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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Moonlight
Schools for the Emancipation of Adult
Illiterates
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
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laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.
Title: Moonlight Schools for the Emancipation of Adult Illiterates
Author: Cora Wilson Stewart
Release date: April 27, 2018 [eBook #57061]
Language: English
Credits: Produced by David Garcia, Craig Kirkwood, and the
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file was produced from images generously made
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by The Kentuckiana Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOONLIGHT
SCHOOLS FOR THE EMANCIPATION OF ADULT ILLITERATES ***
Transcriber’s Notes:
Larger versions of the photographs can be viewed by clicking on each photo in a web
browser.
Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.
The spelling match.
MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS
FOR THE EMANCIPATION
OF ADULT ILLITERATES
BY
CORA WILSON STEWART
Chairman Illiteracy Commission, National Education
Association; Chairman Illiteracy Committees:
National Council of Education, and General
Federation Womens’ Clubs.
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 Fifth Avenue
Copyright, 1922,
By E. P. Dutton & Company
All Rights Reserved
PRINTED IN THE UNITED
STATES OF AMERICA
TO THE VOLUNTEER TEACHERS IN THE MOONLIGHT
SCHOOLS, WHOSE VISION, COURAGE AND SELF-SACRIFICE
MADE IT POSSIBLE TO BLAZE THE
TRAIL FOR THE EMANCIPATION OF
THE NATION’S ILLITERATES, THIS
VOLUME IS GRATEFULLY
DEDICATED
Grateful acknowledgments are made for assistance and helpful
suggestions to the following: Mr. Erwin A. Holt, Mrs. Cornelia
Steketee Hulst, Dr. J. G. Crabbe, Miss Linda Neville, General William
H. Sears, Mr. Everett Dix, and Dr. Louise McDanell Browne.
PREFACE
Many requests have come for a book telling the story of the
moonlight schools. Teachers have expressed their need of such a
book for their inspiration and guidance, and the general public has
evidenced a desire to know more of the dramatic story of the origin,
development and goal of these schools.
“I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the
lamp of experience,” said Patrick Henry. The crying need of “the
lamp of experience” to guide the teachers who are engaged in the
fight on illiteracy impels the author to present the experience of
years of strenuous campaigning against illiteracy in book form and
likewise to show forth the achievements of adults who have passed
from the darkness of illiteracy into light through the portals of the
moonlight schools.
This book is purposely written in simple language and kept free from
technical terms. It is a message to the teachers of every land and
would be as easy and accessible to those who have had little
preparation for teaching as to those who are experienced and
trained. Not for the teacher alone is it written but even those who
are not engaged in teaching will find a message, it is hoped, within
its covers.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The People Who Gave the Moonlight Schools to the
World 1
II. The Origin of the Moonlight Schools 8
III. Surprises of the First Session 14
IV. Pioneer Methods in Dealing with Illiterates 21
V. A Moonlight School Institute 32
VI. The Results of the Second Session 38
VII. To Wipe Out Illiteracy the Teacher’s Goal 47
VIII. The Movement Extends to the Whole State of Kentucky 57
IX. The First Text-Books for Adult Illiterates 70
X. Moonlight Schools in War Time 81
XI. Moonlight Schools in Reconstruction Days 106
XII. The Illiteracy Crusade Spreads from State to State 124
XIII. The Purpose of the Moonlight Schools 145
XIV. The Need of Moonlight Schools 167
XV. The Call of the Illiterates 189
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Spelling Match Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
They Came Carrying Babes in Arms 16
Young Men and Women Whose Chance Had Come 18
Arithmetic Was a Popular Study 28
A Man Aged 87 Entered and Put to Shame the
Record of the Proud School Girl of 86 of the Year
Before 38
They Were Schoolmates, and That is a Tie That
Binds 44
Letter From a Home Department Pupil 45
A Class of Moonlight School Pupils All Past 50 Years
of Age 48
Letter Written After Three Lessons 80
Letter Written After Six Lessons 80
Letter From Pupil After Attending Full Session of
Moonlight School 80
Letter From Man of Draft Age 94
Letter From a War Veteran 108
Letter From a Student in Prison 118
Letter From an Alabama Pupil 124
Letter From an Alabama Pupil 125
Letter From a North Carolina Pupil 126
A North Carolina Moonlight School 128
Oklahoma Moonlight School 130
Letter to the State Superintendent of Schools,
Oklahoma 130
A Class of Mexican Mothers in California Learning to
Read and Write 132
Letter From New Mexico Moonlight School 132
Letter From a Georgia Moonlight School 134
Jewish Mothers in New York Improving Their
Education 140
Mother of Twelve Children Learns to Read and Write 190
Alex Webb, Aged 98, Who Learned to Read and
Write in the Moonlight Schools 192
INTRODUCTION
It has been said that every great movement for freedom originated
among mountain people. However true or untrue this may be, the
movement to emancipate the illiterates of America originated among
the people of the mountains of Kentucky. It is not something that
America is doing for the mountain people, but something which they
have contributed to the nation and to the world.
