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Mountain Life & Work vol. 09 no. 2 July, 1933

Mountain Life & Work vol. 09 no. 2 July, 1933 Council of the Southern Mountains 400dpi TIFF G4 page images University of Kentucky, Electronic Information Access & Management Center Lexington, Kentucky 2003 mlwv9n20733 These pages may freely searched and displayed. Permission must be received for subsequent distribution in print or electronically. Mountain Life & Work vol. 09 no. 2 July, 1933 Council of the Southern Mountains Berea College; Council of the Southern Mountains Berea, Kentucky July, 1933 $IMLS This electronic text file was created by Optical Character Recognition (OCR). No corrections have been made to the OCR-ed text and no editing has been done to the content of the original document. Encoding has been done through an automated process using the recommendations for Level 1 of the TEI in Libraries Guidelines. Digital page images are linked to the text file. VOLUME IX .JULY, 1933 NUMBER 11 CONFERENCE NUMBER Proceedings of the Twenty-first Annual Conference of Southern Mountain Workers, printed in the order of the program. Our Common Task Helen H. Din;rnan Economic Conditions and Tendencies in the Southern Appalachians as Indicated by the Cooperative Survey The Work of Private Schools in the Mountains I. C. Gray 7 Fannie W. Dunn 7 3 Extent and Nature of Public Education in the Mountains The Churches of the Highlanders Missionary Program in the Highlands From the Mountain Worker's Point of View Economic Conditions Education Religion Walter H. GatrmniL: EliNahetlr K. Hoolzer Hermann N. Morse 20 25 3 (1 Olive D. Camyhell William jesse Baird Edwin E. White Published Quarterly at Berea College, Berea, Ky., in the interest of fellowship and mutual understanding between the Appalachian Mountains and the rest of the nation MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK VOL. Ix JULY, 1933 NUMBER 2 0 UR COMMON TASK Helen H. Dingman In 1913 thirty-five people representing church boards, independent schools, and other agencies interested in mountain work met in Atlanta, Georgia, for the first session of what has been called ever since the Conference of Southern Mountain Workers. Tonight there are present at least three who attended that first meeting-Mrs. Campbell, Miss Pettit, and Dr. Wilson. Others who have loyally supported the Conference through the years I miss tonight-Mr. Messler, Mr. Clark, and Mr. Trowbridge. I speak of them particularly because they were faithful members of the EXecutlN-a Board for many years. Each has written personally of his great regret that he cannot be with us. For six years after that first meeting, under the wise guidance of Mr. Campbell, we met here in Knoxville. Never can we cease to be grateful to him for bringing us together. Before then we were all going our individualistic ways, many of us unaware of each other's existence and certainly unconscious of the vast expanse of the Southern Mountains and the magnitude of the problems. With Mr. Campbell's skillful leadership we built up a foundation of acquaintance, understanding, and comradeship in our common task. He shared with us the wealth of his knowledge about the section in which we were working, cleared up for us many misconceptions as to the territory, and its population, and courageously led us into our first unified thinking. I like to think that with his far-seeing vision he set the goals of real cooperation for us, and perhaps, great prophet that he was, he realized the long years of patient education it would take before we were ready for united action in the solution of our problems. We were indeed fortunate to have Mrs. Campbell, who shared so intimately Mr. Campbell's study, work, and dreams, to lead us for the next nine years. I like to think of that period as the period of challenge, the period when we began to question many of our old ways of doing things. We were better acquainted. We were getting beyond the stage of seizing every opportunity of telling what we were doing at our particular centers, and we began to scrutinize more objectively our techniques of approach and our programs. In 1922-1923 Mrs. Campbell and Miss Butler went abroad to study the folk high schools of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and in the light of the educational achievements of those countries we dared question the value of our system of standardized education as it related to the promotion of rural culture in our mountain section. We were challenged by rapidly changing conditions. Isolation was vanishing, good roads and public schools increasing. We began to grapple more definitely with the question Mr. Campbell had confronted us with at the beginning: whether our private schools were competing with the public-a question that has never yet been satisfactorily answered. Agriculture, the omnipresent subject on every program from the beginning, met with critical analysis. Depopulation, reforestation, and industrial development were discussed. Industrial problems in the coal fields and textile mills obtruded themselves into our rural con i sciousness. We came to realize the complexities of our problems and the need for revaluating our programs in the light of the changing conditions. As the John C. Campbell Folk School more and more claimed Mrs. Campbell's whole time and attention, she felt that she had to hand over the leadership of the Conference to someone else. The question was broached to me at the 1927 Conference and at the 1925 Conference when I was abroad studying the folk high schools in Scandinavia I was made executive secretary. In the last five years Mr. Campbell's years of sowing and Mrs. Campbell's years of cultivation have borne fruit in some of our first cooperative efforts. I sometimes think that we as a group 1V1OUN'iAIN LIFE AND WORK of workers are far more individualistic than the mountaineers themselves. All through the years we have preached cooperation to our communities, our schools and our churches, but as a group of agencies, church boards, and leaders, we have been slow to demonstrate our preaching in truly cooperative programs. We have made a start, if not as they say in the mountains "a soon start," and it is of those few beginnings I want to speak first tonight. SOUTHERN MOUNTAIN HANDICRAFT GUILD In December, 1929, a group representing seven handicraft centers met at Penland, North Carolina, to discuss the advisability of a loosely-formed cooperative association for the promotion, improvement, and marketing of our mountain handicrafts. As a result of that meeting the Southern Mountain Handicraft Guild was organized at our spring conference in 1930. Although we have not been able to make the progress we hoped and wished in the marketing of the crafts during these past few years-I need not remind this group of the depression-an unusual degree of unity and experience have been achieved by the discussion of our problems at our fall and spring meetings, by the exhibits we have had, and by our cooperative ownership and marketing at the Allanstand Cottage Industries. Today we have enrolled in the membership of the Southern Mountain Handicraft Guild twenty-four producing centers, six individual craftsmen, and eight friends, representing five states in our Southern Mountains. We regret that the Guild exhibit which has been assembled by Mr. Allen Eaton for the American Federation of Arts could not be shown in Knoxville at this time. The reports are that it is an unusually beautiful and impressive collection of our best mountain arts and crafts. The Guild will welcome any suggestions and help as to arrangements for its showing in cities and large centers all over the United States. COMMITTEE OF FRIENDS OF THE MOUNTAIN CHILDREN Another cooperative venture has been the Committee of Friends of the Mountain Children. In 1930 at the request of Dr. John R. Voris, who was then connected with the Golden Rule Foundation, the Committee was formed to administer July, 1933 a common fund given us by the Golden Rule Foundation to advance social welfare work for cildren both in the Southern Mountains and the hi I I Ozarks. That first year $1,000 was allocated to five different centers to be used for dental clinics, the next year $800 to seven centers. It was de cided to continue in the work of dental clinics and to add eye corrections where the centers felt that that need was even more imperative. The next year, 1932, we were able to announce that the Sigma Phi Gamma Sorority had decided to make health work among mountain children their ~-::ial service project and that they would give the money they raised to the Friends of the Mountain children to administer for that pur pose. Therefore this past year through the co operation of the Sigma Phi Gamma Sorority, the Golden Rule Foundation, and the Save the Chil dren Fund we have distributed $3,003 to 39 dif ferent centers to be used for nutrition, the cor rection of remediable defects, and emergency re lief for children. The reports of what these small sums of money have accomplished make thrill ing reading. Not only have children been helped through this difficult winter, but workers have been encouraged and strengthened in receiving even this little help to meet the appalling needs that have surrounded them. I am hoping that this unified approach to the social needs of our mountain children is just the beginning of what we can later accomplish. MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK Our quarterly is another venture dependent upon cooperation. From the letters received in our office, it appears that Mountain Life and Work, now accepted as the official organ of the Conference of Southern Mountain Workers, continues to grow in usefulness, although its circulation has been somewhat curtailed by the present financial situation. By practising the greatest economy we have been able to pull through this year, and with the cooperation of our subscribers and the Conference, I am hoping we can do even better next year. It is the only magazine presenting the interests of the whole mountain field. OUR TWO MOUNTAIN STUDIES Although the Conference has by no means carried the burden of the two studies which are to be reported in the sessions tomorrow and the July, 1933 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK Page 3 next day, we do have the proud distinction of having been the initiators. On November 25, 1929, a group of people feeling the great need of an up-to-date study of conditions in the Southern Mountains met at the Russell Sage Foundation to talk over a possible plan of cooperation. In December of that same year Dean Cooper of the University of Kentucky called a meeting of federal and state agencies in Knoxville to secure their interest. A general steering committee representing the agencies interested was organized and a plan of study drawn up. After unsuccessful efforts to secure financial support for our cooperative project from one of the Foundations, our plan was made possible by the federal and state agencies offering to finance and carry on the Economic and Social Study with Dr. L. C. Gray as director, and the Institute of Social and Religious Research undertaking the Religious Study with Miss Elizabeth Hooker as director. At this Conference we are to have reports of those completed studies. It is my hope that in the light of the facts and interpretations which they are to give us we shall honestly revaluate our work and courageously dare to make the changes that such an evolution may reveal as vital and necessary. Their part of the work is about completed. Ours is just beginning. THE OFFICE OF THE CONFERENCE OF SOUTHERN MOUNTAIN WORKERS This is also a result of cooperation. With all the different interests heading into this center a large correspondence of wide scope has developed. Then there is of course the planning of the Conference itself. In addition, we are still earning M.A.'s and Ph.D.'s in various universities, although I am afraid we shall never be given the credit. One of the sad phases of the task i.1 the last two years has been writing to tell applicants for mountain work that there are no openings. Your secretary has been called upon to make two studies of mountain schools, one this year and one last, and since October has been the counsellor for the mountain work of Save the Children Fund. That work has necessitated some trips into the mining sections of Kentucky and Tennessee, has considerably widened her own knowledge, and has made some useful contacts for the Conference. All in all our common task in the office is a busy and growing one. We want you to feel that we belong to you, that we are at your service, and that we are most happy to cooperate in every way possible. As I have studied our common task in the field this past year I confess that there have been times of dismay and discouragement. Never have so many needs been reported and never have we as a group been less able to meet them. Public agencies as well as private have had to curtail budgets, reduce staffs, and cut programs. Years of patient effort to develop wider and more useful programs seem to have been lost, at least temporarily. School terms have been shortened, teachers' salaries reduced or in some cases not even paid, public health work has been cut, and the little social work machinery that we have has either been eliminated or overburdened. We therefore have to rethink our mountain work not only in the light of findings from our studies but within the limits of much reduced financial support. Perhaps necessity will hasten us into cooperation more quickly than our wishful thinking has thus far been able to do. If so, great values may still come out of this long depression. One can not review the field-its needs and its opportunities-in one short introductory speech. But tonight I do want to unburden myself of a few of the "concerns" by which I am plagued. I borrow that expression from the heading which Malcolm Ross gives one of the chapters in his book, "Machine Age in the Hills""Plagued by a Concern." Most of us are plagued by the concern of making a living. Our mountains are certainly plagued by that concern. The economic problems undergird all of our problems but I shall leave the solution of those to the economists who will speak tomorrow. Tonight I want to open up for the discussions that will be a part of our conference program a few of the matters on my own heart. Education has been one of the great goals in our mountain work from its earliest beginnings. As I have thumbed over the proceedings of our conferences since 1913 I have seen many references to the education of exceptional mountain boys and girls and education for leadership. We have built up institutions and programs for these purposes. As public education has advanced we have had more and more to come under the standard set by the state. During the past few Page 4 MouNrnrN LIFE AND WOKK July, 1933 years most of our schools have run the state's gauntlet in order to become accredited institutions. For many it has been a real struggle to attain the required equipment, the required qualifications of teachers, and the required courses in the curriculum. It has meant bending every energy toward building up the institution itself; having a restricted budget and a limited staff, we have in many cases neglected the service to the community in which the institution is located. One of the strange paradoxes of the situation for the past two or three years has been that we are turning out high school and college graduates as leaders whom we have not been able to place in positions of leadership. No one expects this abnormal situation of unemployment to continue just at it is, but I do believe that by facing the reality we can check on the course we are pursuing. No one will dispute the fact that we need to train young people for places of leadership, but some questions which I have asked myself over and over this year I should like to ask you tonight. What have we done to .prepare these young people who can not find positions to teach-and I think we all agree that teaching is the vocation upon which we have focused most of our attention-what have we done to prepare them for richer, more satisfying lives back on the farm or in the little community where they are now awaiting the opportunity to get jobs? Are they educated just for one purpose or are they educated for life? Will they for their education show more resourcefulness during these hard times and and the better develop "live-at-home" programs? Will they not only be able more effectively to grapple with the problems of making a livingwhether it be on the farm or at some trade-but will they also use that education for making a richer social and cultural life for themselves and their communities? After the Conference last year one of our Berea workers returned enthusiastic to start a general campaign on the campus to train our students for summer community service. Preparation for such service was initiated as an extracurricular activity. Through the Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A., the Literary Societies and voluntary groups, many young people learned how to organize a Sunday School, how to tell stories well, how to conduct community singing, how to teach games to children and adults, how to interest boys and girls ii: nature study and other outdoor crafts. This year the project has grown to much greater proportions; in all three schools-college, academy, and foundation-junior high-groups with student chairmen and faculty advisers are working along these lines. Mimeographed material is being prepared and compiled into community service notebooks, and suggestive booklets and bulletins are being collected. As a result without any additional ins estment of money we are hoping that stronger morale, good cheer, and courage will be carried to groups remote from the campus, and that our students will find that wherever they are there are real jobs of usefulness awaiting them. Other schools I am sure are doing these same things. More and more I feel that we must place greater emphasis upon these types of extracurricular education which unfortunately are not emphasized in our standard credit courses. Those who left the mountains to go to Detroit, Toledo, Hamilton, and other cities have crowded back this year to the little, old mountain farm as a shelter in the time of industrial and financial storm. One of our Berea boys is reported as saying that the way his family had felt the depression was that his ten brothers had come home to live. To me it is a tragedy to think that with money gone, with the barest subsistence to be wrested from the poor, rocky soil, our unemployed in the mountains have just been "settin' " around, losing courage and morale, growing dull and apathetic, because they have had no understanding or appreciation of what makes life outside of food, shelter, and clothing. We face not only economic poverty-and in some sections that poverty has been more acute this winter than I have ever known it beforebut we face a poverty of recreation, of good literature and the desire to read it, of music, of art, of appreciation of the cultural resources about us, and of a dynamic religion that will motivate all of life. When one thinks of little Denmark, far-seeing and wise enough to subsidize the unemployed to get further education, one realizes how impotent and foolish we have been as a nation. What have we done better to prepare our fifteen million un July, 1933 employed to face life after they get jobs, if some of them ever do? What are we doing as mountain workers, particularly in our mining camps where groups are concentrated and available, to use this enforced leisure for adult education? Does each one of our mountain schools, churches, and centers have a program that reaches out beyond the institution itself? The more I carry on the program of Opportunity School and extension Opportunity Schools the more convinced I am of the hope which lies in the adults as well as in young people. If we are going to raise the level of the whole group and not just pick out the more hopeful young people to train as leaders, the richness and usefulness of our educational and religious programs must be extended beyond our immediate schools and churches. For several years I have been talking freely of one of the greatest concerns that "plagues" me: the need of trained social service in our mountains. Our mission work has been centered mostly upon schools and churches. There has beer. some wonderful pioneering in education. Much work needs still to be done, especially in the face of some of the drastic curtailments being made by our state economy programs, but I believe that one of the greatest needs and problems before us today is the need of social work. Security, which is the foundation of all personality development, is being threatened: economic security, physical and health security, religious security, social security, and what we might call psychic security-that sense of belonging to a family which although it must struggle has status in the larger group, the community. One dreads to think of the trail of malnutrition, disease, broken morale, and what we might call disintegrated personalities that we shall have to meet long after the depression as such is over. These are days when emergency relief has had to be given, and because of the limited social work resources available it has been given in almost a wholesale way. As a result, and from all sections of our mountains, we hear of the breaking down of independence, of pauperization, of drifting, dissatisfied people. How are we preparing to meet this situation? The Southern Mountains, as we know, are practically a no-man's land so far as social workers are concerned. Many of us have tried to help in amateur ways, but we need MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK Page 5 trained family case workers, probation officers, visiting teachers, and recreation leaders. I asked an experienced mountain worker not long ago what the children of her section most needed. After thinking a long while she said that she would like to see placed in her county a worker who could give her time exclusively to the welfare of the childrenone who would be responsible as a case worker to follow up and treat problem situations, who would act as probation officer to those who were delinquent, who would wisely place the dependent, who would study child labor laws and see that they were enforced, and who would organize wholesome recreation. I am happy to say that this step has already been taken in two Tennessee counties by Save The Children Fund. Has the time come for some of us to turn our attention to pioneering in social work? Trail need to be blazed long before we can hope to have that work publicly supported. In the meantime. delay means great losses among our children. I was struck recently by this quotation from Harry Emerson Fosdick: "Unless we prevent the ruin of childhood we are preparing an aftermath to the crisis worse than the crisis itself-it is a foolish nation which in an emergency destroys its seed corn." It seems sometimes that it is the children who are really bearing the heavy end of the depression. Caught in the mining situation alone there are 400,000 children. I will let Malcolm Ross's book, "Machine Age in the Hills" put the burden of the miners upon your heart. He has given a graphic and thoughtful picture of what is a national crisis. Most of our programs were started before industry penetrated the mountains, and we have gone on with our work without feeling that industry's problems are a part of our mountain responsibility. This fall on my trips I have driven for miles and miles through the mining camps of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. It is an appalling situation. The drabness of the camps, the hopelessness of the people, and the sordidness of their lives haunt me. I do not see how we can go on longer without including the miners in our conscious planning. The Quakers are doing the first real constructive work with a carefully planned program that has been done by any group. Individual churches and workers living near the camps have done Page 6 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK July, 1933 much to help the present conditions, relief agencies have touched different sections, and spasmodically we have all done our bit to send something for their relief. But the American Friends Service Committee is starting on some rehabilitation experiments. They are not only helping to relieve the present suffering but are planning for the future, particularly for those miners who will never be reabsorbed into the industry. A glorious effort would be for us to join the Friends in the service they are undertaking. It is a gigantic task that needs the help of all, and it is concerned with many of the mountaineers with whom we have worked in the rural sections. I confess that I am more of a realist tonight than an optimist, but yet I have an abiding faith in the mountaineer and his future. I have faith also in our great desire to make our service and the money that we are investing count for the most. We have been looking forward since 1930 to these studies which are to be reported; we have silently pledged ourselves to a revaluation of our work in the light of the facts that