The Importance of True Education to a Free and Independent Dixie

[The inspiration for the lengthy article which follows comes from a short conversation I recently had with one of my younger brothers, whose kids, my brother informed me, started “back to school” Wednesday last week. When I remarked that the persons who are really receiving a “good education” in modern American schools are the teachers and administrators, my witty brother nodded agreeably and replied, “they’re receiving a good education on the causes of the degradation of society.” I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment as my brother expressed it; the problem is of course that in spite of that first-hand education, the teachers and admins (to say nothing of parents) in question consider themselves and their institutions as THE solution to the situation my brother so aptly named, and not, as they truly are and always have been, a main source, if not THE main source, of the fatal disease. To the point made in the previous sentence, the following article is wholly dedicated.]

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In October of the year of our Lord, 1848, the Southern Literary Messenger ran an article titled “The Education of the People”; a “piece” in which the author (or, rather, “compiler,” since it mostly consists of a compilation of the various musings of the “best educators” of the day upon the merits of a system of universal, and uniform, compulsory government schooling imposed throughout the land) goes unnamed. For those of you who are as yet less than well-informed on the matter, it was the Ichabod Crane of his day – Boston Brahmin, Horace Mann (after whom many modern American schools are rightly named) – who was instrumental in, and almost solely responsible for, “getting the ball rolling” towards universal education (government schooling) in America, Prussian style.

Mr. Mann’s achievement in this vein is, in a very real sense, quite impressive given the strong written opposition to his plan he received from certain of the American clergy and almost universally throughout the Southland. When I say Mann’s achievement was and is “impressive,” I’m simply giving credit where credit is due, not in any way applauding the predictable disastrous outcome of his life’s work. Moreover, and as many of us know all too well, while Northern Mind and Character was perfectly shaped by nature alone to embrace the starry-eyed vision of their own ‘best educators’ of ‘48 in this matter of non-sectarian “universal education,” it required the bloodbath of the so-called “Civil War” and its disastrous aftermath to impose such a fiendish institution upon our fathers and mothers in our beloved Southland, as well as many decades of time for their own offspring to fully embrace the imposition. While “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” even giving Mann and his cohorts the benefit of the doubt of actually having had good intentions in their scheme, it is to spite those “good intentions” that modern American society has degenerated into the hellscape that it has in our generations. You can’t fool Mother Nature, nor is it wise to tempt fate, as they say. As Dr. Dabney rightly notes on this point:

This perversion of a pretended system of education is as intolerable as it is certain. … These practices have already disclosed their destructive fruits in preparing a whole generation, by a pupilage of lies, for a war of plunder and subjugation against the South. For years before the war the sectional and aggressive party had control of the State education in New England and the Northwest. They used their opportunity diligently; and the result was that when the chance to strike came, they had a whole generation trained to their purpose in hatred of the South and in constitutional heresies. [See e.g., John Ransom’s Andersonville diary, et al, in this connection.]

Well did Mr. Lincoln opine that, “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” I trust I needn’t explain further to this intelligent readership that the ‘philosophy of the school room’ it the North in the decades preceding the WBTS was radicalism and “black republicanism,” borne of the spirit of the French Revolution and Jacobinism; whereas, south of Mason and Dixon’s line, the ‘philosophy of the school room,’ and, indeed, the school room itself, was as Dr. Dabney describes in another place, to wit:

This old system evinced its wisdom by avoiding the pagan, Spartan theory, which makes the State the parent. It left the parent supreme in his God-given sphere, as the responsible party for providing and directing the education of his own off-spring. This old plan, instead of usurping, encouraged and assisted, where assistance was needed. It was wise again, in that it avoided creating salaried offices to eat up the people’s money, and yet do no actual teaching. It was supremely wise, in that it cut the Gordian knot: “Religion in the State school,” which now baffles British and Yankee wit. It set that insuperable difficulty clear on one side, by leaving the school as the creature of the parents, and not of the State. It was wise in its exceeding economy, a trait so essential to the State now.

Quite so! In the above quotation, Dr. Dabney is referring to the excellence (and superiority) of the old Virginia plan for educating its future generations; a system of true education to which Dabney later writes,

…it was the old Virginia system that reared the yeomanry which filled those immortal ranks with such a body of privates—so virtuous, so enduring, so brave, so intelligent, as no other generals ever commanded.

