Kentucky education (oxymoron?)

When I was a girl, I took my 12 years of public education with free textbooks for granted. Though Kentucky’s education system, even then, was from rescued from bottom status only by, I think it was, Alabama, I had no idea how close I was to a time when education for the ordinary dirt farmer’s kids was all but nonexistent. I suppose all children tend to think that the way things are for them is the way things have always been.

My eyes were opened when I read Thomas D. Clark’s Agrarian Kentucky (University Press of Kentucky, 1977). As Dr. Clark explained it, before the Civil War, there just wasn’t much enthusiasm for public education in a state full of yeoman farmers who couldn’t see why their children needed schooling:

Throughout the nineteenth century public apathy to educational progress was a stumbling block. Thousands of rural parents envisioned no real necessity for educating their children. They and their forebears had lived primitive lives closely identified with the soil. Their way of life was physical. Men wrested livelihoods from hills and valleys through backbreaking labor which did not require literacy. Nor were reading and writing necessary adjuncts to herding a drove of stubborn hillside hogs to market, bucking a willful log raft down a swollen stream, building a crude house, or marrying and begetting many children.

This tendency may have been exacerbated by the political history of most of those forebears. Here is Dr. Clark in A History of Kentucky (Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1988), speaking of the Transylvania Company’s difficulties in establishing a constitution:

Nearly every settler in the western country was there because either he or his father before him had become disgruntled with the semiproprietary form of government and the quitrents of the eastern Atlantic colonies. These settlers had been on the move for a long time and had faced hardships and privations to reach this land of promise. Hand to hand fighting with the Indians would be necessary before the land west of the mountains might be theirs. Because of these conditions, the westerners were reluctant to take orders from a land company, especially when one man’s trigger finger was worth just about as much as another’s to the settlement. [p 44]

Nobody wanted to pay property taxes.

The Civil War destroyed any early tepid efforts to provide everybody with at least a fourth grade education, and it was not until about 1920 that Kentucky finally decided to get its educational act together. (Bob Sexton might argue with that statement.) This was about the time my parents hit the educational system. They received an 8^th grade education in a one-room school. For anything above that, it was necessary to pay tuition, and probably room and board.

My siblings and I got the 12 years, but I, the youngest, am the only one who went all 12 of those years to a graded school.

I read all of Dr. Clark’s chapter on education with some horror, but I was shocked by this passage:

Slavery down to 1860 was a somewhat vague but forceful fact in Kentucky education. Some itinerate Yankee schoolmasters, traveler-visitors, and after 1820, emancipationists and abolitionists were associated with the public school movement. For instance, it was not entirely helpful that the names of Calvin Fairbanks, Delia Anne Webster, John G. Fee, Calvin Stowe, and Horace Mann were both apostles of public education and crusaders for human freedom. While . . . the abolition crusade [was] never directly associated with the public school movement, the slavery question had become so sensitive by 1848, creating such bitter partisanship, that no social question in the state could be entirely disassociated with it. [pp. 101-102]

Though I suppose you could argue that this association isn’t highly significant in a state that just didn’t put much value on public education, it seems important to me as one more way in which slavery was as indirectly destructive to the freedom of poor whites as it was directly destructive to that of African Americans.

And I will extrapolate forward and say that racism continues destructive of our public education system 150 years later. The last 40 years of American politics has been one of racial division and with it has become a tremendous decline in public schools.

Unfortunately, agrarianism, which I value, has long been associated with pernicious ignorance and racism. I wish there were a way to correct this. A good public school system would seem a start, and I’m not talking vouchers and home-schooling here.

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