrating what I have always believed, that reading, writing and arithmetic are comparatively easy subjects for the adult mind.” Some educators, however, declared preposterous the claims we made that grown people were learning to read and write. It was contrary to the principles of psychology, they said. While they went around saying it couldn’t be done, we went on doing it. We asked the doubters this question, “When a fact disputes a theory, is it not time to discard the theory?” There was no reply.

The memory subjects were the most difficult for these adult students. They had passed the “golden memory period,” most of them, many years ago, and though they had memorized ballads, folk-lore and recipes to some extent, nevertheless, memory was in them a thing practically untrained.

They were taught only a few memory gems. The first one was from Whittier’s poem, “Our State.” It was the motto at the head of the little newspaper which they used for a reading text:

The riches of the Commonwealth

Are free, strong minds and hearts of health,

And dearer far than gold or grain

Are cunning hand and cultured brain.

The following lines from Longfellow’s “The Ladder of St. Augustine,” were popular as a memory gem, comparing as it did with their own ladder of enlightenment, of which they were just mounting the first round:

The heights by great men reached and kept

Were not attained by sudden flight,

But they, while their companions slept,

Were toiling upward in the night.

Another gem precious to them was this one taught them by a Louisville club woman, who at the age of seventy-five came and traveled over the hills at night, inspired by a desire to see and to help these men and women who had heroically begun their education late in life:

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.

Only one complete poem was to be memorized during the session. What should it be? With the world so full of poet lore to choose from, should it be Burns’ “To a Mountain Daisy,” Bryant’s “To a Waterfowl,” Lanier’s “Ballad of Trees and the Master,” Wordsworth’s “The Daffodils,” Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar” or should some other gem of poetry be bestowed on those who possessed not even one? The one who introduces the first poem to students like these stands on holy ground, and should prayerfully make the choice. As literature, the selection made might be criticised by some, but as the needed inspiration, the choice was one that met the test.

A man who was for twenty-five years president of a normal school in the mountains, visited the moonlight schools and on hearing the students recite this poem, said, “If these men and women learn nothing else besides this poem during the session it has been worth while for them to attend.” It was Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life” and the sentiment expressed in these two stanzas found an answering echo in their hearts:

In the world’s broad field of battle,

In the bivouac of life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle,

Be a hero in the strife.

…

Let us then be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate,

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.

CHAPTER V
A MOONLIGHT SCHOOL INSTITUTE

The people clamored for the moonlight schools to open the next year. They, and not the teachers, took the initiative and pressed the matter. The teachers responded heartily.

Prior to the opening of the second session, a moonlight school institute was held—the first institute for night school teachers in America, if not in the world. The methods of teaching adult illiterates, materials to use, ways and means of reaching the stubborn and getting them into school and other things relative to the problem of educating adults were discussed. Teachers were not compelled by law to attend this institute, as they were the institute for day-school work but, nevertheless, they did attend, paying their own expenses during the session and participating more earnestly than they had ever been known to participate in any other institute. They compared their experiences of the previous session, and some cases of supreme sacrifice and rare heroism were unconsciously revealed. Most of them had succeeded with but little effort. They had but to meet the rising tide of eager, hungry-minded adults who came rushing to the schools in almost overwhelming numbers. Others had been misunderstood, but had stemmed the buffeting waves of criticism and misunderstanding and, after being tossed about, had ridden to success. None had failed—not one, though some had been compelled to make two or three efforts before they finally succeeded. One had tried it alone and failed, then enlisted the children as recruiting officers and sent them far and wide to gather in their elders, which they did with remarkable success.

One young woman—a perfect blend of the Scotch-Irish type—who was teaching her first school when the moonlight schools were inaugurated told her story with a twinkle in her eye that seemed to belie any suggestion of hardships endured.

“I went to the school-house the first evening,” she said, “and nobody came. I went the second and there was nobody there. I went the third, fourth and fifth and still no pupils. I said, ‘I’m going to be like Bruce and the Spider, I’m going to try seven times,’ and on the seventh night when I got to the school-house I was greeted by three pupils. Before the term closed I had enrolled sixty-five in my moonlight school and taught twenty-three illiterates to read and write.” This, like all the stories, was modestly told. No mention was made of the day by day visits to the homes of illiterates, the long walks, the hours on horseback, the earnest persuasion, the chill of disappointment when waiting at the school-house alone. The Scotch determination was revealed in the words, “I said I’m going to be like Bruce and the Spider, I’m going to try seven times.” The twinkle of humor in her eye was at the recollection, no doubt, of the schemes and designs by which she had outwitted those illiterates and brought them into the school.

