Southern Values and Public Education: A Revision

Abstract

AFTER COMPARING the development of public education in the South to its development in other regions, most students of Southern history have concluded that the people of the South cared little about education. (i) In this paper I will show that the South's educational backwardness cannot be attributed to any lack of interest in education on the part of the people of that region; rather, this educational underdevelopment was due to the lack of interest and/or commitment to public education by those who exercised political power in the South. Statistics demonstrate that historically the South has lagged behind the rest of the nation in its commitment to public education. While public education was well advanced in the North and West before 1860, the South provided very little in the way of educational opportunities for the mass of its population before the twentieth century. In 1861 the number of days of schooling per person of school age in the North ranged from 49.9 to 63.5, while in the South the comparative figure was 10.6. (2) While every Northern state could, at that date, claim to have established a creditable public school system, only five of the Southern states had even begun to do so. (3) In 1880, the average school-age child in the South received only 23.6 days of schooling while his Northern counterpart received 72 days and as late as 1930, the comparative statistics were 95.9 and 120.1 (4) A variety of hypotheses have been advanced to account for the South's poor educational performance. There are those explanations that stress the region's poverty and other, economically related fac-