Cora Wilson Stewart

“ It has come up through trials, tribulations and struggles innumerable. A night school in every community! If it is an educated community, a night school for more education, for culture and specialization; if an illiterate community, for the emancipation of the illiterates and their new birth into the realms of knowledge and power! ”

“ Nothing just like it has found expression in any educational system, in any age; the sureness of faith of those who teach, the simplicity of their efforts, the general response. I have seen three generations studying the same books in one moonlight school. “There are 2,442 illiterates in the county,” said a man to me in one of the counties in the Cumberland Mountains. “It will take two years to wipe out illiteracy.” Think of the calm faith of it! I believe that the story of the moonlight schools is the most exalted and sacrificial that has been told in the educational effort of America. ”

“ 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?
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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. ”

“ The enlightening of public opinion, the quickening of the missionary spirit, the arousing of state pride and the opening of pocketbooks to finance the movement were some of the tasks which confronted this Commission of volunteers besides the actual instruction of illiterates.
The public school teachers being already at the helm were in better position to influence the people than any others. They must be the soldiers in this bloodless war against illiteracy but soldiers in the trenches must have organized and intelligent support from those back home. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The teachers and citizens of Kentucky are pioneers in the movement, which has now become nation-wide and has even been adopted in other countries. The movement which they have so unselfishly fostered demands the best that is in us all at this time when the last battle in the crusade against illiteracy in Kentucky is being waged.
I honor the moonlight school teachers and set a high value upon the service which they are volunteering to render to humanity and to the state. May that service enrich their own lives as much as it will their fellow-men and the great commonwealth of Kentucky. ”

“ Oh, that every one of the five million illiterates in America might become as this old man and others redeemed [174] from illiteracy, who will not tolerate the crime of keeping children out of school!
Some used to say that laboring men worked better and were more contented, if illiterate. There never was a greater fallacy. Illiteracy never plowed a furrow straighter nor produced an extra bushel to the acre. It never turned out a better product from factory, field or mine. It handicaps the laborer, making his task more difficult, his position less secure and his life less safe. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In those days of earnest discussion and planning for helping a people who had been abandoned by the educational forces of all time, and a people who, themselves, until the moonlight schools burst upon them, had abandoned hope, there was never a doubt expressed, a complaint made or even a suggestion that this volunteer service was a sacrifice or a hardship, or anything but a holiday joy. ”

“ The moonlight school in 1911 advanced the idea that illiteracy could be wiped out of a given locality within a given time. It is an idea that has taken such firm hold on the public mind that nothing less than the emancipation of every illiterate will satisfy the public conscience. The removal of illiteracy is now the fixed purpose of the Nation. ”

“ Girls who had offered their services for patriotic duty of various kinds during the War and had been rejected because of their limited education, had not gone home to content themselves with their lot, but the rude awakening to their condition had sent them seeking opportunities to learn. Middle-aged men and women and older ones whose illiteracy had been revealed to them during the War in all its ugliness were nursing a divine discontent. These were ready, as never before, for school. ”

“ Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll,
nor is it by the will of the illiterates themselves but through the shortsightedness and selfishness of educated men.
The illiterate is more to be pitied than the blind, the deaf, the dumb, the lame, and he has [190] an affliction, in a measure, equal to that of the insane. The illiterate can see, but is blind to all the lore over which the masters have striven and left to bless the world; he can hear, he can distinguish sound, but cannot appreciate music ”

“ Illiterates are nowhere at a greater disadvantage than at the ballot box, where corrupt men often purchase their birthright for a mess of pottage or cheat them out of it entirely. Henry Van Dyke says, “To place the ballot in the hands of illiterate persons is like hanging a diamond around the neck of a little child and sending it out into the crowded street.” The ballot has not only been placed in the hands of 2,273,603 illiterate male voters but since the enfranchisement of women, the number of illiterate [183] voters in America has been augmented by, perhaps, two millions more. ”