One youthful teacher was inclined to apologize for the few she had enrolled and said, “I didn’t have as large a school as the others—just four—but they were in earnest, and I did my best with them, and told them I would teach as long as one of them would come,” and then she added with an evident thrill of pride, “but I taught a preacher to read and write, and that was something, wasn’t it?”

There was no lack of interest or enthusiasm on the part of the volunteer teachers or their pupils, but there was a pitiful lack of suitable text-books and school material for adults, which was voiced many times during the institute as chief of their handicaps. The little newspaper with its reading lessons and drills, a simple copy book, arithmetic taught from the day-school text, these, supplemented by whatever knowledge the teacher could impart or could draw from the community, constituted our supply.

Out of that first institute for night-school teachers we emerged with, perhaps, a few things gained. Our position was strengthened, and we presented a united front, if possible to bring about more unity than had existed the year before; there was a renewed consecration, a common knowledge of all the plans and devices used in the different districts the year before to gain the confidence and secure the attendance of illiterates, and a determination to excel the record of the previous year. Back of us was a battle won; it was the convincing proof that hundreds had been taught, a strength and stay that we had not had in the first year, a mile-stone gained that made the next mile easier to travel, a precedent, which to many is the most powerful argument of any in the world. Some had learned, even the aged and infirm, the poor of sight and dull of mind. Glory be! others could learn, or else must admit themselves more stupid than their neighbors. Each teacher had all the facts, the arguments and the experiences of his fellows, and they knew his, and there was a crystallization of their enthusiasm, which made them well-nigh irresistible.

In those days of earnest discussion and planning for helping a people who had been abandoned by the educational forces of all time, and a people who, themselves, until the moonlight schools burst upon them, had abandoned hope, there was never a doubt expressed, a complaint made or even a suggestion that this volunteer service was a sacrifice or a hardship, or anything but a holiday joy. To them it was a high adventure, not without its tests of endurance and sincerity, but one whose tests they fully met, even the frailest of them, because their faith was absolute; this faith and one other thing they possessed that gave them victory over all hindrances and obstacles—the right spirit. These two are well-nigh unconquerable elements in any noble endeavor.

CHAPTER VI
THE RESULTS OF THE SECOND SESSION

The second session surpassed the first in every particular. We enrolled 1,600 students, and taught 350 to read and write. A man aged eighty-seven entered and put to shame the record of the proud school-girl of eighty-six of the year before.

There were many evidences of individual development and achievement. One man, foreign born, who had been working at a lumber camp at the meager wage of $1.50 per day entered the moonlight school and specialized in mathematics—that part of it pertaining to his business, and at the close of the six weeks’ session, was promoted at a salary double that which he had received before. Some of the school trustees, who were none too well educated, found in the moonlight school their opportunity to advance, which many of them embraced. One school trustee who went from the moonlight school into the day school sat in the seat with his own twelve-year-old boy and studied in the same books and recited in the same classes. Another accompanied his wife to the moonlight school, she being the teacher, and he was so delighted with his progress that he enrolled, also, in the day school—and his deportment was good, so the problem of discipline did not enter in to cause domestic infelicity.

A man aged 87 entered and put to shame the record of the proud school girl of 86 of the year before.

We taught two postmasters to read and write, and Uncle Sam still owes for their tuition. How they received their commissions has never been explained, but it is a well-known fact that while the fathers had held the commissions, their daughters had performed the services. When the fathers were emancipated from illiteracy, the daughters were emancipated from the post-offices and were free to follow their own inclinations. One of them entered High School and the other got married.

We taught four Baptist preachers to read and write. While this may seem inconceivable to some, nevertheless it is a fact that there are men in the mountains and an occasional one in the valleys of the South, who, when they have felt the call to the ministry, have not even permitted the fearful handicap of illiteracy to deter them from doing that which they conceived to be their duty. Naturally these illiterate ministers are much handicapped. “If the blind leads the blind both shall fall into the ditch,” is a maxim very applicable here. Illiterate ministers must depend entirely on others to read the Bible to them, and, unfortunately some turned out by the day school are as poor readers as those who attempted to read for the king, according to the story told in one of McGuffey’s school books. A reader of this type, attempting to read to an illiterate minister one day, read the sentence, “Paul was an austere man,” like this, “Paul was an oyster man.” The preacher declared to his congregation the next Sabbath that Peter was a fisherman and Paul was an oyster man, thus giving his congregation an unusual conception of Paul. Another heard the sentence, “Jacob made booths for his cattle,” read, “Jacob made boots for his cattle,” and discoursed from the pulpit on “Jacob, that humane man, would not even permit his cattle to go barefooted, but made boots for them to protect their tender feet as they walked over the stones.”

