By Henry N. Snyder, LL.D.
[Illustration:
HENRY NELSON SNYDER, M.A., LITT.D., LL.D.
]
President Henry N. Snyder, of Wofford College, speaks to our readers
in a thoughtful and commanding way on a question, that with the rapid
and general development of the South is becoming more and more
recognized as a vital popular problem.
As the executive head of one of the South’s most representative
denominational colleges and as a lecturer on the subject before
representative summer schools for teachers, President Snyder has had
occasion to bestow upon his theme serious and special study and his
intelligent and earnest treatment of his topic tends to present it in
a practical and popular form and to eliminate from it those
speculative and academic qualities that have so generally
characterized its discussion.
A native of Macon, Ga., where he was born during the final year of the
Civil War, President Snyder was reared and educated in Nashville
where, after completing the course of the city high schools he entered
Vanderbilt University in 1883, and from which he graduated in arts,
with both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
He was until 1890 connected with his alma mater, the last three years
of which time he was instructor in Latin and student of graduate
subjects. He subsequently pursued advanced special work in German and
English universities, since which time, until 1902, he was professor
of the English Language and Literature in Wofford College. He has been
president of this institution since 1902.
President Snyder’s contribution to the actual promotion and solution
of his subject has been considerable, as he has served as lecturer on
English Literature at the South Carolina State Summer School and the
Summer School of the South, at Knoxville, Tenn.
He is a frequent contributor to magazines on literary and educational
subjects and is a member of the Modern Language Association of
America, and the Religious Education Association.
The American democracy is not so much an achievement as a prophecy. Its
chief glory cannot be in what it is, but in what it is to be. It has not
attained the measure of its growth till every man in it has a fair
chance and an open field to make the most of himself, and has done so
with reasonable completeness. It is therefore essentially idealistic,
and, however deeply concerned with the present hour’s duty and work, its
face is ever set toward a larger future for itself. But this larger
future can only be realized in a finer and more efficient quality of the
men and women who are to do the work and continue the unfolding life of
this free democracy of equal opportunity,—equal opportunity not for the
few favored by fortune or circumstance, but for every child born in it.
No democracy dare have any other mind with reference to itself.
The most necessary, as the most inspiring, work therefore which a
democracy assumes to do is that of seeing to it that all its children
are rightly trained for intelligent service and skilled efficiency. This
task it undertakes not only that it may live as a collective body but
also that each citizen may in the best and fullest manner express his
own individual life. In this two-fold view of the matter popular
education, the putting of all the children of all the people into the
best possible schools, under the best possible teachers, for the longest
possible time, becomes the sacred and imperative duty of a democracy
that cares for to-morrow as well as for to-day. And the to-morrow of a
democracy, in all the manifold activities of its complex life, is
determined by what it does for the child of to-day.
From this viewpoint no democracy ever had a better opportunity to test
itself and its ability to control the future than that phase of
democratic life working out its destiny here at the South. For the
conditions are such as to make the task of training the citizenship of
the future almost the one thing to be done. The figures representing
those conditions have been so often used of late that one is really
inclined to resent the very mention of them. Nevertheless, a proper
understanding of the conditions entering into this, as into any problem,
is the first step toward the solution. Moreover, in this struggle now on
for popular education at the South, it is no part of courage to blink a
fact because it is ugly, nor of sane judgment to let anything or anybody
beguile us into fighting our battle in the dark. We should keep steadily
before us the facts as they are, the stupendous nature of the work that
lies ahead and how it is to be done, and withal the eternally vital need
of doing it now and in the right way.
Now as far as figures can give one anything like an adequate conception,
the situation is about this: In 1900 there were 8,683,762 persons of
school age in what we are used to call the Southern states,—5,594,284
white persons and 3,089,478 black. It should be said in passing, yet
with all emphasis, that the South may as well get used to reckoning the
children of its former slaves in both its educational assets and
educational liabilities. Justice and expediency are both vitally
involved in this view of the situation. Now, of this future citizenship
only sixty out of every hundred were actually in process of school
training, and of this enrollment only forty-two were, on the average, in
daily attendance. The only comfort that one can get in this situation is
by looking back and seeing that conditions have been worse and forward
to see that they are bound to be better.
These figures, then, represent the mass of material that popular
education has to deal with and the actual portion upon which it is
really working. Now when one considers the machinery of instruction, the
teachers, the school-property, the length of terms, and the capital
invested, one sees even more vividly that the democracy of the immediate
future must be limited in its development, not alone because its
children are not in process of training but because the means themselves
are inadequate and inefficient. The entire country pays, on the average,
for its men teachers a salary of $49.00 per month, for its women $40.00.
