Let's look now at the development of black elementary and secondary schools after 1900. >> Hm. >> How were these schools funded and what did they teach? In 1900, the US census counted a total of 770,000 black children enrolled in elementary schools across the South. 36% of black children ages 5 to 14, compared to 55% of white children in that age group. Private philanthropic black schools staffed by black teachers accounted for less than 1% of this total. Yet as conduits to higher education, they wielded an influence disproportionate to their numbers. In 1900, about one-half of Southern black children, age 10 to 15 were employed in agricultural labor. After 1910, black laborers began to migrate to the North and into the industrializing cities of the New South in search of higher wages, better living conditions, and education for their children. Rural white elites grudgingly acknowledged that they would have to provide more public schools for blacks if they hoped to retain black labor in the agricultural sector. Northern philanthropy played an important role, especially the school fundraising efforts of the Anna T. Jeanes Fund, a total of $5.7 million, and the school construction projects of the Rosenwald Fund. Founded by the Chicago philanthropist and president of Sears Roebuck and Company, Julius Rosenwald, the fund helped build rural black school houses. Yet the fund operated solely on a matching basis, with land, labor, and construction materials provided by black citizens and most of the cash coming from their private contributions or the direct taxes they paid. The fund donated about a third of the total. >> Hm. Rosenwald schools were sturdy, three and four-teacher, wood-framed buildings. They replaced dilapidated one-room structures that creaked in the wind. Almost 3,500 Rosenwald schools were built by the mid 1920s. Yet only about 15% of all Southern rural schools serving black children on the eve of the Great Depression were Rosenwald schools. Rickety, one-room structures that creaked in the wind were still the norm for black schoolchildren. By 1930, the Southern blacks had the majority of the school aged children in public schools. By 1940, they had achieved approximate parity with the whites in the percentage of black children attending elementary. Yet they paid a voluntary double tax for this right, as white school boards routinely allocated disproportionate amounts of local tax dollars to white schools. Whites refused to allocate any tax dollars to transport black chil, school children even as school boards paid for school buses to transport white children. Across the Jim Crow states, white schools received about three times as many tax dollars as black schools. In the Deep South, four states spent almost five times as much on white schools. One, South Carolina, spent ten times as much on white schools. As James Anderson observes, quote, to be sure, the overwhelming majority of younger black pupils attended wretched and inadequate one-teacher elementary schools. >> [COUGH] Next we look at an institution called the county training school, which Northern philanthropists invented and funded for the purpose of embedding manual and industrial training in black rural schools. As Anderson notes, the county training school was a unique educational institution, sponsored by the General Education Board, the John F. Slater Fund and the Anna T. Jeanes Fund. According to Anderson, quote, the basic idea was to establish an industrial boarding school centrally located in the counties of the Southern states with facilities and teachers to operate seven elementary grades and three years of secondary and normal school courses to train industrial teachers for the little country schools. End quote. By 1917, each of the former states of the Confederacy had at least one county training school. State superintendents of black rural schools were charged with ensuring that the county training schools followed an approved curriculum of industrial training. By 1933, given a widespread lack of public high schools for blacks, county trading schools were, in Anderson's words, in quote, a far-reaching and dominant institution in Southern black secondary education, end quote. In about a third of the counties in 15 Southern and border states in 1933, a county training school represented the only opportunity black youths had for a secondary education. >> Hm. Some black teachers and principals defied the philanthropists and implemented liberal arts curricular, sometimes masking them as industrial training courses. These schools were exemplars of black agency and community action. As blacks gained increasing access to public high schools after 1935, the county training schools disappeared, some of them becoming black high schools. Anderson provides this epitaph, quote, their purpose was to adjust black Southerners to a life of subordination. And they were oppressive in form and content, except when their intended purposes were subverted by local school officials, unquote. In our next module, we look at a generation of progressive educators who took a counterpoint position to the administrative progressives and their social efficiency agendas. David Tyack calls this group the pedagogical progressives, a term we adopt from him. We will center our module on John Dewey. Although the world-famous John Dewey is often associated with pedagogical progressives, he rejected their tendency toward child centeredness at the expense of important social and academic aims. We interpret Dewey as a foil for examining the claims of both the administrative and pedagogical progressives. [MUSIC]