These men realized their disadvantages, and they knew the value of the education offered them. They knew it by the best standard by which the value of a thing may be measured—the need of it—a need that in their case had been many times made painfully manifest. So, they accepted the opportunity and used their influence, which was more powerful in the community than might be supposed, among their followers to get them to enroll in the schools. They did more; they gave a new support to the day schools, working for them with zeal, visiting them, speaking in their behalf, and sounding louder than any others the cry, “Everybody, young and old—to the books!”

Nothing better was ever given to any crusader than the privilege which was mine one Sabbath day, that of hearing a minister recently redeemed from illiteracy read from the Bible for the first time and preach from this text, which I thought strangely appropriate, “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?”

I stood in the door of New Hope school-house one evening and watched the throng come trooping through the moonlight to school. There were farmers and farmers’ wives, and their grown sons and daughters; there were former school teachers who had seized this opportunity to break up the stagnation which had overtaken them; there was the community carpenter, the district blacksmith, the postmaster and his wife, the country doctor, the cross-roads merchant, the mill-owner with his crew of illiterate men, all coming joyously, hopefully in quest of knowledge. It was “new hope” indeed to them. Some came to learn, some to teach, but all learned, for those who taught developed amazingly.

“Everybody in school” was the ideal, and it was caught and cherished by children as well as parents. The children exerted a powerful influence in getting their parents to school. The teachers would say to them at the close of the day, “Now, children go home and send your parents to school this evening,” and while it was a pleasantry, it was, also, a request and one that they heeded. The children were wonderful recruiting officers for the moonlight schools. They worked and reported their success with the keen enthusiasm of childhood. One little fellow listened to the others and said sorrowfully, “I talked moonlight schools too but it didn’t do any good.” He persisted, however, and the words, “A little child shall lead them” proved literally true, for the following evening he came to school proudly leading his mother by one hand and his father by the other.

A thousand seeds sown by teachers and school children this year did not bear fruit until the next. Some who did not yield to persuasion and come out to school were found learning in secret at home. However, there were few who did not seek the school more earnestly than it sought them. These few, from pride, and false pride it was, feared to expose their illiteracy and thought to hide it by remaining at home.

For such as these and the stubborn, the decrepit and the disinclined, a home department was established. Gladys Thompson, a blessed teacher, gone to her reward, and whom these pages would memorialize, finding two in her district who could not attend school at night, one because of feebleness and the other because of defective sight, went to their homes between the hours of her day school and moonlight school and taught them to read and write. Her plan was adopted and proved a valuable adjunct to the work of the moonlight school, especially in dissolving the dregs of illiteracy, in teaching the last few or the lone, difficult one.

Besides the incidents of individual development and individual achievement, a new community spirit was born. A school trustee thus describes the change in his community:

“I have lived in this district for fifty-five years, and I never saw any such interest as we have here now. The school used to just drag along and nobody seemed interested. We never had a gathering at the school-house and nobody ever thought of visiting the school. We had not had a night school but three weeks until we got together right. We papered the house, put in new windows, purchased new stovepipe, made new steps, contributed money, and bought the winter’s fuel.

“Now we have a live Sunday school, a singing school, prayer meeting once each week, and preaching twice a month. People of all denominations in the district meet and worship together in perfect unity and harmony, aged people come regularly, and even people from the adjoining county are beginning to come over to our little school-house.”

Good-roads clubs, fruit clubs, agricultural clubs, home economies clubs and Sunday schools were organized. There was an awakened, if not trained leadership, a whetted desire for co-operative activity where individualism and stagnation had prevailed. Friction and factional feeling melted away in districts where they had existed, and a new spirit of harmony and brotherhood came to take their place. Men and women who had hitherto been divided by contention and strife now worked side by side in concord. They were schoolmates and that is a tie that binds.

They were schoolmates and that is a tie that binds.

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.”

“Oh, no,” I protested, “That’s not the way to get rid of illiteracy. You must teach him before he goes.”

