Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Class reaction - Education in the South
I thought that our history lesson on American Education was very informative. After some thought, I don't believe that I have ever really studied or even thought in depth about the how public education system in America began. We covered over 200 years of history in 20 plus minutes. One area that I particularly found interesting during this class is the theory of why the South is farther behind the rest of the country in education. The fact that the south was behind in education because it was predominately an agrarian society that was run by aristocratic gentlemen who came to the new world to make their fortunes even larger never really occurred to me. I considered that their male children were probably home schooled and daughters were properly educated in societal affairs but I thought this was due to such a sparse population. I never thought about how they viewed education in general. I think that perhaps this is because agriculture has always been a way of life for my family. I know what its like to stand in the middle of 1000 acres and all of it belong to your family. No homes, no lights....just trees and wildlife. Education as far back as my great-grandparents are concerned was considered very important. However, education was also considered out of the question for all. The farm was and is a way of life for many in my family and necessary for survival. My own maternal grandmother had to quit school in the seventh grade so that she could work the cotton fields and help earn the family's keep. She was a sharecropper. All of the children in her family shared a single bedroom in a 4 room shack on the Doctor's farm. She was looked at by society as a white slave. She walked every Sunday to a rural black church for worship. Her clothes were hand made and ragged with patches and stitched up but she always told me that none of that mattered to God. As long as you were clean and your clothes were clean and you were dressed in your best; that was what mattered. I get this mental picture every time she tells me of her childhood days. I know her life was very hard to say the least. She and her sisters and brother all dropped out of school to work full time in the cotton fields for the land owner so that one of her sisters could finish school. They all worked for years to pay the college tuition for Winthrop. While they worked in the fields and the hot sun, my great aunt didn't have to do any manual labor. She was waited on by the rest of the family and her most difficult job was to read by lamp light late at night while she was in school. They even made her clothes for her. She graduated from the all girls school known as Winthrop and became a teacher. The entire family had to work to put her through school and they did this so that she could get a decent job and then take care of the family. What they didn't count on was her getting married and then moving to Georgia and never helping out the family. My great grandparents told my grandmother years ago that if they had it to do over again, they would have chosen her to go on to school because they knew she would have helped the family. I can hear the sadness in my grandmother's voice when she talks about her childhood. She didn't really have a childhood. Even though she never went on to finish school or attend college, she is one of the smartest people that I have ever known in my lifetime. She read to me every day after school. I remember Little Pig like it was yesterday...Many southerners have made tremendous sacrifices to help promote and advocate education. My own parents, although they never went on to schools of higher education, both went on to become very successful people and always instilled in us the importance of education. Considering public schools for all classes were not started in the South until after the Civil War, and all races were not included until much much later, I like to think that we have come a very long way in a shorter period of time. I believe that this is due to people like my own grandparents and parents instilling in their children that our future depends on our education.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Thanks for sharing, your post made me think of my own grandfather. He is from Dillon, SC, which is funny because we talked about this particular area in class. He came from a family of 5 and had to work very hard to be where he is today. He drove a school bus to help pay for college, and is a self-made man. He is one of the smartest people that I know, and was actually an SC Senator and owned his own collecting agency. My hope is that we can reform education so that all children are offered opportunities to make something of themselves, and that we can truly equalize education.
I also thought of a family member when I read this post. However, the family member that I thought of was not a grandparent or great-grandparent, it was my father. My dad's family struggled to keep food on the table and clothes on everyones back. My grandfather was a military man, not home very often, and my grandmother stayed at home with the kids. All of my fathers brothers and my father worked from a very young age to financially support the family. They would pick up cans on the side of the street or sell vegetable from their garden in the summer. When my father was 14, he went to work in the cotton mill on 3rd shift while still going to school during the day. My father atteneded on year of college but could not keep up because he also had to work a full time job. Like Liz, my father is the smartest person I know. Education in the south is behind the rest of the country. The generation that this phenomenon are not as old as one might think. Hopefully we are catching up. I know that if my father would have had the chance to attend college he could have been so much more professionally than a paper machine operater at Bowater.
A great post, Elizabeth. What struck me in your post was how important family is in the story -- that the family put its hopes in this one daughter who then was supposed to take care of everyone.
Post a Comment