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From: Branson, " Our Carolina Highlanders," UNC Extension Bureau Circular No.
2 ( 1916)
UNIVERSITY of NORTH CAROLINA
Extension Bureau Circular, No. 2
Chapel Hill, July, 1916
OUR CAROLINA HIGHLANDERS
E. C. BRANSON
Rural Economics and Sociology, University of North Carolina
What I shall say or try to say concerns the 17 Highland counties of North Carolina, and
the 243,000 people who dwell in this land- locked area. This is the region and these are
the people I best know in our southern mountain country. I assume to speak for no others.
I. OUR HIGHLANDERS ARE NOT A PECULIAR PEOPLE
First of all I want to claim for the whole of North Carolina an identity with our
mountain people. They are our very own kith, kin, and kind. They are not a peculiar
people— in illiteracy, poverty, degree of isolation, fiery individualism, or organizable
qualities. They differ in no essential particular from the democratic mass in North
Carolina in mood, humor, temper, and attitudes. Their economic and social problems are
not regional; they are state- wide. There are no differences in kind, and few in degree,
between the civilization of our hill country and that of the State as a whole. Its virtues and
its deficiencies are ours, and I claim them as our own.
Their Civilization is Dominantly Rural
Our Carolina Highlanders are a rural people. Only 50,000 of them live in towns of any
size whatsoever, and almost exactly half of the town dwellers in this region live in
Asheville, while 6,300 more live in Canton, Waynesville and Hendersonville, the only
other towns with more than a thousand inhabitants in all our mountain country. That is to
say, 85 out of every 100 of our mountain people live in the open country; but then, 79
people in the 100 the whole state over live out- side all incorporated towns and cities. Four
mountain counties in the southwest have fewer than 20 country people to the square mile;
but then, another group of four counties in the lower Cape Fear region has fewer than 20
country people to the square mile; while three other counties in the Pamlico region have
fewer than 15 people to the square mile.
North Carolina is Primarily Rural
Our civilization in North Carolina is primarily rural. Both the strength and the
weakness of our democracy lie in this fact. We are saturated with a sense of equality. We
Object Description
| Title | Our Carolina Highlanders |
| Author | Branson, E.C. |
| Description | Text of an address to the Conference of Southern Mountain Workers, Knoxville, Tennessee, March 29, 1916, regarding education and economic development in Western North Carolina. |
| Subject | Education |
| Date | 2013-05-21 |
| Holding Library | Lees McRae College |
| Identifier | lm00035* |
| Relation | Published as University of North Carolina Extension Bureau Circular, No. 2 |
| Transcript | From: Branson, " Our Carolina Highlanders" UNC Extension Bureau Circular No. 2 ( 1916) UNIVERSITY of NORTH CAROLINA Extension Bureau Circular, No. 2 Chapel Hill, July, 1916 OUR CAROLINA HIGHLANDERS E. C. BRANSON Rural Economics and Sociology, University of North Carolina What I shall say or try to say concerns the 17 Highland counties of North Carolina, and the 243,000 people who dwell in this land- locked area. This is the region and these are the people I best know in our southern mountain country. I assume to speak for no others. I. OUR HIGHLANDERS ARE NOT A PECULIAR PEOPLE First of all I want to claim for the whole of North Carolina an identity with our mountain people. They are our very own kith, kin, and kind. They are not a peculiar people— in illiteracy, poverty, degree of isolation, fiery individualism, or organizable qualities. They differ in no essential particular from the democratic mass in North Carolina in mood, humor, temper, and attitudes. Their economic and social problems are not regional; they are state- wide. There are no differences in kind, and few in degree, between the civilization of our hill country and that of the State as a whole. Its virtues and its deficiencies are ours, and I claim them as our own. Their Civilization is Dominantly Rural Our Carolina Highlanders are a rural people. Only 50,000 of them live in towns of any size whatsoever, and almost exactly half of the town dwellers in this region live in Asheville, while 6,300 more live in Canton, Waynesville and Hendersonville, the only other towns with more than a thousand inhabitants in all our mountain country. That is to say, 85 out of every 100 of our mountain people live in the open country; but then, 79 people in the 100 the whole state over live out- side all incorporated towns and cities. Four mountain counties in the southwest have fewer than 20 country people to the square mile; but then, another group of four counties in the lower Cape Fear region has fewer than 20 country people to the square mile; while three other counties in the Pamlico region have fewer than 15 people to the square mile. North Carolina is Primarily Rural Our civilization in North Carolina is primarily rural. Both the strength and the weakness of our democracy lie in this fact. We are saturated with a sense of equality. We