A young teacher who felt somewhat discouraged, came in for some advice. “You gave me a list of sixteen illiterates in my district,” said he, “and I’ve taught fifteen of them to read and write; but there’s one stubborn old woman out there who absolutely refuses to learn. I’ve exhausted my resources with her.”

He deserved commendation and he needed encouragement, so I said, “A young man who has made a success as you have done in that most difficult of all places, his home district, who has enrolled one hundred and eleven men and women in his moonlight school and has taught fifteen out of sixteen illiterates to read and write will get the other one. I have no fear but that you will succeed.”

We got the illiteracy record and looked up this old woman’s history. We found that she thought she was a physician, and felt flattered when anyone sought her services as such.

The young man went back to his district and there developed an eruption on his wrist. He went over and consulted this old woman. She diagnosed his case as erysipelas and proceeded to treat him. She concluded that one who possessed such excellent judgment in the selection of a physician, knew enough to teach her something; so while she treated him for erysipelas, he treated her for illiteracy, and she learned to read and write. He sent in her first letter, enclosed in his own, and wrote in great glee, “Tabor Hill district is freer from illiteracy than Boston; come at once and bring the Bibles.” It was the plan at that time to give a Bible to each one who learned to read and write. It was an offer that was made when our vision was small and we could not anticipate the large numbers that would take advantage of it. When hundreds began to claim it, we tried to keep the faith, and some of us have not yet recovered from the strain on our pocketbooks.

I drove out to Tabor Hill one bright moonlit evening to witness the celebration which marked the banishment of illiteracy from the district. The scene was one good for the eyes of those who delight in a real community center, although at that time such a thing as a community center was known in few rural districts in the United States. But here was the highest ideal of a community center being realized. Every person in the district was at the school-house. The men and women, who had been in their seats bright and early, were gaily chatting; the young people stood around the organ, singing their gladsome songs, and around the house, peering in at the windows, was a cordon of spectators six rows deep.

The newly learned gave an exhibition of their recently acquired knowledge. They read and wrote, quoted history and ciphered proudly in the presence of their world. They did it with more pride than ever high school, college or university graduates displayed on their commencement day.

They were next presented with Bibles, and as they came up one by one, some young and stalwart, some bent and gray, to receive their Bibles with gracious words of thanks, it was an impressive scene—and when the Jezebel of the community came forward and accepted her Bible and pledged herself to lead a new life forevermore, there was hardly a dry eye in the house.

Lemonade was a thing rarely seen in those parts, a treat indeed, so it was served as the final reward, not from a punch bowl, as it is served in most places, but from the most available thing to be found on Tabor Hill—a lard can. As they passed in line around the receptacle to be served, an old man rose in the back part of the house and said in a loud voice, “Things certainly have changed in this district. It used to be that you couldn’t hold meeting or Sunday school in this house without the boys shooting through the windows. It used to be moonshine and bullets; but now it’s lemonade and Bibles.”

Some teachers found obstacles in their way, such as the prolonged absence of the illiterates from home, but they watched for their return, and even if they came back and tarried but a short time, they put them for the moment to the book and pen. One teacher said to me, “I have a father and three grown sons in my district who are employed twelve miles from home and are only at home on the Sabbath day. Do you think there would be any harm in my going over there on Sunday and teaching them to read and write?” Remembering those words of the Master when he was asked in regard to healing the withered hand of a man on the Sabbath day—and certainly these were withered hands—and His answer, “Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath day?” I said, “It is a holy day and I think it would be a holy deed.” The young man went Sunday after Sunday and taught the father and sons to read and write.

There are masterpieces of art that one would travel many miles to see, but to me there is no picture more beautiful than the one my imagination conjures up of that young teacher, with those four grown men grouped about him learning to read and write on the Sabbath day.

We tried by every means, to wipe illiteracy out of the county to the last individual. Every one was offered the opportunity and some were offered it repeatedly. The overwhelming majority accepted it with joy and gratitude—a few had to be coaxed. Some few, in their ignorance had a misconception of our motives and stubbornly refused to learn.

When the campaign closed, of the 1,152 illiterates in the county, only 23 were left, and these were classified; six were blind or had defective sight; five were invalids languishing on beds of pain; six were imbeciles and epileptics, two had moved in as the session closed and four could not be induced to learn.

