WHITE EDUCATION
"The most progressive nations have now definitely come to the conclusion
that there is no mode of increasing industrial and commercial efficiency
so effective as universal education sufficiently prolonged to effect
permanent improvement in the observing and reasoning powers of the
children." So said that primate of American education, President Eliot, in
an address at Tuskegee, Ala. Though speaking before an audience chiefly
composed of colored people, he was laying down a general principle, for he
goes on to say that in the Southern states "for both whites and blacks the
school time is too short; a large proportion of the children leave school
at too early an age; well-trained teachers are lacking; and the range and
variety of accessible instruction are too small. Hence a large proportion
of both the white race and the black race in the South are in urgent need
of better facilities for education."
This is one point of view; at the other extremity stand such men as a
Southern editor who has recently written, "As an educational influence the
investment of $100,000 in a cotton mill is worth ten times the $100,000
given a Southern college." What does the South as a whole think on this
question of education? What are its needs? What has it so far done? What
is it prepared to do? How does education affect the race question?
Throughout the South there has been and still persists an excellent
tradition of reading and of education among the classes which may be
presumed to afford such advantages for their children. Classical allusions
and quotations from Scripture and Shakespeare are still recognized by all
well-educated men. Some of the few fine old plantation houses contain
elegantly appointed libraries, stopping short, however, at the year 1836,
or whenever the owner died. The city of Charleston has better bookstores
than the city of Albany. Probably more people in North Carolina can
comment on Shakespeare than in Maine; and the man who can read Horace
without a pony and quote Greek without looking at the book is a public
character. Besides this admiration for an old-fashioned learning that is
now passing, the South feels a genuine and lively interest in what goes on
in the world. The present generation of fairly well-to-do people travel
more, see more, read more that is written in their own time, think more
than did their fathers and grandfathers. They feel a genuine interest in
education, put intelligent thought on methods, show respect for the
colleges, are willing to spend money on schools.
Like England in the Eighteenth Century the South abounded in readers of
good literature, while the land was full of ignorance. Though in early
Virginia suggestions were made for free common schools, and Thomas
Jefferson strenuously advocated them, though in the forties and fifties
several Southern states had elaborate paper systems of schools, outside
the large cities there were no graded schools open to all white children
such as were familiar in the North after 1840. Even New Orleans waited for
good school buildings till the fortunate bequest of McDonogh; as for free
rural schools, not a single Southern state had organized and set in
operation a system before the Civil War. From the first the sparse
settlement of the South, the presence of the Negro, and the lack of that
commercial connection with the rest of the world which so arouses the
human mind, made it difficult and perhaps impossible to found a system of
general popular education in that region.
For the higher education of the dominant class much more was done.
Beginning with William and Mary in 1692--the first colonial college except
Harvard--many colleges were established. The first state university was
North Carolina, founded in 1790; the first American university of the
German type was the University of Virginia, which began operations in
1825; the first institution to introduce coeducation was Blount College,
which, about 1800, conferred the degree of A.B. upon a woman. But for
various reasons there never were money enough, students enough, and
trained educators enough to man the Southern colleges that were founded;
and secondary schools to feed the colleges were lacking. The girls had a
few boarding schools, some of which were called colleges by courtesy, but
their education was superficial. Many students who could afford it found
their way to Northern colleges, and that is why John C. Calhoun, the
apostle of slavery, was a Yale graduate, and Barnwell Rhett, the
protagonist of secession, was a graduate of Harvard.
After the Civil War came a dismal period, when some of the old
universities were closed for want of means and of professors who could
take the oath of allegiance. The training of the children of the best
families at that period has been thus described by one who experienced it:
"The schools that I attended--may God forgive the young women who one
after another taught the children of the sparsely settled
neighborhood--were farces and frauds. There was no public school.... We
lived in sort of a secluded training place for Southern gentlemen.... We
never saw a newspaper.... The professor of mathematics--so a rumor
ran--was a freethinker. He was said to have read Darwin and become an
evolutionist. But the report was not generally believed; for, it was
argued, even if he had read Darwin, a man of his great intellect would
instantly see the fallacy of that doctrine and discard it."