stand unabashed in kingly presences. We revel in assured freedom. We have a fierce passion for self- government. We have always held high the spirit of revolt against centralized power, and we have been quick to wrest from tyranny its crown and scepter. All of which is magnificent. But we are learning that untaught and unrestrained individualism needs to develop into the wisdom and power of safe self- government. The civic and social mind supplants the personal and individual view of life all too slowly everywhere. Our dwellers in the open country number 1,700,000, and they average only 39 to the square mile. In Ashe, Madison, Mitchell, and Buncombe the country people are 40 or more to the square mile, while four more of our mountain counties are just below the state average. The ills attendant upon sparsity of population in rural regions are social isolation and insulation, raucous individualism, illiteracy, suspicion, social aloofness, lack of organization and cooperative enter- prise; but our mountain people suffer from these deficiencies not a whit more than the people in definite areas of the tide- water country and in the state at large. I will undertake to duplicate a hundred times over, in sparsely settled rural areas beyond mountain walls in North Carolina and in other states, every virtue and every failing of our kinspeople in the hill country. The Deficiencies of Sparsely Settled Ruralism Everywhere in thinly settled country regions we find people here and there who are suspicious, secretive, apathetic, and unapproachable; who live in the eighteenth century and preserve the language, manners, and customs of a past long dead elsewhere, who prefer their primitive, ancient ways, who are ghettoed in the midst of present day civilization, to borrow a phrase from President Frost. They are the crab- like souls described by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables, who before advancing light steadily retreat into the fringe of darkness. People like these abound in Clinton and Franklin counties ( New York) where an eighth of the native white voters are illiterate, in Aroostook county ( Maine) where nearly a fifth of the native white voters cannot read their ballots or write their names; in Windham county ( Connecticut), where a seventh of the voters illiterate. Windham by the way, lies midway between the academic effulgence of Yale on the one hand and of Harvard on the other. You can find within the sound of college bells anywhere what we found the other day in a field survey that took us into every home in a mid- state county in North Carolina— a family of whites all illiterate, half the children dead in infancy, and never a doctor in the house in the whole history of the family. All the ages of race history and every level of civilization can be found in any county or community, even in our crowded centers of wealth and culture. We need not hunt for 18th century survivals in mountain coves alone. We Need a Consciousness of Kind We shall not make headway in well- meant work in the mountains unless we can bring to it what Giddings calls a consciousness of kind. We need to be less aware of picturesque, amusing, or distressing differ- ences, and more keenly conscious of the kinship of the mountain people with their kind elsewhere and everywhere. Otherwise we shall bring to noble effort in the mountains a certain disabling attitude that is fatal to success. And so over against the types we find in the pages of Craddock, Fox, Kephart, and the rest, let us set the mountain people as they are related to the civilization of which they are a part. I therefore urge upon your attention the fact that they are not more poverty-stricken, nor more lawless and violent, nor more unorganizable than the democratic mass in rural North Carolina. Our Highlanders Are Not Poverty Stricken 1. In the first place and quite contrary to popular notions, our mountains are not a region of wide- spread poverty. In per capita rural wealth Alleghany is the richest county in North Carolina. Among our 100 counties, five highland counties, Alleghany, Buncombe, Ashe, Henderson, and Watauga, rank lst, 5th, 6th, 13th, and 14th in the order named, in the per capita farm wealth of country populations; and two more, Yancey and Transylvania, are just below the state average in this particular. The people of these counties are not poor, as country wealth is reckoned in North Carolina. They dwell in a land of vegetables and fruits, grain crops, hay and forage, flocks and herds. It is a land of overflowing abundance. It is not easy for such people to feel that they are fit subjects for missionary school enter- prises. As a matter of fact, they need our money far less than they need appreciative understanding and homebred leadership. Their wealth is greater than their willingness to convert it into social ad- vantages. They need to be shown how to realize the possibilities of their own soils and souls. Mountain civilization, like every other, will rise to higher levels when the people themselves tug at their own boot- straps; and there is no other way. It is true that three of the poorest counties in the state in per capita country