will be revealed. I would like to see the initial suggestions for any new planning come from those on the field who know the situations most intimately. They can then offer these suggestions to the boards of trustees, officials of church boards, and executives of other agencies that are carrying on work in our section. Any changes will of course need the sanction and cooperation of all. I will close with suggestions of three preliminary steps which I feel might be taken by us this coming year. First, during the year, I would like to see the workers, public and private, of some of the different sections of our mountains meet together and clear programs with one another. Such action would be a pooling of resources of service in that section and give an opportunity to measure what is actually being done against the needs that exist. In an impersonal way it would be discovered-whether all are putting major emphasis on one or two needs to the exclusion of others which are just as vital. Any overlapping or pos sible competition could be discovered and plans for real cooperation within the section could be made. Thus each center would have a chance to see its program in relation to the others, and see its contribution .to meeting the needs of that sec tion. These meetings might take place first in some of the particular sections covered by our two studies. The workers on the Cumberland Plateau have set us a fine example. I do not know just how far their programs have been modified but they at least know what each is doing-and that is more than a great many of us know about neighboring pieces of work. One objection that may be immediately raised is the extra cost at a time when all are so financially burdened. With automobiles and highways shortening the distances, a group can come together for a day's conference very easily and very reasonably. Preliminary information can be gathered and tabulated and the time together so planned that it will count for the very most in clearing our thoughts on our programs. The second suggestion came to me as a sudden inspiration on one of my extension Opportunity School trips this last fall. As I was going through what was new country to me and seeing absolutely new conditions, I thought, "Why not have a short study tour of the mountain work and conditions?" Study tours are organized to go to Russia, Mexico, and other countries-why not organize a week's tour in the mountains when a group of different workers can together study different pieces of work and discuss their conclusions right on the spot. Denominations have studied their own pieces of work but have too often approached them from their own particular slant without having the wholesome corrective of other points of view to challenge them while they were making the study. My plan is to have two or three cars-ten or twelve people-leave from Berea, we might say, and go together to several places selected to show different types of program. It would be quite ideal if the group could represent a cross section of those interested in mountain work-board officials, heads of schools, social workers, public officials, ministers, agricultural extension workers, etc. The only expense involved would be paying the expense of the cars and the cost of board at the different mountain centers. In that tour I feel that the industrial as well as the rural problems should be seen. If possible we should get a cross section of all the mountain problems. At the end we would return to our ewn schools, churches, and offices with a wider July, 1933 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK vision of the work as a whole and a clearer understanding of our relation to it. Then would come the third step and the hardest of all-an objective critical study of our own particular institution or task. At the beginning we would have to realize that it is the easiest thing in the world to rationalize concerning our own programs. We see day by day the good that is being done, the lives which have been and are being touched and changed, and the people who feel dependent upon the opportunities we are offering. We know the years of service and the money that have been built into the institution, we see back of it the constituency which has been interested and which clings to the old romance of things as they were. Realizing that we have done good, and I have not yet visited a center which has not, we must go still further and study whether the money that is being entrusted to us is being spent to build a wholesome, satisfying life for the greatest number of people. We must find out whether we are travelling in our old ruts Page because it is difficult to make changes both on the field and in the minds of our supporters, or whether we are honestly convinced that our present programs are the ones which are needed the most. We can call in outside counsel, but the final decisions rest upon us. Most of us today are having to study our work to see where to cut in order to reduce the budget. There is a danger of cutting out some of our w'der usefulness in order not to imperil the standardized work of the institution. Our public economy programs have cut out much of the progress-progress for which we have long struggled-and have thereby retarded development by years. We in our curtailments must not make the same mistakes. Personally I feel that our existence and our appeals to the public for support can not be Justified unless we subject ourselves to this analysis and then proceed to act upon our findings and our convictions. Economic Conditions And Tendencies In The Southern Appalachians As Indicated By The Cooperative Survey L. C. Gray Our task has been truly cooperative, carried forward by the labors of a considerable number of technical workers in various bureaus of the Department of Agriculture, in the Bureau of Education, and in the agricultural colleges of the five participating states. Approximately a dozen technical workers in the Federal Government and half that number in the states have participated in the undertaking, not counting clerks and the persons who took part in local surveys. Therefore, I come before you today only as a sort of middleman of information, with some of the results of what other workers have produced. The Southern Mountain Research project was conceived as a result of the feeling of leaders of and contributors to mountain work that the work could be more helpfully directed in the light of a better understanding of the important differences and tendencies of economic and social conditions in various parts of the Southern Mountain region. It was first planned to employ some $250,000 in the task. Inability to procure the funds necessitated a revision of the more extensive undertaking and the development of a program that could be carried through by the part-time work of personnel already available. Instead of extensive field work, it was decided to portray on maps the statistical information already available or readily obtainable so that workers might obtain a bird's eye view of the significant contrasts and tendencies in various parts of a region comprising approximately 55,000,000 acres, about 10 per cent of the area of the United States east of the Mississippi River. * It was arranged to prepare more than 200 maps to portray the physical characteristics of the region and important conditions and tendencies in population, land iilization, types of farming, standard of living, iti 1 1 industries, taxation and public expenditures, edu ` for various reasons the mountain area of Maryland and of northern Alabama was excluded from the study. MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK cation, social conditions, and social work. At the same time several local surveys to provide a more intimate picture and understanding were undertaken by various bureaus in the Department of Agriculture in cooperation with the states. A sympathetic and helpful relationship has also been maintained between the Southern Appalachian project and the religious survey under the supervision of Dr. Morse and Miss Hooker. I am glad to report that the study is nearly completed and will be submitted for publication during the summer. It would be wholly impracticable to exhibit and explain any considerable part of the large number of maps, and therefore I cannot present to you the most valuable results of our work, namely, the local contrasts of economic and social conditions and tendencies in various parts of the Southern Mountain region. I am compelled in this brief talk to deal largely with conditions and tendencies for the region as a whole, moreover, it is but fair to say that this paper is both premature and immature in view of the fact that considerable work yet remains to be done, especially the work of analysis and interpretation. In making the maps for this region it was impracticable to exclude the Great Valley and the various lesser valleys, for their boundaries frequently cut across county lines. Moreover, it seemed desirable to present some of the contrasts between the valley and the strictly mountainous areas. Since the valley economy and social life are strikingly different from corresponding conditions in the mountains, however, the inclusion of the valleys tends to dilute somewhat statistics for the region as a whole. Our work shows how necessary it is to revise our old ideas of the Southern Appalachians as a static region where life goes on unchangingly, a land exclusively occupied by the tall mountaineer with his lanky wife and shock-headed children. The past thirty years have been a time of rapid transformation. Population in the region has increased about 56 per cent. This is almost wholly due to great transforming influences-the growth of cities and the development of rural industries, especially mining. While urban population in the region increased above 300 per cent and rural nonfarm population 75 per cent, farm population increased only about 5 per July, 19 3 3 cent. The heavy increases were in the coal-producing counties of eastern Kentucky and southwestern Vest Virginiafor coal production in the region as a whole increased nearly sixfold during the thirty years-and in and about urban centers in North Carolina and Tennessee. Decreases in population persistently occurred in six groups of counties with focal points in Fauquier and Warren Counties in northwestern Virginia, Botetourt and Franklin Counties in southwestern Virginia, Elliott County in Kentucky, Grainger County in Tennessee, Lumpkin County, Georgia, and the Chattanooga district. These decreases in total population were associated with decreases in county population in all these groups. Several of these groups of counties are in fair to good farming areas. In general, lacking the industrial and mining developments that stimulated population increases in other parts of the region, their people were drawn away to industrial developments not far outside their borders, probably leaving the extensive inferior lands lying within the boundaries even of the better area. It seems to be broadly true that accessibility to mining and industrial areas and absence of isolation have been favorable to decrease in country population. On the other hand, in many of the isolated rural counties of poor natural conditions for farming and without any industrial or mining developments, country population remained stationary or even increased somewhat. In general, the inferior parts of the region as a whole were fully populated agriculturally- in some areas overpopulatedbefore the beginning of the thirty-year period. In parts of the region poorly adapted to farming, the pressure of population was somewhat relieved by the development of part-time employment in mines or forest industries or by the pull of industrial and urban developments, while in more isolated areas population pressure continued unabated or even increased. An outstanding factor in population pressure is the high birth-rate and large proportion of children in the purely mountain counties. According to the 1927 life tables of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 368 children under five years are needed for every 1,000 women of childbearing age to maintain a stationary population. July, 1933 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK Page 9 In 1930 some of the counties of eastern Kentucky, Southwestern West Virginia, and the Blue Ridge in North Carolina had as high as 900 children under five years per 1,000 women of childbearing age, and in most of the counties of the region 600 or more. In general, we find the areas with large average size of families correspond with the areas containing a large proportion of farms classed as self-sufficing. The proportion of children was lowest in the Appalachian Valley counties. In the six cities of 25,000 population or over, there were only 332 children per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 45, or less than enough to maintain a stationary population. Thus here, as elsewhere, urban civilization would consume itself were it not for the support of the rural birth-rate. The mountains are doing more than their share in maintaining the nation's population, and their high birth-rate is directly associated with isolation, poverty, and ignorance. It seems broadly true that these mountain counties cannot escape the vicious circle unless the population pressure can be reduced by an increased economic opportunity through industrial development, through emigration, or by a lessened birth-rate. Emigration to industrial employment is at least temporarily curtailed, and former emigrants are flocking back to increase the pressure on the slender means of subsistence in the rural sections of the mountain region. If we would have these people continue to contribute an undue share to the maintenance of the nation's population in order to offset the declining birth-rate in the more prosperous regions, then we must assume the responsibility of stimulating emigration, providing local industrial opportunities, or sub sidizipg life in the mountains to a greater degree. High birth-rate is only one phase of the rural problem in the mountains. Another phase is the extremely limited terrain adapted to arable agriculture, characteristic of mountain regions. In 1930 only 60 per cent of the land area of the Southern Appalachians was in farms, as compared with 73 per cent thirty years earlier. During the thirty-year period increases occurred only in seven counties, widely scattered. Still more limited is the area of crop land. Even in 1900 the area of harvested crops was only 16.5 per cent of the total land area. By 1930 it had decreased to only 14.1 per cent. In large groups of the rougher counties the percentage ranges from 3 to 10, and in most of the region outside the Great Valley it is under 20 per cent. This limitation is perhaps most effectively brought out by our maps showing number of acres of cultivated land per farmer 15 years old and over. In a few counties the average is less than 5 acres; in extensive groups it is under 10 acres; and in all but a few counties, including a large proportion of the principal valleys, it is under 15 acres. Moreover, in much of the area where the proportion of crop area per man is very small the crop land is of poor quality, consisting of infertile soils on steep hillsides. Much of the decrease in crop area from 1900 to 1930 doubtless represents a compulsory abandonment of lands where erosion has reduced the yields below subsistence levels. As described in my talk two years ago, some of our local surveys have revealed avicious cycle of clearing steep hillsides, cultivating them to corn for a few years, abandoning them to pasture and then to brush and forest growth, subsequently replacing the abandoned area by new clearings. In general, there was a considerable increase of plowable pasture from 1909 to 1929, and a notable increase of "other" pasture, amounting to 156 per cent. Both of these developments were associated with the decrease in crop acreage, which was reverting to pasture, and were also related to the clearing of timber from pasturable lands in some parts of the region. In central eastern Kentucky, there were increases both in harvested crops and plowable pasture; while in northern West Virginia both crop land and plowable pasture decreased. The increase in plowable pasture was especially rapid in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia, and of "other" pasture in Tennessee. The increase in farm population and in number of farms in spite of a large decrease in total farm area and a somewhat smaller per cent decrease in crop area, probably reflects in part the influence of mining, timber work, and industrial development in making possible part-time farming. The large decrease in farm land was probably due largely to the purchase of farm lands by timber and mining companies and for inclusion in national forests and parks. In some of the areas where the most marked increases occurred Page 10 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK July, 193 in number of farms and in rural and farm population, there was a considerable decrease both of land in farms and of crop area. The Southern Appalachians outside of the valleys are essentially a region of small farms and low farm incomes. Even including the valleys, three-fourths of all the farms show an average production sold, traded, and consumed at home valued at less than $1,000, and for about half of the farms, less than $600. In 1930 nearly 42 per cent of all the farms of the region were of the type classed as self-sufficing.~'- This type predominated in all of the region except the Appalachian valleys, and was especially numerous in the northwestern Cumberland Plateau and in parts of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Nearly 16 per cent of all the farms were in the group which includes part-time farming. So-called general farms were nearly 20 per cent of the whole number, and cotton farms nearly 8 per cent. General farms are mainly located in the Appalachian valleys, and cotton farms principally in the Appalachian valleys of Georgia and in Cleveland and Rutherford counties, North Carolina. It is interesting to note that dairy farms were less than 2 per cent, poultry farms a little over 1 per cent, fruit farms 1.2 per cent, and truck farm less than one-half per cenC' ~~ The most prevalent mountain type, the selfsufficing group, were an average size of 67 acres in 1930, of which 13 were in harvested crops, 11 in plowable pasture, and 5 in "other" pasture. This means that the greater proportion were under these averages. The average value of these farms was $30 per acre. The average value of all products sold and used was roughly $450 per farm, of which over $300 worth was used by the family. On 19 per cent of these farms the total product sold or used was valued at less than $250; on 47 per cent it was less than $400; on 75 per cent less than $600. On only 2 per cent was it more than $1,000. Another very characteristic type of farms is the group consisting mainly of part-time farms. These are scattered throughout the region. They are comparatively numerous in mining areas, in Xlore than one-half the value of products employed for direct consumption. ` Besides the above, there were crop specialty farms, 4.9 per cent; animal specialty, 4.2 per cent; cash grain, 0.9 per cent and stock ranches, 0.5 per cent. lumbering areas, and in the vicinity of cities. There are comparatively few in the Appalachian valleys, except near cities or large towns. In 1930 the average size of this type was 56 acres, of which 10 acres consisted of crops harvested, 11 acres of plowable pasture, and 4 acres of "other" pasture. On 23 per cent of this class of farms the average value of all products was less than $250, and on 85 per cent it was less than $600. Since the definition of part-time farms specified that 150 days or more must be spent by the head of the family in labor off the farm, it is probable that a large proportion of the self-sufficing farm families in considerable measure are supported by work off the farm, either through labor by the head of the family for a period somewhat less than 150 days or through outside labor by other members of the family, even though not conforming strictly to the census definition of part-time farms. Moreover, in addition to work off the farms, a large proportion of the farm families have other sources of income. Thus, our survey in Knott Ccunty, Kentucky, shows that on 228 farms income from coal, oil, and gas leases averaged $47 per family. Besides this, $152 was obtained from family contributions and pensions. The income from non-farm enterprises, mainly outside employment, averaged $342, and the income from farming only $215. Corn is the outstanding crop of the mountains in spite of the fact that the region is climatically ill adapted to corn. In 1930, about 39 per cent of the total acreage of harvested crops consisted of corn, but in the strictly mountain counties the proportion was much larger. The product per acre averaged only 14 bushels in Georgia, about 20 bushels in North Carolina and Tennessee, and about 28 bushels in the Virginias. Hay comprised 25 per cent of the harvested crop area, wheat 10 per cent, oats and rye a little over 5 per cent. Cotton, mainly in Georgia, was 6 per cent. Horses and mules over 2 years and 3 months old averaged 1.4 animals per farm, cattle 4.8 per farm, and milk cows and heifers over 2 years and 3 months old nearly 2 per farm. However, by reason of the large proportion in the valleys, there are many counties in the mountains where there is an average of less than one horse or one milk cow per farm; in other words, many farms with no work animal or no milk cow. Most of the July, 1933 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK Page lI sheep are in Virginia and West Virginia, and for the entire region would average but little more than 2 per farm. Most of the farms in the region contained a few hogs and pigs, outside of the valleys kept mostly for home consumption. I am not prepared at this time to bring to you a very full picture of the timber industry and of the extent to which timber resources have been exploited. It is estimated that wooded areas of all classes from recently cut over to virgin timber comprise from two-thirds to 70 per cent of the total area of the region. Something over a third of the total area of timber is in farms, but the area of woodland in farms decreased greatly from 1900 to 1930, largely due to purchase by timber or mining companies. In general it is broadly true that the remaining timber of high grade is mainly in the less accessible regions, and is principally owned in large bodies by timber com panies, and where accessible has been rapidly depleted by timber operations. In the cutting of farm timber our statistics show a relatively great activity in Tennessee, with an average annual cut of about 125 board feet per acre, besides small amounts of pulpwood, posts, ties, mine props, and fuel wood. Proposed national forests and parks will eventually include large areas. In presenting this very incomplete sketch of economic conditions and tendencies, it is but natural that you should expect me to supply some conclusions. Since our study is not completed, and particularly the analysis and interpretation, any conclusions I may draw must be immature impressions rather than seasoned judgments. Nevertheless, a few of these impressions may serve to stimulate discussion. There is much interest nowadays in the elimination from our agricultural plant of what have come to be known as submarginal farms, on the theory that they are of little advantage to their occupants while contributing substantially to the agricultural surplus. The National Land-Use Planning Committee includes the gradual elimination of submarginal farms as an important element in its program. By every normal criterion a large proportion of the farms in the Southern Highlands are submarginal. Yet, I am inclined to believe that we should go very slowly in undertaking a program of elimination. For one thing, by and large there has been no extensive farm abandonment in the region, such as has occurred in the northern Appalachians, although in portions of the Southern Highlands there has resulted, as in the northern region and elsewhere, the scattering occupancy that would suggest further elimination as a means of economizing schools, roads, and other public services. On the whole, settlement in the Southern Highlands is as compact as the topography and extensive holdings of mineral rights and timber lands will admit. The people who occupy these submarginal farms are in a wholly different class traditionally from the commercial farmers in other sections who have occupied submarginal farms inadvertently or whose farms have become submarginal through changes in economic conditions. The Southern mountaineer has long been accustomed to a largely self-sufficing mode of life. The older persons do not readily adjust themselves to a new environment. It is a very questionable kindness to stimulate the movement of these people to another environment, particularly into the midst of this chaotic industrial world of ours. As I have already shown, the mode of life of a considerable proportion of these farmers has already been materially changed by the invasion of mining