Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 5: Southern Agrarian John Gould Fletcher

The fourth of the 12 essays in the 1930 book, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, was by John Gould Fletcher, "Education, Past and Present." The book consisted of essays by 12 different Southern writers arguing in various ways for the virtues of Southern agricultural societies.



John Gould Fletcher (1886-1950)

As we've seen in the previous posts on other essays in the book, these writers weren't especially interested in developing plausible suggestions for some kind of new approach to making the American South a prosperous society based primarily on agriculture. The "agrarian" notion for them was primarily an ideology to glorify what are sometimes politely called the "folkways" of the South. In the South of 1930, those "folkways" were Jim Crow segregation laws, white supremacy in social relations, a whites-only democracy that in practice was often corrupt to the bone, and a network of organized white groups like the Ku Klux Klan to maintain the existing order against challengers white or black.

Fletcher's essay is mainly a long gripe about the existence of public education in the South. His argument, which he justifies with his version of the history of public schools in the region, is that free public schools aren't especially desirable but the South probably can't get rid of them. And they do some good in the primary grades, anyway. But he prefers to see them oriented as much as possible to promoting education for an elite, i.e., for the children of relatively affluent families.

He's quite defensive on the historical issue of public schools in the antebellum South. The system of private academies for the children of the wealthy worked well enough, he argued, and the lower orders didn't much care about education anyway. But the South did have some limited public schools prior to the Civil War, he protests, and it was really mean of the Yankees then and in 1930 to say that education in the antebellum South was inferior to that in the rest of the country:

The South was not, as was charged by the North before and after the Civil War, indifferent to education. She siply preferred the older schemes of education which were best suited to her own rural populations, to such novel methods as [Horace] Mann's, which were non-sectarian, non-religious, urban and egalitarian in scope.

He finds odd a quote he cites from an unidentified national teachers' convention of 1865 in Pennsylvania that slave children were "by law, prohibited the advantages of an education." But it was a fact that in slave states it had been illegal to provide a formal education to a slave, child or adult. Teaching a slave to read was a serious crime.

Fletcher summarizes his general grievance against all this here public education stuff as follows:

The inferior, whether in life or in education, should exist only for the sake of the superior. We feed and clothe and exercise our bodies, for example, in order to be able to do something with our minds. We employ our minds in order to achieve character, to become the balanced personalities, the "superior men" of Confucius' text, the "gentlemen" of the old South. We achieve character, personality, gentlemanliness in order to make our lives an art and to bring our souls into relation with the whole scheme of things, which is the divine nature. But the present-day system of American popular education exactly reverses this process. It puts that which is superior- learning, intelligence, scholarship - at the disposal of the inferior. It says in effect that if the pupil acquires an education, he will be better able to feed and clothe his body later. It destroys the intellectual self-reliance of character, and the charm of balanced personality, in order to stuff the mind with unrelated facts. Its goal is industry rather than harmonious living, and self-aggrandisement rather than peace with God. That is the indictment against it, and that is what we of the South now have to face.

In other words, we are somehow depriving the children of workers and farmers the higher things in life by teaching them about the higher things of life to better enable them to earn money to enjoy the higher things of life. Presumably working in a factory all day or picking cotton from dawn to dusk will better enable children to attain "intellectual self-reliance of character," a "balanced personality" and "peace with God." Why did those Yankees have to oppress the South with this nonsense about educating children who aren't born to wealthy parents?

Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, slavery, southern agrarians, us south