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APPENDIX.

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The following essays have all been prepared as public addresses or magazine articles. Severai of them have been widely circulated in pamphlet form, chiefly in the Northern States. I have always regarded the Northern side of my Ministry of Education in the South" as of equal importance to its Southern department. For, even in educational circles, the knowledge of the actual condition of the Southern people in respect to the schooling of their 6,000,000 children and youth of school age is of just that confused description that the most absurd exaggerations, favorable or adverse, everywhere prevail. These essays are a selection from a large number of similar character, through which, in addition to a large amount of writing in the educational and popular press and constant public speaking, I have labored in the past twelve years to keep at least the Northern educational public informed of the real condition of affairs in the sixteen Southern States. They cover the entire period of my Southern ministry, and indicate my growing confidence in the thorough soundness of the Southern educational public and the increasing hope that the majority of the Southern people will consent to be guided by it in building for the children. As an introduction to the more mature and extended discussion of Southern educational affairs in the main essay of this "circular of information," the addresses and articles in this appendix may be useful.

A. D. MAYO.

213

I.

THE SOUTH AT SCHOOL.

An address delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, at St. Albans, Vt., July 6, 1881.

The word of the Lord (which in my copy of the "improved version" includes the command of our honored president of the American Institute of Instruction) came to me last week, resting under the maples of Wellesley, saying "Gird up the loins of your mind and go to St. Albans to stand in the place of one whom everybody is always eager to hear, and try to make the people forget that he is away." The foremost virtue of a good schoolman is a reasonable consent to be "supervised," and after ten years' training by Secretary Dickinson, who is said to have supervision on the brain, I have at least learned the art of swift and gracious obedience. So I am here not to stand in anybody's place or to make anybody's speech, save that which is given me to deliver on my own account.

It was suggested by our president that I shonld "tell my experience" concerning my journeyings during eight months of the past year through nine of the Southern States, on what I hope it is not vanity to call "A ministry of education." Certainly there is enough to tell about this, the most interesting and the happiest year of my life. But when I begin to collect my recollections, I realize that you have been instructed this afternoon by one of the most distinguished representatives of education in the South, Dr. J. L. M. Curry, one who knows all that is worth telling of its past schooling, and who must know more than all of us concerning its present condition, aspirations, aptitudes, and pathetic necessities. I certainly shall not presume to repeat his word and shall not attempt to speak in any positive or compendious way on the mighty theme-Education in the South.

And when I would tell the little story of my own wanderings up and down a land which, even under the leaden skies of last winter, had always sunshine enough to build a pathway of light for one of its visitors, I am more at a loss than ever what to say. For, on looking back over these months of pleasant occupation, I feel that much that I heard and saw, and was permitted to do, was of a nature so confidential, sacred, and involved in the personality of myself and those who met me with such friendly welcome, that to write it out in the press or shout it from a summer-convention platform would be like rushing to the housetop and proclaiming a year's history of my own family.

But there is one line of remark which I may be permitted to follow to-night without presumptious interference with the theme of our distinguished absent or present friends. Possibly I know as much of Northern school men, including school women, as either of these eminent gentlemen. And, though I know very little yet of the South in general, or the South at school, I am sure I know a great deal more than the multitude who are daily rushing to the front with loud and infallible prescriptions for all the ills that afflict that vast and various community. Governor Seward told me that the most profitable investment ever made by the State of New York was the geological survey that demonstrated thero were no coal beds within its imperial boundaries. Henceforth no more fortunes would be wrecked prospecting for coal in

New York. It will richly pay several years of observation by more competent observers than myself if the Northern schoolmen and Northern people can learn what can not be done in this vast enterprise of schooling the Sonth by anybody outside itself or virtually identified with its home life. But there are some things which we Northern teachers, representing especially the old North, can do. And these few things can be better told us perhaps by one of ourselves than by any man south of the Potomac or the Ohio. So I have concluded to occupy your attention during this evening hour by a very free, possibly a rambling, talk; trying to keep in sight of the landmark I set up as my theme, "The South at School."

I am aware that the educational public, North and West, is now intensely preoccupied with local educational questions which, like a silver dollar held before the eye, may shut off the whole universe outside the world at home. But the experience

of the past year has brought me to the conviction that however important may be such local controversies and interests, neither one of them nor all together compare in importance with this radical question of the new education through that imperial domain we call the South. I do not underrate the importance to New Boston of its chronic controversy on the proper administration of its splendid system of schools. I feel the great importance of the discussion, not yet closed, in the great Middle States, between private, corporate, and church education on the one hand, and the public school on the other; a discussion that certainly touched bottom in the late deliverance of Mr. Richard Grant White. I wore out ten continuous years in the vain effort to prevent the capture of the grand educational system of the most cultivated Western city by a politico-ecclesastical "ring," and I realize that for some years yet the Western and Pacific States will be vexed by the persistent attempt of these pernicious combinations to administer the public school in the interest of ecclesiastical power and political plunder. Still I am as sure of this as of anything, that if the education of the people goes wrong through that vast assemblage of States that stretches from Philadelphia to San Antonio, it will be comparatively of small importance who is superintendent in Boston, what university leads in New York, what methods of instruction prevail in St. Louis, or whether some monster of pedagogic depravity steals the examination papers in San Francisco.