and industry, permitting the development of numerous part-time, or "amphibian" farms supported by both agricultural and industrial employment. This raises the important question whether we should bring industry to the mountain farmer-whether the industrialization of the mountains has been of advantage to the mountain people and whether further industrialization should be encouraged. No doubt from first-hand observation some of you are in a better position than I to answer the question as'to the effect of the coming of industry on the mountaineer. For some, I know, it has meant displacement through the purchase of their farms for industrial uses, forcing the occupants out into the industrial stream to sink or swim, in too many cases, alas, to sink, through the hazards of unemployment. One hears harrowing stories of the pitiful conditions among some of them who have drifted back to the mountains in the endeavor to eke out an existence in abandoned shacks and tents, by clearing new ground that is ill-adapted to supply a livelihood. For others, no doubt, the coming of industries has supplied mar Page 12 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK July, 1933 kets for the small salable products of the mountain farm, although our local surveys show that in certain deficit areas the improvement of transport facilities has tended to lower the local value of farm products. For many others, the coming of industry has meant a supplementary source of income, changes in the living standard in the direction of a larger pecuniary element, and the consequent increase in hazards. In many cases, no doubt, it has also brought greater sophistication, more discontent, and increased unrest and instability. On the whole, it seems probable that the coming of industry has proved a doubtful blessing where it has drawn the mountaineer away from his farm home, and that it has proved most advantageous where it has been possible for the family to retain a foothold on the land while supplementing its income from industrial employment, as in the neighborhood of Kingsport, Tennessee, and in certain other industrial developments. Looking at our economic world through the new glasses this depression has supplied, I am not so much inclined to displace the mountain farmer as I might have been a few years ago. Though I am a land economist, I am inclined to lay less emphasis on the limitations of nature and more emphasis on the capacity of man in the development of a worthwhile life. The Alpine farmers have sFlown the possibilities of this in an environment more rugged and bleak than that of these mountains. In spite of the limitations of nature, the mountain farmer can gradually be taught to improve greatly his standard of living without the intervention of that uncertain and unreliable medium called money. He has land enough and the labor to greatly diversify his diet, and there is room for improvement in the method of cooking and serving it. He has land enough to keep a family cow, which would contribute greatly to dietary improvement, yet perhaps half the families in eastern Kentucky are said to be without mR. I I I I Without doubt some of the hillsides cropped to corn would be better devoted to improved pasture, and the limited area topographically suited to cultivation, devoted to intensive crops. Some of the labor that is aimlessly wasted for lack of employment could be intelligently used for the improvement of housing and furnishings. If cooperatively used, labor could gradually effect a great improvement in local roads and schoolhouses, even without external subsidies. Cooperation also can go far toward facilitating the better management of woodlots and the harvesting, transport, and marketing of woodlot products. The very leisure which many of these farmers have for considerable periods of the year is one of their most precious assets. How much some of us hard driven mortals covet a little more of it for reading, thinking, and conversing on matters not connected with the business of the day! Our friends in the mountains, like most of their fellow Americans, badly need to learn how to employ leisure. In this day of traveling libraries and cheap books and magazines there is no need for a poor man to be ignorant or spiritually lifeless. One of the greatest tasks that confronts you is to bring this lesson to the mountains. Another needful lesson is the rich potentiality of human association and community life, even among people with a minimum of material income-perhaps a richer potentiality than among those who have much. It is along these lines that I should like to see the "new deal" and the new day come to the Southern Highlands. If the Social and Economic Study will supply you a better factual basis on which to build, those who have carried it through will feel fully repaid. i July, 1933 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK Page 13 The Work O f Private Schools In The Mountains Fannie W. Dunn CHANGES IN PROGRESS Three types of change are occuring in the work of private schools in the mountains: (1) Discontinuance or complete change in auspices, (2) Change in level or nature of offerings, and (3) Change in clientele served. (1) Of 150 institutions known to have been in existence in 1929 or later, definite information is available of withdrawal of missionary support, by 1931 or since that year, from at least twentytwo. Some of these have been relinquished to full control of the local public school system. In the case of a few others, the responsibility of continuing the school has been assumed, practically on faith alone, by the faculty, who hoped somewhere to find other sources of support for an institution which they believed too useful to discard. Several are now private institutions with independent boards of control, and there is some reason for believing that in a few at least of these, the mission purpose has been entirely given up and the appeal of the school is to a group of students capable of paying for their education. (2) In numerous instances part of the work has been turned over to public support, though the private agency is still operative. Thus Highland High School, Alvan Drew, Hazel Green, Stuart Robinson, and Sue Bennett, all in Kentucky, report discontinuing respectively the first two grades, the first three, the first six, and all elementary school work, and these changes are typical of what is going on in many other cases. It is usually work on the lower levels that is being dropped, but a few schools have chosen to give up a pretense of college work which neither their funds nor their student body was adequate to support, and to offer instead a thoroughly good high school course. One or two institutions, with financial support decreased, have dropped high school or college classes without correspondingly strengthening their work on lower levels. Such schools as these are almost surely waging a hopeless struggle against impending extinction. In a few cases the missionary agency is today concerned chiefly or altogether with the provision of a home where at small expense, or earning their own maintenance, children from inaccessible and inadequately provided sections may live while attending the public school. Occasionally rooms in the dormitory of the discontinued private school are rented to young people from the country who take full responsibility for their own maintenance, bringing food from home on the occasion of their weekly visits. Numerous schools, either with or without discontinuance of lower work, have added offerings on higher levels. Thus the Berry Schools now include full four years of college, Lees-McRae and Sue Bennett add junior college to their former offerings, and Tallulah Falls, Erie Industrial School, St. Mary's School, and Dorland-Bell, among others, have all raised their upper levels to full high school status. (3) In a few cases there is a distinct shift in the nature of the mission which they seek to perform. Brevard Institute, for example, which had as its original purpose service to the ambitious of a remote mountain section, now draws less than two and one-half per cent of its students from the mountains, since the area of its location is now well supplied with readily accessible and superior consolidated schools. It is now focussing its missionary attention upon the delinquent children or those from broken homes in the industrial sections of its state. No other school was discovered which so nearly completely had shifted its missionary interest, but in several evidence was found of increasing demands that the schools serve urban regions. Nor were these urban regions limited to the state or section in which the school is located. There were reports of pupils from Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, from the vicinity of Washington, D. C., from New York State, Montana, and even Utah. In several cases there were students from Cuba, though these were likely to be older than the average pupil in the school, and neither delinquent nor from a broken home. It seems possible that there may be on the horizon, though perhaps yet no larger than a man's hand, a problem of setting up a school in such a way as to serve Page 14 MOUNTAIN LIPS AND WORK July, 1933 equally well the divergent needs calling upon some of the institutions, or else to limit the enrollment in any one school to types likely to be good to bring together. DISTRIBUTION OF SCHOOLS AIMING TO AFFORD EDUCATION TO MOUNTAIN YOUTH This study is primarily concerned with those institutions whose aim is definitely to provide education to mountain youth. There is reliable evidence that there were in the Highlands in 1931 at least one hundred and fifteen such schools under mission or other philanthropic auspices.- These schools were of many types, ranging from oneteacher schools with a bare handful of enrolled p'Is to four-year colleges of recognized stand upi inu;, and seeking such diverse educational aims as affording a refuge for the indigent, giving a classical education, training leaders for religious denominations, and others equally distinctive. Of these aims I shall say more later. The distribution of schools and types of schools shows marked unevenness and inequalities in the various areas of the Highlands. One hundred and ten of the hundred and fifteen schools are found in the five states, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, only one being located in South Carolina and two each in Alabama and West Virginia. Just why there should be fewer in Alabama than in Georgia, and especially why there are only two in all thirtyeight of the highland counties of West Virginia, is not explicable by the data at hand. Probably a'dental bases of selection have from the begin cci ning been strongly influential in the location of the mountain missions. Within the five states wherein practically all the schools are found, distribution also is very uneven. In only sixty-five of the hundred and forty-nine highland counties are any such institutions located. The number in the Central Valleys is small, and also in the Piedmont and the Highland areas. This seems reasonable and desirable, for thetse sections today in both accessibility and financial competence are generally able to support education at public expense. There are of course exceptions to this generalization, as, for It is possible and even likely that the number is larger, but no more than these were discovered by the several questionnaires and the inquiries of the field agents. example, in the case of Overton county, Tennessee, which is the poorest mountain county in that state in the amount of total wealth per teacher employed in its schools. It is exceptions such as this which may justify here and there in these sections the continued performance by philanthropic agencies of functions generally recognized to be public responsibilities. Even this may be questionable, as will be, considered later in this report. There are, however, evidences that private agencies are maintaining schools in locations where public wealth is adequate for the burden. With the information now made available through Dr. Gray's survey, including Mr. Gaumnitz's section of that study, and through certain recent nation-wide investigations, notably those on teacher-training and finance, the philanthropic agencies will in the future have much sounder basis for judging the relative needs of various situations, to the end that funds available may be spent where the investment will make the greatest return in human betterment. The distribution of the present institutions indicates the desirability of careful study of such facts as have now been gathered. Approximately three-fourths of all the mountain schools lie in two areas, the Blue Ridge and the Northeastern Cumberland Plateau. Concentration in the latter area is not surprising, for this region by its natural features is inaccessible both from without and within, and is excessively poverty-stricken and undeveloped. Mountain schools in general partake in an extreme degree of the qualities of isolation, inaccessibility, and low income, which are the common handicaps of rural schools the nation over. If it be said, as it fairly may be, that mountain education represents an extreme case of the difficulties of rural education in general, it is equally true that the Northeastern Cumberland Plateau represents an extreme degree of the difficulties of education in the mountains. The Blue Ridge, however, despite the isolation of many of its pockets, is financially almost twice as able to support public schools as is the Northeastern Cumberland Plateau. Yet the ratio of number of schools to number of counties is only three-fourths as great in this plateau as in the Blue Ridge. In the latter area are to be found half of the mountain schools of the five states, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Geor July, 1933 MOUINIAFN LIFL AND WORK Page 15 gia. In view of the educational advances made dur ing the last quarter century in this region, especially in North Carolina, it seems likely that the large number of private schools here situated is due more to the fact of an early beginning of numerous missions here than to the greater need of this section as compared with other portions of the highlands. If this be the case, missionary enterprises here should be critically scrutinized to determine whether the need for which they were established continues today. There is now not a single Blue Ridge county, whether in Tennessee, Virginia, or North Carolina, which has not at least one accredited high school; many have five or more. A striking feature of missionary education in the Blue Ridge is the concentration of schools offering work of elementary grade only. Of thirty-two such schools in all the Highlands, twenty-two are in the Blue Ridge, composing forty per cent of all its mission schools. A possible explanation of this fact may be that emphasis on consolidation, to the end of bringing together enough pupils to make a high school economically practicable, has in this section tended to leave stranded small groups too far off the highway to make their way to the highway and the school bus. This, however, though it may be an explanation; is a questionable justification for mission support of the small elementary schools thus necessitated. It may be true that in a few cases families arc living in remote coves and pockets so isolated and sparsely settled that only by a provision of a boarding home can enough children be assembled to make even the smallest type of school. But where the need is to be met by day schools, of one or two teachers, it is difficult to see why the county system might not organize and conduct such a school without recourse to philanthropic support. It is strongly recommended that private agencies maintaining elementary schools of one or two teachers give careful consideration to the policy of their continuance. These schools have in several cases been unfavorably reported to the survey agents. On the one hand public school officials have expressed the opinion that the small mission schools in their counties were doing less efficient work than the publicly supported schools in the same area; and, on the other hand, mission workers have more than intimated that the public authorities were evading their responsibility to the difficult isolated situations, in order to support more generously the larger schools in central locations. At the other extreme, there are to be found in the Blue Ridge certain institutions, such as Brasstown and Asheville Farm School, which because of their unusual or unique programs arc highly desirable to continue as educational experiments for the sake of the whole mountain field. These are the more possible in this section because there is not so great an unsupplied need for ordinary schooling as is the case, for example, in the Northeastern Cumberland, and, to a lesser extent, in the Northwestern Cumberland Plateau. The latter region is diverse in its conditions and correspondingly so in its missionary enterprises. This s;ction, comprising roughly about one-eighth of the mountain area, contains about one-fourteenth of the mountain schools. These schools, ci lude one junior college with ight in number, inc I a secondary department; one small boarding school for girls; two schools for boys and girls respectively, distinctly religious in emphasis and essentially college preparatory institutions; and five schools, offering secondary and some ele mentary work to both boarding and day pupils, and in general giving much emphasis to education of practical type. The differences in the types of educational provision made by these institutions roughly correspond to differences in the financial and educational status of the counties of their location. These counties, ranked in the order of their financial competence to support education, are Franklin, Roane, Cumberland, and Overton in Tcnncssee, and Laurel, Jackson, and Wolfe in Kentucky. The Tennessee counties of the list far exceed in per capita wealth the K;ntucky counties. Franklin and Roane counties have more than four times the wealth per capita of population aged 6 to 20 which Jackson and Wolfe have, and nearly four times that of Laurel. Cumberland, by the same measure, is more than twice as able as the Kentucky counties, though little more than half as competent as Franklin and Roane. Road conditions in Laurel, Jackson and Wolfe arc also worse than in Cumberland and much worse than in Roane. Page 16 MOUNTAIN LIFE Such factors as these should receive much con sideration in distribution of missionary funds for the support of general educational programs. That they have influenced the private school provision in these counties is clear. The two institutions in Franklin county are boarding schools with strong religious emphasis, and are thus not primarily or even greatly concerned with local general education. The school in Roane is also a boarding institution, its service being provided for girls from homes in surrounding counties inaccessible to public high schools. The institution in Laurel county has until recently offered elementary and secondary work to both day and boarding pupils, but has recently relinquished all elementary grade work and added Junior College to its offerings. It is only in the less competent counties of the two states that regular public school work of both elementary and secondary grade is privately pro vided. i It is an important question of social justice, and one which it seems increasingly urgent to face, whether any child anywhere in America should have to be dependent upon charitable contributions to provide him an education. This question is receiving careful study, with respect to the capabilities of different regions to support adequate schools and to administrative plans for financing equitable education provision wherever there are children to be educated. Humanitarian organizations and individuals have a social responsibility to inform themselves with regard to such undertakings, in order that they may lend their influence to worthy plans for meeting educational needs otherwise than through charitable contributions. This is not to say, however, that there is no longer need for philanthropically supported educational institutions. The need is, indeed, greater today than it has been for many years past. Public school education at the present time is in a crucial, if not a desperate situation, because upon it the axe of retrenchment has fallen perhaps more drastically than upon any other social institution or undertaking. Though educational research has greatly clarified the problem of financial support for universal public education, adequate solutions have not yet been surely determined, and those conclusions which have been reached by experts are not yet generally known, much less put into AND WORK July, 193 3 practice. Therefore, while it is undoubtedly desirable that philanthropic agencies concerned in the provision of education of public school rank should critically scrutinize their programs and eliminate such institutions as cannot justify their support in the light of present knowledge of the whole situation, nevertheless there is great need at the present time for well-considered aid in many situations, and such aid will unquestionably be needed for some time to come in situations marked by extreme isolation and poverty of resources. AIMS OF THE PRIVATELY SUPPORTED SCHOOLS An important element in any educational program is a clear statement of the aims which guide it. As has already been stated, the aims professed by the private mountain schools are extremely diverse. When all those are compiled of which expression has been found in the course of this survey, they seem to fall into three general classes, which may be termed respectively individual, social and religious. The aims here classified as individual are those concerned with giving each child the opportunity of ordinary schooling of elementary and secondary grade, to afford him a fair chance with his more favorably situated fellows, that he may not be disadvantaged in the race of life. Examples of this type are the statements of catalogs or school officials that their institutions are "for poor boys and girls," or "for the under-privileged"; that they seek to put "training in reach of the worthy and ambitious," to afford "academic and industrial education for mountain and rural" youth, to glue "high school education in the country," or to '`help girls not in reach of high school." It may be that social purposes underlie these individualistic aims, but they are at the best inexplicit and probably vague. In other statements a clear and explicit social emphasis appears. The schools are designed to afford "leaders for the home community," to "upbuild the community," to "send back young women who know how to make healthy, happy homes," to help with "home and living problems," to give "training in ideals and citizenship." As in the statement just quoted, social aim tends to connote an emphasis on character, and the July, 1933 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND `YORK Page ly character emphasis usually is translated into religious terms. Thus complete statement of the last mentioned illustration was to give "training in ideals and citizenship not generally found in public schools." Other stated aims which showed a religious emphasis were "Christian character building" "religious training," "conversion," and "training Christian leaders" for a specified denomination. The diversity of these statements suggests two interpretations, first, that the schools differ widely in their purposes, and secondly, that they are not very clear as to their purposes. Probably both of these are true in part. To the extent that the first of these is true it is desirable that the conduct and offerings of the school be adjusted to its aim. To the extent that the second is the case, obviously clarification is desirable. In any case, the aims deserve careful and critical determination, and, having been set up, they should determine the curriculum and methods of the school. Such relationship of purpose and offering is definitely found in the case of the so-called individual aims. Humanitarian agencies, discovering that children in certain areas do not have such opportunities for education as they believe to be the right of all children, proceed to offer those opportunities. The offerings may be formal and in many cases of little actual value to the learners or to the society of which those learners are today or may in the future be a part. The same, however, is widely true of conventional schooling, in and out of the mountains. The stated purpose may not be particularly worth serving, but at any rate it is served. Of character as an aim neither of these assertions is to be made. For character is assuredly a worthy aim of education, but little if any contribution to character development was observed in the general work of the classes visited. I hasten to add that in my judgment the mission schools do definitely improve the character of their pupils, but they do it between the end of one school session and the beginning of the next, rather than during the school hours, and by means of the home life and practical duties outside the school room rather than the formalized instruction within it. The