Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/551

Rh that to be known by your neighbors is a liberal education, the attempts at schooling in the later sixties and early seventies presented many picturesque variations from the usual type. The early morning hours would see sedate horses bestridden by from three to five children each making their way into town to deposit their load at a dame school, sometimes a dame school of delicate and antiquated refinement, and sometimes one of a rather hot-handed domesticity, where the boys were cuffed through geography and fractions. These schools sprang usually from the teacher's need instead of from her ability; almost invariably was she without professional training and without educational standards, and too often even without any but the most meager schooling. Such institutions quite deserved the practical disregard in which they were held. Their potent influence—for they exercised one—was not upon the reluctant children within their walls, but upon the community without, for whom they alone represented learning, knowledge, the great society of scholars. It was with such educational standards, perhaps we should say also such educational habits, as these that the generation born just after the war grew up; they knew such schools or none at all; and it was not the child of the poor white alone who depended upon them, but the children of all classes, outside of the chief cities. For many a year after the close of the civil war the shrunken and disheveled libraries lay neglected in the dignified old houses; other cares than those of literature absorbed their owners and their owners' sons and daughters. The res angustae domi were studied at first hand, instead of through the medium of Latin authors, and it was full twenty years after, in many cases, before the ruling group of people, even in many of the most favored parts of the south, sent a son to a college of exacting standard and liberal equipment. Their daughters they are hardly sending even now. It is the men and women of that bereft generation, shorn of the family distinction of the past, lacking the discipline of the civil war itself, so royally met by so many southern men and women, and growing up with little or no education who are now in the saddle. Is not this the key to many of the lamentable social conditions in the south to-day? Is the persistent medievalism of thought any but a logical outcome?

In so comprehensive a range of needs it would seem difficult to single out any as specially vital, and it is true that educational endowment for the south can hardly go amiss. But there are certain strategic points which it is especially desirable to gain. The first of these is the development of industrial training. For many a year to come, if not for many a generation, the south must be essentially a rural population, and if the dormant mind is to be reached, it must be through the things with which it is in daily contact. One of the ways to dignify labor is to