One of the few benefits conferred by the Reconstruction governments was a
system of general public schools nominally open to every child in city or
country; but just as the education of Negroes and Poor Whites was
beginning, the schools were separated for the two races, and the Negroes
were cut off from Southern white teachers. To start the new system there
was no tradition of public school training and management, little sense of
public duty in laying sufficient taxes, and the South was very poor. Hence
it was about 1885 before the South put into operation a general
educational system, supported by public taxation. The most recent
statistics available (for 1906) show over 6,000,000 common school pupils
in the South, besides 380,000 pupils in private schools, 118,000 pupils in
public high schools, and 34,000 more in private secondary schools; 38,000
students in public and private universities, colleges and schools of
technology. Every Southern state has now worked out some system of both
rural and urban public schools, and several of them have a sizable State
school fund which is distributed among the districts. The ordinary type of
rural school is practically the district school of the North over again.
City schools are graded in the usual fashion. Most states have a State
Superintendent of Education, and the more progressive communities like
Louisiana are introducing county superintendents with power to compel good
schools. Surely with so many people and so much money, all must be happy
in the South. It is an educational army, with common school infantry,
secondary school cavalry, and in the institutions of higher learning the
heavy artillery and the big guns. Yet it is an army in which every
division, brigade, and regiment is divided into two camps, in which spear
clashes on shield, for hardly anything in the South so brings out into
relief the race question as the problem of education, and especially of
negro education.
The Reconstruction governments made no provision for public high schools,
but the growth of towns and cities in the South and the need of
preparatory schools for the colleges, and the public sense of the value of
secondary education, have compelled the founding of a great number of such
schools, both for girls and boys. Normal schools have also developed till
there are 45 with over 10,000 students. The colleges are also flourishing;
and of professional schools the South has more than 160, with above 12,000
students.
A rough measure of the need of education is the statistics of illiteracy,
which in the reports of the United States Commissioner of Education is
defined as the status of a person over ten years of age who is able
neither to read nor to write. Such illiterates in Germany are about one
per cent of the population; in England about six per cent; in the whole of
the United States about ten per cent. The various states of the Union show
great variations: in Nebraska in 1900 it was two per cent; and the lowest
Southern state, Missouri, with six per cent, showed a greater proportion
of illiterates than any of 27 Northern states; while the 12 highest
communities on the list, from Arkansas with twenty per cent to Louisiana
with thirty-eight per cent, are all Southern but two. Of 58,000,000
persons sufficiently old to be capable of both reading and writing in some
language in the United States in 1900, 6,000,000 were illiterate, of whom
about 4,000,000 lived in the South; of the 21 most illiterate states and
territories, 15 are Southern, the worst being Alabama, South Carolina, and
Louisiana, in all of which more than a third of the population was
illiterate. This alarming state of things is not due wholly to the negro
race; out of 5,700,000 blacks at least ten years of age, 2,700,000, or
forty-eight per cent, were illiterate; out of 13,000,000 Whites,
1,400,000, or eleven per cent, were illiterates. The white illiterates,
with all the advantages of their superior race, were half as numerous as
the Negroes! Out of 1,900,000 white children of school age, 200,000, or
ten and a half per cent, could not read or write; out of 1,000,000 colored
children of the same age, 300,000 were illiterate, which is twenty-five
per cent.