The besetting weakness of American school men is the notion that the school of each master or the system of each locality or State is a little world in itself with which no stranger may intermeddle. But we are all finding out that American education, however various and in some ways antagonistic, is all embarked on one steamer bound for one port. I have a vivid recollection of a scene on board a European ocean palace, when a raging discussion in the cabin was suddenly suspended by a tremendous lurch of the good ship that brought every disputant's stomach, if not his "heart, into his mouth;" and I noticed that the very exclusive Beacon street family that so far had hardly realized the existence of anything outside its own double stateroom gave unmistakable indications, through the partition walls, that it was stirred in profound sympathy with the sorrows of the colored cooks in the kitchen and the sooty salamanders that fed the fiery furnaces down below. American school life, underneath all its varieties, must be the training of American children and youth for that intelligent and righteous manhood and womanhood which is the absolute condition of good American citizenship. If Massachusetts or Louisiana is captured by any power hostile to this idea of education, the great school ship of the Republic will spring a leak and we shall all be summoned from our little berths and graded seats at the table to toil at the pumps to keep the ocean from coming in.

Of the American children and youth now in or out of school it must be said, as of humanity by the great apostle, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither male nor female, there is neither bond nor free: for ye are all one" in the glorious union and boundless hope of the new Republic now coming to pass, and, we trust in God, to endure long enough to be the normal school of self-government for all mankind. I can not discuss this radical position-that no phase of education is to-day half so im

portant, so worthy of intense observation, as the spectacle of the South at school-so I shall confine my remarks to suggestions of what our teachers and our people can do for the encouragement and help of our brethren and sisters in those States in their present enterprise of putting their children in training for the momentous years which too soon are sure to come.

As I look at this matter it seems very evident that the first and essential duty of our Northern schoolmen is to cultivate the most friendly and intelligent sympathy with all educational workers and especially with the younger people and children of these Southern States. There are certain cold facts concerning the status of education in these commonwealths which can be gathered from the new census, or even in more vital shape from the reports of the various public, private, missionary, and home ecclesiastical schools. Of course, in any general estimate and comparison with other parts of the country, the South must be judged by these facts. But I know from personal contact how small an element these tables of statistics, even added to the whole past of Southern history and supplemented by what anybody can see of the opinions and policy of a considerable portion of its people who represent the old past, really are in any fair estimate of this question. What the education of the South shall become depends less and less every year on what all these things staud for in the national life. My son, born on the first presidential election day of Abraham Lincoln, remembers nothing of the great war save a vision of soldiers marching in Cincinnati to repel the raid of Johnny Morgan from over the border. The most brilliant young university man of the Southwest was a boy under 15 in Virginia, while the Old Dominion was rocking to its base with the wrestling of mighty armies between Washington and Richmond. The teachers of the South, outside a few dozen colleges, are largely young men and women, under 35. The children, in ́these swift years, read of the great conflict as some of us heard of the old war of the revolution; and, more and more, the management of Southern education is passing into the hands of a generation that, in all essential things, represents the new Republic. The man who has not visited the South and in a sympathetic and friendly spirit met that portion of its people most deeply interested in education, talked with its teachers, looked into the faces of its children, and seen for himself the absolute inability of its people to do much that is expected of it, can have but little valuable knowledge in this matter. Gen. Lee said to his soldiers at Appomattox, "Let us go home and cultivate our virtues " He went home to become a schoolmaster. Every prominent school man of the North, for the next ten years, should visit the South to cultivate his sympathies with Southern teachers and children. If anybody can do this without prejudice, with charity and common justice, and come back with any feeling save the most profound and brotherly interest, asking the Lord "what wilt Thou have me to do?" he is a man I am unable and do not care to understand.

In all great popular movements, like the present educational movement through the South, the most vital force is, after all, a mighty tidal wave of sympathy, overflowing all bounds, breaking in at every crevice, irresistible as the motions of the providence of Almighty God. Down in Kentucky one stormy day last winter, as I stood in the dripping station waiting for the train, a haggard, feeble old gentleman accosted me: "I hear you are down South visiting the schools. I was a rich man in Mississippi twenty years ago. The great war flung me up, a wreck, upon my relations in old Kentucky. I am almost through, but I thank God for this new boom in education and I want to shake hands with a man that has come from New England to help it along." I find it not easy to explain to comfortablə ladies in luxurious parlors; to sharp merchants after their per cents; even to ministers of the gospel buried up to their eyes in little parish worriments, the things amid which I have lived for the past year. But I know if I could persuade a thousand teachers to do what I have done there would be a revival in their own souls that would make them behold "all things new." Nobody ever yet estimated the irresistible power of intelligent and educated sympathy in human affairs. The school public of the North includes the

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