You can’t be wise on an empty stomach. You can’t fill that stomach until
you are wise. Nor can you be educated or fed until you are good, happy,
clean—nor good, happy or clean until you are educated and fed. In the
individual, then, life is a complete circle, every part of which is
integral. In the whole group of individuals, there is the same circle,
no part of which is complete in itself, or even significant unless
considered merely as a segment.
This fundamental fact, so obvious, yet so seldom fully recognized, gave
form and force to the Conference on Education in the South, recently
held in Richmond. Farmers, business men, country preachers, officials,
writers, editors, physicians, plain citizens, and school teachers—some
2,300—met together to discuss the problems which are common to them all.
Wonder of wonders, the “conference” was a real conference; spell binding
addresses were conspicuous by their absence. To a remarkable extent, the
program consisted of concise and vigorous statements of actual
accomplishments and constructive pleas for needed accomplishments. At
one meeting Virginia Pearl Moore of Tennessee would tell how a mountain
girl had made at the cost of a dollar or so a home canner with which she
had won a prize—and rebuilt a whole community; at another E. M. Tousley
of Minnesota would tell how the farmers’ corporation at Dassel in his
state had procured for the consumer his share of the price of his
crops—and rounded out and made full the life of the neighborhood.
These men and women who met at Richmond had their faces set toward the
village and the open country. They realized that American life was
becoming a pyramid set wrong end up. To turn the pyramid over, so that
at the bottom supporting the whole structure will be a satisfied and
satisfying country life, was the large task to which these southerners
gave vigorous attention. The conference took note of the fact that the
“great American contortion” of the fed trying to support the feeder
cannot be perpetuated. It realized, too, that the general assumption
that all country people are or are to become men is wholly wrong; that
it is many generations past the time when in an organized and
comprehensive way, educational and social agencies should have begun to
help the farmer’s wife and daughter so that they could help themselves.
To be sure, wife and daughter will not have their due until the farmer
is economically efficient, but what are the chances that he will
increase his yield if he has to eat poorly cooked food, to say nothing
of putting up with a nagging wife and a discontented daughter?
As the most tangible and immediate method of making the farmer more
efficient economically, the conference emphasized better business
methods. Here again Dr. Albert P. Bourland, executive secretary, showed
discernment, in that he related the subject of agricultural co-operation
and better farm credits to the other topics discussed—school, church,
home and business in the large. The conference had the right to preach
co-operation for it was practicing it!
All the discussions were illuminated by honesty—the recognition of
problems and the characterization of evils by their right names. Indeed,
this meeting made the few visitors from north of Mason and Dixon’s line
again wish that in their sections of the country there were the same
hearty frankness joined to tact.
Since this conference discussed the whole of the circle of life, what
right had it to be called a conference for _education_?
In the South, the machinery for social amelioration is to a large extent
educational. Whether it be the hook worm in South Carolina or bad
housing in Texas that is attacked, efforts to make the South a better
place in which to live emanate to a surprising degree from state
departments of education, agricultural colleges, state universities,
sectarian colleges, secondary schools, and—praise be!—one-room rural
schools. Whether or not these institutions have the help of individuals,
they do their work in the name of all of the people.