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Southern Values and Public Education: A Revision

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Irving Gershenberg
Irving Gershenberg*
Affiliation:
University College and University of Connecticut
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Extract

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. 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.

Type
Education in the South
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , Winter 1970 , pp. 413 - 422
Copyright
Copyright © 1970 History of Education Quarterly 

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References

Notes

1. See, for example, Cash, W. J., The Mind of the South (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956); Nicholls, William H., Southern Tradition and Regional Progress (Chapel Hill, N.C.; The University of North Carolina Press, 1960); and John Samuel Ezell, The South Since 1865 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1963).Google Scholar

2. The average number of days of schooling per person of school age is calculated by multiplying together enrollment, average daily attendance, and the length of the school year. It is a summary statistic encompassing the three quantity components of education. Albert Fishlow, “The American Common School Revival: Fact or Fancy?” in Rossovsky, Henry (ed.), Industrialization in Two Systems: Essays in Honor of Alexander Gershenkron (New York: Wiley, 1966), p. 62.Google Scholar

3. Only in Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Tennessee did taxation and other public funds provide over half the total income devoted to public schooling in the South by 1860. United States Bureau of the Census, Statistics of the United States in 1860 of the Eighth Census (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office), p. 506.Google Scholar

4. Compiled and computed from United States Bureau of the Census, Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1883), pp. 916–18, and United States Department of Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1933), pp. 107–09.Google Scholar

5. This explanation is to be found in every standard history of the South.Google Scholar

6. See, for example, Vann Woodward, C., Origins of the New South 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), p. 406; Curry, J. L. M., “Education in the Southern States,” reprinted as Appendix II, in William Dabney, Charles, Universal Education in the South, Vol. II (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1936), pp. 531–36.Google Scholar

7. Nolan, Claude H., The Negroes' Image in the South, The Anatomy of White Supremacy (Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 1967), p. 107 and Ezell, The South, p. 246.Google Scholar

8. Fishlow, , “The American Common School,” pp. 51–61; Sherman Shapiro, “Some Determinates of Expenditures for Education: Southern and Other States Compared,” Comparative Education Review (October, 1966), pp. 160–66. For an entirely different interpretation of the role of the Negro see Irving Gershenberg, “The Negro and the Development of White Public Education in the South: Alabama, 1880–1930,” Journal of Negro Education, XXXVIII (Fall 1969).Google Scholar

9. A listing of these values and their implications for education will be found in Nicholls, Southern Tradition. This discussion owes much to his analysis.Google Scholar

10. This point is also made by Myrdal, Gunnar, An American Dilemma (New York: Harper & Row, 1944), p. 547.Google Scholar

11. Moore, Albert B., History of Alabama (University, Alabama: University Supply Store, 1934), p. 547.Google Scholar

12. Boyd, William K., “Some Phases of Educational History in the South Since 1865,” Studies in Southern History and Policies; inscribed to William Archibald Dunning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1914), pp. 262–63.Google Scholar

13. Before 1900 every state outside of the South but two had enacted compulsory school attendance legislation but no Southern state except Kentucky had done so. And as for Kentucky, its law was flagrantly ignored especially in the rural areas. Between 1905, beginning with Tennessee, and finishing with Mississippi in 1918, all of the Southern states passed compulsory school laws. Harlan, Louis R., Separate and Unequal: Public School Campaign and Racism in the Southern Seaboard States, 1901–1915 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1958), p. 30.Google Scholar

14. White and Black in the United States (London: Chatto & Windus, 1879), p. 259 in Myrdal, An American Dilemma, p. 884.Google Scholar

15. Stannard Baker, Ray, Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1908), p. 53 in Myrdal, An American Dilemma, p. 884. Myrdal also presents an explanation for the Negro's strong attachment to education, p. 879.Google Scholar

16. My thanks are due to Professor Benson, Charles S. of the University of California at Berkeley for this information. In a recent study conducted by Professor Benson he found that about the only consistent factor which correlated positively with improved results in various tests given to pupils was a declining classroom size, i.e., a reduction in pupil-teacher ratio.Google Scholar

17. This regression was also run including, where data permitted, all three of the economic indexes. An examination of the correlation matrix for the various years revealed that multicollinearity existed among these explanatory variables. One of the basic assumptions underlying this statistical analysis, that of independence among independent variables, would not be fulfilled if all three of the indexes were included. Following standard practice in such cases, the weaker explanatory variables were deleted, this being permissible since there was no theoretical objection to doing so.Google Scholar

18. The Brookings Institute, Taxation of the State Government of Alabama Vol. 4, part 3, p. 47 in Horace Mann Bond, “Social and Economic Forces in Alabama Reconstruction,” The Journal of Negro History, VII (July 1938), 343.Google Scholar

19. Between 1875 and 1890, the state general property tax was reduced on seven occasions from 7½ to 4 mills. Emory Q. Hawk, “Taxation in Alabama,” Birmingham Southern College Bulletin, XXIV, No. 1, Supplement (January 1931), 12.Google Scholar

20. Mobile Daily Registrar (December 31, 1890); Boyd, “Phases,” p. 269.Google Scholar

21. United States Department of Interior, Bureau of Education, An Educational Study of Alabama, Bulletin 1919, No. 41 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919) 27.Google Scholar

22. Myrdal, , An American Dilemma p. 452; Vann Woodward, C., The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 59. Representation in the Alabama Legislature is based on population and this permits the Black-Belt counties to exercise political control. Counties are also represented in party conventions in proportion to total population, which again allows Black-Belt representatives to perpetuate their control.Google Scholar