One of the teachers who had taught fifty-six people in her own and other districts to read and write, went into the home of one of these stubborn four after the campaign closed and paid her an exorbitant price for board. She induced this old woman to teach her to knit, and one day when they were sitting and knitting together and had become fast and familiar friends and the time was ripe, she said to her, “Now you’ve taught me something valuable, something, in fact, that I’ve always wanted to know. I’m going to return the favor, I’m going to teach you to read and write, so that you can write to your son in Washington, and the one in Indiana and the one in Illinois. I know how glad they’ll be to have letters from their mother’s own hand, and how glad you’ll be to read letters from them.”

While she was speaking, she was placing the material in the old woman’s hands, and, almost before she knew it she was copying “E” the first letter in her name.

One morning shortly afterward, that little teacher knocked at my door; I opened and she entered. Without a word, but with shining eyes, she laid that old woman’s first letter on my desk.

CHAPTER VIII
THE MOVEMENT EXTENDS TO THE WHOLE STATE OF KENTUCKY

Twenty-five other counties in the State were, by this time, having moonlight schools, and whether it was in a Bluegrass County among the tenant class, in the Purchase among the farmers, in the coal regions among the miners or in mill or distillery sections, there was the same response; men and women thronged to the schools, strove to make up for the time they had lost, and pleaded for a longer term when the session closed. It seemed that the State should extend its aid to these unfortunate men and women and should support the volunteer teachers in their patriotic efforts. So I opened up a correspondence with the Governor on the subject of an Illiteracy Commission. The first letter read as follows:

Morehead, Ky.
Dec. 16, 1913.

Governor James B. McCreary,
Frankfort, Ky.

My dear Governor McCreary:—

I am taking the liberty of addressing you upon the subject of having an Illiteracy Commission formed by legislative act to study the condition of adult illiterates in our State and to give men and women their freedom from this bondage; also, to place our State in a better light before the world. For years there has been a constant cry about Kentucky’s appalling percentage of illiteracy. It has been repeatedly declared that we are near the bottom of the literacy scale.

The purpose of forming such a commission would be to promote voluntary effort on the part of the teachers and others and to co-operate with those who are already making an effort. Many teachers have already volunteered, but they need guidance and inspiration and other teachers need to be called upon to volunteer.

We have taught over a thousand men and women in Rowan County during the past three years, and now some twenty-five counties are putting forth an effort along this line. I have hundreds of letters which demonstrate the fact that men and women can learn to read and write in a very short time after their interest is quickened.

I have letters from octogenarians besides many middle-aged and younger men and women. What has been done in Rowan County in three years in reducing and almost wiping out her illiteracy, can be done in Kentucky during the next six years—by the time the Federal census is taken.

This movement started in Kentucky, and Kentucky is the State which should take the initiative and form a commission to advance this important work. I earnestly request that you will include in your message to the Legislature the suggestion that such a commission be formed.

Hoping that you will see the expediency of this matter, and believing that you will stand for the enlightenment of the 208,084 benighted Kentuckians who cannot read or write, I am,

Yours most respectfully,

By return mail came Governor McCreary’s answer:

Your letter, dated December 16, 1913, was received this morning.

I thoroughly endorse all you say on the subject of an “Illiteracy Commission” “formed by legislative act to study the condition of adult illiteracy in our State and to give men and women their freedom from this bondage.”

I congratulate you on the strong points presented in your letter, and I will be glad to assist you and to encourage any movement which has for its object the elimination of illiteracy from our State and the education of all our people.

I will refer in my message to an “Illiteracy Commission” and the good work that can be performed by such a commission.

After some further exchange of letters with the Governor on the subject, on February 19, 1914, he wrote:

I congratulate you heartily, on the unanimous vote of both branches of the General Assembly in favor of the bill providing for the Kentucky Illiteracy Commission. Your address and the strong arguments in favor of this much-needed legislation caused its passage without opposition.

There is nothing in life more pleasant than to feel that you are living for the benefit of humanity and to contribute to the welfare of men and women.

I respect and admire you for devoting your intellect and energies to your good work among adult illiterates in Kentucky.

The Governor appointed J. G. Crabbe, President of the Eastern Kentucky State Normal, H. H. Cherry, President of the Western Kentucky State Normal, Miss Ella Lewis, Superintendent of Grayson County schools and myself as members of the newly created Illiteracy Commission. The State Superintendent of Public Instruction was a member ex officio.