This was acknowledged by the United States Commissioner of
Education in a bulletin issued in 1913 in which he said,
“I submit herewith, for publication as a Bulletin of the Bureau of
Education, a statement showing in some detail the amount of
illiteracy in the United States among men, women and children over
ten years of age according to the Federal Census of 1910; also a
brief statement of an experiment which has been conducted for
nearly two years in one of the mountain counties in eastern
Kentucky having a large number of illiterates in its population, to
ascertain if it were possible to teach these illiterate grown-up men
and women and older children to read and write, and whether other
men, women and children with very meager education would
respond to the opportunity to learn more of the arts of the school.
The success of this experiment, made under very difficult
circumstances, has been so great as to inspire the hope that, with
the cooperation of schools, churches, philanthropic societies, cities,
counties, States and the Nation, the great majority of the five and a
half million illiterates over ten years of age in the United States may,
in a few years, be taught to read and write and something more.”
MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS
Moonlight Schools
CHAPTER I
THE PEOPLE WHO GAVE THE MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS TO THE
WORLD
In the mountains of Kentucky there has been buried a treasure of
citizenship richer far than all its vast fields of coal, its oil, its timber
or mineral wealth. Here lives a people so individual that authors
have chosen them as their theme and artists as their subjects to
interpret to the world a people with a character distinctive, sturdy,
independent and rugged. This is a stock in which great movements
can have their origin. No inferior people, no degenerate stock can
embrace and demonstrate with enthusiasm new truths. These
people are descended from the best ancestry—Virginia and North
Carolina—that traces back to England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales.
Theirs was, in the main, an educated ancestry; some of their
forefathers read Latin, and some of them Greek. Here and there in
the mountain cabin and farm-house may be found an ancient copy
of Cæsar, Virgil, Chaucer and other rare old books, useless to the
possessors save as relics of the past. They are a people of arrested
civilization, who sing the ballads sung in England three hundred
years ago and forgotten there now, and who use expressions that
belong to the centuries past. Not all by any means, but some of
them live lives such as were lived in rural England and in the hills of
Scotland two hundred years ago. They have the blood and bearing
of a noble people; they are a noble people. Possessed of a high
degree of intelligence, they have not degenerated even though
deprived for years of educational opportunities, but have preserved
the sturdy traits of their Scotch-Irish, English and Welsh ancestors.
Their capacity for learning has always been immense and their
desire for it has been equally so. Of all the authors who have chosen
them as their theme and the artists who have recently begun to
present them as a type, none have seemed to catch, or, at least, all
have failed to portray, the dominant thing in mountain life, the
strongest urge of the mountaineer’s soul—his eager, hungry,
insatiable desire for knowledge. It is this which has sent mountain
girls and boys walking a hundred miles or more to reach the school
where they could work their way through. It is the thing which has
caused many a slender mountain maid and many a frail lad to
assume the work of a man when by so doing they could earn a little
money to provide for a few weeks in school. It is the same desire
that has caused many a mountaineer to give his last few acres of
land, his labor and his last dollar to found a school where his
children and his neighbor’s children might have an opportunity to
learn. But, intense as this fervor for education has been, it has had
to satisfy itself with looking back to the time when “Gran’pap was an
educated man,” and forward to the time when the children and
grand-children would have an education. There was a lack of hope
for the present and passing generation, a broad gap between the
past and the future culture, which seemed to condemn many
brilliant minds to an intellectual grave. Many of these people had
never been permitted, for reasons all too tragic, to enter school, or if
enrolled, they had been stopped at the end of a week, a month or at
the close of their first term. There were married folk, who if they
could even have overcome their embarrassment and summoned
courage in later life to seek a school, would have found none open
to them. In a land where people live long, these men and women,
thirty, forty and fifty years of age, with, perhaps, a good quarter of a
century, and many of them a half century, ahead of them—what
must be done with them? Shall they be considered the wasted
citizens of a state that cares not to redeem and use them, and of a
nation that does not need such character and such brain?
These mountain people now stand at the threshold of a new
civilisation, eager and hopeful, anxious to enter in and take their
part in the work of the world. They need the world’s help, its best
thought, its modern conveniences, but not more than the world
needs them. In a day when racial groups weld themselves together
in America and seek to advance the welfare of the country from
which they came rather than the welfare of the nation which has
received them into its bosom, it is comforting to remember that in
these mountains of the southern states America has a reservoir of
strength and patriotism in the millions of pure Anglo-Saxon
Americans.[1] It is a reservoir that should not be kept walled in, nor
should it be turned back when it attempts to flow out over the land,
but should be developed and permitted to send its strength to every
section to carry virility and the very essence of Americanism to
communities where these precious things are diluted or dying out.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] From Roosevelt’s “Winning of the West.”
Along the western frontier of the colonies that were so soon to be
the United States, on the slopes of the wooded mountains, and in
the long, trough-like valleys that lay between the ranges, dwelt a
peculiar and characteristically American people.