wealth are Graham, Cherokee, and Swain— counties set against the steeps of the Great Smokies. They rank in this particular 92nd, 94th, and 96th respectively; but their poverty is duplicated by that of Moore, Brunswick, Carteret, and Dare— four counties in our coastal plain. The rank of these eastern counties is 93rd, 95th, 97th, and 98th in the order named. The two poorest counties in North Carolina in per capita farm wealth are in the tide- water region, not in the mountains. Approaching the poverty of our mountain people from another angle, let us consider indoor pauperism in 11 mountain counties that maintain county homes or poor houses. The 1910 Census discloses an average Tate for the United States of 190 almshouse paupers per 100,000 inhabitants. In North Carolina the rate was 96; in these 11 highland counties it was only 79. Six of the mountain counties make a far better showing than the state at large. Buncombe with a rate of 125 and Watauga with a rate of 139, the two highest rates in this region, make a better showing than all the North Atlantic and New England States, where indoor pauper rates range from 153 in New Jersey to 447 in Massachusetts. But we may make still another and better approach to the subject of poverty in our mountains by examining the outside pauper rates; better, because outside help is less repugnant to the feelings than resi- dence in the poor house. In 1914 the state rate for outside pauperism was 234 per 100,000 inhabitants. In 12 highland counties the average rate was 205. Seven of the counties have rates far smaller than the state average, ranging from 35 in Mitchell to 184 in Cherokee; three are just below the state average; and only two, Buncombe and Clay, are near the bottom. It ought to be clear that poverty in the mountains of North Carolina is actually and relatively less than elsewhere in the State. Here both indoor and outside paupers in 12 counties in 1914 numbered only 559 in a population of 209,000 souls. State- Wide White Illiteracy 2. In the second place, illiteracy among native whites in our mountains is not more distressing than white illiteracy elsewhere in the state. In Alleghany, Buncombe, Graham, Henderson, and Transyl- vania the rates of white illiteracy are less than the state average; in Macon, Haywood, and Watauga the ratios are near the state average of 12.3 per cent. The average rate for the mountain region is 15.1 per cent, due to excessive white illiteracy rates in eight counties; namely, Jackson 15.3, Ashe 15.6, Clay 16.3, Swain 18, Madison 18.7, Cherokee 19.4, Yancey 19.5, and Mitchell 22.4. More than one- seventh or 15.1 per cent of all the white people ten years old and older in 17 mountain counties are illiterate. It is appalling; but the fact that nearly one- eighth of all the white people of these ages the whole state over are illiterate is also appalling. But nearly one- fifth or 18.5 per cent of all our people, both races counted, are illiterate; and this fact is still more appalling. There is comfort, however, in the further fact that with a single exception North Carolina lead the Union in inroads upon illiteracy during the last census period, and we are running Kentucky a close second in Moonlight Schools. Our mountain people are not peculiar, even in their illiteracy. True, 11 of the 16 highland counties reported in the 1910 Census are illiterate beyond the state average of white illiteracy; but 53 counties east of the Ridge are also above the state average. In Surry, ‘ Colum- bus, Stokes, and ‘ Wilkes the white illiterates number from 19 to 21.7 per cent of the total white populations. Sparsely settled rural people are everywhere apt to be fiercely individualistic, incapable of concerted effort, and unduly illiterate; both behind and beyond mountain walls, in New York State, Maine, Connecticut, and North Carolina alike. The problems of developing democracy in our highlands, I repeat, are State- wide, not merely regional. They concern a sparsely settled rural ‘ population, socially insulated, fiercely individualistic, un- duly illiterate, unorganized, and non- social, both in the mountains and in the state’ at large. Our Homicide Rates 3. For instance, the bad eminence held by North Carolina in homicide rates among the 24 states of the registration area is due to the slow socialization of a population that is still nearly four- fifths rural. In 1913, we lead the registration states with an urban rate of 274 homi- cides per million inhabitants, and a rural rate of 173, against a general rate of 72 in the registration area. I may say in passing that Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina are the only southern states in the registration area, and that 24 states are all told still on the outside. I wish it were possible to have the facts about all the states in a subject like this. Town rates are higher than country rates in 21 states, largely be- cause the steady cityward drift of country people introduces into the organized life of American towns an element that is slow to learn the lessons of social adjustment. Thus, 57 or nearly half of all the homicides in 16 mountain counties between 1910 and 1914 occurred in