xt7hhm52g777 https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt7hhm52g777/data/mets.xml Stewart, Cora Wilson, 1875-1958. 1922  books b92-123-28575600 English E.P. Dutton, : New York : Contact the Special Collections Research Center for information regarding rights and use of this collection. Education Kentucky. Literacy Kentucky. Moonlight schools for the emancipation of adult illiterates  / by Cora Wilson Stewart. text Moonlight schools for the emancipation of adult illiterates  / by Cora Wilson Stewart. 1922 2002 true xt7hhm52g777 section xt7hhm52g777 













































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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 Gen-
      eral Federation Womens' Clubs.



        NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON  COMPANY
      681 FIFTH AVENUE

 














     Copyright, 1922,
By E. P. Dutton  Company


   All Rights Reserved



iRINTED IN THE UNITED
  STATES OF AMERICA

 





























TO THE VOLUNTEER TEACHERTS 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 MeDanell
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 achieve-
ments of adults who have passed from the dark-
ness of illiteracy into light through the portals
of the moonlight schools.
                     Vii

 








yiii             PREFACE
  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                                  PACE
   I. THE PEOPLE WHO GAVE THE MOONLIGHT
        SCHOOLS TO THE WORLD  . . . .     1
  Il. 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 Nam OF MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS       167
XV. THE CALL OF THE ILLITERATES . . . 189
                     ix

 
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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
                      xi

 










xii            ILLUSTRATIONS
                                       FACING PAGE
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 Learn-
  ing 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 move-
ment 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 Bul-
letin 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
                    xiii

 








INTRODUCTION



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 experi-
ment, made under very difficult circumstances,
has been so great as to inspire the hope that,
with the cooperation of schools, churches, philan-
thropic 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."



XiCV


 















MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS

 
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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 in-
dividual that authors have chosen them as their
theme and artists as their subjects to interpret
to the world a people with a character dis-
tinctive, 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,
                     1

 








MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS



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 Ca-sar, 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 Eng-
land 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 intelli-
gence, 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



2

 








THE PEOPLE WHO GAVE THE SCHOOLS 3



equally sol 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 moun-
tain life, the strongest urge of the mountain-
eer's soul-his eager, hungry, insatiable desire
for knowledge. It is this which has sent moun-
tain 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 mountain-
eer 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 for-

 








MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS



ward 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



4

 









THE PEOPLE WHO GAVE THE SCHOOLS 5



   These mountain people now stand at the
threshold of a new civilization, eager and hope-
ful, 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 to-
gether 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 comfort-
ing 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.' It is a reservoir
that should not be kept walled in, nor should
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 be-
tween 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

 











6



MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS



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
differed markedly from the people of the older and more
civilized communities to the eastward.
  The backwoodsmen were Americans by birth and by parent-
age, 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 Round-
head 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 North-
east, and more than the Cavaliers were in the South. Min-
gled with the descendants of many other races, they never-
theless, 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 ma-
jority 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

 











THE PEOPLE WHO GAVE THE SCHOOLS 7

to carry virility and the very essence of Amer-
icanism to communities where these precious
things are diluted or dying out.

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 oppor-
tunity 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 indis-
tinguishable from one another. Long before the first Conti-
nental Congress assembled, the backwoodsmen, whatever their
blood, had become Americans, one in speech, thought and char-
acter, clutching firmly to the land in which their fathers and
grandfathers had lived before them. They had lost all remem-
brance 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 pleas-
urable. 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 be-
cause 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 inter-
ference.
  Moonlight schools were first established in
September, 1911. They had their origin in
                     8

 








ORIGIN OF THE SCHOOLS



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 sev-
eral 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 learn-
ing .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 rural district-the night school. She



9

 








MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS



so improved her education and increased her
efficiency that she was enabled to engage, profit-
ably, in a small business. Her letters were the
only joys that came into that mother's life and
the drafts which they contained were the only
means of relieving her needs. Usually she
would bring those letters to me, over the hill,
seven miles, to read and answer for her. Some-
times she would take them to the neighbors to
interpret. Once after an absence of six weeks,
an unaccustomed period, she came in one morn-
ing fondling a letter. I noticed an unusual
thing-the seal was broken.
  Anticipating her mission, I inquired, "Have
you a letter from your daughter Shall I read
and answer it for you"
  She straightened up with more dignity and
more pride than I have ever seen an illiterate
assume-with more dignity and more pride
than an illiterate could assume as she replied,
"No, I kin answer hit fer myself. I've larned
to read and write!"
"Learned to read and write!" I exclaimed



10

 