boarding department is a character de veloping agency of great potentiality, much of which is realized. Contact in daily living with the refined, cultivated, and socially minded members of the mission staff is an educational influence that cannot be duplicated in day schools. The boarding school touches the child during his whole day, controls his whole life while he is enrolled in it. The common necessity of productive work has distinct educative value, where that work is not carried to an extent which exploits rather than benefits. Genuine returns in character almost certainly accrue from the experience of participation in performing under wise guidance the varied duties of home and farm by which the whole social group is benefited, and this is especially true when, as in some schools, tasks are rotated over periods of four to six weeks. It may be that less attention has been given to character as an aim of all instruction, because two features of mission schools are relied upon to afford all the means that are needed. These are Bible study and the "spiritual" or "religious" quality of the teachers. Not enough classes in Bible were observed to afford basis for any general statement, but those which were observed were factual and historical rather than functional to make possible continued maintenance of that in the modification of living. As for the teachers, it is of course impossible to substantiate any assumption of superior Christian character among teachers in mission schools as compared to other institutions. If education in a denominational school were to be counted upon as an earnest of superior religious character, then the public schools which were studied for comparative purposes have somewhat the better of the situation, 42 per cent of their teachers coming from mission schools as against 34 per cent of the mission school teachers. Such advantages as may accrue from these two means should be sought in addition to the character outcomes to be achieved through general educational activities rather than depended upon as a substitute. GENERAL EFFICIENCY OF THE PRIVATE SCHOOLS Not only in respect to their aims is it important that the private agencies be critical, but of every feature of their programs. Today, when lessened support has seriously reduced the budget Page 18 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK July, 1933 of almost every institution, all useless or wasteful aspects of work should be eliminated, in order to make possible continued maintenance of that which is of genuine value. Three types of educational practices discovered in the schools seem wasteful, useless, or actually hurtful. The first is the offering of courses which cannot be justified beyond reasonable question. Such for example are trigonometry offered in several high schools, and four years of Latin, or excessive amounts of algebra or geometry in others. It seems bad enough to formalize educational offerings for all children to the extent necessary to meet college entrance requirements for a few, but it is difficult to see any excuse at all for spending hard-come-by money to teach subjects neither demanded for college entrance nor related to the pressing life problems which the children in the mountain schools must face. The second is inclusion, within justifiable subjects, of bodies of materials which cannot function, or are not made to function, in improving the lives of the children who study them. An illustration of this type of wastefulness was a lesson observed in which the children were reading a passage from Chaucer in a compendium of literary selections that was their text. In a fortyminute period the class covered forty-two lines, or about what it might have done had the lesson been Latin. It was indeed, just as a Latin lesson would have been, an exercise in translation. One boy, in fact, as the lesson began, said, "I can't translate that." Modern words met in context that were not understood were "confession," "curate," and "palfrey." The summary of the whole lesson consisted in telling "in your own words" what a monk was like, a purely factual question. Granted that Chaucer may be literature for some people, it certainly was not literature for those children. Nor does it seem likely that for those children it could be made to return values in appreciation and interest worth the time it was costing. In sharp contradistinction was another high school English class. The teacher came into the room with one or two copies of the nb ' "The Golden Book," in his hand. Fa,azine, 1 1 He asked the class what success they had had in finding copies of Bret Harte's stories in the library, and after their report, referred to two or three he he had found in "The Golden Book." Then he began to read aloud "The Luck of Roaring Camp." He read beautifully and sympathetically, and the class listened with rapt attention. When I left the class to visit another room, he sent a girl to show me the way. I asked her casually as we went out together, "Do you like Bret Harte?" and she replied, "Crazy about him!" That this lesson was genuinely serving the purpose which justifies literature teaching seems as obvious as that the other was not, and though differences in the quality of teaching certainly had much to do with the difference in returns from the two lessons, a fundamental factor lay in the inappropriateness of the material of the first lesson. The third type of wastefulness, already to some extent illustrated, lies in the use of inefficient teaching method. This was outstandingly characteristic of practically every lesson observed in elementary reading. In this important field, not a single class was seen in which use was made of the improved techniques of teaching which arc the outcomes of psychological investigation and experimental practice in that subject during the past twenty years or more. We have got used to dubbing everything that goes on in school education, and expecting from so many years of "education" thus conceived, certain magic values, as unrelated as the jewels of Aladdin's palace to the shabby old lamp he rubbed to get them. This attitude is unquestionably responsible for the fact that the aim of instruction, as expressed in practice, was almost wholly to cover certain bodies of subject matter as set forth in the textbook, and the method was in the large majority of cases textbook rehearsal, drill, and test. Teachers and pupils alike accepted the educational fare which the textbooks set before them, and concentrated their efforts on first swallowing and then regurgitating it, with little care for the efficiency of the process or the value of the achievement. That the same type of criticisms can be leveled against the public schools, and that observations in each type showed the mission schools on the whole, though not in every case, to be carrying out a somewhat better program and using slightly better methods than the public schools, is not satisfactory justification. Time is cer July, 1933 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK Page 19 tainly being egregiously wasted in both. More worthwhile things could be done in both, and the kinds of things that are being done could be done much better. It is literally terribly important that critical consideration be given to the specific needs, present as well as future, of the young people in these schools, that educational content be selected with definite relationship to these needs, and that economical and efficient methods of instruction be employed throughout the educative process. As has already been said in respect to character development, it is also true for education in general that the schools with their boarding departments and their control of the whole of the child's life while he is a pupil with them have unusual opportunities. By coordination and integration of the out-of-school and in-school life, an educational program of outstanding value might be afforded. It is therefore doubly distressing to see how far apart the two lives usually lie. A particular case of this lack of integration lies in the use of mountain crafts. In some schools these are carried on as a productive industry to aid in support of the school or the student, in other cases the school encourages crafts among the adults of the community, while in still others crafts are offered as a form of training for future earning. Whatever the type, much more effort and thought appeared to have been devoted to the development of the crafts themselves than to the use of crafts as means of developing the children in the schools. Yet these crafts are a uniquely valuable part of the environment in which these children have grown up, a rarely preserved remnant of a racial culture, and as part of this environment and culture they afford a basis for such range and extent of intellectual adventure as thrills the imagination. We are told, for example, of the pupil at Hindman who brought with her to school a dozen or so quilt patterns which her "mammy's mammy" had brought with her from her old home. Where was that home? How did these patterns come to be there? Where further back was their source and what was their meaning? How did mammy's mammy make the journey from her old home hither, and how and when did these quilt patterns first set out on their journey? What other occupations went on in the old homes and how are conditions changed today? Why have these quilt patterns rather than others been saved? What makes one pattern better than another? An so on and on, the fascinating questions open out, partly to be answered by neighborhood lore, partly by reading from books, partly by one's own artistic experimentation, while life all about takes on richer and fuller meaning as the study proceeds. Active occupations and the life of the environment play a large part in the work both of the John C. Campbell Folk School and Asheville Farm School. Both of these have dared to throw off the formal body of materials, developed in relation to the educational philosophy and psychology and the differently selected student body of an earlier day and a different social setting, and have sought means and modes of education appropriate to the students they serve and the needs and conditions of present life. The Folk School finds these materials in the economic and social life of the community and the school family, in the creation of beauty by means of mountain crafts and in the experience of beauty by appreciative living in the midst of it, in song and literature that interpret the present lives of the learners, and in such training in the tools of reading, number and language as are required for day-by-day needs. The educative materials of the Farm School are all the productive occupations which are potential with its present plant, including dairying, crop raising, orchard culture, canning, farm mechanics, landscape architecture, house-building, plumbing, electrical wiring, printing, automobile mechanics, house work in dormitory and hospital, and any tool subjects or academic and cultural training for which the student has genuine need, which have ranged from practical computation and English usage to etiquette and French. The road to increased efficiency in the mountain school is that along which these two institutions have pioneered, first by studying the individual needs of their pupils, and second, by organizing all the potential experiences of their environment to the service of these needs. Page 20 MOUNTAIN Lit-E AND WORK July, 1933 OTHER FACTORS OF PROGRESS Not only by refinement of aims and better adjustment of means to end is economy to be effected. Various types of reorganization may be desirable. The schools are in the main small. Could they be made larger by consolidation without sacrificing any present advantage? Staffs are often larger than afforded for the same number of pupils in good public schools. Can economies be effected by improved internal organization? Here and there new schools are starting which duplicate existing efforts. A high degree of cooperation in planning is desirable. Cooperation is particularly needed between private agencies in the mountains and state agents of education. Each of these should know better the work that the other is doing. Both have the same general aims, so far as secular education is concerned, and both are concerned with the same young people needing education. Duplication, interference, and consequent waste almost inevitably will occur in parallel programs independent Extent And Nature 0 f Public Walter H. I shall herewith attempt to give a brief account of some of the findings revealed by one section of the educational survey of the counties constituting the Southern Appalachian Mountains. This survey is a part of a very comprehensive undertaking to examine the several social and economic factors in these mountains which determine the presence or absence of a decent standard of living on the part of the people within the region. It must be borne in mind that a survey as here conceived merely attempts an overlook rather than a detailed and careful examination of all the aspects involved. The great difficulty is that such an overlook overlooks too much. As pertains to education it can only draw statistical samplings here and and there and consider these as indices of the educational opportunities provided for the children of the area. It is only fair to say that oftentimes these indices point toward certain conclusions which if further and more detailed evaluations could be made would be found to be con ly developed, and today is no time for wastefulness. Nor is this a time for faltering. Human need calls as never before in our generation. Every means of effectiveness must be employed. Policies must be carefully thought through, in the light both of facts made available through recent research and of intimate first-hand knowledge of the local situation to be serN ed. All the educational resources of the environment must be capitalized. Means must be creatively adjusted to ends and available forces must be integrated. Habituated routines must be critically scrutinized. Demands which are justified merely by convention or by tradition must be refused. New trails must be blazed to newly envisioned goals. Through programs thus conceived and carried out, it is confidently to be expected that human welfare in the Highlands may be advanced to levels it has never reached before. Faith moves mountains, faith without works is dead, and without vision the people perish. Vision, faith, works, these three, will carry us through. Education In The Mountains Gaumnitz side°rably in error. Within the above limitations, however, certain data have been brought together which will here be briefly reviewed and their implications discussed. The entire survey undertaken by the United States Department of Agriculture includes 205 counties beginning with the Northern boundaries of Virginia and West Virginia, and extending in a southeastern direction through Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and into Georgia. It is clear that such a group of mountain counties will involve all degrees of mountainousness. Some of the counties will be extremely cut up by mountains and will contain comparatively little tillable land; others will be composed largely of fertile fields, tillable land, and foothills. In order to discover degrees of difference between educational conditions in these mountain counties and the educational conditions in counties not in this area, this study selected five counties from each of the states named above distributed at random July, 1933 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK Page 21 over the areas not included by the Department of Agriculture as mountain counties. These counties will be referred to below as non-mountain counties. The six states named were found to have a total population between the ages of 6 and 20 of 2,932,982. The counties included in this study as non-mountain were found to have a total of 1,182,279 persons between these ages. It will, therefore, be seen that over one-third of the educables of these six states live in the mountain counties. It was also found that these six states employ a total of 90,642 teachers and that of these the mountain counties employ 36,695. It can, therefore, be readily seen that an undertaking to survey so large a part of the educational systems of these states is tremendous. For data the survey had to limit itself largely to the published reports of the state departments of education, to census figures, and to other published sources dealing with problems of education. The sources introduce further complications due to the fact that each state has its own scheme for gathering, tabulating, and publishing school facts, and that it is a most difficult thing to make studies gathered by one state comparable to those gathered by another. Many vital measures of educational conditions could not be included in this survey because comparability between the data available could not be established. After all, true education is to be measured by what happens to the child in the schoolroom. It is a question of changes in habits, changes in knowledge, in attitudes, in outlooks, and in comprehension, of the whole scheme of things with which the child is surrounded and in the midst of which ha must function when he reaches adulthood. These are clearly very complex and intangible things which can scarcely be reduced to absolute measures. About all that a survey of this kind can measure are the more external things such as the character and adequacy of the school plant, the levels and types of education offered, and the amount of schooling provided. Then it can measure such other quantitative aspects of education as the number of children in and out of school, the age and level of education to which they are retained in school, the number of days annually of actual school attendance, and measures of illiteracy. It is with such measures as these that this part of the survey was concerned and with reference to which it attempts to marshal statistical data. There are certain other values of education which can be obtained only by implication; for example, teachers' salaries will in part indicate the quality and training of the teacher employed. Generally speaking, high salaries tend to attract and hold a better qualified and more acceptable type of teacher than poor salaries. There are, of course, extreme exceptions to this generalization. Again the amount of training shown by the teachers can in general be assumed to be positively related to a teacher's skill, her knowledge, her degree of culture, her resourcefulness, and her professional spirit. Again there are exceptions. But training can be measured quantitatively, and in so far as more training means better teaching performance such measures imply quality of education. Per capita expenditures are also more or less intimately related to the quality of education p'ded. Amounts of money spent for state rovi aid determine to a considerable degree the extent to which states conceive of education to be a state and not a local function, and in areas of low per capita wealth state subventions often become the final determinant of whether or not educational opportunities are to be provided. Then there is, of course, the factor of the per capita wealth back of the child to be educated. Public education implies support of the schools by taxation. This means that there must be wealth to be taxed, hence, the larger the amount of taxable wealth per child or per teacher, the more probable it will be that the county or the community can provide an acceptable type of education for its children. All of the above factors were studied in connection with this survey. Now let us turn to a brief examination of some of the facts brought out by the investigation. Referring to the table here submitted we wHI find that data are presented for two states, i namely, Kentucky and Tennessee. For the sake of brevity this review is limited to these two states. The first column is headed "Measures Compared." Most of the items appearing in this column are self -explantory. They represent the various types of measures discussed above as indices to the extent and nature of the education provided in these mountain counties. Statistical data are presented for mountain counties and for non-mountain counties for each of the two states. Page 22 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK July, 1933 Under mountain counties we selected five which, according to several measures, constitute the most mountainous counties of the state. Under nonmountain we included counties outside of the mountain area which in effect represent the sections of the states containing no mountains. The counties included under each head are listed at the foot of the table. The third column under each state labeled "comparison in per cent" shows in percentages the relationship of the numerical indices found in the mountain counties to those found in non-mountain counties. That is to say, that since the mountain counties of Kentucky show 65.7 per cent of the children 6 to 20 years of age enrolled in the public schools, and the nonmountain counties show 60.8 per cent so enrolled, this percentage of enrollment for the nonmountain counties is 92.5 per cent that of the mountain counties. It may be observed as concerns the first measure that the mountain counties show a larger proportion of the educables enrolled in public elementary schools than the non-mountain counties. Several explanations may be advanced. First, the mountain counties contain several cities in which a portion of the children attend parochial and other private schools. Second, since many of the mountain counties provide no opportunity for secondary education and since the annual attendance of children in elementary schools is such as to retard their progress a larger proportion of those 6 to 20 years of age will be found attending elementary schools. The significance of these data is that there is comparatively little difference between the number of children reached by public elementary schools in mountain areas and in non-mountain areas. This is contrary to what is commonly assumed. Much has been said and written to the effect that children in mountain counties do not have the opportunity to attend public elementary schools. Examining now the second measure it is found that a very much larger proportion of children attend secondary schools in the non-mountain counties than in the mountain counties. Obviously opportunities for secondary education are not as frequently provided or as accessible in the mountain counties as in non-mountain areas. It would seem, therefore, that agencies interested in providing equal educational opportunities for children in mountain counties should interest themselves primarily in the field of secondary education. As regards elementary education their efforts should be directed toward securing a higher quality of service in these schools and toward obtaining more equitable functioning on the part of elementary school agencies. Some physical provisions for elementary education are obviously available to most of the children. The problem is to secure better housing and to improve the quality of the service. The item showing what per cent the fourth year high school enrollment is of the third grade further amplifies the facts shown under the item labeled "Secondary." It will be seen that the data compare closely with those under that head for the two states. It is significant to note that, if there is any difference, conditions in Kentucky show comparatively few of the children retained to the last year of the public high school. It was found that more than five times as many are retained to this level in the non-mountain counties of this state as in the mountain counties. The next two items relate to the amount of education provided. It will be seen that schools are in session somewhat longer in the non-mountain counties than in the mountain counties. The differences are, however, not as great as one would expect. Viewing the situation from the standpoint of the advantages taken by the children of the number of days annually during which schools are in session it was found that the attendance in mountain counties is considerably poorer than in the non-mountain counties. The explanation probably is that distance, inaccessibility, and climatic conditions, result in these poorer attendances in the mountains. Community attitude toward education is probably also an important factor. Items 5 to 8 shed further light on the extent and character of the education provided in the mountain counties. It may be seen that the per cent of children over-aged is very much greater in the mountain counties than in the nonmountain counties. This, of course, is closely related to the number of days children are in school attendance. It is a logical outcome that those children who attend more days make more rapid progress than those attending fewer days. Of course, the matter of teaching efficiency, school equipment, attitude towards education, and the like, are also involved in school progress. It is important to note that there is less than half as much July, 1933 MOUNTAIN Liar- AND WORK Page 23 SOME COMPARATIVE INDICES OF PUBLIC EDUCATION IN THE MOUNTAIN AND NON-MOUNTAIN