Buncombe, Haywood, and Henderson, in four towns of which dwell 25,000 people or nearly seven- tenths of all the town dwellers in this entire region. On the other hand, the high spirited retreat into inaccessible coves before advancing civilization. They climb into the high levels of the Great Smokies in Haywood, Swain, and Graham, where they settle personal difficulties in the highland style of primitive times. These counties lead the mountain region in homicide rates. Madison ranks 87th with an average annual four- year rate ( 1910- 1914) of 174 homi- cides per million inhabitants; Swain ranks 92nd with an average rate of 217; Haywood 95th with a rate of 238; and Graham 98th with a rate of 242. These are the people, by the way, among whom Kephart dwelt and who colored his impressions of our entire mountain civilization. But just as might be expected, three of our lowland counties have just as fearful records. Anson, for instance, ranks 93rd with a rate of 235, Scotland 97th ‘ with a rate of 277, and Roheson is at the very bottom of the list with an appalling rate of 408 homicides per million inhabitants. No, our Highlanders are not peculiar even in their fierce and fiery individualism. Human life is just as safe west of the Ridge as east of it. Good Roads in North Carolina 4. Kephart urges that the mountain people cannot pull together, except as kinsmen or partisans. “ Speak to them of community in- terests, try to show them the advantages of co-operation,” says he, “ and you might just as well be proffering advice to the North Star. They will not work together zealously even to improve their neighborhood roads.” But these are the faults of sparsely settled rural populations in the mountains and on the plains alike. Nothing could be worse, for instance, than the country roads of southern Illinois in the bad winter seasons. Failure to organize and co- operate is the cardinal weakness of country people everywhere. True, there were no improved country roads in four counties west of the Ridge on January 1, 1915; but also, four neighboring counties in the Albemarle country fall into the same category. Thirty- one of our counties in 1914 had 10 per cent or less of their public road mileage improved. Seven of these were west and 24 were east of the Blue Ridge. Five mountain counties, Henderson, ‘ Cherokee, Yancey, Haywood, and Buncombe, are among the forty counties that made the best showing in the state in improved public road mileage in 1914; the per cents of improved road mileage ranging from 17.7 in Henderson to 72 in Buncombe. Avery, a mountain county with no improved roads in the last report, is now spending $ 150,000 in road construction. Our mountain counties are falling into line about as rapidly as other sections of the state. And North Carolina is doing well in highway building. In 1914 she stood ahead of 29 states in per cent of surfaced roads, and outranked 32 in the expenditure of road funds locally raised.* Mountain Public Schools 5. As a last word in my attempt to show that our mountain conditions and problems are state- wide conditions and problems, let us consider the investment made by our Highlanders in their schools and children; say, their per capita investment in country school ‘ property in the census year. ‘ In 1910 it was only $ 1.86 per rural inhabitant.’ But then, it was only $ 2.08 the whole state over. Seven mountain counties were well above the state average with per capita investments ranging from $ 2.56 in Swain, one of the three poorest counties in the state, to $ 4.56 in Transylvania. Two other counties, Macon and Madison, were not far below the State average. The seven remaining counties had per capita investments in rural school property as follows: Cherokee $ 1.78, Watauga $ 1.56, Mitchell $ 1.42, Yancey $ 1.34, Haywood $ 126, Graham $ 1.09, and Ashe, a county that stands 6th from the top among our 100 counties in per capita rural wealth, foots the list with 78 cents. * Based on the Report of the Federal Office of Public Roads covering the year 1914. Ashe and Watauga, both of them among our 14 richest counties, are capital illustrations of wealth without corresponding willingness to convert it into community weal. Our mountain counties are moving forward in rural school property about as rapidly as the rest of the state. Between 1900 and 1914 the value of such property in 17 highland counties rose from $ 408,000 to $ 637,000, an increase of 56 per cent, against an increase of 45 per cent in the state at large. Ashe and Yancey more than doubled their investments in rural school property during these four years. In Cherokee the investment was more than trebled. And it is proper to add that under the superb leadership of Hon. J. Y. Joyner, the State School Superintendent, our State as a whole has made marvelous gains during the last ten years in the education of all our people. As a matter of fact, these gains make a story of unparalleled achieve- ment. II. A COMING, NOT A VANISHING RACE The mountain people I know are democratic by nature, high spirited, self- reliant, and proudly independent. They scorn charities, and scent patronage afar. They are not a weakling people. They