ORIGIN OF THE SCHOOLS



in amazement. "Who was your teacher, and
how did you happen to learn"
  "Well, sometimes I jist couldn't git over
here to see you," she explained, "an' the cricks
would be up 'twixt me an' the neighbors, or the
neighbors would be away from home an' I
couldn't git a letter answered fer three or four
days; an' anyway hit jist seemed like thar was
a wall 'twixt Jane an' me all the time, an' I
wanted to read with my own eyes what she
had writ with her own hand. So, I went to the
store an' bought me a speller, an' I sot up at
night 'til midnight an' sometimes 'til daylight,
an' I lamed to read an' write."
  To verify her statement, she slowly spelled
out the words of that precious letter. Then
she sat down, and under my direction, answered
it-wrote her first letter-an achievement which
pleased her immeasurably, and one that must
have pleased the absent Jane still more.
  A few days later a middle-aged man came
into the office, a man stalwart, intelligent and
prepossessing in appearance. While he waited



11

 








MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS



for me to dispatch the business in hand, I
handed him two books. He turned the leaves
hurriedly, like a child handling its first books,
turned them over and looked at the backs and
laid them down with a sigh. Knowing the
scarcity of interesting books in his locality, I
proffered him the loan of them. He shook his
head.
  "I can't read or write," he said. Then the
tears came into the eyes of that stalwart man
and he added in a tone of longing, "I would
give twenty years of my life if I could."
  A short time afterward, I was attending an
entertainment in a rural district school. A lad
of twenty was the star among the performers.
He sang a beautiful ballad, partly borrowed
from his English ancestors but mostly original,
displaying his rare gift as a composer of song.
  When he had finished, I went over and sat
down beside him. "Dennis," I said "that was
a beautiful ballad. It is worthy of publication.
Won't you write a copy for me"
His countenance, which had lighted up at my



12

 








ORIGIN OF THE SCHOOLS



approach, suddenly fell, and he answered in a
crest-fallen tone, "I would if I could write, but
I can't. Why, I've thought up a hundred of
'em that was better'n that, but I'd fergit 'em
before anybody come along to set 'em down."
  These were the three incidents that led di-
rectly to the establishment of the moonlight
schools. I interpreted them to be not merely
the call of three individuals, but the call of
three different classes; the appeal of illiterate
mothers, separated from their absent children
farther than sea or land or any other condition
than death had power to divide them; the call
of middle-aged men, shut out from the world of
books, and unable to read the Bible or the news-
papers or to cast their votes in secrecy and
security; the call of illiterate youths and
maidens who possessed rare talents, which if
developed might add treasures to the world of
art, science, literature and invention.



13



 














CHAPTER m



        SURPRISES OF THE FIRST SESSION

  The opening of the day schools to them was
first considered, but the day schools were al-
ready crowded with children, and anyway,
illiterates, more than any other class, are
chained to labor by day. Then came the thought
of opening the schools at night, but bad roads
with innumerable gullies, high hills and un-
bridged streams were obstacles to overcome.
Besides, the county had been, at one time, a
feud county and the people were not accustomed
to venturing out much after night. It was de-
cided to have the schools on moonlight nights,
and let the moon light them on their way to
school.
  The teachers of the county were called to-
gether and the conditions laid before them.
They were asked to volunteer to teach at night
                     14

 








THE FIRST SESSION



those whom the schools of the past had left
behind. To their everlasting credit be it said
that not one of those teachers expressed a doubt
or offered an excuse, but each and every one of
them, without a single exception, volunteered to
teach at night, after she'had taught all day, and
to canvass her district in advance to inform
the people of the purpose of these schools and
to urge them all to attend.
  This preliminary canvass was made on Labor
Day, September 4, 1911. The teachers of
Rowan County celebrated the holiday by going
out into the highways and byways to gather in
to school all who needed to learn. They went
into every farm-house and hovel, inviting both
educated and uneducated to attend.
  On September 5, the brightest moonlight
night, it seemed to me, that the world had ever
known, the moonlight schools opened for their
first session. We had estimated the number
that would attend, and an average of three to
each school, one hundred and fifty in the entire
county was the maximum set.



15

 








MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS



  We waited with anxious hearts. The teachers
had volunteered, the schools had been opened,
the people had been invited but would they
come They had all the excuses that any toil-
worn people ever had. They had rugged roads
to travel, streams without bridges to cross, high
hills to climb, children to lead and babes to
carry, weariness from the hard day's toil; but
they were not seeking excuses, they were seek-
ing knowledge, and so they came. They came
singly or hurrying in groups, they came walk-
ing for miles, they came carrying babes in
arms, they came bent with age and leaning on
canes, they came twelve hundred strong!
  There were overgrown boys who had dropped
out of school at an early age and had been
ashamed to re-enter the day school and be class-
ified with the tiny tots. These came to catch
up again. There were maidens who had been
deprived of education, through isolation, in-
validism or some other cause, but who felt that
there was something better for them in life than
ignorance. There were women who had mar-