COUNTIES OF KENTUCKY AND TENNESSEE Measures Compared Mountain Counties Kentucky Non- Compari- li Non- ~ Compari Mountain son in Mountain I Mountain I son in Counties Per Cent- - Counties I I Counties Per Cent 1. Per cent in public schools, I (6-20 years, inclusive) Elementary 65.7 60.8 , 92.5 68.5 ', 58.9 ~I 85.9 Secondary 3.1 9.9 319.0 6.2 9.6 ~I 154.8 Total 68.8 70.7 ' 102.8 74.7 68.5 1 91.7 I. 2. Per cent Fourth Year High School ' I enrollment is of Third Grade 3,7 i 20.5 554.0 13.2 i 19.9 150.8 3. Annual length of term in days 143 I 151 105.6 155 ', 171 ~I 110.3 4. Average days attended per pupil 96 I~ 113 117.7 104 ~I 138 132.7 5. Per cent over-aged 52.7 ~i 37.8 , 71.7 39.9 I 29.3 II 73.4 I 6. Average over-agedness in 4th grade, 1,5 .9 58.6 1.1 h ,g I 67.6 7. Illiteracy (10-20 years of age) I 5.9 '~ 2.5 42.3 4.6 I~~ 1.2 I~ 26.1 8. Illiteracy (21 years and over) ~, 13.3 i 7.0 52.6 12.4 I 3.1 25.0 9. Per cent of teachers with high I ,~ I school education or less 76.1 21.3 ~ 27.9 42.5 31.6 ~ 74.4 10. Average salaries of teachers $510 $876 ~ 171.8 $716 $1,123 156.8 11. Average value of school buildings I per teacher $710 $3,082 I 428.4 $2,477 $3,478 1 140.4 i 12. Average value of furniture, equip-~ I ~ i ment, and libraries per teacher $167 II $332 li 198.8 $264', $357 ~~ 135.2 i 13. Average expenditure per teacher I $611 $1,150 i 188.2 $879 , $1,549 ~ 176.2 14. Average State aid per teacher II $306 i $307 l100.3 $354 , $273 ' 77.1 I 15. Average estimated wealth per i teacher I $58,829 $205,943 ' 350.1 $118,697 I $475,488 II 400.7 16. Per cent average expenditures are of average estimated wealth 1.03 Most Mountainous Counties: Non-Mountainous Counties: 0.55 53.4 ~ 0.74 ', 0.32 ~ 43.2 KENTUCKY-Carter, Elliott, Jackson, Leslie, Owsley. TENNESSEE-Johnson, Fentress, Monroe, Morgan, Scott. KENTUCKY-Barren, Bullitt, Daviess, Franklin, Graves. TENNESSEE-Bedford, Davidson, Hardin, Henry, Lauderdale. Page 24 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK July, 1933 I 'll'teracy between the ages of 5 and 20 in the non I mountain counties of Kentucky as in the mountain counties. In the case of Tennessee the disparity is much greater but the percentage of illiterates is smaller. With considerable accuracy we may assume that these percentages indicate the illiteracy which these counties are now perpetuating. The education of children between the ages of 10 and 20 may reasonably be assumed to be the present responsibility of the schools. The fact that there are so many illiterates seems to indicate that somewhere public education is failing. Turning our attention now to the remaining measures it may be pointed out that item 9 shows extreme disparities between the educational qualifications of teachers in non-mountain counties and those in mountain counties. In Kentucky it is found that more than three-fourths of the teachers of mountain counties have the equivalent of a high school education or less. For the nonmountain counties only 21.3 per cent of the teachers are found with so little training. Tennessee makes a much better showing both in the preparation of teachers who have received more than this very limited amount of training and in the differences between these measures in the mountain and non-mountain counties. The next item is more or less closely related to these indices of teacher preparation. It shows the average amount of annual salaries paid to the teachers in the two types of areas. The next two items relate to the adequacy of the school plant. They represent a considerable amount of estimating. School authorities have no accurate way of measuring values of school buildings, furniture, and equipment. Even when they have records of initial costs there are elements of appreciation and depreciation which cannot be accurately evaluated. The figures here given indicate the average value of school buildings and the average value of furniture and equipment as reported to the state department of education. Again, especially in Kentucky, they show extreme disparities between mountain and non-mountain counties. When it is considered that in the mountain counties there are many school buildings which are very meager and not at all conducive to the best interests of education, it should not be wondered at that children do not as readily attend these schools as the better ones, and that parents show comparatively less interest in the education provided. This is, however, not the place to attempt evaluations. We can only present the facts as they are. The average annual expenditures per teacher presented in the next item show much the same situation, in so far as they relate to quantity and quality of education, as the factors discussed above. The next three series of measures are more or less closely related. Item 14 shows that in Kentucky the proportionate amounts of financial aid dispersed from state sources are about equal for mountain and non-mountain counties. This would seem to indicate that the poorer counties are at least not discriminated against. However, there is not much evidence of an attempt to equalize on the basis of ability to support an acceptable amount and quality of education. When we consider item 15 and find that the non-mountain counties have more than three and one-half times as much wealth per teacher as the mountain counties, we can readily understand why it is that the mountain counties provide more meagerly for public education. These data clearly indicate a need for more state funds to be apportioned with a view to equalization. Referring for the moment to item 13, we find that the average amount of money expended per teacher is $611.00. Out of this, in the mountain counties, more than half comes from state sources. That is to say, education in the mountain counties of Kentucky is to a large extent limited to that paid for out of state sources. The local communities are able to add comparatively little. In the non-mountain counties quite the opposite condition obtains. Examining these data now for Tennessee it is found that the state aid provided in the mountain counties of this state is considerably larger than that provided in the non-mountain counties. Here seems to be a definite effort to equalize educational opportunities. The disparity between the average estimated wealth back of each teacher is somewhat greater than in Kentucky, and the margins between the average expenditures in the funds coming from state sources are con siderably wider. In so far as the average estimated wealth approximates the true situation of the amount of taxable wealth available the mountain counties seem to be in poor shape to support public education. Their capacity to do so is seem July, 1933 ingly taken full advantage of, as indicated by the approximate rates of taxation for school purposes shown in item 16. It is decidedly premature to attempt any definite conclusions from the survey other than those implied above. It is recognized that the data presented are in many cases approximations rather than closely controlled facts. They do, however, approach the problem and provide some rather sI ificant indices of the extent and nature of gni I I public education provided in the Southern Mountains. MOUNTAIN LIPL AND WORK Page 25 Many other more detailed and intensive investigations are under way which will enable us later to analyze more adequately the data yielded by the investigation. The plans are to publish in a bulletin of the United States Department of Agriculture a more or less graphic account of the comparative facts as they arc revealed by the sources available. If the available data warrant a more complete report a statistical bulletin will possibly be published by the United States Office of Education which will give supplementary and more detailed information on the educational conditions in the Southern Mountains. THE CHURCHES OF THE HIGHLANDERS Elizabeth R. Hooker Every one in this audience knows the term applied by the Highlanders to people from other parts of the United States: "furriners." We do not like this. But is it not possible that when it comes to understanding the religion of the Highlands we are indeed foreigners? The home missionary was surely foreign in spirit who wrote in a questionnaire of "the intense and strange spiritual vagaries which have for so many generations held this people in mental servitude." So was the author of a recent article on the coal camps, who wrote: "It is a real question whether the religion that these people have is always a civilizing influence." So, might one suggest, was one of the speakers this morning, who called the Highlanders "blind to things religious." This sort of distant superiority is not uncommon in persons genuinely desirous of helping the Highlanders. On the other hand, many missionaries take for granted that religion is manifested in one and the same way the world over; and they talk to their Highland congregations and classes as they have been in the habit of doing in Iowa or Massachusetts. Neither a superior insistence on differences in religious outlook nor the assumption of identical religious attitudes will enable the missionary pastor or teacher to lead his people forward. To do that, he must understand in a sympathetic spirit just how they feel about religious things. Sympathetic insight should be furthered by con sidering, first, the antecedents of the Highlanders; second, their environment both in the Highlands as a whole and in different sections; and finally, certain distinctive characteristics of n a t i v e churches not affected by homemissionary influences. Consideration of the antecedents of the Highlanders must go back to Europe during the Reformation. In those days the ancestors of the people who finally settled in the Highlands included, in England, many Lollards and later many Puritans and Separatists; in the Palatinate and neighboring districts near the Rhine, large numbers of Germans; in Scotland and later in Ireland, numerous Scotch-Irish; smaller numbers of French Huguenots; and scattering representatives of other European stocks. Each of these racial elements included at that period many persons who were in revolt against mediaeval Catholicism, and who in consequence suffered persecution, which lasted for most of the races just named during a century and a half. To many people of all these stocks, rerigion was a matter of vital importance, for which they would make any sacrifice. They had all come to associate the Roman Catholic Church with traditions of martyrdom and persecution. They had accepted the Bible as their standard of truth, and they thought and spoke in Bible terms. Many of them had an intense belief in predestination. Moreover, they had developed to an unusual degree certain sturdy traits of char Page 26 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK July, 1933 acter, such as courage, hardihood, integrity, and persistence. They were more intelligent than people of their usually not elevated rank were apt to be in those days, their wits having been sharpened by reading the Bible, listening to sermons, and disputing on points of doctrine. Most important of all, perhaps, they were people that tended to see the unpopular side, to differ with the average man-in short, to be individualists. Finally, the fact that in spite of obstacles they had taken the tremendous leap into the dark that emigration must have seemed in those days bespeaks in them an unusual degree of ambition and initiative. With religious motives for emigration were combined poverty, unemployment, and oppression, which drove many to the new world in the hope of a better livelihood. When after sojourning in other parts of the American colonies, in some cases for generations, the ancestors of our Highlanders in the eighteenth century reached their present home, then on the western frontier, they led a life that intensified both their virile traits and their individualism. Sore of them organized in very early days churches of the kinds familiar to them, such as Regular and United Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Brethren. To these, Methodist circuit riders soon added large numbers of Methodist churches. But since the pioneers lived far apart and were compelled to struggle for bread and shelter, their churches had to be few and simple. If there was a church building, it was a log structure of one room. The only form of religious ministry consisted of rare preaching servicds, usually conducted by traveling missionaries or by earnest, untrained men of other occupations who preached without salary. Lawlessness was common on the frontier, and the scarcity of religious privileges tended toward carelessness in matters of religion, and therefore, for people of their heritage, to uneasiness of conscience. The church situation of the Highlanders was modified by several events in American reliizious history which took place not far from the Highlands. In 1800 the Great Revival in the West, centering in Kentucky, awakened many uneasily non-religious people to intense religious experience. In great camp meetings striking emotional and physical phenomena were manifested, :ind thousands of persons were converted. From that period the church of the Highlands has inherited an insistence on the necessity for every one of sudden conversion, and the institution of the camp meeting with its present-day successor, the protracted meeting. The religious interest aroused by the Great Revival strengthened and multiplied the churches. Baptists grew very numerous. Splits of denominations resulted in several new religious bodies, -the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, the Christian denomination, and the Disciples of Christ. The wave of missionary enthusiasm of the early nineteenth century led presently to the splitting of many Baptist churches and associations, the more conservative factions, who did not believe in missions-or in Sunday schools or trained ministers, reforms also approved by th^ Missionary Baptistwithdrew to churches of their own, which they called by various names, of which Primitive Baptist was the most common. Other Baptist sects arose out of differences over free will and predestination, with the Free Will Baptists at one extreme and the TwoSeed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists at the other. Later on the number of denominations was further increased by divisions in Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian bodies over the issue of slavery. Toward the end of the nineteenth century the Holiness movement reached the Highlands. Its extreme emotionalism was welcome to the Highlanders, both because of their barren lot and their tradition of intense religious experience; and fifteen Holiness sects came to be represented. Altogether, the denominations present in the Highlands in 1926 numbered close to one hundred. Meanwhile many features of the pioneer church situation had been perpetuated. One reason for this is that when railroads and highways came to surrounding territory, the mountains and hills delayed for a long time their introduction into the Highlands, except through the central valley. For generations the Highlanders lived to themselves, "the world forgetting, by the world forgot." Their schools were very poor. Many could read only with difficulty, and they had almost no books, magazines, or papers. Therefore neither through personal contact nor through reading did the Highlanders learn of the great changes July, 1933 MOUNTAIN Uiz AND WORK Page 2? that gradually came about in religious beliefs and in the practices of the churches. This was particularly true of churches representing denomina tions for which the management of church affairs lay in the hands of the local congregations. Old beliefs and ways were therefore handed down by tradition, from parents to children and from old preachers to their young hearers. In the most isolated sections of the Highlands many churches of primitive denominations have lived on unchanged. Some of these are of kinds brought to the Highlands in early days, such as the Regular and the United Baptists. Others are antimissionary Baptists of later origin, still others are conservative Churches of Christ. Moreover, familiar denominations like the Missionary Baptists and the Disciples are represented in the Highlands by some churches with practices so simple that they can hardly be told from churches of primitive sects. And even churches that have adopted Sunday schools, ministerial salaries, and contributions to missions retain attitudes, conceptions, and standards that have come down all the way from colonial times, or even from still earlier days in Europe. The effects of isolation through the generations were reinforced by extreme poverty. The Highlanders could not employ salaried ministers because they had no money to spare. For the same reason they could not have musical instruments, or any but the simplest church buildings. They found scriptural texts to justify their plain religious institutions. For example, a salaried preacher came to be called a "hireling," unworthy of spreading a gospel that was intended to be given "without money and without price." What has been said of the antecedents of the religious situation in the Highlands needs to be supplemented by a brief consideration of the environment of the churches today. To begin with, the isolation and the poverty that in the past had so much to do with shaping religious institutions, though modified in some sections, still characterize the Highlands as a whole in comparison with other parts of rural America, and arc very pronounced in certain sections of the region. As long as isolation and poverty remain, the distinctive features that these handicaps have produced and perpetuated in the church situation are likely to be preserved. In the second place, because schools were very poor in the rugged parts of the Highlands until within two or three decades, the older people, who largely control the affairs of the churches, have had very little education. This is true not only of the church-members but also of many of the preachers. They do not read, and the ideas about science and religion that are current in American society outside the Highlands are utterly unfamiliar to them. Moreover, their religious conceptions and standards were passed on to them ready-made, and were built into their brains from babyhood; to change them is practically impossible. Again, the Highlands are divided into natural districts that differ greatly from one another in contour and consequently in degree of isolation and of poverty. Corresponding differences arc found in the church situation. The six principal sections will now be pointed out and briefly described. This audience does not need elaborate descriptions, especially those who listened to Dr. Gray's address this morning. The sections will be mentioned in the order of degree of isolation and of poverty. The ranking is based on fifteen tests, the details of which there is no time to give. The poorest and most isolated section, the Northeastern Cumberland Plateau, lies mostly in eastern Kentucky and southwestern West Virginia. As those of you who work there know, the surface is deeply trenched by countless narrow, winding valleys, valleys separated by knifeedged ridges, and has practically no level land. The roads, with the exception of a few highways, most of which were constructed very recently, are merely rough tracks, lying for much of their length in beds of the creeks. Both on the steep little farms and in the many coal camps along some of the larger streams the people are very poor. The Northwestern Cumberland Plateau, west and southwest of the section just described, forms a narrow band across Kentucky and Tennessee. The surface is a rolling plateau, of which much of the part of the eastern side that lies in Tennessee rises very abruptly from the lower territory adjoining. In these precipitous bluffs streams have cut back narrow gorges. Though this section has long had a few highways and railroads, both Page 28 MOUNTAIN LrrE AND WORK July, 1933 the gorges and large areas with unimproved roads on clay soil experience considerable isolation. Part of the coal deposits that could be developed cheaply, and practically all the timber have been pretty much exhausted. This fact, combined with an unproductive soil and poor opportunities for marketing products, has resulted in a considerable degree of poverty. The Blue Ridge consists of a single mountain chain through most of Virginia, but widens into a broad field of mountains in North Carolina. In topography this section is composed of larger and simpler masses than in the Northeastern Cumberland Plateau, so that a few improved roads come within at least distant reach of a much larger proportion of the people. Scattered through uninhabitable territory are level stretches, a few of considerable size, but most of them mere pockets, where one or a very few families live in considerable isolation. In the Alleghany Plateau, a wedge-shaped piece of territory down the middle of West Virginia, the streams have worn deep valleys, but upon the tops of the separating ridges are level places, where are found most of the roads and homes. Just east of the Alleghany Plateau extends the Central Ridge country, which consists of long, steep parallel ridges, alternating with narrow valleys, extending in nearly straight lines in a northeast and southwest direction. Communication is easy along the length of the valleys, but is very difficult during much of the year over the dividing ridges, except at a few points where graveled highways have recently been constructed. The farms in the valleys, run for the most part by descendants of early German and English settlers, are largely devoted to stock-raising, and are more prosperous than the farms of any other section of the Highlands. Finally, the Central Valleys, which, one beyond another, form a trench between the high and rugged sections on either side, since they formed the most accessible part of the region, were the places where settlement began. Roads and railroads along the length of the trench were begun early, and have been improved and extended in larger measure than in any other section. The Valleys are the scene of comparative prosperity, based partly on agriculture and partly on industries in the centers, some of which, like Knoxville, are large cities. Yet ridges and knobs interfere with travel cast and west, especially since many districts are served only by unimproved clay roads. With variations in degree of isolation and of poi erty among the six sections described are associated variations in the church situation. These will be illustrated by charts.", In each chart the bars corresponding to the different sections will be arranged in the same order as the descriptions just given, that is, the order of degree of isolation and poverty. The first chart shows the proportions of the churches that belong to primitive denominations. The proportion is highest for the Northeastern Cumberland Plateau, where isolation is extreme, and lowest for the much less handicapped Alleghany Plateau. The second chart shows the marked correspondence between degree of isolation and proportion of churches of denominations having a congregational form of local church government. A third chart represents the number of churches per one thousand inhabitants. There are only two churches to a thousand people in the Northeastern Cumberland Plateau, where there are many unchurched districts. The highest ratios, 4.4 and 4.2, are those for the Blue Ridge and the Central Ridges, both characterized by a surface divided into small units by topographical barriers, and by a high degree of denominational competition. The last chart shows sets of bars representing the ratios of church membership at the last three religious census periods, the lowest bar of each set standing for the ratio in 1926. In general, the percentages increase as isolation and poverty decrease. Comparing the three bars of each set, it is evident that the proportion of the people in church membership was higher in 1926 than it had been twenty years earlier for every section except the Northwestern Cumberland Plateau. Even in 1926, however, these ratios were con siderably below the average for rural territory i 1 1 in the United States. In spite of the differences shown by these charts, many characteristics of the church situation are u'form throughout the Highlands. Everywhere ni I common traditions make religion a matter of The charts, displayed by Miss Hooker during her address, are not reproduced here.