are sturdy and strong in character, keenly responsive to fair treatment, kind hearted and loyal to friends, quick to lend help in distress; and salted unto salvation by a keen sense of humor. They are not a submerged race. They are not down and out, after a hand to hand struggle with advancing civilization. They are not victims of social maladjustment. They are as yet, the unadjusted. They are not decadents like the country people in the densely populated industrial areas of the North and East. They are a coming, not a vanishing race. Their thews and sinews are strong, their brains are nimble and capable, and at bottom they are sane and sound, healthsome and wholesome, in wind and limb, body and soul. They are a hopeful element in developing democracy in North Carolina. There is immense lifting power in the people of our hill country. They need, to be sure, to be organized for economic, civic, and social efficiency; but ‘ this need is state- wide, not merely regional. A Liability, Not an Asset The Highlanders have long been a segregated, unmixed, ethnic group— a homogeneous mass without organic unity. Miss Emma Miles, herself a mountaineer, says in The Spirit of the Mountains, “ There is no such thing as a community of mountaineers. Our people are almost incapable of concerted action. We are a people yet asleep, a race without consciousness of its own existence.” All of which means that here is a social mass that lacks social solidarity. It lacks the unity in variety and the variety in unity that social development demands in any group of people. A fundamental need in the mountains is an influx of new people with new ideas and enterprises. The homogeniety of our Highlanders has long been a liability, not an asset. Appalachia needs the mingling of race types. The English Midlands offer an illustration in point. Here is where the Cymric, Pictish, and Irish tribes of Celts struggled for long cen- turies with the Anglo- Saxons, Danes, and Scandanavians. Here they finally coalesced, and here is the seed- bed of national supremacy in intellect. Here is the England of Shakespeare, Macaulay, Ruskin, and George Eliot, Hogarth, Turner, and Burne- Jones, Watt, Hamilton, and Farraday. A New Era in Our Hill Country But a new era is at hand in our hill country. Industrialism is rapidly invading and occupying this region. The timber, mineral, and water power treasures of the mountains have at last challenged the attention of organized big business. The blare of steam whistles, the boom of dynamite, the whir of machinery, the miracle of electric lights and telephones, the bustle of business in growing cities announce an economic revolution in our mountain country. Industrial enterprises will introduce the needed elements of population. They demand railway connections with the outside world. Automobiles in increasing numbers demand improved public highways. This economic revolution will mean better schools, stronger newspapers, another type of religious consciousness, and a more liberal social life. The industrial transformation of Appalachia has begun, and the next generation of Highlanders will be well in the middle of this new era. III. THE CHALLENGE TO MOUNTAIN WORKERS Main enquiries for mountain worker’s are: How will the people in our hill country react against the new order that is rapidly developing here? Will our Highlanders adjust themselves advantageously to new economic and social conditions? Will they surrender a sturdy man- hood for the subservience that industrialism demands? Will they be content to stand quite discrowned in the presence of invading aliens? Will they withdraw into their shells like periwinkles, or in remote coves seek freedom from the annoyance of an impious new order of things? Or will they decline the struggle for adjustment and drop into chronic apathy, or develop the dependency that afflicts modern civilization like creeping paralysis? These various social results will follow— inevitably so; but one or another of them will at last become the regnant humor and attitude of the mountain people, as modern civilization with its curious mixture of good and ill conquers the life of this long sequestered territory. Which result shall it be? It is a question for devoted social servants in this region to predetermine. Whatever we bring to the people we serve let us bring no standards, plans, or methods that have long ago been tried out and abandoned elsewhere by the common sense of mankind. We ought not to pitch our tents in the graveyard of dead traditions, however ancient and honorable. Church and Sunday school workers in the mountains must think their way sanely through these various social alternatives, and choose wisely far in advance of the thinking of the people they serve; and not only must the goal of school and church efforts be clearly visioned, but direct, effective ways, means and methods of approach must be em-ployed. Here is a great opportunity to try out to a conclusion the last J word in educational thinking and spiritual seership. The Main Problem to be Solved We ought to keep clearly in mind a concern of primary importance to the mountain people. The question, says President