For both races this proportion of illiterates is steadily diminishing; and
that is the effect of the schools and of nothing else. Never again will
the South see a generation like the present, in which many adults have had
no opportunity, or have neglected the opportunity of going to school when
children. These figures accord with the experience of other states; for
instance, New Hampshire in 1890 was as illiterate as Missouri was in 1900;
and in both states illiteracy is steadily decreasing. As for the Southern
Poor Whites, it is true, as Murphy says, that they have a potentiality of
education. "I find no hopelessness in it, because it is the illiteracy,
not of the degenerate, but simply of the unstarted. Our unlettered white
people are native American in stock, virile in faculty and capacity, free
in spirit, unbroken, uncorrupted, fitted to learn."
The gross figures of illiteracy are misleading, because the old people who
cannot now be taught to read and write reduce the general average against
the children who are learning the arts of intelligence. The percentage of
colored illiterates in the whole of the United States in 1900 was
forty-four per cent as against seventy per cent in 1880; in Louisiana the
percentage runs up to sixty-one per cent; but the Negroes between ten
years old and twenty-five show only about thirty per cent of illiteracy,
and that proportion is steadily decreasing. In 1900 the illiterate
children from ten to fourteen years of age were in Mississippi only
twenty-two per cent. With reasonably good schools and proper laws for
compulsory attendance illiteracy may be expected to sink to about the
figures of other civilized nations.
This raises at once the question of the actual efficiency of the schools
in the South, their comparison with other parts of the country, their
probable effect upon the future of the region. The ability to write one's
name and to read a few words is only the beginning of education; the real
educational question in the South is, What are the schools doing beyond
the rudiments of the three R's? Some light is thrown on that question by
comparing the school statistics of the Lower South with those of a block
of similar Western and Northwestern agricultural communities from Indiana
to Utah: 20,700,000 Southerners have 7,000,000 children of school age
(five years to eighteen), of whom 4,400,000 are enrolled and the average
daily attendance is 2,700,000; 20,700,000 Northerners with 6,000,000
children (a million less than the equivalent South) enroll 4,500,000 and
have a daily attendance of 3,200,000. The Southern group has 92,000
teachers; the Northern, 158,000. The value of Southern school property is
$42,000,000; of Northern, $217,000,000, or over four times as much. The
Southern school revenue is $26,000,000; the Northern, $92,000,000. The
average expenditure per pupil attending in the South is under $10.00; in
the North nearly $30.00. The South spent about 16 cents on each hundred
dollars of valuation; the North spent about 20 cents.
When the whole South together, including such rich states as Maryland and
Missouri, is compared with an equivalent population group in the North,
the figures are more favorable to that section: 28,000,000 Southerners
furnished an average daily attendance of 3,700,000 children; the same
number in the North furnished 4,200,000. The South has 127,000 teachers;
the North, 200,000. The total value of Southern school property is
$84,000,000; of Northern, $294,000,000. A comparison of per-capita
expenditure in the year 1900 showed an average school tax in the United
States of $2.84 per head; but not a single state south of Washington
raised above $2.10. Alabama raised only 50 cents, and even the rich state
of Texas only about $1.50, as against $4.80 in North Dakota. Tennessee
spent $1,800,000 a year in public education; Wisconsin, with an equivalent
population, spent $5,500,000; South Carolina, with a population nine
tenths that of California, spent one eighth as much. The state of
Mississippi spent $6.17 per pupil annually; the state of Vermont spent
$22.85.
Inasmuch as the Negroes contribute several million school children and not
very much in taxes, it will be instructive to compare the 12,000,000
Whites of the Lower South with 12,000,000 Northwestern Whites, in those
forms of education which are referable chiefly to the Whites. The Lower
South, on this basis, furnished in 1906 68,600 pupils in public secondary
schools against 172,600 in the equivalent North; the secondary school
plants in the South cost $23,000,000; in the North $52,000,000. The
college students in the South were 27,800; in the North, 27,200. The
Southern college income was $6,000,000; the Northern, $7,500,000. Here,
again, the comparison of the whole South with 18 million Whites against 18
equivalent millions in the Northwest is somewhat more favorable. The
secondary plant costs $40,000,000 against $77,000,000 in the North. The
normal schools of the South have an income of $1,400,000, those of the
North $2,400,000. The Southern college students are 38,000 against 42,000;
and the college income, $9,000,000 against $12,600,000.
