Schooling in the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880-1920. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Summer, 1998 by Julie Walsh

By James L. Leloudis (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. xvii plus 338pp. $39.95).

In this important new study, James L. Leloudis sets the oft-studied subject of New South education reform within the context of the region's industrializing economy, stormy politics, and declining race relations. The thesis, hinted at in his subtitle, is that the graded school movement - in which North Carolina took the lead in the South - was a response not only to developments in pedagogy but to demands for a disciplined, educated workforce attuned to an increasingly industrialized and market-oriented society. This meticulously researched and usefully annotated book ambitiously aims to bring the opinions and values of parents, children, and teachers into a history which has been dominated by administrative developments.

At the heart of his story is an analysis of the shift from one-room schoolhouses - periodically attended, poorly equipped and ruled by rote learning and threat of punishment - to graded schools with regular semesters, individualized programs of learning, and fear of failure as keeper of discipline. The classroom was no longer the "crucible of community," but rather "a staging ground for the great race of life."(p. 22) The development of the individual, the "self," became the focus.

This movement was led in the state by a group of white male graduates from the University of North Carolina - the graded school men - who epitomized the New South ideal. Many came from middle-class rather than aristocratic backgrounds, favored efficiency over tradition, and were prepared to spread the "gospel" of educational reform through the state. Men such as Charles McIver and Edwin Alderman were themselves products of a transformation of southern university education in which a broad liberal arts and science training replaced the world of classics and debating clubs.

Central to the success of the graded school movement was a large force of teachers to carry out the mission of the graded school men. Women filled this slot. Female teachers were less subject to the local political infighting that determined teaching appointments and more likely to accept the low pay and poor working conditions that existed in even the most enlightened schools. Graded schools demanded better teacher education, and the struggle for state-supported higher education for women was fierce. McIver and Alderman traveled the state holding educational training institutes and promoting the development of a normal college for women, which eventually opened in Greensboro in 1892 (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro).

Using the diaries written by McIver and Alderman as they crossed the state and the letters written by the first women at the normal college, Leloudis carefully links the effort to train female school teachers to larger gender issues in the south. This "feminization of teaching" (pp. 77,106) gave women a new outlet, educational opportunities, and a limited degree of financial independence. Yet at the same time it reinforced existing gender notions; with the move to a more nurturant form of teaching, female schoolteachers were confirming societal notions of women as mothers and caregivers.

Education, as always, remained a political and a financial issue. Leloudis positions the issue of funding for public education in the context of the stormy politics of the 1890s when Democrats, Republicans and Populists fought to control the state government (and the education of the state's children). Populists, who fused with the Republicans to take control of the legislature in 1894, feared the decline of "democratic localism" (p. 115) in education as well as in government. Many Populist politicians were Baptist ministers, jealous of the funding given to state schools over their own religious colleges and fearful of the pervasive secularism of the new institutions. Bill after bill attempted to quash public education funding and to give more control to local school boards, turning back the graded school men's efforts at consolidation.

But the Fusionists' days were numbered. The graded school men rallied in response to Populist attacks by favoring the white supremacist Democrats and the disfranchising laws that they used to push out Populists and Republicans and restrict African-American voting. The educators felt that literacy requirements would encourage the right sort of voter who was enlightened enough to support education funding. Leloudis does not shy away from this less "progressive" side of the graded school men. But he relates how many regretted these allegiances as the Democrats secured control and quickly moved from the notion that blacks could not vote to a notion that they could not learn.

While lawmakers fought over funding and ideology, men and, particularly, women, continued to work at the local level, particularly in the Women's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses (WABPS). This group, which funded cleaning and rebuilding schoolhouses and educated children about sanitation and health, was successful because it was organized on a local basis and did not provoke the hostility that some national education movements did when they worked in the South. Leloudis expertly recreates the culture of the WABPS, showing how it became an important social and political outlet for educated middle-class white women, though he might have placed the organization more firmly within the national context of Progressive women's movements and clubs.