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Transcriber’s Notes:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.
* * * * *
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration]
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
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE PEOPLE WHO GAVE THE MOONLIGHT
SCHOOLS TO THE WORLD 1
II. THE ORIGIN OF THE MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS 8
III. SURPRISES OF THE FIRST SESSION 14
IV. PIONEER METHODS IN DEALING WITH
ILLITERATES 21
V. A MOONLIGHT SCHOOL INSTITUTE 32
VI. THE RESULTS OF THE SECOND SESSION 38
VII. TO WIPE OUT ILLITERACY THE TEACHER’S
GOAL 47
VIII. THE MOVEMENT EXTENDS TO THE WHOLE
STATE OF KENTUCKY 57
IX. THE FIRST TEXT-BOOKS FOR ADULT
ILLITERATES 70
X. MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS IN WAR TIME 81
XI. MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS IN RECONSTRUCTION
DAYS 106
XII. THE ILLITERACY CRUSADE SPREADS FROM
STATE TO STATE 124
XIII. THE PURPOSE OF THE MOONLIGHT
SCHOOLS 145
XIV. THE NEED OF MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS 167
XV. THE CALL OF THE ILLITERATES 189
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Spelling Match _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
They Came Carrying Babes in Arms 16
Young Men and Women Whose Chance Had Come 18
Arithmetic Was a Popular Study 28
A Man Aged 87 Entered and Put to Shame the
Record of the Proud School Girl of 86 of the
Year Before 38
They Were Schoolmates, and That is a Tie That
Binds 44
Letter From a Home Department Pupil 45
A Class of Moonlight School Pupils All Past 50
Years of Age 48
Letter Written After Three Lessons 80
Letter Written After Six Lessons 80
Letter From Pupil After Attending Full Session
of Moonlight School 80
Letter From Man of Draft Age 94
Letter From a War Veteran 108
Letter From a Student in Prison 118
Letter From an Alabama Pupil 124
Letter From an Alabama Pupil 125
Letter From a North Carolina Pupil 126
A North Carolina Moonlight School 128
Oklahoma Moonlight School 130
Letter to the State Superintendent of Schools,
Oklahoma 130
A Class of Mexican Mothers in California Learning
to Read and Write 132
Letter From New Mexico Moonlight School 132
Letter From a Georgia Moonlight School 134
Jewish Mothers in New York Improving Their
Education 140
Mother of Twelve Children Learns to Read and
Write 190
Alex Webb, Aged 98, Who Learned to Read and
Write in the Moonlight Schools 192
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.