But the plan of Mr. Mann and his Yankee cohorts – a plan, I daresay, far too many sons and daughters of the South warmly embrace and espouse as their own in our generations – was something altogether different; it meant to, and unashamedly promised to, train ninety-nine out of a hundred students (99 of every 100, y’all!) under its immortal supervision, out of all of those human traits which give rise to intemperance, profligacy, infidelity, etc., and into all those traits which, by direct contrast, characterize a civilized society of men and women all living in perfect love and harmony with one another,- ‘without regard to race, sex, or previous condition,’ etc. To prove the veracity of this otherwise unbelievably wild, impossible estimate, let relevant facts be submitted to a candid readership.

Miss Catherine Beecher, a lady of the highest order of talents, who has been engaged with signal success and usefulness the last fifteen years as a teacher in Connecticut and Ohio, whose pupils have come from every State in the Union, and who has had charge at different periods of not less than one-thousand teachers, after adverting to the conditions proposed in [Mr. Mann’s] inquiry, and the nature of the education which should be conferred, says:

“With these preliminaries, which I hope will be carefully pondered, and borne in mind as indispensable, I will now suppose that it could be so arranged that, in a given place containing from ten to fifteen thousand inhabitants, in any part of our country where I have ever resided, all the children at the age of four shall be placed, six hours a day, for twelve years, under the care of teachers having the same views that I have, and having received that course of training for their office that any state in this Union can secure to the teachers of its children. Let it be so arranged that all these children shall remain till sixteen under these teachers, and also that they shall spend their lives in this city, and I have no hesitation in saying, – I do not believe that one, no, not a single one, would fail of proving a respectable and prosperous member of society; nay, more; I believe every one would, at the close of life, find admission into the world of endless peace and love. I say this solemnly, deliberately, and with the full belief that I am upheld by such imperfect, experimental trials as I have made, or seen made by others; but, more than this, that I am sustained by the authority of Heaven, which sets forth this grand palladium of education,- ‘Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.’

“This sacred maxim surely presents the Divine imprimatur to the doctrine that all children can be trained up in the way they should go, and that, when so trained, they will not depart from it. Nor does it imply that education alone will secure eternal life, without supernatural assistance; but it points to the true method of securing this indispensable aid.

“In this view of the case, I can command no language strong enough to express my infinite longings that my countrymen, who, as legislators, have control of the institutions, the laws, and the wealth, of our physically prosperous nation, should be brought to see that they now have in their hands the power to secure to every child of the coming generation of life of virtue and usefulness here, and an eternity of perfected bliss hereafter. How then can I express, or imagine, the awful responsibility which rests upon them, and which hereafter they must bear before the great Judge of nations, if they suffer the present state of things to go on, bearing, as it does, thousands, and hundreds of thousands of helpless children, in our country, to hopeless and irretrievable ruin.”

I chose, among the broader selection of responses from the “best teachers in the country” contained in “The Education of the People” above-mentioned, Miss Beecher’s submission to Mr. Mann’s inquiry in his circular because it so fully and so vividly illustrates the level of self-righteous Yankee conceit and arrogance (to say nothing of untamed female silliness, which is a feature, not a bug, of Problematic Womanhood), already so prevalent in the North in 1848. I should imagine that it must have been a “proud lady moment” for Miss Beecher when that “Problematic Woman” of days gone by learned that her answer to Mann’s inquiry was to be published, for broad dissemination and with equal authority, alongside those of the likes of her preeminent male colleagues to the North in the “education” racket. One supposes we are to believe, in reading her magical incantations, that Cain would not have slain his brother, Abel, had he the ‘indispensable’ benefit of a Catherine Beecher, or of some other teacher equally qualified and “having the same views that I have,” to train him up for twelve years in the way he should have gone. But I digress.

In any case, that compulsory government schooling was, at length and for all intents and purposes, fully embraced over the course of time in the South and her western territories should be no surprise to us in hindsight. Its warm acceptance by the better blood of the country closely followed the same inescapable pattern and logic Dr. Dabney delineated when he accurately predicted that the woman’s suffrage movement would ultimately win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the people:

Some who see the mischievousness of the movement express the hope that it will, even if nominally successful, be kept within narrow limits by the very force of its own absurdity. They “reckon without their host.” There is a Satanic ingenuity in these radical measures which secures the infection of the reluctant dissentients as surely as of the hot advocates. The [parents] now sensible and modest who heartily deprecate the whole folly, will be dragged into the vortex, with the assent of their now indignant [brethren]. The instruments of this deplorable result will be the (so-called) conservative candidates for office. They will effect it by this plea, that ignorant, impudent, Radical [families] will [participate] and [taint the public schools with their influence]; whence it becomes a necessity for the modest and virtuous [families], for their country’s sake, to sacrifice their repugnance [and their offspring] and counterpoise these mischievous [brats] in the spirit of disinterested self-sacrifice. Now a woman can never resist an appeal to the principle of generous devotion; her glory is to crucify herself in the cause of duty and of zeal. This plea will be successful. But when the virtuous have once tasted the dangerous intoxication of [freedom from parental responsibility], even they will be absorbed; they will learn to do con amor what was first done as a painful duty, and all the baleful influences of [government schooling] will be diffused throughout the [nation].