Here was a Commission new to the world, without chart, guide or compass, starting to attack adult illiteracy, a thing supposed to be invincible. Nobody had even undertaken to abolish adult illiteracy before, so there was no precedent and no literature. The State had not appropriated a dollar for the Commission’s work and there was not a dollar in hand. Scoffers stood on every corner predicting dire failure. Illiteracy statistics were challenged and disputed and much energy that could have been used in the fight on illiteracy was used by the opposition in trying to disprove the statistics, while the proof was lying buried in a vault in the Federal Census Bureau at Washington. The enlightening of public opinion, the quickening of the missionary spirit, the arousing of state pride and the opening of pocketbooks to finance the movement were some of the tasks which confronted this Commission of volunteers besides the actual instruction of illiterates.

The public school teachers being already at the helm were in better position to influence the people than any others. They must be the soldiers in this bloodless war against illiteracy but soldiers in the trenches must have organized and intelligent support from those back home. It was everybody’s war and volunteers from every profession and every walk of life must be enlisted.

The Kentucky Federation of Women’s Clubs led out. In recognition of the service rendered by those pioneer teachers of Rowan County, they sent them on a vacation trip to Niagara Falls and to visit the cities in the northern part of the United States and Canada. It was a novel thing to see public-school teachers traveling in a private car at the expense of the grateful people of a State and being sung to and fêted along the route. It served the purpose of more than a merited reward; it was a stimulus to other teachers and inspired a large number to volunteer.

The Colonial Dames and other women’s organizations made a whirlwind campaign for funds; editors agitated through editorials and news items on illiteracy; ministers celebrated, “No Illiteracy Sunday” in the churches and attacked the evil in sermon, song and prayer; bankers were on the alert for illiterates who made their mark on checks and made a campaign to teach each to read and write; jailers put their prisoners to the book; traveling salesmen carried the slogan of the crusade as stickers on their baggage and talked “no illiteracy” as enthusiastically as they talked dry-goods, notions, boots and shoes; college students placarded the walls of the colleges with illiteracy statistics, used illiteracy as the theme for their finals and each pledged to go home and teach someone to read and write. We even enlisted the politicians and put them to some use. A galaxy of speakers, headed by the Governor and State officials and composed of men and women prominent in politics and in other professions, went out over the State at their own expense fighting illiteracy and urging the establishment of moonlight schools. What these prominent ones advocated so openly, many great souls carried further in some quiet way, either by organizing a moonlight school in some isolated spot, by talking for the cause at some country store, or by going over the hill or across the field to teach some neighbor to read and write.

The Governor had issued a proclamation against illiteracy, and much of this activity was in response to it. As the first proclamation of its kind in history, it is a paper of unusual interest, and is here reproduced:

At the last meeting of the General Assembly of Kentucky, I recommended that a Kentucky Illiteracy Commission be appointed and authorized to inquire into and alleviate the conditions of the adult illiterates in the State, and Mrs. Cora Wilson Stewart, Chairman, Miss Ella Lewis, Doctor J. G. Crabbe, and Doctor H. H. Cherry were appointed as members of the Commission. This Commission has inaugurated a State campaign, Mrs. Stewart being the accepted leader in the efforts to stamp out illiteracy through moonlight schools and other methods.

Upon their call for volunteers about one thousand teachers offered their services and are teaching or making arrangement to teach at night, and others are daily offering their services.

The aim of the Kentucky Illiteracy Commission is noble and exalted and of the greatest benefit, and there is no subject of more importance or of more far-reaching influence than the elimination of illiteracy from our State. We should educate all of our people, those under twenty-one years of age, and those upward of twenty-one years of age. The perpetuity of our free institutions depends upon the intelligence and virtue of the people.

There are 208,084 men and women in our State who cannot read and write, and of whose intelligent efforts along the lines of education, religion and general development and advancement the State is deprived, and this constitutes a deplorable situation and presents a great and urgent need which should be promptly met and relieved.

Instruction should be offered to the mothers for their own sake and for the sake of the children and the benefit of the State; it should be offered to the fathers for their own sake and for the sake of increasing their earning capacity and of promoting home comforts, and for the sake of a more intelligent exercise of the right of suffrage so as to help maintain good government for the State. Instruction should be offered to the young men and young women who have missed opportunities earlier in life, but may yet take hold of instruction and make achievements.

The instruction of all the illiterates in the State will not only give to Kentucky a higher rank, educationally, among the states, but will give her a new and distinct position as the first Commonwealth which has ever attempted to accomplish such a great and important work.