-Editorial mote. July, 1933 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK Page 29 vital importance. Though many people stand aloof from the services, they all believe in the things for which the churches stand, and almost all of them attend revivals and expect to be converted before they die. Atheists are practically unknown. Preaching services and in most sections Sunday school sessions are highly valued privileges. They afford food for thought, stimulus toward righteous conduct, and temporary escape from the limitations of narrow lives. Around these regular services and such rarer occasions as decorations and funerals, centers practically all the social life of the more rugged districts of the Highlands. Another universal characteristic is the acceptance of the Bible as the unquestioned authority on truth of every kind. Theological discussion consists in the citing by both parties of Bible verses apart from their context, interpreted according to long-established traditions. Among such traditional conceptions is a belief or half belief in predestination, which casts gloom or doubt over the minds of very many Highlanders. Again, the standard religious experience for the Highlanders is a sudden, emotional conversion, rather than the gradual development of character. To bring about the conversion of sinners and the renewal of religious emotion in those previously converted, the protracted meeting is almost universally considered an important part of the church year. From these occasions the people derive not only escape from their bare and monotonous existence, but relief from a sense of guilt, the unification of their impulses, a fresh start in right ways, a sense of personal worth, and deliverance from fear of the unknown future. Aside from the protracted meeting, the indigenous churches throughout the Highlands have a very simple program. Preaching services, usually held only once a month, and weekly Sunday school sessions, with here and there a prayer meeting, are about all there is to it. The order of exercises is extremely informal, lacking any approach to ritual or symbolism, for to the Highlanders such things are associated with the Roman Catholic Church, against which they still have a strong inherited prejudice. Churches having societies for women or for young people are comparatively few. The church building, almost invariably, consits of only one room, which is usually very plain. Annual expenditures in the counties surveyed averaged only $280 to a church, and $4.80 to a resident member. No form of community service is undertaken by the churches, the sole function of which is believed to consist in the preparation of individuals for happiness in a world beyond the grave. The ministers-or rather the preachers, for their duties in relation to their congregations are conceived to be fulfilled almost entirely through preaching-are in large measure untrained men who earn their living wholly or partly through other occupations, and who receive very little compensation from their churches, of which they usually serve from two to five. Among these preachers are a large proportion of thoroughly earnest men; and some of the younger ones keenly realize their handicaps in the face of the many problems arising from rapidly changing conditions. The preachers are the natural leaders of the Highlanders, who accord to many of them a high degree of appreciation. Take it all together, the Highlanders have a genuine religion, which in many respects resembles the religion of our colonial ancestors, and which probably stands for fully as much in their inner lives as is the case where other religious attitudes prevail, and where religion is associated with far more complex organization and with greater beauty of form. Page 30 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK July, 1933 Missionary Program I n The Highlands Hermann N. Morse It seems to me that I have never undertaken a task of church analysis with so little confidence of being able to do it satisfactorily. I know of no other area in the United States in which the religious life is so difficult to appraise; where the spirit and the objective count for so much more than the organization and the activity; where one must so often take the will for the deed and the motive for its projection of itself into life; where it seems so necessary at times to speak critically and is yet always so necessary to speak appreciatively. The background for this discussion is furnished by the reports which have already been presented to this conference by Dr. Gray, Dr. Dunn, Mr. Gaumnitz, and, in particular, by Miss Hooker. The data which I am to present have been assembled by Miss Hooker and her associates. I am personally contributing only a certain measure of interpretation. The Protestant churches of the Highlands may be broadly classified in three groups. In the first group are the primitive sects. These are the equivalent among the churches of the type of farm to which Dr. Gray referred as "selfsufficing," and in their distribution they are characteristic of much the same areas. The churches of these primitive sects are highly indi11 idualized, independent, unregimented and uncontrolled. Organizationally, they are divided into numerous small units, each of which is easily sub-divided again. There is little cohesion among them, and they show high rates of birth, of morbidity and of mortality. Their programs are meager, conventional, and stereotyped; their leadership is largely untrained and non-professional. Their financial support is almost nonexistent. The religious life fostered by these primitive sects is largely of an ecstatic, emotional, unstable type. It is a religion with no socializing objective. It is non-cooperative in its point of view. It is too often devastatingly destructive in its effect upon the orderly development of Christian life and work. It is a fire that consumes but does not warm, a draught that inebriates but does not cheer. Its message is an other-wordly appeal from the life that now is: a sort of petition in spiritual bankruptcy. In the second group may be placed the churches of the long established denominations, native to the South, which generally speaking treat the Highlands simply as a geographical area to which they apply much the same standardized procedure of administration, support, and program which characterizes their general operation in rural sections elsewhere. At one extreme these churches approach the level of the primitive sects in their type of organization, leadership, program, equipment, and support, as well as in their intellectual and spiritual outlook. At the other extreme they approach the best standards of their own and similar denominations elsewhere. The conception that the Highlands differ from rural sections of the United States as a whole only in degree seems to me a conception of limited application. This is both because of physiographic and economic limitations and because of traditional reasons having to do with characteristic attitudes and modes of life. At any rate we are able to show that the measurable differences in institutional life between the Highlands and typical rural sections elsewhere indicate that we have here what practically amounts to a distinctive social situation, the essential modification of which will necessarily be a very slow process. These churches are clearly below the average of comparable groups elsewhere, while they accentuate attitudes of independence and of a non-cooperative individualism. In the third group we have churches of other Protestant denominations, national in their distribution, which are markedly different in many particulars from all other Highland churches. This is chiefly because of a superimposed pro gram, an imported leadership, and a high degree of financial support from outside sources. These i national church bodies, not native to ths area, though in some cases present in it from the beginning of settlement, have treated the Highlands as a distinctive missionary area of special char July, 1933 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK Page 31 acteristics within which they maintain a distinctive program of missionary work. Curiously enough, the churches which are often thought of by many as foreign to the Highlands include some of the churches earliest established here, while those to which we are apt to refer as the native or indigenous churches are historically a later development. But the various types of primitive sects (and their variety is endless), once they had entered the Highlands spread quickly over the land and possessed it. Isolation, poverty, educational backwardness produced those emotional states which fostered here the development of that type of religious expression that elsewhere has characterized areas of economic privation and retarded development. These churches are the product of an environment plus a tradition. They survive because the environment is not yet sufficiently modified to uproot the tradition. Of many sections of the mountains today we can still paint a picture (as Dr. L. C. Kelly of Pineville, Kentucky, did in his paper in a recent issue of Mountain Life and Work):` of social, economic and moral stagnation, of rampant superstition, of political corruption, and spiritual impotence; and over against that you can put another picture of this native religious order that is the product of a situation that it is powerless to change. And of much of the leadership of these movements, the mildest comment you can make is that of the old man who said of certain of his neighbors, "The less you have to do with them, the less you are worse off." I would be the last to contend that these native churches are without spiritual value, or that their leaders are wholly lacking in vision and in consecration. I know the contrary is true. But those who maintain that religion should be a constructive force for personal righteousness and social progress must apply to it a qualitative as well as a quantitative measure. And such churches as these are the product of conditions that are slowly but inexorably changing. The walls of isolation are being broken through. Education is winning a slow but certain victory. The mental and spiritual outlook of the mountains is changing. The future is with the church that looks to the future and builds for the future, if religion is to count in the years ahead. The churches of the second and third groups April, 1933 mentioned represent, it must be admitted, no single pattern. Many of them are no more than a short jump ahead of the primitive sects, but the jump, if short, is usually in the right direction. The principal emphases in their programs, stated as objectives rather than achievemcnts, which most clearly distinguish them from the characteristics of the primitive churches are these: First, a trained and educated leadership giving full time to the work of the ministry, and supported by their ministry. Second, an emphasis on a continuity of church life and on the development of functioning church organizations. Third, an evangelism that has permanent as well as immediate, institutional and social as well as personal, and ethical as well as emotional implications. Fourth, a program of church work which includes an emphasis upon pastoral ministry and personal work, upon religious education and leadership training, upon reverent worship and cultivation of a personal devotional life, upon service to the community for the development of a satisfying group life, of a sense of responsibility for the financial support of the church and of its world-wide program. That is a rationalization, but it at least expresses a hope. It cannot be said that the missionary program has attained these objectives or even that it has been wholly concerned with them. In part, here as elsewhere, the missionary program represents no more than an out-reach of denominational zeal to propagate its own type of organization and teaching for its own advantage. But, broadly speaking, the justification of the missionary program is in the degree to which it is actually distinguishing its work by such objectives. Although the preceding speakers have discussed the environmental and traditional factors in the Highlands, I should insert a word here as to the conditions confronting the Home Mission agencies which have been responsible for various developments in the missionary program. The lack of educational facilities was the first handicap to be generally recognized. Education came early into the missionary program. Church schools first substituted for and later supplemented the public schools. Just what part mission policy has played in the development of Page 32 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND ,WORK July, 1933 public education in the Highlands we cannot here attempt to measure. Doubtless its influence has been considerable. Most denominations have maintained that they had no intention of competing with the public school. To some extent a "parochial school" attitude has been present and still persists. But on the whole, the mission school policy has been to develop a distinctive service to be evaluated as something apart from the service that the public school can or does render. Poverty and economic limitations very early brought into the missionary program scattered efforts to improve farming, to encourage and cooperate with state extension agencies, to develop mountain industries, and to provide a market for their products, and to furnish an adapted vocational training. Deficiencies in home conditions, in health, and in social life have perhaps more generally engaged the attention of mission workers as problems more easily analyzed and more within the scope of missionary activity. A wide variety of services in these fields has been developed. Generally it has been recognized by the missionary agencies that the development of the religious life, intelligently understood, required the improvement of the Highlands in these various respects and that such improvement may be regarded as a proper fruitage of religious effort. Obstacles of a different sort have been presented to the missionary agencies by the characteristic mental attitudes and conceptions of the Highlanders. There is, for example, their pride that may accept benefits, but is likely to resent their offer. There is their individualism which makes difficult group action and any degree of social discipline or of ecclesiastical control. There is their prejudice against outside leaders and "brought-on" ways, and there is their preoccupation in religion with dogmatic conceptions, and their regard for a religious experience which is primarily emotional and non-ethical, a sudden development rather than a growth. For the year of the survey the missionary program as a whole involved an expenditure estimated at $1,500,000. First both in time and in numbers among the missionary enterprises conducted is the local church. The maintenance and support from mission funds of the organized church would generally be considered the center and heart of the missionary program. Exact figures are not available, but it is probable that over $400,000 was expended in a year in grants-in-aid to some 850 ministers serving about 3,000 separate churches in this area. The proportion of all churches in the mountains aided from mission funds is not above the average, though for certain denominations the proportion is well above the national average. In the long-established denominations as a whole, the average grant per minister was $298 per annum toward a total average salary of $914. Each aided minister served an average of 4.2 churches, these churches contributing toward his support $147 per church. These figures may be contrasted with the corresponding figures for the national church bodies, for which the average grant per minister was $994 toward an average total salary of $1460. Each of these aided ministers served an average of 2.7 churches, each of which contributed $173 per annum to his support. The contrast between the churches in the mountains and the churches in typical rural sections elsewhere may be drawn by comparing the conditions in the 17 highland counties intensively surveyed with conditions in 21 selected rural counties typical of the entire United States, which have been recently studied by the Institute of Social and Religious Research. In the mountain counties two out of three ministers combine some other occupation with the work of the ministry. In the counties outside only one out of four does so. In these mountain counties three churches out of four have non-resident ministers; in the counties outside, less than half. In the mountain counties 84 per cent of the churches have Sunday schools as compared with 91.5 per cent outside, 15.5 per cent have women's organizations as compared with 65 per cent, and 21 per cent have young people's organizations as compared with 45 per cent. In these 17 mountain counties practically four out of five of the ministers now serving churches have had neither college nor seminary education. This compares with two out of three ministers for the seven southern states within whose borders the mountain area lies and with approximately July, 1933 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK Page 33 half of the ministers for the 17 major Protestant denominations in the United States. In these 17 mountain counties only 2 per cent of the churches have full-time resident ministers and only 17 per cent have part-time resident nFinisters. Three-fourths of the churches have non r*dent ministers, the others being without any es] I I I I ministerial service. In general, the level of the financial support of the churches is extremely low. Nearly 10 per cent of the churches receive no financial support at all, 39 per cent receive $100 a year or less, and another 39 per cent re ceive not more than $500. There has been in some sections a considerable development in re cent years of some form of commodity support. The so-called God's Acre Plan has been success fully promoted in many sections. However, even taking into account this practice of giving in "kind," the support accorded the churches is de cidedly meager. Over 18 per cent of the min l isters serve without salary. Another 15 per cent receive $100 a year or less, and practically 25 per cent more receive not to exceed $500 a year. Hardly more than one-fourth of all of the ministers serving in these counties receive salaries in excess of $1,000 a year. In general, as Miss Hooker has pointed out, the once-a-month preaching service is characteri,tic. Seventy-two per cent of all the churches operate on this basis. Less than 4 per cent have services on three or four Sundays a month. One other illustration may be cited. More than onetenth of the congregations do not own any church building, while seven out of ten own only a simple one-room structure. There are very few instanecs in all of these counties of welladapted modern plants with facilities for religious education and community work. In all of these particulars the churches which are maintained by the missionary program show higher averages. The record at least points the direction in which the missionary program is tending, but also emphasizes the long way it has to go to attain even the average rural standards. The contrasts, if one follows the medium line for each of the three types of churches to which reference has been made, are sharp enough at certain points. Here is the primitive church. It has an untrained native preacher supporting himself. Frequently it has no building, or at best has a simple one-room structure meagerly furnished. It has a simple type of organization, independent of any sort of outside control. Its program is practically limited to once-a-month preaching, a Sunday school, and an annual revival. It is very unlikely to have any other church organizations. Usually it has no church budget and no missionary or benevolent interests. It displays an intellectual and spiritual outlook and an emotional character that strike the average level of its congregation. But withal it represents a genuine religious experience, though an experience without external or social objectives and without service or missionary incentives. Then, in the second place, we have the church of one of the long-established denominations. In its ministry it shows a higher average of training. The principle of the church supporting the minister has been accepted, but the basis of such support is still woefully inadequate. Its program is still characterized by once-a-month preaching and a simple Sunday school organization, but there is more frequent use of other subsidiary church organizations, and there is a definite attempt to develop the denominational program of educational and missionary work. Rather frequently the church is tied up with service projects directed toward community betterment, and religion has been somewhat diverted from a too exclusive concern with the individual. Finally, there is the church supported by the national missionary organizations. It is ordinarily not so deeply rooted in the affections and confidence of the people. It has a trained ministry reasonably well supported. Its program emphasizes regular services of worship, a well-rounded system of religious education, and a wide variety of subsidiary organizations. It emphasizes service in the community and a missionary out-reach beyond it. These churches have definitely attempted to make themselves the focal points for educational, cultural, and civilizing influences as well as for evangelism and the cultivation of the religious life. Space does not permit, even did the circumstances require, any elaborate treatment of the other principal aspects of the missionary program. The schools have been sufficiently dealt with by Miss Dunn. Suffice it to say here that they range in grade from kindergarten to college, are of al Page 34 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK July, 193 most every known educational pattern, and have considerable importance also as centers of missionary extension work. The Sunday school mission program requires a word. There are twenty Sunday school missionaries in the mountains, the two organizations interested in their support being the Presbyterian Board of National Missions and the American Sunday School Union. Their task is to establish and maintain Sunday schools in unserved communities, to develop religious education in the small churches, to foster Vacation Bible Schools and week-day religious instruction, and in general to develop throughout their territories a program of leadership-training and of religious instructinn. There have been identified 121 separate community centers of which five-sixths are supported by denominational mission agencies. Nearly twothirds of these are either Presbyterian or Episcopal, the others representing ten different denominations. These community centers present awide variety of religious, educational, and service activities. Their programs include the conduct of religious services, Sunday schools, and Vacation Bible Schools; clubs and classes for various agegroups; home visitation; public health nursing and health education; social and recreational activities; the development of home industries. Such a community center is often regarded as the forerunner of the church, the entering wedge into a community which is not yet prepared to support a church. Sometimes the community center is an evolution out of a school. Often its work is continued as a part of the service program of an organized church. Other types of missionary activity include health work through hospitals, dispensaries, clinics, and public health nursing; the maintenance of boarding homes or hostels; orphanages; and also miscellaneous projects in leadership training. It will thus be seen that the missionary program as a whole is as highly variegated as it is widely extended. By way of critical appraisal, very much that Dr. Dunn said of the mission schools can be said of the missionary program as a whole. For example, the distribution of the various mission projects appears fortuitod;s. Certain areas are amply provided with service of every sort. Other areas have been largely neglected. Some of the work at least appears to be decidedly temporary in character. Further, the missionary program has been weakened by competition. In church wont the problem of competition is acute throughout the mountain area, even more so than is general in the South. The primitive sects, of course, compete on confliction with any and all other churches. But this fact should not be allowed to obscure the further fact that there is a great deal of competition between denominations which have at least somewhat similar objectives. For example, one town of less than 500 population was found in which a Southern Presbyterian church, first on the field, had been followed successively by Baptist, Methodist Episcopal South, and Disciples of Christ churches. Then came a Holiness church. The first four withdrew one after another because they were unable to maintain themselves in the face of the competition, and ultimately the field was left to the exclusive occupancy of the Holiness church. There has clearly been a tendency to overdevelop some phases of the program beyond thcapacity of the resources which are available. This fact, of course, has reduced the opportunity to do a quality job which is one of the avowed objectives of the missionary agencies. To this may be attributed many of the commonly observed weaknesses in the church program. Finally, it should be said that in all phases of the mission program there is need that we should more sharply define our objectives and more realistically criticize our methods and organization. Various aspects of the program too often appear to be working at cross purposes or at least to be working without a sufficient degree of coordination and integration. There is need, too, to be more realistic as to the advantages and disadvantages of maintaining indefinitely a level of expenditure which the communities concerned either cannot