16



 











































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THE FIRST SESSION



ried in childhood, practically, as is so much the
wont of mountain girls-but who all their lives
had craved that which they knew to be their
inherent right-their mental development. By
their sides were their husbands, men who had
been humiliated when they had made their mark
in the presence of the educated and when forced
to ask the election officers to cast a vote for
them for the candidates of their choice. There
were middle-aged men who had seen a hundred
golden opportunities pass them by because of
the handicap of illiteracy, whose mineral, tim-
ber and material stores, as well as their time
and labor, were in the control of the educated
men, maaking them but beggars, as it were, on
the bounty of those whom they enriched. There
were women whose children had all grown up
and vanished from the home, some of them into
the far West, and when the spoken word and
the hand-clasp had ceased there could be no
heart-to-heart communication, for the third per-
son as an interpreter between mother and child
is but a poor medium at best. These and other



17

 








MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS



folk-some half educated and some more-made
up these schools.
  "Just to learn to read my Bible!" was the
cry of many a patriarch and many a withered
dame.
  "Just to write my children with my own
hand, and to read their letters with my own
eyes!" was the cry of the mother's heart.
  "Just to escape from the shame of making
my mark!" was the appeal of the middle-aged
man.
  "Just to have a chance with the other folk-
to be something and to do something in the
world!" was the expressed desire of youth and
maid.
  The youngest student was aged eighteen, the
oldest eighty-six. It was a scene to bring tears
to the eyes, but surely one to make the heart
rejoice, to see those hoary-headed old people
and those robust young people seated at their
desks studying together, or standing in a row
in class to spell, or lined up at the blackboard
to solve problems or to write.



18



 



























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THE FIRST SESSION        1



  Many of them learned to write their names
the first evening, and such rejoicing as there
was over this event! One old man on the shady
side of fifty shouted for joy when he learned to
write his name. "Glory to God!" he shouted,
"I'll never have to make my mark any more!"
  Some were so intoxicated with joy that they
wrote their names in frenzied delight on trees,
fences, barns, barrel staves and every available
scrap of paper; and those who possessed even
meager savings, drew the money out of its hid-
ing place and deposited it in the bank, wrote
their checks and signed their names with pride.
Soon letters began to go from hands that had
never written, before, to loved ones in other
counties and in far distant states, and usually
the first letter of each student came to the
County School Superintendent. In a movement
full of romance and heroism, there is no incident
more romantic or more delightful to record
than the fact that the first three letters
that ever came out of the moonlight schools
came in this order: the first, from a mother



19

 







20        MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS

who had children absent in the West; the
second, from the man who "would give twenty
years of his life if he could read and
write"; and the third from the boy who would
forget his ballads 'before anybody come along
to set 'em down." This answered the anxious
question in our hearts as to whether the moon-
light schools had met the need of those who had
made the appeal.



 













CHAPTER IV



PIONEER METHODS IN DEALING WITH ILLITERATES

  There were no readers in print for adult
illiterates, so a little weekly newspaper was
published as a reading text.

            Can we win
            Can we win what
            Can we win the prize
            Yes, we can win.
            See us try.
            And see us win!

  This was the first lesson. It consisted of
simple words, much repetition and a content
that related to the activity of the reader, all
of which, in a first lesson are essential. The
lesson referred to a contest between the moon-
light schools, and the element of rivalry thus
introduced heightened the interest and produced
                     21

 








MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS



a style of reading that rang with the emphasis
of a challenge. There was attained immediately
what had been striven for in the day schools
with only indifferent success-natural expres-
sion in reading.
  In the later lessons there was a sentence
which read, "The best people on earth live in
Rowan County." Provincial though this may
seem to some and flattery to others, it had the
desired effect of keeping the interest at white
heat, as perhaps a sentence like-"Foreign
birds wear pretty feathers" could not have
done. One old man read the sentence and openly
expressed his approval. He leaned back in his
seat and with a hearty laugh exclaimed, " That's
the truth!"
  Continuing the lesson, he found a little fur-
ther along a sentence that read like this, "The
man who does not learn to read and write is not
a good citizen and would not fight for his coun-
try if it needed him."
  This was published before the World War
when a vast number of illiterate soldiers were



22

 








DEALING WITH ILLITERATES



called into the American Army, and is a state-
ment disproved, of course; for illiterate soldiers
are courageous and as patriotic as their under-
standing will permit. But the sentence pro-
voked students to their best possible work. The
old man who had exulted in being one of those
"best people on earth," became very thoughtful
after reading it, and then resumed his study
with grim determination, for to a Kentuckian
there is no accusation so humiliating as