New schooling for a new SOuth: a community study of education and social change

Journal of Social History, Fall, 1997 by Wayne K. Durrill

In May 1888, Wilson, North Carolina, "educationally speaking," had reached "a crisis in her existence." "Our future in every department of progress," wrote Josephus Daniels, the editor of the local newspaper, the Wilson Advance, "depends to an alarming extent upon the manner in which we sustain the schools we already have and the efforts we make to establish other institutions of learning."(1) The Wilson graded schools, one for white children and one for black children, had closed in 1884, and the editor now hoped to persuade merchants and planters in and about Wilson to finance the white graded school privately, although not the school for black children. Therefore, he appealed to the interests of moneyed men in the town, pointing to the profits that they had already made from a real estate boom that accompanied the establishment of the Wilson Collegiate Institute in the 1870s, a private school, and the Wilson graded schools in the early 1880s. He also pointed to the value of a middle class, the "desirable element," men who could manage the money and employees of the wealthy and many of whom were products of the local graded school for white children. Yet there was much the editor left unsaid about the impact of schools in Wilson. After 1881, the graded schools especially had introduced new ways of thinking and new forms of social relations that some planters and merchants found unsettling. Moreover, the establishment of graded schools in the early 1880s had led to a bitter and prolonged political crisis in the county that drew poor men, both black and white, into the political process, and thereby shifted the balance of power away from the wealthy. Hence, the editor sought to play down the innovations created by new schools, and to narrow the scope of their impact to that chief interest of the wealthy and powerful in Wilson - profits.

Most Popular: 5 Regular Mistakes In Public Speaking; 3 Questions No Job Seeker Ever Wants To Be Asked?; Today's Best Part-Time Jobs; Harassment Policy; 10 Jobs That Pay $30 An Hour

Yet, in retrospect, it is the broader view of education and social change that is the more interesting if we are to understand how the New South and its schools came into being. That transformation was thoroughgoing, touching every aspect of a person's life - what kind of work a person found, whom he or she associated with, and the fund of ideas with which to think about that rapidly transforming world. The changes to which the editor of the Wilson newspaper alluded, moreover, came on suddenly and raised a profound opposition in the countryside that culminated in the political challenge of Populism. In the face of such opposition, how, pondered Wilson's leaders, could ordinary people become accustomed to working for wages, to associating with strangers, and to seeing "progress" as a good thing. Those who had lived most of their lives in a slave society were largely lost to the future. It was the young who might be trained up to the rule of institutions and their managers in place of the personal sway of local notables. But how? Perhaps through new kinds of schools that sought to produce the social relations and ideas coordinate with an expanded market economy then emerging in the South. That is not to say that schools caused economic and political change, as the editor of the Wilson Advance seemed to argue. Rather, it was one of the elements of a broader set of measures - fence laws, new courts, local governments, taxes in cash rather than in kind, road building with convict labor - that pushed Southerners, often kicking and screaming and sometimes with good reason, into modernity.

The story of educational reform in the New South has been told many times. The older version, written mainly by schoolmen themselves in the early twentieth century, stressed the role of state government in transforming Southern schools. This story usually begins about 1900 and attributes change mainly to a handful of progressive reformers in the Democratic Party. It also measures that change mainly in quantitative terms - numbers of school houses built, teachers employed, and students enrolled. What happened in those schools was left largely to the imagination of readers, as were relations between the new schools and changes in the larger society. These latter issues have been more adequately addressed in recent years, especially in the work of William Link and James Leloudis, but still mainly at the state level. The local origins of school reform in the late nineteenth-century South remain obscure in these accounts, although both authors point in that direction. And it was at the local level that conflicts between the pre-industrial social relations of a slave society, now dead but not entirely gone, and the needs of capitalists in the New South first began. Hence the value of a case study which examines closely not only the politics of local reform but also the creation of new social relations among students and a distinctly progressive pedagogy among teachers. The advantage of such a study is not merely to trace out in greater detail themes raised by Link and Leloudis, but to demonstrate how local reform originated dramatic changes that occurred only twenty years later at the state and regional level in Southern society. For these purposes Wilson is particularly well-suited. Thousands of people visited the town's new graded schools in the 1880s and carried their observations back to their homes throughout the South. Moreover, several of Wilson's reformers would go on to play important roles, after 1900, in regional efforts to build progressive schools. Finally, the ideological battles waged in Wilson would inform later arguments for and against progressive schools, and indeed the main progressive trope in North Carolina for justifying state supported public schools would be developed by Josephus Daniels himself. Wilson then was not just one Southern town among many struggling to improve its schools in the late nineteenth century, but one of two or three on the coastal plain of North Carolina that proved to be a cradle of reform for the state and region.(2)

Featured White Papers

New schooling for a new SOuth: a community study of education and social change

Journal of Social History, Fall, 1997 by Wayne K. Durrill

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: News

Most Popular Articles in Reference

Most Popular Publications in Reference