These frontier folk, the people of the up-country, or back-country
who lived near and among the forest-clad mountains, far away
from the long settled district of flat coast plain and sluggish tidal
river, were known to themselves and to others as backwoodsmen.
They all bore a strong likeness to one another in their habits of
thought and ways of living and differed markedly from the people
of the older and more civilized communities to the eastward.
The backwoodsmen were Americans by birth and by parentage,
and of mixed race; but the dominant strain in their blood was that
of the Presbyterian Irish—the Scotch-Irish as they were often
called. Full credit has been awarded the Roundhead and the
Cavalier for their leadership in our history; nor have we been
altogether blind to the deeds of the Hollander and the Huguenot;
but it is doubtful if we have wholly realized the importance of the
part played by that stern and virile people, the Irish, whose
preachers taught the creed of Knox and Calvin. These Irish
representatives of the Covenanters were in the west almost what
the Puritans were in the Northeast, and more than the Cavaliers
were in the South. Mingled with the descendants of many other
races, they nevertheless, formed the kernel of the distinctively
and intensely American stock who were the pioneers of our
people in their march westward, the vanguard of the army of
fighting settlers, who with axe and rifle won their way from the
Alleghenies to the Rio Grande and the Pacific.
They did not begin to come to America in any numbers till after
the opening of the eighteenth century; but by 1730 they were
fairly swarming across the ocean, for the most part in two
streams, the larger going to the port of Philadelphia, the smaller
to the port of Charleston. Pushing through the long settled
lowlands of the seacoast, they at once made their abode at the
foot of the mountains, and became the outposts of civilization.
From Pennsylvania, whither the great majority had come, they
drifted south, along the foothills and down the long valleys, till
they met their brethren from Charleston who had pushed up into
the Carolina back-country. In this land of hills covered by
unbroken forests they took root and flourished, stretching in a
broad belt from north to south, a shield of sinewy men thrust in
between the people of the seacoast and the red warriors of the
wilderness. All through this region they were alike; they had as
little kinship with the Cavalier as with the Quaker; the west was
won by those who have been rightly called the Roundheads of
the south, the same men who, before any others, declared for
American independence.
But indeed they were fitted to be Americans from the very start;
they were kinsfolk of the Covenanters: they deemed it a religious
duty to interpret their own Bible, and held for a divine right the
election of their clergy. For generations their whole ecclesiastical
and scholastic systems had been fundamentally democratic. In
the hard life of the frontier they lost much of their religion, and
they had but scant opportunity to give their children the schooling
in which they believed; but what few meeting-houses and school-
houses there were on the border were theirs.
A single generation, passed under the hard conditions of life in
the wilderness, was enough to weld together into one people the
representatives of these numerous and widely different races;
and the children of the next generation became indistinguishable
from one another. Long before the first Continental Congress
assembled, the backwoodsmen, whatever their blood, had
become Americans, one in speech, thought and character,
clutching firmly to the land in which their fathers and
grandfathers had lived before them. They had lost all
remembrance of Europe and all sympathy with things European;
they had become as emphatically products native to the soil as
were the tough and supple hickories out of which they fashioned
the handles of their long, light axes. Their grim, harsh, narrow
lives were yet strangely fascinating and full of adventurous toil
and danger; none but natures as strong, as freedom-loving and
as full of bold defiance as theirs could have endured existence on
the terms which these men found pleasurable. Their iron
surroundings made a mould which turned out all alike in the
same shape. They resembled one another, and they differed from
the rest of the world—even the world of America, and infinitely
more the world of Europe—in dress, in customs and in mode of
life.
CHAPTER II
THE ORIGIN OF THE MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS
Strange impressions have prevailed in regard to the moonlight
schools. Some have imagined them to be schools where children
study and play and scamper on the green, like fairies by the
moonlight; others have supposed them to be schools where lovers
stroll arm-in-arm, quote poetry and tell the old, old story by the light
of a witching moon; others, perhaps because these schools
originated in the mountains of Kentucky, have speculated upon their
being schools where moonshiners, youthful and aged, are instructed
in the best method of extracting the juice from the corn, and, at the
same time, one so secretive as to prevent government interference.
Moonlight schools were first established in September, 1911. They
had their origin in Rowan County, Kentucky. They were designed,
primarily, to emancipate from illiteracy all those enslaved in its
bondage. They were, also, intended to afford an opportunity to
those of limited education who desired to improve their store of
knowledge.
These schools grew out of the only condition that can give to any
institution permanent and substantial growth—an imperative human
need. This need was expressed, not by any theorist or group of
theorists but by the illiterates themselves.
When I was Superintendent of Rowan County schools, I acted as
voluntary secretary to several illiterate folk—a mistaken kindness—I
ought to have been teaching them to read and write. Among these
folk there was a mother whose children had all grown up without
learning save one daughter who had secured a limited education,
and when grown, had drifted away to the city of Chicago, where she
profited by that one advantage which the city possessed over the
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