“ The aim of the Kentucky Illiteracy Commission is noble and exalted and of the greatest benefit, and there is no subject of more importance or of more far-reaching influence than the elimination of illiteracy from our State. We should educate all of our people, those under twenty-one years of age, and those upward of twenty-one years of age. The perpetuity of our free institutions depends upon the intelligence and virtue of the people. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Shall Kentucky Send Thirty Thousand Illiterates to France? God forbid! Why should she send any? Hasn’t she an Illiteracy Commission, 11,000 public school teachers and as patriotic people as ever the sun shone on? To the guns, yes, every man of them—even though with their affliction they might well be exempt from military duty, I believe—but to the books first, and then they’ll go to the guns more content and with less embarrassment and less handicap. ”

“ Not everyone came rushing out to school in every district when the schools first opened. An institution so new as a school where illiterate adults could learn to read and write may easily be misunderstood, criticized and even resented by those who need it most. Considering the mistaken attitude of the educated for generations past on the question of teaching them, it is not [160] at all strange that some of the illiterates, themselves, with minds so befogged and darkened, should have had doubts and misconceptions of the school and what it would do for them. ”

“ 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 republic, society rests upon the intelligence of the people and only in universal education is democracy safe and liberty securely enthroned. A nation which has over four million illiterate voters is not strongly fortified to uphold any principle, and society is undermined and weakened at its very source. ”

“ The moonlight school movement does not assume to be an educational regeneration. It assumes but one duty and that is to redeem the illiterates. Its by-products, however, are increased attendance in the day schools, increased interest in school improvement, intelligent support of progressive legislation and other things that vitalize and help the schools. Some who have no vision of a community redeemed from illiteracy and no sympathy with the illiterates are often heard to remark, “The best result of the moonlight school is its effect on day-school attendance.” ”

“ You cannot teach the illiterates of the district to read and write without increasing the educational spirit of the community and improving the school advantages of the children. You cannot start the educated out on a crusade to redeem their illiterate [162] neighbors without arousing in them a sentiment for better education for their own and their neighbors’ children and for better educational conditions throughout the system for future generations. ”

“ Since universal education is so essential to the success of a democracy it is a wonder that a provision was not written into the Constitution of the United States similar to the one once proposed by Cortez for the constitution of Spain, “That no person born after this day shall acquire the right of citizenship until he can read and write.” ”

“ The pioneers had to educate themselves as to the nature and scope of the problem and the plan of attack, to educate the public to co-operate—some to contribute funds, a larger group to give service, and the whole public to give their moral support. The public had to be brought under indictment for the illiteracy statistics, which, viewed in bulk for state and Nation, had seemed too stupendous to arouse a feeling of responsibility in community or individual, but when analyzed and presented for counties and local communities produced an entirely different effect. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He said, “My learning may never do me much good. My hands are stiff and I can’t write much; my eyes are bad and I can’t see to read a great deal, but I see now what I’ve missed in life, and I want to tell you what I’m going to do—I’m going ’round to every home in my district just before school begins each year, as long as I live, and urge the parents to send their children to school.” A friend of education! ”

“ A galaxy of speakers, headed by the Governor and State officials and composed of men and women prominent in politics and in other professions, went out over the State at their own expense fighting illiteracy and urging the establishment of moonlight schools. What these prominent ones advocated so openly, many great souls carried further in some quiet way, either by organizing a moonlight school in some isolated spot, by talking for the cause at some country store, or by going over the hill or across the field to teach some neighbor to read and write. ”

“ The idea of eradicating illiteracy has taken firm hold of the Nation’s leaders. Congressman Horace M. Towner, of Iowa, in making the report of the Committee on Education to the National House of Representatives, said of the first county that had attacked illiteracy: “This experiment conclusively shows that it is possible to bring help to illiterate men and women even under the most adverse circumstances. It demonstrates the fact that under proper leadership [154] and under proper direction adult illiteracy is easily and quickly wiped out.” ”