I call upon all to help in the cause of education of those under twenty-one years of age and those upward of twenty-one years of age, and I appeal to every public and private school teacher, every professor in our high schools, colleges and universities, all public officials, every representative of the press, every professional man, every farmer, mechanic and business man and every woman who loves the blessings of education, and to all who desire to promote religion, science, literature or art, or to advance progress or improvement in any line, all who desire to lessen crime, to help in the great work of teaching adult illiterates, both male and female, to read and write and spell and to encourage them to seek knowledge and to add to their acquirements through moonlight schools in illuminated school houses where education is as free as the air we breathe, and where all may come to edify themselves and to drink of the water of life freely.

In testimony whereof, I have caused these letters to be made patent and the seal of the Commonwealth to be hereunto affixed. Done at Frankfort the 21st day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and fourteen, and in the one hundred and twenty-third year of the commonwealth.

James B. McCreary,
Governor.
C. E. Crecelius,
Secretary of State.

(seal)

Cecil H. VanSant,
Assistant Secretary of State.

The United States Bureau of Education, at this time, made Kentucky’s campaign against illiteracy the occasion for a second notice to the public. In this bulletin, which was headed “Kentucky Wars on Illiteracy,” the Commissioner of Education said:

It will be a part of the lasting glory of the State of Kentucky that it has taken the lead in this movement. It is the first state to offer to all the people, of whatever age, an opportunity to learn to read and write, and thus break away from the prison wall of sense and silence within which the illiterate man and woman must live. Whatever else Governor James B. McCreary may do for his State, this proclamation and his recommendation to the legislature that it provide for the appointment of an Illiteracy Commission must always be accounted among his wisest and most important acts.

CHAPTER IX
THE FIRST TEXT-BOOKS FOR ADULT ILLITERATES

Attractive and easy texts and school supplies for adults which would enable them to learn quickly and would stimulate them to further endeavor was a manifest need. The little newspaper had been valuable for a county campaign, but was not so easy to carry out for the State, with its varying conditions and its remote sections to be reached.

Someone had to provide the tools with which these men and women could dig their way out of the mental dungeon in which they were imprisoned. A reader was prepared for them and brought out as quickly as possible. The first lesson was:

Can you read?

Can you write?

Can you read and write?

I can read.

I can write.

I can read and write.

This lesson contained but six words. It appealed to the ego, referring as it did to the student himself, and related to the activity in which he was, at the moment, engaged.

As the lessons progressed, farm improvement, good roads, civics, health, home economics, horticulture, sanitation and thrift were woven into them, and each lesson accomplished a double purpose, the primary one of teaching the pupil to read, and at the same time that of imparting instruction in the things that vitally affected him in his daily life. It was a correlation of subjects which, in adult education is even more necessary than in that of the child.

The lessons on the road, placed side by side, compared the advantage of the good and the disadvantage of the bad roads. The first was:

This is a road.

It is a good road.

It will save my time.

It will save my team.

It will save my wagon.

The good road is my friend.

I will work for the good road.

On the opposite page appeared this lesson:

See this bad road.

It will waste my time.

It will hurt my team.

It will hurt my wagon.

The bad road is my foe.

I will get rid of the bad road.

The key-note sentence in each lesson appeared in script form at the bottom of the page and was to be copied by each student a number of times.

When a man has repeatedly written the sentence: “The good road is my friend. I will work for the good road,” and “The bad road is my foe. I will get rid of the bad road,” he becomes something of an advocate of good roads through suggestion, if through nothing else. The copying of the script sentences in the book pledged the student to progress and impressed upon him certain evils with fine psychological effect. In the reading lessons on voting, the key-note sentence to be copied was: “The man who sells his vote sells his honor.”

This type of copy which was carried throughout the book had, like the reading lessons, a double purpose; the necessary practice in writing and the dwelling on and emphasizing of some vital truth. These took the place of the axioms commonly used in the copy-books for day schools. Instead of writing, “Many men of many minds, Many men of many kinds,” these folk wrote, “I will build a silo,” “I will rotate my crops,” “It is a waste of time and money to raise scrub stock,” “We must protect the forest,” “I will take a newspaper and read it,” “I will keep my money in the bank.”

Taxation is the cause of much unintelligent complaint, and some enlightenment on the subject seemed worth while. One lesson read:

I shall pay my taxes.

I pay a tax on my home.

I pay a tax on my land.