The inevitable inference from these figures is that the South still needs
to bring up its equipment and its expenditure if it is to educate as
efficiently as its neighbors; and this presumption is strengthened by
observation of schools of various grades. The Southern city schools are
good, especially in the former border states; St. Louis, Baltimore, and
Louisville come close up to Cleveland, Indianapolis, and St. Paul in the
outward evidences of educational progress. Statistical comparison of a
group of Southern cities with a group of Northern cities of the same
aggregate population shows that in externals they are not far apart; the
Northern schools have more schoolrooms, more teachers and more plant, but
the annual expenditures are about as large in the Southern as in the
Northern group.
The rural white schools are a different matter. It is, to be sure, nearly
thirty years since old Bill Williams explained why there was no school in
the Clover Bottom district in the Kentucky mountains: "They couldn't have
no school because there wasn't nary door or winder in the schoolhouse.
I've got that door and winder, and I paid a dollar for 'em; but I've been
keeping 'em, you see, because there was trouble about the title. Jim
Harris gin us that land, and we 'lowed 'twas all right, because it
belonged to his gran'ther and he was the favorite grandson; but when the
old man died it 'peared like he had willed it to somebody else; and I
wouldn't put no door nor winder into no schoolhouse where there ain't no
title, and there hain't been no school there sence. You want to know when
all that trouble happened 'bout the title? I reckon it was fifteen or
twenty year ago." There are still just such schools or rather such no
schools in many parts of the South.
Even in prosperous regions, buildings, apparatus, and teacher may be
alike, dirty and repellent. Take, for instance, Mt. Moriah school in Coosa
County, Alabama. The building is twenty-five feet square, inclosing a
single room with two windows and two doorways, one of them blocked up. In
the middle is an iron stove, around which on a winter's day are parked
four benches in a hollow square, upon which, or studying in the corner,
huddle and wriggle twenty-three pupils, ranging from seven up to
twenty-one years of age. They are reading physiology aloud, in the midst
of the gaunt room, with very little in the way of blackboards or
materials. An example of the better district schoolhouse is in a populous
region near the mill town of Talassee; a new building with eleven windows,
well ceiled throughout, with a clean gravel space in front, good desks and
plenty of blackboard.
The curse of many of the rural schools is their easy money, for all the
Southern states have a system of state school funds, the income of which
is subdivided among the districts, and is in some of them about enough to
keep up school three or four months on the usual scale of payment to
teachers. When the school fund is exhausted, great numbers of districts
close their schoolhouses, and the result is that the average number of
school days in a year is far below that of Northern schools. In
Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island the public schools are in
session about 190 days; in Georgia, 118; in Arkansas, 87. These are
averages; and since the city schools commonly run seven or eight months,
there must be many districts in which there are not over fifty or sixty
days' school. One of the great educational reforms now going on in the
South is to secure from the local governments appropriations to continue
the schools after the state fund runs out. When the South is sufficiently
aroused to the blessing of education, it will find that it has money
enough for its needs.
Another defect is in the schoolhouses. The Southern towns and cities are
coming to follow the example of the West and North in putting up imposing
school buildings, though there is no such need for elaborate heating
apparatus and ventilation as in the North, and they are in general
simpler. The country schoolhouse is in many cases a big, dirty hut, often
built of logs, wretchedly furnished, and devoid of the commonest
appliances of civilization. There seems to be a feeling throughout the
South that schoolhouses cannot be built wholly out of taxation, but the
people on the ground must contribute at least a part of the cost. You may
find neat and tidy rural schoolhouses, actually painted, but they are far
from typical.