Frost, is whether the mountain people can be enlightened and guided so that they can have a part in the development of their own country, or whether they must give place to aliens and melt away like the Indians of an earlier day? That is to say, both the church and the school problem are fundamentally economic and social. The highest values, of course, are spiritual. As invading industrialism turns into gold the natural re- sources of these mountains, will it enhance the value of their largest asset— the men and women of the hill country? Keeping the King’s daughters all beautiful within, and making men that are finer than gold, yea than the golden wedge of Ophir, are purposes far beyond the making of money here and everywhere. IV. THE TYPE OF EDUCATION NEEDED With this said to indicate that I do not have in mind any crass materialism, I may venture perhaps to add: 1. John Frederick Oberlin’s life- long work in the Ban- de- la- Roche of the Vosges mountains well nigh perfectly types the ideals, the spirit, and the methods of effective social service work everywhere. Baird’s account of it ought to have a large place in the required courses of church seminaries, and teacher training schools the world over. The School Must Educate for Usefulness at Home 2. Our mountain schools ought to be directly and effectively related to the resources, opportunities, and possibilities of the hill country. They ought to be busy with the problems of hill- country farming— terracing, crop rotations, fruits and nuts, cabbage, potato and celery culture, ham and bacon production, beef’ animals, dairy farming, cheese and butter factories, poultry and eggs. The school farm is, at present, the most important department of the school— far more important than formal grammar, algebra and geometry, Latin and Greek. However, we see in the mountain ‘ schools, as elsewhere, a lingering belief that the further away a thing is in time or space the better worth studying it is. There are schools that somehow cannot connect up with the near- here- and- now; that cannot or will not become effective agencies of social adjustment to immediate social surroundings. What value they have lies in transplanting boys and girls into other social soils— and thus the mountains are bereft of their choicest social treasures. The acid test of success in our mountain schools lies in this: Do they set the thinking of our young Highlanders sanely against the background of the big, wide world, and at the same time keep alive in them a homing instinct true as the carrier pigeon’s. It is the final test of success in country high schools everywhere. Training young people in the countryside for useful lives elsewhere may be good for them, but it steadily decreases leadership in country regions where it is most sorely needed. School Farms Must Show Profits 3. I may add that the school farm must show a clean balance sheet from year to year. It cannot be a laboratory or experiment plat, with its unavoidable deficit. The farm manager must here apply the results of expensive experimentation elsewhere, and demonstrate beyond all doubt or debate the value of other and better types of farming than the mountain people as yet know much about. It ought also to be clear that it is folly for the school farm to illustrate activities that do not yield a profit. The production of farm wealth in forms that cannot be turned into ready cash at a fair price under neighborhood conditions is absurd. And nobody sees the absurdity any more quickly than the keen people in our mountains. It ought to be equally clear that profit in farm products lies in access to markets and in capable salesmanship; and that the local market problem is related to improved public highways, railway facilities, and co- operative selling. And here is where the uncommercial mind of the mountaineer fails him. The mountain school, therefore, ought to step adroitly into leadership in local taxation for good roads, for consolidated, well- equipped public schools and in co- operative market and credit associations. Otherwise it will be repeating the oldtime mistake of agricultural high schools and colleges the whole country over; a mistake that a few of them are attempting to remedy in very recent years. The Need for Vocational Education 4. The work of the mountain school must be strongly vocational; and the head of it will know about the direct, simple forms of worth- while activities in country schools. Recent bulletins of the Federal Department of Agriculture offer invaluable plans and details in this field of country school activity. The old order of manual training is out of place in our mountain schools. The shop and tool work here must have a direct applicancy and an unmistakable value. The Mountain Home a School Concern 5. And the mountain school must keep the mountain home clearly in view, and must develop courses and activities that concern home- building: simple, tasteful, inexpensive decoration; possible conven- iences and comforts; vegetables and fruits, pigs and poultry; health and sanitation; dietaries, nursing and emergencies; books, magazines, and the reading habit; housewifery, and household arts and crafts