The South gets its men for $35.63 and its women for $30.47. Leaving out
of consideration the quality of service to be had at such a pitifully
low price, one can be perfectly sure that no high professional ideals
and standards can be maintained at such rates. But let us look at the
matter from another standpoint; upon every child in its schools the
South spends $6.95 as against $10.57 for the entire country; while some
states of the West spend $31.49, some Southern states are spending only
$4.50. It is not surprising therefore to see what this means as to the
average length of school term among us: in the entire country every
child has a chance to be in school at least 145 days, while the child of
the South has open to him only 99 days. Clear enough is it, then, that
democracy in this section is, in comparison with the rest of the Union,
handicapped in the very beginning of its race. Moreover, the relation of
popular education to its best life, in the light of the situation
revealed by these figures, is a deep and fundamental one.
How deep and fundamental this is, can be best realized by the
comparative density of illiteracy already prevailing at the South. Fifty
out of every hundred negroes ten years old and over can neither read nor
write, and nearly thirteen out of every hundred whites are in the same
condition of darkness. In the United States as many as 231 counties
report a proportion of twenty per cent of illiterate white men of voting
age, and of the total, 210 of these counties are in the South. Now the
conditions represented by all these figures—and at best they can only
bring the matter vaguely to our conception—in one sense, on account of
the magnitude of the work to be done and the difficulties in the way,
are of a nature almost to take hope and courage from us. On the other
hand, the absolute need of doing the work, the fruits that must follow,
and the progress already made are a clarion call to patience,
patriotism, faith, and unresting effort.
But before taking up the progress already made, it would be well to
remind ourselves once more of some of the causes which have brought
about the present state of affairs and render the Southern situation as
to popular education a peculiar one. In the first place, there was the
all but disheartening poverty due to the collapse of the entire social
and industrial system of the South. War, followed by Reconstruction, did
the work with ruthless thoroughness. From 1860 to 1880 taxable property
at the South suffered a decrease in value of $2,167,000,100, that is, to
less than one-half its value at the breaking out of the War. Indeed, in
1870 the one little state of Massachusetts paid considerably over
one-half the amount of taxes paid by the entire South. It is clear,
then, that for nearly twenty years the South was under the simple yet
stern and inexorable compulsion of how to live. In this light,
therefore, what it did accomplish in the matter of training its children
is to be regarded as a really heroic achievement, and is no occasion of
blame because, by comparison, it seems so little. Absolutely, it is
worthy of all praise.
It should be remembered, too, that in spite of its poverty, in spite of
the fact that its energies have been given to a pressing struggle for
its very existence, the South has had to maintain a two-fold system of
popular education. It has had to care for the children of its former
slaves in separate schools, and bear virtually all the expense. This has
both complicated its problem and necessarily limited its educational
advancement. But at this time it can be asserted with emphasis, that the
South, in spite of certain reactionary eddies in the current of its
thinking, will still continue to support Negro schools. Our best thought
is fast fixing itself in the unalterable conviction that to keep the
black man in ignorance is an injustice to ourselves as well as to him;
and, moreover, that expediency itself dictates that he shall neither
remain sunken in the night of illiteracy nor mistrained for the sphere
of life for which he is, in his present stage of advancement, fitted.
Therefore popular education has meant, will continue to mean, with the
South a two-fold system of education. And the Southern white man, with
his own taxes, is largely to maintain it,—at least for many years to
come.
But above everything else, the chief consideration with reference to the
whole question of popular education in the South, both as to its needs
and difficulties, is that we are dealing with a rural folk and rural
conditions. More than eighty-three per cent of the Southern people live
in the country,—a pure, wholesome Anglo-Saxon stock of unwasted, if
untrained, physical, intellectual and moral qualities. The problem of
popular education in villages, towns, and cities is virtually solved.
The task therefore is concerned wholly with what we shall do for and
with the saving, and in this case, the larger remnant which draws its
support from the fields. No democracy ever had better or richer assets
from which to recuperate itself, or a more inspiring duty to perform in
giving this class opportunity for training and development. But from the
very nature of the case the proper performance of this duty is a task of
stupendous magnitude, and even an approximate accomplishment of it must
wait upon necessarily slow processes. The deep-seated conservatism of
the people, the extent to which illiteracy prevails and the narrow
poverty in many sections, remote and widely-sundered homes, roads almost
impassable at certain seasons of the year, the immediate need of the
children in the fields, even if the best of schools were at their
doors,—here are conditions which would discourage any but a brave and
patient people who believe in the divine right of all to whatever power
there is in knowledge and the bounden duty of the state to offer to all
its opportunities.