Another difficulty is the teachers. The monthly salaries for white
teachers in several of the Southern states are high. A Coosa County farmer
complains that a teacher in his district is getting $3.50 a day for twenty
days in the month, which was more than any farmer in the district could
earn. But of course her $70.00 a month would only run while school was in
session, which might be five months. In Louisiana rural teachers receive
higher salaries than in any other state in the Union, and no commonwealth
is making such determined effort to improve its rural schools. In the
remoteness of Catahoola Parish may be seen a system of wagonettes to bring
children to central graded schools, a reform which goes very slowly in New
England.
A further reason for the backwardness of the Southern rural schools is
that they are in the hands of county superintendents, whose place until
recently has too often been political. Now there is a body of trained
superintendents who are giving people object lessons in what can be done
even with poor buildings by well-trained teachers. The South is also
bending its energies on normal schools, and the result is a growing body
of teachers with professional spirit, who expect to make the schools their
life work. The state superintendents are also improving in their
professional power. The worst Southern rural schools are not too much
behind those that Horace Mann found in Massachusetts when he began his
work in 1837; the wages of the rural teachers are probably not so low as
those in Maine; and the next decade will see a vast improvement in the
rural schools throughout the South.
So with the secondary schools, where the number of pupils has
astonishingly increased. In 1898 there were in the South 1,107 schools and
72,000 pupils; in 1906 there were 1,685 schools (Texas alone has 321),
5,100 teachers, and 118,000 pupils. A great change has come about in the
education of girls. Nearly half the teachers and nearly two thirds of the
pupils (70,000) in these schools are women, and that means that in
connection with the normal schools, in which there are over 7,000 women
students, the South is now training a body of teachers who are going, to
make a great change in the education of the next generation. The growth of
secondary schools means further that the South is putting an end to a
reproach of many years' standing--namely, that it could not adequately
prepare pupils for college.
It was a severe lesson when the trustees of the Carnegie retiring
allowance fund in 1906 laid down its principle that no grant would be made
to professors in any college which did not come up to the following
standard: "An institution to be ranked as a college must have at least six
professors giving their entire time to college and university work, a
course of four full years in liberal arts and sciences, and should require
for admission not less than the usual four years of academic or high
school preparation, or its equivalent, in addition to the preacademic or
grammar school studies." To the surprise of the Lower South, it was
discovered that only one institution, Tulane University, had insisted on
the condition of four years academic or high school preparation. Several
other organizations are waking the South up to the need of improvements,
such as the Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the
Southern states, with nineteen colleges as members; a commission of the
Southern Methodist Church; the General Education Board of New York, with
its fund of $43,000,000; and the Southern Education Board.
In the South as in the North, there are two types of institutions of
higher learning, the endowed (in most cases denominational) and the
public. The number of Southern colleges is considerable; 166 out of 493 in
the United States--which is not far from the proportion of the population;
but only 8 of these institutions have upward of 500 undergraduate
students, as against 42 in the rest of the Union; and the total number of
undergraduate students in universities, colleges, and technological
schools, 25,300, is about a fifth of the total of 122,000 in the United
States, while the normal proportion would be a third. The property of the
Southern colleges ($99,000,000) is about a fifth of the total college
property; the income of $7,300,000 is about a sixth of the whole, the
benefactions in 1906 ($2,400,000) about a seventh. That is, in number,
wealth, and students, Southern institutions of higher learning represent
about the same reduced proportion to the North as in the case of public
wealth and public expenditures; that means that an average million of
people in the South enjoy less than half the educational advantages
possessed by an average million in the Northwest.
This rather favorable proportion does not obtain in women's education; of
the fifteen colleges for women, recognized by the Bureau of Education as
of full collegiate rank, only 4 are in the South; they include less than
an eighth of the women students, and their property is less than a tenth.