There is a certain level of poetic justice that naturally comes with these predictable results. When leftists and right-liberals so often complain of the “school to prison pipeline,” and are thwarted at every ‘turn of the wrench’ in their ill-conceived, ill-fated and wasteful attempts to ameliorate the crisis, I just sigh and shake my head, noting well the hard truth of that old scripture stating that, “My people perish for lack of knowledge.” But, again, Dr. Dabney addressed this very thing and accurately prophesied such would be the exact result. To wit:

We often hear this apology for the State’s wholesale intrusion into education advanced with the exactness of a commercial transaction. They say: “It costs less money to build school-houses than jails.” But what if it turns out that the State’s expenditure in school-house is one of the things which necessitates the expenditure in jails? The fruits of the system show that such is the result, and hence the plea for the State’s intrusion is utterly delusive. The regular result of the kind of education which alone it can give is to propagate crime.

Allison’s History of Europe states that forty years ago two-thirds of the inhabitants of France could neither read nor write. In Prussia, at the same time, the government had made secular education almost universal, by compelling parents to send their children to school from seven to fourteen years of age. Statistics of the two countries show that serious crime was at that time fourteen times as prevalent in intelligent Prussia as in ignorant France—volume V., page 15.

Again it has been found from the official records of the 86 departments of France that the amount of crime has, without a single exception, been in proportion to the amount of scholastic instruction given in each. Again, we are told that much the largest number of the lewd women of Paris come from those departments where there is most instruction. In Scotland the educated criminals are to the uneducated as four and a half to one. M. De Toqueville remarked of the United States that crime increased most rapidly where there was most instruction. The ancients testify that the moral condition of the “Barbarians” was comparatively pure beside that of the Greeks and Romans, and that the most refined cities were the most corrupt.

But let us bring the comparison nearer home. The Northern States of the Union had previously to the war all adopted the system of universal State schools, and the Southern States had not. In 1850 the former had thirteen and a half millions of people, and twenty-three thousand six hundred and sixty-four criminal convictions. The South (without State schools) had nine and a half millions, and two thousand nine hundred and twenty-one criminal convictions—that is to say, after allowing for the difference of population, the “educated” masses were something more than six times as criminal as the “uneducated.” The same year the North was supporting 114,700 paupers, and the South 20,500. The “unintelligent” South was something more than four times as well qualified to provide for its own subsistence as the “intelligent” North!

But Massachusetts is the native home of the public school in America. In Boston and its adjacent county the persons in jails, houses of correction or refuge, and in alms-houses bore among the whites the ratio of one to every thirty-four. (Among the wretched, free blacks it was one to every sixteen.) In Richmond, the capital of “benighted” Virginia, the same unhappy classes bore the ratio of one to every one hundred and twelve.

Such are the lessons of fact. Indeed, it requires only the simplest ocular inspection to convince any observer that the economical plea for State schools is illusory. In the South State school-houses were unknown, and consequently jails and penitentiaries were on the most confined and humble scale. The North is studded over with grand and costly public school-houses, and her jails are even more “palatial” in extent and more numerous than they. (emphasis mine)

There you have ‘the rest of the story,’ gentle reader. The conclusion is that the long-term success of our movement – the permanent establishment of a free and independent South – rests upon the condition that the people of our beloved Southland must become free and independent internally before they can hope to be free and independent externally. In other words, our people must break free from the mind-numbing bondage imposed upon us by the Yankee and his pagan philosophy of “education,” and return to a Bible-based philosophy of same. To borrow from Dr. Dabney (and Mr. Jefferson) yet once more in closing, if we must have a form of ‘universal education’ in the meantime, “we beg leave to do our own thinking,” and to organize and administer it as we see fit – in such a way that to us, “shall seem most likely to effect our safety and happiness.” Good day!

God save the Southland!