However, neither the pressure of poverty, nor the double burden of
caring for two races in separate schools, nor the special difficulty
growing out of the peculiar nature of conditions, nor the huge magnitude
of the task, has daunted courage or enfeebled effort. On every hand
there are inspiring marks of progress, and results prophetic of greater
advances yet to follow. In the first place, the last six or eight years
have been a period of quite remarkable educational agitation throughout
the entire South. Every kind of leadership has been systematically at
work to quicken the conscience and stir the sentiment of the people on
this subject. Pulpit, press, organized philanthropy, and civil authority
have combined with professional educators in a campaign whose
rallying-cry has been the uplifting of democracy through the power of
the schoolhouse. The general result is an interest both wide and
intelligent, an awakened conscience, and an aroused sentiment throughout
all this Southern land, all of which tends to put behind special and
definite efforts of improvement an irresistible public opinion. The
South is therefore keenly realizing its sense of civic obligation and
its duty to its own future, and when the South once sees its duty and
that rich vein of sentimentality, which lies at the basis of its
temperament, is once touched, there will be no turning back. And surely
it has now seen its duty and its sentimentality is thoroughly alive to
all that popular education means to the child of to-day and the state of
to-morrow.
For this condition we have to thank, not only the church, the press, and
organized philanthropy, but a strikingly courageous and far-sighted
political leadership, which the situation has called forth,—men, for
example, like Governor Frazier of Tennessee, Governor Aycock of North
Carolina, Governor Heyward of South Carolina, and Governor Montague of
Virginia, men who have convincingly fought for the inalienable right of
every child to be trained by the state at public expense. To their
influence must also be added the skilled patriotic service of such State
Superintendents of Public Instruction as Mynders, Martin, MacMahan,
Merritt, Whitefield and Joyner,—men who seemed to regard their office as
peculiarly the most sacred of all trusts committed by a people to public
servants. The people have listened to such as these when they might have
turned deaf ears to voices from any other source.
Too much importance cannot be attached to the sentiment which has been
thus created in the last half-dozen years. It was the necessary step in
the preparation for more definite things. Its immediate value has been
in the awakening of people to such an extent that they will not only put
their children in school but will also tax themselves for educational
purposes. General and local taxation, as a result, has been increasing
at a significant rate. Indeed, some of the Southern states are now
giving a larger proportion of their income from taxes to the use of
education than the states of the North and West. They are everywhere
building better schoolhouses, furnishing better equipment, and demanding
better trained teachers. Consolidation of schools, free transportation,
longer terms, expert supervision, the removal of educational matters
from the blight of political influence, are the things which now make
the educational atmosphere fairly electric with reform, and the next few
years will show a growth that will please even the most ardent optimist.
This general agitation has thus connected with it certain definite aims
and methods of educational policy, which have already taken shape and
are bearing fruit. Not the least important among them has been the
effort to secure, above everything, trained teachers. Many of the states
have either established Normal Schools for this purpose or have added to
their Universities departments of Education. But it has been felt that
even these were not sufficient to meet the demands for a trained
teaching force. Hence in some of the states, in Georgia, Mississippi,
and South Carolina, for example, summer schools with an attendance of
from four to six hundred have been running for a number of years, and at
Knoxville the great Summer School has been drawing from all over the
South a choice body of teachers to the number of two thousand, and
offering them the best instruction to be had, North or South. To the
influence of these general schools is to be added that of the County
Institutes, which of themselves have been an inestimable source of
power. All have stood for an intelligent knowledge of the situation, for
the missionary spirit of propaganda, for a broader and more accurate
scholarship on the part of the teacher, for the application of expert,
up-to-date methods of instruction and organization, and for the raising
of the teacher’s work to the dignity of a great profession. The
significance of all this is that this movement for popular education is
laying its foundations in wisdom in that it sees that the teacher
himself must first be taught.
And the work has already begun to tell to a degree that can even now be
measured. In the last score of years Virginia has reduced its ratio of
white illiteracy by 7 per cent, Georgia and Mississippi by 8, Kentucky
by 10, Alabama by 11, North Carolina and Florida, by 12, Tennessee by
13, and Arkansas by 14 per cent. These figures are eloquent of present
progress and inspiringly suggestive of the future. Democracy is really
caring for its own. It is told that a famous German teacher of the
Reformation once stepped into his schoolroom and greeted his pupils with
these words: “Hail, reverend pastors, doctors, superintendents, judges,
chancellors, magistrates, professors.” Some there were who laughed at
him as a joker and mocker. But he was wiser than they, and in his wisdom
was the prophet of that true democracy which sees not merely the child
in the school, but the future man in the state. The South therefore
views in this way the progress already made and realizes that what it
now does and will do with its children in the schools of the people is
the true measure of its own life in the coming years.