The Myth of an Uneducated Antebellum White South

dvrmte

Major
Joined
Sep 3, 2009
Location
South Carolina
Robert Dabney, a Confederate veteran, writer and theologian once wrote, “if all you mean by education is teaching people to read and write, then all you accomplish is to create a mass market for trash literature.” Was Dabney correct that mere literacy isn't an education?

If a college education is the real mark of an educated society then the antebellum South was the most educated region in the world. Frank Owsley wrote in, The Plain Folk of the Old South, "...there was one college student for each 247 white persons in the South and one in 743 in the North." He goes on the say that a large portion of those attending Northern universities were actually Southerners.

What have ye to say?
 
Back
Top