The 95 Southern institutions classified as "Colleges for women, Division
B" are practically boarding schools of secondary grade, and are balanced
by the greater number of Northern girls in high schools; 345,000 against
70,000 Southern high school girls; the 17,000 in private high schools and
academies are overbalanced by 35,000 in the North. One of the great needs
of the South at present is high-class colleges for girls, which shall turn
out a well-grounded and well-trained body of women, interested in public
affairs, and shall be a nursery of high school and college teachers.
The Southern denominational colleges are open practically to men only. The
normal schools receive both sexes, and 4,000 women are registered in the
Southern universities, colleges, and technological schools which are open
to both sexes, as against 10,000 men. As the Southern states grow richer,
they are giving more attention and more money to their public
institutions, but so far few of their advanced institutions take rank
alongside the great Northwestern universities. The University of North
Carolina has 682 students and an excellent tradition; the University of
Texas counts 1,100 men and 400 women, and is in many ways the most
flourishing of the Southern institutions. The University of Virginia,
though it has an annual grant from the legislature, is practically an
endowed institution with 700 students; the University of Georgia has 408
students, though it at one time put forth the whimsical claim that it had
the largest attendance in the United States, surpassing Harvard and
Columbia, a result made up by adding in day scholars in affiliated schools
below the high school grade. The state university funds, including the
federal grants, are usually dispersed among two, or even three or four
small institutions.
There is a vigorous intellectual movement in the South. The recent
graduates, who at one time had a preference for college appointments in
their own colleges, are now giving way to a throng of eager young scholars
who have enjoyed graduate study in American or foreign universities and
hold higher degrees. Wherever you fall in with a body of those men, you
are impressed with their good training and their broad outlook. Politics
are yearly less forceful in such institutions; and probably never again
will there be such an episode as happened in a border state university
about ten years ago. A new president discovered after a time that the
janitor of the college buildings was not disposed to take instructions
from him, whereupon he appealed to the board of trustees to put the man
definitely under his control. The trustees held their meeting, at the end
of which the janitor appeared with a bundle of blue envelopes, the first
of which he offered to the president with the confidential remark, "You're
fired!" The others were addressed to the professors, every one of whom was
summarily removed. Having thus gone back to first principles, the trustees
elected a new president and a new faculty, including some of the old
teachers; strange to say, that university has since become one of the most
promising in its section. In all institutions of this kind and in the
literary faculties of many colleges is a sprinkling of Northern
professors, for the Southern colleges, like the Northern, are more
tolerant than they were half a century ago. Most of the young men now
receiving appointments in colleges and scientific institutions have
studied in other Southern colleges, in the North or in Europe; and in all
the learned associations they take their places as well-equipped and
productive men.
Professional education has also made great strides in the South. Many of
the most promising young men are sent to Northern law and medical schools,
not only because of their supposed educational advantages, but because it
is thought well for a young man to have a double horizon; but the greater
number find instruction in nearby professional schools either established
by practitioners or attached to some university. For the medical students
the hospitals which are springing up everywhere furnish clinical material.
Theological education is less systematized; the older and more settled
denominations have good schools, but too many preachers in the back
country have no other training than a natural "gift of the gab." In the
agricultural and mechanical colleges, and the engineering departments of
the endowed public universities, the South is educating her future
engineers and scientific men.
The educative effects of travel and intercourse with other people are
making themselves felt. In ante-bellum times few Southerners traveled
widely, except the comparatively small number of the richer young men who
found their way to Northern colleges, or abroad. Until ten years ago it
was difficult to hold Southern conventions and gatherings of intellectual
men of kindred aims because people could not afford to travel. Now there
is more circulation, more knowledge of the world, more willingness to see
in what respects the South lags behind, a greater spirit of coöperation
between Southern states, and with some people of other sections. The norms
of common schools, secondary schools, and higher institutions are now laid
down on about the same principles as in the North, and it remains to
develop them, to make paper systems actual, to get more of the school
children registered, more of the registered children in attendance, more
months of school for those who attend, better teachers for the longer
sessions, new buildings to accommodate the larger numbers, more students
to fill the little colleges and to enlarge the universities. White
education in the South is in a progressive and hopeful condition.