or will not assume. It is worth while to ask if any phase of the missionary program can advantageously be regarded as a permanent benevolence, particularly if it is a lack of coordination and cooperation that makes it so. To put it crudely, are the mission agencies in the mountains to prime the pump, doing a job to which they should set a definite term, or are they July, 1933 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK Page 35 engaged upon a service which is without any possible termination? Over against these critical considerations should be placed the hopeful aspects of the work. The adventuring, pioneering character of much of the missionary program has been a precious asset. The hopeful and helpful experiments which have been carried on are making a contribution, the value of which it would be difficult to overestimate. Scattered through the mountains will be found a considerable number of really distinguished enterprises with long records of continuous service, enterprises which have been kept flexible in form, diversified in interest and of a high quality of performance. The mission program as a whole has made a definite contribution in the development of leadership with a social vision and with some social technique, and in the development also of a more sympathetic public attitude toward improvement along many lines. There has been helpful cooperation between the mission agencies and public service agencies of many sorts, as in education, in agricultural and home extension, and in health; and there has been a slow but gradual grading up of the whole level of the church program. In conclusion, we clearly need some machinery for better planning to avoid duplication of effort, to provide for extension of service into unreached areas, and to unify more thoroughly the various types of activities now carried on. Clearly, too, we need a definite projection of cooperative programs in the field of leadership training and in various phases of community service. The missionary agencies concerned will be well advised if they undertake a careful re-study of the various aspects of their program in the light of clearly defined objectives attuned to the needs of the present day. In this area religion is generally honored, but the church is generally ineffective. The church is not an end in itself but if the church is ineffective as an organization, religion is likely to fail to influence life as it might and should. This whole problem which has been unfolded hefore us in these various reports presented to this conterence-where and how shall we attack it? Is it not at base a spiritual problem? Does it not primarily concern itself with the spirit, the motives, the outlook of the people, and are not the church and the school after all the keys to the situation? And if so, must not the church make itself an effective organization? This study shows that, in general, it is not that now, but there is enough evidence before us to give us hope that it can be made so. From The Mountain Worker's Point Of Kiev ECONOMIC CONDITIONS Olive D. Campbell I have only a few things to say and these very humbly. As a mountain worker, however, I will try to sum up briefly what seem to me some of the most important thoughts expressed here on the Conference floor and discussed among ourselves, at least those which agree with my own thought on the matter. At the beginning I shall have to say that I am leaving out the mining situation, of which I know nothing personally, for Miss Dingman tells me that there are present some who do know this at first hand. I shall also leave out of consideration our present economic crisis: when the times are out of joint everywhere, we cannot hope to be normal in the mountain country; we can only do the best we can to meet the situation while at the same time we lay deeper foundations for the future. Two aspects of the depression are, however, important to keep in mind. Whatever our feeling about the limitations of mountain life, a strong country slant is likely to continue for one generation at least. Many have already spoken of the numbers who have poured back into the highlands from industrial centers. Some will return to industry when opportunity arises; others have suffered too much from the uncertainty of such employment and will prefer the security of the mountain farm, even if it brings less return financially. We have already spoken here about uur changed feelings as to what living standards we should demand for the rural dweller. We are inclined to be a little less exacting than we were a few years ago. But to what can we look forward? You have all had experiences, doubtless, similar to those we have had in Brasstown this winter. Here comes a young man of twenty-five, who is mountain-born and reared but has adventured out into industry at the Ford plant or elsewhere. He has learned what it is to walk the streets hungry in search of work and appreciates what a roof in the highlands and a plot of ground and good neighbors may mean. He wants better things, however, and he comes and says, "What do you see for me on a mountain farm?" Here is another young man, also mountain-born and reared, who has spent many years of his life in a mill town. When the mills cut their production, he returned to put his strength into raising truck, for which, alas, he found no market. He asks the same question, "What do you see in this region for me?" It is a solemn question to answer. Both of these are young fellows with energy; they want material things and they want then, quickly before they themselves are old. Behind these with energy are many seemingly without energy or desire for better things. The question is not only a solemn one to answer, but it is sad as well, for I see no quick solution, no rapid growth which will bring wealth. In fact, I may say that I see only a slow process in which one cannot disentangle all the forces, economic, educational, and social, that make for growth. If I step from Page 36 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK July, 193 3 one province to the other and tread upon the territory of other speakers, I am afraid you will have to pardon me, for I cannot separate them. The answer to the question, then? It must depend upon many things, in the first place on where we are. Dr. Gray tells us that the Survey has had to be based on material already gathered, and not upon new field work. He does not pretend to answer detailed questions of area characteristics. At the same time he could point out readily, I suppose, certain areas suited especially to forest, and sections where it would seen, impossible to develop a normal rural life. We must first study our area with whatever help we can get from the survey and state, and second, with these findings before us, we must try to decide where we want to go. Naturally this .second decision must depend upon our philosophy of life, on how one feels about the old "plain living and high thinking." I agree with Dr. Gray that we must lay less emphasis on the limitations of nature and more on the capacity of man in the development of life. He called attention to what other peoples have done, the Swiss and the Danes, for example, in the way of overcoming obstacles and in building up a rural culture higher than ours. We ourselves know what can be done in the way of increasing crop production on land which has been yielding only ten to fifteen bushels of corn per acre. If Dr. Cooper were here he could speak eloquently on this subject. I remember well visiting the Eastern Kentucky Experiment Station at Quicksand shortly after it was taken over by the State. There stood what was left of an industrial development. When the big mill closed down and left, it took with it not only the growth of the mountain sides and the best of those workers who had conic in, but the best of the young people who lived there. It left behind bare hillsides, broken-down, rotting shacks, and a hopeless, depressed population. The next time 1 visited that section, the fields were producing rich crops of alfalfa, and, in places, corn at a hundred bushels to the acre. Our own farm, which is situated in one of the areas marked on the map as "marginal or submarginal," practically split even last year, in spite of the low prices. Of course it could not have done this without the help of our cooperative creamery. But the building of a better economic life, or let us say, the building of a rural civilization cannot be a one-man proposition; it concerns all the people who live there. When Miss Butler and I were searching for a place to put our school, we went over with the county agent a certain mountain county of Eastern Kentucky. I always remember what he said, "I can see how this country can be developed, but I cannot make the people see it." I am snore deeply impressed all the time with exactly this limitation. We cannot pass on our 'vision of what may be to other people unless they are ready to see it, nor do we wish to persuade them against their will. How can we get other people to see what we see and stir their imagination so that they will put their energy to work? How can we get the Danish philosophy of "I sing behind the plough?" The weakness in our work is that we began wrong end to. We looked down on what country people had to do to live and talked only in terms of the drudgery of country life and of the wider opportunity of the city. We did not really think very much about the economic possibilities of highland life. What I am trying to say is this: we could have a better economic life in sections classed like ours in the Survey, as marginal or submarginal, if the people who lived there could catch the vision of what may be and would try to realize it. Denmark first passed the necessary legislation and then, through her folk schools, gave the people desire and vision so that they found their way out of their economic predicament. It almost seems as if we had to start everything at once, while at the same tine facing the fact that results can only come slowly. We must try to give vision and desire, and at the same time get on foot some economic enterprise in our community-whatever kind of enterprise may be best suited to the section in which we live. The two must go hand in hand. Or let us put it in another way. There must be no forcing or coercing, no "putting across" of a program. We must live our philosophy, work out our plan as far as possible with the people; and, if it is worth while, it will spread. Some years ago, Mr. Lange, head of one of the folk schools in Denmark, said, "Country people do not assimilate easily through books or through what they hear, but they take in enormously through what they sec." Imagination is a great spur to energy, and it seems easier to stir the imagination of youth; but even older people get interested and change when they see that change is advantageous. Agricultural development we may forward where it is possible, and perhaps some other supplementary economic venture, some small industry. We have already spoken of the crafts which have so many sides, economic and social. The economic, the educational, and the social must advance together. Miss Dingman brought me the other day, from Conference files which I had turned over to her when she became our Secretary, a letter written by Sir Horace Plunkett, March 24, 1921. He says: Of course the foundation of your movement as well as ours must be economic. You cannot make life upon the land permanently progressive until you have first insured a .standard of comfort which will resist the lure of the city. I have always held that agriculture will give to those who live by it physical comfort, but not luxury. It permits of a better physical condition than city life, but it is urgently necessary to develop the spiritual life of rural communities so as to make it socially enjoyable and intellectually progressive. We all know that private enterprise precedes public. Years ago Mr. Campbell gave what I believe is still sound advice for most of us: Helpful as the church schools may be in assisting the public school to become a better one of the type that prevails, their greatest service will be to find through experiment and to inspire by example a new type of school which will serve the country. This truly rural school will meet more effectively the economic needs of the Highlands, will point out the possibilities of a richer, fuller life in the country, and will impart the spirit of altruism and the training necessary to make these possibilities real. Like Miss Dingman I have great faith in the mountain people ano faith that they can, through much of this highland sects, work out a satisfying rural life. For one, I would rather use all the expert help I can get, all the brains and energy I have, to help them stand on their own feet, and if I must fail in the effort, fail rather than plod on in dull routine fearful of losing my own life. Many of you will remember Georg Bidstrup, our farmer from Denmark. Some weeks ago he was talking to our young people about the development of rural Denmark. "It used to be," he ,atd, "that the farmer's wife came to town with her butter and her eggs and peddled them from door to door in the village. Fhe village dweller looked out and saw her coming up the steps and said, 'It is only a farmer's wife.' Now the farmer's wife li(, longer peddles, nor the farmer either. By scientific agriculture and cooperation they have made the farmer a different person in the eyes of the city dweller. Now, instead of saying, 'It's only a farmer,' they say, 'He is a farmer!' " Until the highlander is out of the field of missions, he cannot command the respect which we all wish for him; he can never build up a high type of rural civilization. May we not all look forward to the time when the city says, not "That is only a mountaineer," but "He is a Highlander!" ? July, 1933 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK Page 37 EDUCATION William ,Jesse Baird A very interesting story was told to me by Mrs. Zande of the Pine Mountain Settlement School. Below the school lived a man whom the neighbors called Fiddler John. There were other men in this same region whose names were John Creech; this one played a fiddle. Fiddler John delighted to play for his visitors and sooner or later would say, "Now, I want to play you my favorite; I calls hit `Napoleon Crossing the Rockies."' This he did a number of times for Mrs. Zande. One day Mrs. Zande said to Fiddler John, "Uncle John, you mean `Napoleon Crossing the Alps."' Said he, "I don't know, maybe I do." Later Fiddler John was playing for a friend of Mrs. Zande, and at his usual point announced, "Now, I want to play you my favorite. I calls hit `Napoleon Crossing the Rockies.' Some folks say Napoleon never crossed the Rockies, that he crossed the Alps, but historians differ on that." In this Conference one may well get the impression that authorities differ about the problems of the mountains. There are even those who say there is no mountain problem. I join the group that says there are many mountain problems. We need to make all the studies and surveys of conditions in the Appalachians that time and money will permit. They are valuable. I favor them. Fach time a survey is made, however, we seem to arrive at many of the same conclusions. The mountains are mountainous. Some land is more marginal than other land, and some valleys are wider than other valleys. In these mountains, on this marginal land, and down these valleys, people live. They are our mountaineers whose characteristics have both strength and weakness. They are confronted with educational, economic, religious and social conditions. These are all subject to change. That we have made educational progress in the Appalachians during the last decade will not be questioned. That educational opportunities for chose who live in our mountains are still not adequate will likewise not be questioned. We have built miles of improved highways throughout the mountains, but these highways have not brought schools within reach of all the boys and girls. The homes of the majority of the boys and girls in the mountains are not on these highways. Isolation with all its attendant problems is still confronting us. The one-room school, with no equipment and no teaching aids whatever, is still predominant in our mountains. Schools are in the main still kept by teachers selected by relatives, and inadequately trained. Often it has been thought necessary to pay a trustee from fifty to a hundred dollars for the privilege of teaching a rural school that pays a salary of less than four hundred dollars. Dr. Dunn has just told us that the teaching in these public schools is poor, and that that in our private schools is but little better. It may be that the enrollment at the beginning of the short school term in our rural schools is fairly large, but it is by no means what it should be. The average daily attendance is low, and there is little effort to enforce the socalled compulsory school-attendance laws. Soon after boys and girls are enrolled in school they are kept out many days to hoe the corn, pick the blackberries, pull the fodder, dig the potatoes, and make the molasses. In addition to the time they are kept out of school for labor at home, there is the time out for measles and mumps, whooping cough and fever, to say nothing of the epidemics of indifference. Those of us who are working in schools on the secondary level appreciate the reasons that have caused our boys and girls to be poorly prepared for the work of the standard high school. We know that in literally thousands of the one-room schools throughout the mountain counties the children do not have textbooks. In Kentucky alone 30 per cent of the boys and girls in the rural schools last year were without textbooks; in many schools not more than 10 per cent were provided with school books. In these .same schools there are no supplementary readers, no charts, no maps, no material for educational seat-work. The blackboards are so slick one can scarcely make a mark with a piece of chalk, and pieces of old felt hats are still used for erasers. Under such conditions we find great soul hunger and little food with which to satisfy that hunger. It is perfectly apparent that boys and girls whose educational opportunities have been such as these have not had a fair start in life. Their retardation is easily understood. Those of us who work in these schools, those of us who have studied the educational problems of this section in comparison with those of other sections, know that in the mountain counties boys and girls do not enjoy equal educational opportunities. Those of us who are working in mountain schools know that we have boys and girls coming from homes where the cultural advantages are few. Only 43 per cent of the people in the United States have access to a library; but less than S per cent of the people in our mountains have this advantage. We do not wonder at the slow reading rate of the boys and girls who are in our schools when we know they come from homes in which the average number of books is less than twelve. Two-thirds of the rural mountain homes do not get a daily newspaper or subscribe to a magazine. Those of us who are working in the mountain schools know that the parents of many of our boys and girls are little more, and often less, than subsistence farmers. Their incomes are small and their families large. We know that we have boys and girls in our schools who come from homes where there are few conveniences, no toilet facilities, no running water; homes where the walls are papered with newspapers and are without pictures. There is little music, canned or otherwise. We have boys and girls in our schools who conic from homes where the health conditions are not all that is to be desired. More than one-fourth of the houses do not have their doors and windows screened. The front yard is not a lawn; instead, it is frequently a litter. Many of the houses are unpainted and in poor repair. The immediate environment is often unsightly, ill-kept, and unsanitary. From the mountain counties we are still contributing more than our share to the population in the state penal institutions. There is a very definite relation between crime and education. A recent study of the state penal institutions in Kentucky revealed the startling fact that the educational level of those confined therein is below the third grade. The record in one of our mountain counties, as revealed by the judge of the county, showed that within a period of twelve months there came before his court seventy boys and girls between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. Twenty-nine of these could not read nor write, only two had attended a Sunday school, not one had belonged to a 4-11 Club, not one had got as far as high school. The picture we have been painting of the conditions in our mountain counties is rather dark. One might ignore this picture and view with pride the progress that has been made in the last decade. I am convinced, however, that it would be better for us to leave this Conference and go back to our several tasks realizing that there is yet much to be done. It is more important chat we here highly resolve to return to our different fields of labor conscious of the bigness of our job. Let us be determined to make every phase of our work educative. To begin with, it is important that our entire school plant and its environment shall teach lessons of beauty, health, and cleanliness. If we permit our buildings to go unpainted, ill-kept and out of repair, we are neglecting our opportunities. The campus on which our students work and live should be beautiful. The dormitories in which our boys and girls live should be constantly teaching their silent lessons of beauty, cleanliness, order, and wholesomeness of living. Who can estimate the educational value, in the room of a boy or girl, of lovely pictures, properly hung, and a growing plant? There is great beauty in our mountains, but our youth must be taught to appreciate it. In the matter of health education the cow will have an irnpotant part. We would not have her become as .sacred as the cow in India; we would, however, have her too sacred to remain outside the barn while the mule occupies the desirable place inside, too sacred to eat the nubbins, rotten corn, and to be forced to pasture on the buds in the hills. We would have her so sacred that she would be kindly treated, well-fed, and made to produce quantities of milk essential to the growth of children and the well-being of the family. This matter of health requires attention to home economics in all our schools. It is linked up with home management, with child care, with balanced food, with proper clothing, with a wholesome and livable Page 3$ MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORI( July, 1933 environment. It must be concerned with gardens, home orchards, and home canning. This eternal urge for food-wholesome foodmust be satisfied. In this connection I would also call attention to the importance of the county and home demonstration agents, who in cooperation with the members of the county health units become the most important public officials in our counties. Yes, beauty, cleanliness, and health must be definite objectives which we strive to reach. In the mountains we have always had leisure and some laziness. The changing economic order compels us to give more attention to training for work-free time and the formation of cultural habits. Art, books, dramatics, games, music, and stories all need to have a definite place in our educational program. We are quite in sympathy with the idea that we should in these days of economy take out the educational frills-but these things I have just mentioned that enrich life are not frills. We must seek elsewhere in our program to find things to eliminate. The work-life throughout our mountains has had too much of drudgery. When the economic struggle is so hard young people grow old in spirit and body before they have matured chronologically. Who can say a stage for dramatics in our school is less important than a chemistry laboratory? Who can say that a rhythm band, an orchestra, a glee club or a quartet, all requiring well-trained leaders, are less important than classes in algebra, geometry, or ancient history? Which of these would make life more abundant in a mining camp, a county seat, or an isolated community in the mountains? We are not asking that we buck the system and leave out those things required for college entrance, for mountain boys and girls have as much right to preparation for college entrance as any others. We do say, however, these other things must not be neglected. We need to train some Zanzigs. What of our church and private schools? This much can be said: each institution must be judged on the basis of its present contribution to educational needs, rather than on its past. It will not be able to live on traditions. If the location of the school no longer serves the best purpose, or the school duplicates the facilities of the public school at a financial disadvantage, these facts should be considered. It is quite clear that the educational work of the private school should be adapted in character to the fundamental needs of its community. We are rapidly approaching the time when we shall not be able to raise