Moonlight Schools for the Emancipation of Adult Illiterates — Text and Context

edged 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.”

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.

[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.

CHAPTER II THE ORIGIN OF THE MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS

Strange impressions have prevailed in regard to the moonlight schools. Some have imagined them to be schools where children study and play and scamper on the green, like fairies by the moonlight; others have supposed them to be schools where lovers stroll arm-in-arm, quote poetry and tell the old, old story by the light of a witching moon; others, perhaps because these schools originated in the mountains of Kentucky, have speculated upon their being schools where moonshiners, youthful and aged, are instructed in the best method of extracting the juice from the corn, and, at the same time, one so secretive as to prevent government interference.

Moonlight schools were first established in September, 1911. They had their origin in Rowan County, Kentucky. They were designed, primarily, to emancipate from illiteracy all those enslaved in its bondage. They were, also, intended to afford an opportunity to those of limited education who desired to improve their store of knowledge.

These schools grew out of the only condition that can give to any institution permanent and substantial growth--an imperative human need. This need was expressed, not by any theorist or group of theorists but by the illiterates themselves.

When I was Superintendent of Rowan County schools, I acted as voluntary secretary to several illiterate folk--a mistaken kindness--I ought to have been teaching them to read and write. Among these folk there was a mother whose children had all grown up without learning save one daughter who had secured a limited education, and when grown, had drifted away to the city of Chicago, where she profited by that one advantage which the city possessed over the rural district--the night school. She so improved her education and increased her efficiency that she was enabled to engage, profitably, in a small business. Her letters were the only joys that came into that mother’s life and the drafts which they contained were the only means of relieving her needs. Usually she would bring those letters to me, over the hill, seven miles, to read and answer for her. Sometimes she would take them to the neighbors to interpret. Once after an absence of six weeks, an unaccustomed period, she came in one morning fondling a letter. I noticed an unusual thing--the seal was broken.

Anticipating her mission, I inquired, “Have you a letter from your daughter? Shall I read and answer it for you?”

She straightened up with more dignity and more pride than I have ever seen an illiterate assume--with more dignity and more pride than an illiterate _could_ assume as she replied, “No, I kin answer hit fer myself. I’ve larned to read and write!”

“Learned to read and write!” I exclaimed in amazement. “Who was your teacher, and how did you happen to learn?”

“Well, sometimes I jist couldn’t git over here to see you,” she explained, “an’ the cricks would be up ’twixt me an’ the neighbors, or the neighbors would be away from home an’ I couldn’t git a letter answered fer three or four days; an’ anyway hit jist seemed like thar was a wall ’twixt Jane an’ me all the time, an’ I wanted to read with my own eyes what she had writ with her own hand. So, I went to the store an’ bought me a speller, an’ I sot up at night ’til midnight an’ sometimes ’til daylight, an’ I larned to read an’ write.”

To verify her statement, she slowly spelled out the words of that precious letter. Then she sat down, and under my direction, answered it--wrote her first letter--an achievement which pleased her immeasurably, and one that must have pleased the absent Jane still more.

A few days later a middle-aged man came into the office, a man stalwart, intelligent and prepossessing in appearance. While he waited for me to dispatch the business in hand, I handed him two books. He turned the leaves hurriedly, like a child handling its first books, turned them over and looked at the backs and laid them down with a sigh. Knowing the scarcity of interesting books in his locality, I proffered him the loan of them. He shook his head.

“I can’t read or write,” he said. Then the tears came into the eyes of that stalwart man and he added in a tone of longing, “I would give twenty years of my life if I could.”

A short time afterward, I was attending an entertainment in a rural district school. A lad of twenty was the star among the performers. He sang a beautiful ballad, partly borrowed from his English ancestors but mostly original, displaying his rare gift as a composer of song.

When he had finished, I went over and sat down beside him. “Dennis,” I said, “that was a beautiful ballad. It is worthy of publication. Won’t you write a copy for me?”

His countenance, which had lighted up at my approach, suddenly fell, and he answered in a crest-fallen tone, “I would if I could write, but I can’t. Why, I’ve thought up a hundred of ’em that was better’n that, but I’d fergit ’em before anybody come along to set ’em down.”

These were the three incidents that led directly to the establishment of the moonlight schools. I interpreted them to be not merely the call of three individuals, but the call of three different classes; the appeal of illiterate mothers, separated from their absent children farther than sea or land or any other condition than death had power to divide them; the call of middle-aged men, shut out from the world of books, and unable to read the Bible or the newspapers or to cast their votes in secrecy and security; the call of illiterate youths and maidens who possessed rare talents, which if developed might add treasures to the world of art, science, literature and invention.

CHAPTER III SURPRISES OF THE FIRST SESSION

The opening of the day schools to them was first considered, but the day schools were already crowded with children, and anyway, illiterates, more than any other class, are chained to labor by day. Then came the thought of opening the schools at night, but bad roads with innumerable gullies, high hills and unbridged streams were obstacles to overcome. Besides, the county had been, at one time, a feud county and the people were not accustomed to venturing out much after night. It was decided to have the schools on moonlight nights, and let the moon light them on their way to school.

The teachers of the county were called together and the conditions laid before them. They were asked to volunteer to teach at night those whom the schools of the past had left behind. To their everlasting credit be it said that not one of those teachers expressed a doubt or offered an excuse, but each and every one of them, without a single exception, volunteered to teach at night, after she had taught all day, and to canvass her district in advance to inform the people of the purpose of these schools and to urge them all to attend.

This preliminary canvass was made on Labor Day, September 4, 1911. The teachers of Rowan County celebrated the holiday by going out into the highways and byways to gather in to school all who needed to learn. They went into every farm-house and hovel, inviting both educated and uneducated to attend.

On September 5, the brightest moonlight night, it seemed to me, that the world had ever known, the moonlight schools opened for their first session. We had estimated the number that would attend, and an average of three to each school, one hundred and fifty in the entire county was the maximum set.

We waited with anxious hearts. The teachers had volunteered, the schools had been opened, the people had been invited but would they come? They had all the excuses that any toil-worn people ever had. They had rugged roads to travel, streams without bridges to cross, high hills to climb, children to lead and babes to carry, weariness from the hard day’s toil; but they were not seeking excuses, they were seeking knowledge, and so they came. They came singly or hurrying in groups, they came walking for miles, they came carrying babes in arms, they came bent with age and leaning on canes, they came twelve hundred strong!