In the means of education outside of schools and colleges the South is
still much behind the richer North, and still more behind foreign
countries. Museums and picture galleries are few, aside from private
collections in Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, and New Orleans. The fine
old paintings that one sees in clubs and public buildings come from an
earlier age, for there are few Southern artists. Nevertheless, the
architectural standard is quite as high as in the North, and the tradition
of wide spaces and colonnades persists. In its public buildings the South
is in general superior to the North; even in remote county seats one may
find buildings old and new of classic proportions, dignified and stately.
The South has been poor in collections of books, but all the larger
Universities have fair libraries, and the cities have public libraries,
and the numerous gifts of Carnegie have stimulated this form of public
education. Several Southern cities, as, for example, Galveston, have
endowed institutions for lecture courses on the general plan of the Lowell
courses in Boston.
The South has never been highly productive in literature, and too much of
the Southern writing bears evidence of a purpose of speaking for the South
or in a Southern fashion. A considerable part of the books written by
Southerners are about the South in one way or another; there is a sense of
sectional obligation. This is the less necessary for a region from which
have sprung Poe, one of the world's acknowledged literary delights, and
Lanier. There is a school of Southern writers, of whom the late Joel
Chandler Harris is a type, who have found broader themes of life about
them and have given to the world the delightful flavor of a passing and
romantic epoch. The principal literary work of the South is now in its
newspapers.
Another intellectual force is found in the Southern historical societies,
of which there is one in almost every state. They have shown a lively
interest in saving the records of the early history of the South and in
preserving its memorials from destruction. There are also two or three
literary periodicals of distinct literary merit, in which one finds an
expression of the newest and most modern South.
In every direction, then, the white people of the South are alert. The
schools are fair and improving, the community is awake to the need of
educating all the children, even in the remote country; and though the
taxes for education are still very light, there is a disposition to
increase them. In Texas, for example, where there is a state tax, the
people have by constitutional amendment authorized all school districts to
double that amount by local taxation. If the Whites were the only people
to be educated, and if education were the panacea, if it brought assurance
of good government, the Southern question would in due time take care of
itself.
The most hopeful sign of intellectual progress is the association of those
most interested for the promotion of their common ends; such is the
Coöperative Education Association of Virginia which holds annual meetings
and general conferences for education. These meetings are means of
attracting public attention to the problems and of suggesting the
solution.
For many years education of the Whites in the South has been aided from
the North, first, through considerable gifts for the education of the
Mountain Whites, and second through more sparing aid to colleges for
Whites in the lowlands. Recently, however, the attention of wealthy
Northern givers has been turned to the importance of uplifting the whole
white Southern community, and after several annual visits to the South
under the patronage of Mr. Robert C. Ogden, of New York, a Southern
Education Board was formed, the purpose of which is to rouse people to the
need of improving their education; following it is the General Education
Board, which makes small gifts to educational institutions usually on the
stipulation that they shall raise a conditional amount varying from an
equal sum to a sum three times as great. This is the more necessary as
there are only two or three institutions in the South that have anything
like an adequate endowment. Tulane University in New Orleans has a
property of several millions, and the University of Virginia has recently
raised a new million outright, but the South has no large body of people
with superfluous funds and its giving turns habitually rather in the
direction of church construction and foreign mission work than to
educational institutions. Of $1,400,000 given to the University of
Virginia during thirty years, $900,000 came from Northerners and $270,000
more from foreigners living in the South.
Of late, voices have been raised for some kind of Federal aid to Southern
education on the plea that where there is the greatest intellectual
destitution there is the most need for money. The appeal is contrary to
the usual instincts of the South in matters of federal and state
relations, and is strongly opposed by part of the Southern press,
particularly the _Manufacturers' Record_, which has waged a campaign
against even the private gifts made through the General Education Board.