funds on the plea that we are in desperate straits, or on the theory of sympathy. We shall get support on the basis of need and of an adequate and well-planned program. We cannot justify our existence on a standard of work lower than that of the public schools; we should not be satisfied with anything less than a superior one. Education .can no longer be regarded as charity. It must be considered an investment. From this investment we have every right to expect dividends. RELIGION Edwin E. White "Rethinking Missions" has made a deep impression upon many of us. It is good to rethink foreign missions, but when are we going to do this kind of thinking regarding the work at home? The church has no plan for reaching America. Especially has there been no able plan thought out and put into operation for reaching rural America. In spite of the tremendous exodus to the cities that went on so long, rural America still contains almost half the population of the nation. The last census showed more than 53,000,000 people living outside towns of 2,500 or more, while more than 44,000,000 lived outside incorporated places as small as 1,000. It seems almost incredible that in all these years the churches have not worked out anything like an adequate way of developing among all these millions in rural America the abundant life which Christ came to bring. Our mountain situation is but one phase, although perhaps a rather special phase, of this whole rural situation in America. EXTENSION How can the church escape the responsibility of trying to reach all the people in the mountains, no matter how far away they are? Generations grow up while we make surveys and discuss them. Must they get along back there without the best gifts that the church has to offer? I know a remote valley where a beautiful, winding river is walled in by steeply rising hills, and little cabins are strung along its bank at long intervals in pioneer loneliness. Last summer we put a fine young college student in there to work. With the help of neighbors he made an attractive little meetinghouse out of an old lumber mill shack. He would hold Sunday school and church service there Sunday morning, walk four rough miles down the river to help in another Sunday school and hold church service, and walk back to be on hand for his day school in the morning, for he had gathered together the children who could not go to school in the winter, and taught them many valuable things. One attractive girl of fifteen could scarcely read or write before that. He conducted a vacation Bible school, led prayer meetings, conducted a young people's society, organized and pitched for a baseball team of the boys scattered through that lonely region who had far too little chance at recreation. They had an amazingly good season, though a game sometimes necessitated twenty miles of walking. Altogether this young man made for the people of that valley such a summer as they had never known before; how wistfully they spoke of it as the time of his departure drew near! There are plenty of fine young people ready to spend some time at this kind of work if we were organized to do it and had leadership for them. Perhaps you have noticed that the poorest folk have the poorest chance. Not for them libraries, fine schools, boy scouts, girl scouts. All these are for the folk who are already pretty well on the way. The best agricultural extension work, home demonstration programs, 4-FI club work are done in the most prosperous counties. The outstanding county health units are in counties well advanced. And so it is with nearly all forms of welfare work, social organization, and the like. How can we be content to build beautiful church "plants" and develop well-articulated programs of work in a few places where people already have most of the good things of this life, while for millions in the most rural regions the church is doing so little? The poorest man, with the least preparation, with the most inadequate implements, is on the poorest land. He is the victim of numerous diseases. He has the poorest schools and the most pitiable excuses for churches. Who is going to seek him out unless the church does? To follow such a program will require a right about face from a church looking out for its own growth and prosperity to a church giving itself to the people that need it most. The timely words of Dr. Fosdick warning our country against the danger of losing a generation of children by retrenchments during the depression have been quoted in this meeting. But generation after generation the children have been lost in the hills. Today, as long ago, multitudes of them are undernourished, subject to tuberculosis and other plagues, very poorly educated, untrained for life. 'they are marrying as children and going to live in shacks to bring other children into the world, with no semblance of preparation for caring for them. Surely the church in America has not undertaken her whole work until she has made plans to reach all the people in America, no matter where they live. The first assumption of a group meeting to plan the church's work in the mountains ought to be that the best gifts of the church must be made available for everyone. I atn not saying that it is possible with the long-accepted church methods. The real task is to work out methods to fit the need. PERMANENCE No one should think of the work of the church in the mountains as a temporary endeavor. The church should settle down in this region to stay. We need an established program, worked out through the years; a steadfast support of every good thing. The school teacher out in the farthest neighborhood should be able to feel the leadership, inspiration, and comradeship of the church. If anyone anywhere needs the constant encouragement of a true friend, interested in all that interests her, she does. The church ought to be giving it to her all the time. The same is true of the county agent, the home demonstration agent, the health service, and every agency working for the advancement July, 1933 MOUNTAIN LIII: AND WORK Page 39 of human welfare in the hills; they continued support of an established leadership. This is not a practice ought to have the constant, church with an experienced field; men and women arc needed who arc willing to establish themselves and stay, working hard until something is accomplished. PROGRAM Perhaps the most important question facing the church in the mountains is the kind of work that it is going to do. To my mind it must be a church interested in the abundant life for those who have least of it and in all phases of the abundant life, a church holding forth a religion to live by in this and any future world, not just a religion that has to do with dying. The country as well as the city needs an institutional church. By whatever name it may be called, we need a church with an outlook and a program of work that include all life, a staff trained and able to lead in many interests and activitics for the welfare of the human body, mind, and spirit. We have as the purpose of our own church, "that they may have life, and may have is abundantly." It has meant helping men buy fertilizer at a reasonable price, enlisting boys and girls in 4-H potato clubs, helping people get baby chicks, distributing large quantities of garden seed, urging people in every way possible to grow their own living at home and a better living than they have ever known before. It has meant stressing better health and better homes, demonstrating the preparation and use of healthful vegetables, demonstrating canning, helping sonic people to secure cows. It has meant helping mothers clothe their children and so keep them in school, helping teachers procure books and other material for their schools. It has meant gathering hundreds of boys and girls into vacation Bible schools summer after summer to try to live as Christians through playing and working and worshiping together. It has meant conducting young people's societies, planning and leading recreation, gathering into scout groups boys who, living in the hills, have never known the joys or the disciplines of scouting. Last summer in addition to the regular workers, we had thirteen special summer workers engaging in a program like this and they were joined by sonic thirty volunteer workers in the several communities. Numerous other organizations in the mountains arc carrying on a similar work each summer. This may be suggestive of a program looking toward the enrichment of all life that the church should carry on the year around and throughout the hills. Certainly site has not done it. We have too often been willing to go through these regions and pick out the brightest boys and girls, give then, an education very slightly related to the life about them, imbue them with ambition for a successful career, and send them out to be lost forever to the region where they grew up, hearing with a glow of satisfaction the marvelous successes our graduates make out in the great cities, while their old communities may be even worse off than before because they have lost their best leaders. In my county perhaps three out of a hundred young people get to start to college; by far the majority do not go beyond the eighth grade. Arc all these and all the company of older folk who in their youth had no chance at higher education to have no benefit from the large sums of money which people give for the mountains? I am not saying the we should want to keep all the mountain young people in the mountains, but I am saying that we should put far more effort than we ever have in the past on an abundant life for the mountain region and for all who live there. As a matter of fact, many of these young people quickly get the vision of a better life for their home communities and arc glad to undertake community projects when they go home if they have had some training for such work. But we must do far more than that. We cannot expect them to go back among the old surroundings and by themselves carry on new programs of work. We ought to be carrying on .such a church work in the mountains and with such true Christian leadership that these fine young people as they go out into their little communities to work temporarily or to settle for life might be sure of constant companionship and backing in all their best hopes and efforts. ORGANIZATION To carry out such a program will require new kinds of organization. The church will have to work in large units; that is, that programs should be worked out and equipment and leadership provided to take care o£ a large region as a unit. In the mountains people arc acquainted for miles; a man far away from his home will seem to know most of the people he meets. Similar interests bind large regions together. Roads are being improved, communication is easier. People go for miles to the movies, to court, or to a "big meeting." It ought to be fairly simple, at least in many sections, to work out a program for an area with a radius of ten, twelve or more miles around a common center. Increasingly for special occasions, people might conic into the center, and a church program that is concerned with all the needs of life might be carried out iron, the center to all the communities in the area. In the first place it scents clear that we need never expect this work to be done by Ph.D.'s and graduates of theological seminaries. To have high educational standards for the ministry is commendable, but the folk far back in the country have waited a long time for these highly trained theological graduates to bring them the good news of Christ. Perhaps a man who has spent years securirg such an education simply cannot afford to go far back into these needy fields. The plan used by the Wesleyan Church in England seems to offer a suggestive pattern. In one unit of that church a considerable number of churches arc grouped together in one program. Perhaps three of the churches have ordained ministers and there arc manses in those centers where they live. They preach in their home churches on most Sunday mornings; Sunday evenings they arc out in smaller churches holding communion services or other important meetings. Then there is a large number of lay preachers. they preach in the smaller centers morning and night and in the larger churches when the program calls the ordained ministers elsewhere; they lead prayer meetings, and in other ways cake an active part in the work of the region. The whole area has common interests in its church work, its young people's societies, its Sunday schools and other activities. This plan is merely suggestive of the way a program might be carried out over an extended area. Only it should include recreation, social life, reading, health, better farming, cooperation in buying and .selling, scouts, 4-II clubs, and many other things that make for the good life. Why could we not have at some of the church schools of secondary rank an extra year after high school with the purpose of preparing young people to be religious and social leaders in their own home communities or cite new communities where they arc going to work or settle? We should teach Bible so that the students would get a fair knowledge of the content and chief teachings, especially the life and teachings of Christ. We should teach methods of religious education, adapted to rural life. The boys would study agriculture and the girls home economics, especially the very practical kind that would help folk make a real home in the mountains. There would be study of rural economics and the principles of cooperatives. There would be study of the principles and practice of health and home nursing so drat these students could cooperate with the doctor ac the center in promoting health in their communities. Perhaps there would be handicrafts or community industries, also folk games and folk music and other forms of recreation. Then these pupils in the communities where they settle as teachers, farmers, storekeepers, homemakers, could become effective Sunday .school superintendents and teachers, leaders of prayer meetings and simple services of worship, boys' and girls' clubs, young people's societies, perhaps organizers of cooperative efforts or of simple community industries, and leaders in all sorts of work for the betterment of their communities. Carried out in connection with regular normal work leading to a teacher's certificate (which would require more rime. of course) this training would be doubly valuable. There arc many college graduates willing and even eager to give a year or two in little mountain communities if only they could have some assurance of a chance for further study after chat. Why could we not have some of the money that is lavished Page 40 MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK July, 1933 on higher education put into scholarships for this purpose? Then we could find some capable college graduates who want to go out and study theology or take other graduate work but arc glad for the opportunity of sonic practical usefulness and sonic real experience first. We should settle them in little mountain communities on a maintenance basis for a year or two with the promise of a scholarship for further study at the end of that They would have little cabins to make into as attractive ible. If the ried, so much the better. They were mar time. homes as poss ywould have some kind of simple community centers-the people in most communities would be glad to build cabin and commun ity center. They would conduct Sunday school, church service, young people's society, boy and girl scouts, 4-H Clubs. They would promote better gardening, canning, health, community cooperation, recreation and social life. They might start handicraft or simple industries. At the general center we should maintain leadership in all these things. Then with the community leaders we should work out a common program for the region. These young people would make a contribution beyond all measure; when they had finished their year or two they would be better fitted for further study than before. Ought not all chose who are going into re ligious service be required to spend some time in such a volunteer service where the need is greatest? There may be far better ways than these of going at all this, but at any rate we must find ways to organize and carry on a church work that will really reach these communities with everything that the church ought to contribute to their lives. SUPPORT There is time to mention two other things: support and leadership. "Equalization" of school funds has been mentioned at this meeting and a school board has been roundly ridiculed for proposing that only those communities have schools that can support them. Does not the same reasoning hold good for the church, only more forcefully? In a certain mining district near us there was a strong circuit of well-organized churches while the mines were prosperous and everyone had money, but when the mining practically failed many of the substantial leaders moved away, people became desperately poor and there was almost no provision for a good and satisfying life, the churches moved out also. Yet now is the very time when chest people need as never before all that the true church of Christ could offer. For generations the accepted policy in home mission finance seems to have been to support the new churches that would soon become self-supporting. Perhaps this was an excellent way to plant strong churches on rapidly moving frontiers where prosperity was expected soon to follow. But now that the country has been settled and some parts of is arc far more prosperous than others, is it not time to survey the whole situation and find ways of supporting good church work among all the people of America? It seems a shortsighted policy also to continue putting in as many men as possible to be missionary pastors of little churches, using up all the home mission funds in supplementing the meager salary that these men can get on the field and so giving them nothing with which to work-no adequate equipment (in many cases practically no equipment at all), no money for expenses. I am pleading for adequate support for a really worthy program of church work in the mountains. It ought to be had, and it can be had. Would not many be interested in giving to this kind of a program who arc unmoved by traditional home missions? LEADERSHIP I used to sit in the class of a great teacher of religious education. After outlining in masterful fashion a really great program he would say, "Of course, this is not being done anywhere." I always wanted to exclaim: "Then for goodness' sake, professor, why don't you go out and do is?" The courses in religious education have been turning out specialists ever since then to become directors of religious education in great city churches, secretaries of religious education for city and state organizations or professors of religious education to turn out more specialists. But the far mountain regions arc still waiting for some ably trained workers to come and do great work. The president of a large theological seminary maintained only a few years ago that his institution should continue doing two things: giving the best training possible to men of brilliant talents who would assume places of commanding leadership in the church, and preparing men of fine spirit but humbler attainments to do good work in the country. But if it takes exceptional ability and excellent training to lead a big city church where there is a permanent organization experienced in doing thingstrained leaders, committees, secretaries to take care of details while the minister is protected for long hours of study, and where there arc a dozen other institutions to which to turn for cooperationhealth organizations, children's organizations, Boy Scout Councils, libraries-what kind of leadership is needed to direct a creditable piece of church work in the far-off rural sections where the task has never been adequately thought through, where there is no well-organized church, where there arc few trained leaders, and where a score of related undertakings on which the city church can count arc unprovided for? We must secure splendidly trained and able men and women. It may be a long time before they can be offered salaries commensurate with those they could receive in the cities. But it is not solely money that men want. The best spirits in the church arc not dominated by the salary motive today any more than they have been in the past. There arc plenty of able young men and women willing to invest their lives where there will be very little financial return. But they do want to know that they will have a chance to use all that is in them. It is surely high time that we have a reasoned, far-seeing and daring plan on the part of at least a fair proportion of the agencies concerned to reach the whole region with the gospel of the abundant life. And there should be developed as soon as possible strong centers of church work, adequately manned and at least moderately financed, to work the plan out on the field and carry it through. MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK Flelen H. Durglurm Dr. William laines Hutchins Orrin L. Keener May B. Smith Dr. Warren H. Wilson Mrs. John C. Campbell Mr. Marshall E. Vaughn Mr. John P. McConnell ___ __ Dr. Arthur T. McCormack CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Dr. E. C. Branson Dr. John Tigert Editor Counsellor _ Associatc Editor Associate Editor New York City Brasstown, N. C. Berea, Ky. East Radford, Va. Louisville, Ky. Chapel Hill, N. C. Gainesville, Fla. ISSUED QUARTERLY-JANUARY, APRIL, JULY, OCTOBER Subscription Price $1.00 per year. Single Copy 30c. Entered at the Post Office at Berea, Ky., as second class mail matter ADDRESS ALL COMMUNICATIONS TO MOUNTAIN LIFE AND WORK BEREA, KENTUCKY WHAT SHALL WI: DO ABOUT IT? On the afternoon of March 30, last day of the Conference, the session was devoted to a symposium for discussion of practical means of using the findings which had been presented at the previous sessions. Dr. Hermann N. Morse presided. It was decided to establish study tours to various mountain centers, so that workers in the field and those interested in mountain work could have an opportunity to visit centers and see at first hand how their own particular problems were being met by others. There was great interest in this project, which it is planned to carry out in the fall. Regional conferences, meeting for a day to consider local problems and work out cooperative solutions for definite mountain areas were also decided upon. At the office of the Conference of Southern Mountain Workers areas are to be laid out and regional committees appointed to :arry out these smaller conferences at some time during .the year. A recommendation that the Home Missions Council be asked to form an Interdenominational Board of Strategy for the mountain work was also voted. Cooperative planning among the mission boards represented in the mountain work would do much, it was felt, toward eliminating wasteful duplication. Programs and responsibilities could be determined so that overlapping alight be avoided, and some real needs might be met for the first time which are now untouched. The Conference was adjourned. Many who had been looking forward to ha-ilig the findings of the two studies presented declared that it had been most worth-while, not only for the faces, but for the cooperative projects which will spring from them. Because the proceedings of the 1933 Conference have given Lis so much data of value for permanent record and material of current worth, it has been necessary, not only to add eight pages to this issue, but also to use every inch of available space. In these days of budgeting, there are still solve economics which are more advisable than others. A choice between extensive cutting and the use of smaller type became necessary. We hope that the reactions of our own mountain workers, though they appear in small print, will prove none the less thought-provoking. OUR CONTRIBUTORS III [.L,N I-I. DINGMAN is Executive Secretary of the Confc:~enec, and Editor of Mountain Life and Work. L. C. GRAY, of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, United States Department of Agriculture, has been associated with the Economic and Social Study. FANNY W. DUNN is a member of the faculty of Teachers College, Columbia University. WALTER H. GAUXIN(TZ is Senior Specialist in Rural Education Problems, Office of Education, Washington, D. C. ELIZABETH R. HOOKER, one of the workers of the Institute of Social and Religious Research, has been engaged in field work connected with the Educational and Religious Survey. HERMANN N. MORSE, author of books on country church problems and Administrative Secretary of the Board of National Missions, has also been associated with the Educational and Religious Survey. OLIVE D. CAMPBI-:L L. IS principal of the John C. Campbell Folk School, and author of "The Danish Folk School." WILLIAM JESSE BAIRD is Dean of the Foundation-Junior High School, Berea College. EDWIN E. WHITE, of the Community Church, Pleasant Hill, Tenn., has developed outstanding extension work among the young people of his region. Students earning all or hart of their expenses cooperated in printing this magazine at the Berea College Press

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