that develop taste, invention, and skill. Strong Courses in Science and Literature 6. The physical and social sciences ought to dominate the formal courses and activities of our mountain schools: ecological and economic botany directly connected with field studies; economic mineralogy that leads to intelligent acquaintance with local deposits; dynamic geology with outside studies in soil erosions, terracing, year- around cover crops, deforestation and its results; general physics, soil physics, and farm mechanics; chemistry and particularly soil chemistry; bacteriology, physiology, sanitation and health; rural sociology general and local; applied mathematics, and the like. Strong courses in drawing, work in light, shade, and color, music, and noble literature ought to cap and crown the work. It is not easy to function the country school properly; but it has been done, and I take it that mountain school workers are thoroughly familiar with the Agricultural High Schools and the Folk Schools of Denmark. If not, they ought to be, and Foght’s bulletins on the Danish schools can be had for the asking from the Federal Education Bureau. Common Causes of Failure 7. Even when properly functioned, such schools frequently do not reach and serve the people who need them most. Sewing, cooking, and farming have no place in their notion of what education means. Why teach in a school what we know all about already, is an exclamation heard every day and many times a day everywhere. Like most of us, the mountain people are acutely conscious of what they want, and feebly conscious of what they need. Arousing appetency for really worth- while things, getting people to crave what they need most is the finest of the fine arts— in the mountains and everywhere else. 8. I have so often seen well- planned, well- equipped schools fail in splendid purposes that I want to single out for brief comment two of the commonest causes of failure. The first is sensitiveness. It is hard to be both sensitive and sensible; and so hard, that I have never yet seen these two qualities in happy combination. Social workers cannot afford to be offended or to manifest consciousness of offended feelings in dealing with children. We patiently and graciously overlook and look beyond the faults of the little people, and most grown- ups are really children of a larger growth. What the French call amour propre muddies, minimizes, or nullifies the influence of social servants in the mountains with fatal certainty. We must always consider it in others; we must never suffer from it ourselves. Social workers cannot afford to be thin- skinned; really, they must grow skins like the pachyderms— a foot thick, say. The second common source of failure lies in a deficient sense of humor. The mountain worker needs a joke center somewhere in his system, almost more than he needs hands and feet. The mountain people are themselves so keen and droll that a mirthless soul is out of place anywhere in Appalachia. If he cannot share with relish in the fun and abundant good humor of these people, and bear with credit his part in an exchange of wit, his usefulness is at an end. A genuine, fun- loving soul quickly establishes a comfortable, folksy, home- folksy relationship with his parishioners in the mountains, and no other type of personality is quite so effective. It is good to recall that The wisest men that e’er you ken Have never deemed it treason, To rest a bit— and jest a bit, And balance up their reason; To laugh a bit— and chaff a bit, And joke a bit, in season. Here and there mountain schools are solving their problems with wonderful directness. But for the most part they exhibit the old type of culturistic education, without any decent regard for immediate social conditions and urgencies. Such schools are unhinged and out of joint; ancient, musty and fusty in their notions of education; bewildered, befogged, and belated. They are 18th century survivals far more truly than the mountain civilization they are set up to serve. The Mission Call 9. And I may also say, somewhat diffidently hut very earnestly, that the task of defending, preserving and enriching our mountain civilization calls for men of God who study social conditions with the insight and foresight of Isaiah of old. It calls for teachers who read and think and serve their fellow kind far beyond the walls of their school rooms; for physicians who campaign public health and sanitation as faithfully and as earnestly as they battle with death in their private practice; for business men, editors, and statesmen who are wise enough and brave enough to turn a keen, untroubled eye home upon the instant need of things. The mission call, says Samuel Bane Batten, is a call to make the world a brighter world for children to be born into, safer for boys and girls to grow up in, happier for men to travel through, and more joyous for departing saints to look back upon. His Kingdom for which we pray may well mean much more than this; but it is certain that it can never mean less. An address. Conference of Southern Mountain Workers, Knoxville, Tennessee, March 29, 1916. |
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