EDUCATION IN LOUISIANA. BY WM. PRESTON JOHNSTON, PRESIDENT TULANE UNIVERSITY, NEW ORLEANS, LA. Teachers of the United States: I pause, when I salute you by such a title, to do homage to the tremendous idea embodied in it. Teachers of the United States: I am here in obedience to your behest, to contribute my grain of sand to the ant hill which we mortals. laboriously heap up-grain by grain-and call knowledge, or by some name equally grand and equally vain. I have labelled my grain of sand "Education in Louisiana," lest some among you may mistake me for a Pangnostic, come to teach you some new truth, or the All-Truth which suffices. Yet my talk aims to be but a bit of information, which the philosophers may, if they please, take into account with their other data, and generalize upon. I have a belief that one of the best ways to master a vast subject is to take one part of it and learn to understand it intelligently in its obvious bearings, and then another part, and then still another; and if we shall then put these known parts side by side in our minds and compare them together, their resemblances and their differences, their accidents and their essentials, we may come to discover the underlying principle which gives unity to the whole subject. In my own teaching I have found that the History of Greece, and Plutarch's Lives made an admirable segment of historical study to inflame the mind of youth. Then, if the student, passing along the noble Appian Way. of Roman Legend and Institutions, would, by a new road and a new gate, come to that life of feudal times, which is so different in all its formal and spiritual aspects, he would find himself better prepared to understand Modern History than if he had attempted to memorize all the catalogues of Chinese and Egyptian dynasties, and to decipher the inscriptions of Assyrian and Babylonian bricks, and to know the ceremonial institutions of all savage tribes, and much more to boot. For in seeking the many, there is danger of missing the much. May we not then, in this great subject of education, safely follow so good a method? If so, I shall be forgiven, if I take a question, relatively not large in the broad field of thought, and bring to your attention some facts, new to you, regarding it, to be compared and coordinated with other larger data pertinent to education. A dragon-fly will reveal wonders under the microscope-so it be a real insect, and not a humbug. I bring you to-day a small matter for your microscopes-Education in one of the United States. There are states to be cited and quoted and boasted of as models, and their representatives are not slow to avail themselves of the prerogative. But Louisiana is not one of these. Her position is exceptional. When I was at Yale College, that student who distinguished himself by taking the lowest honor at the Junior Exhibition, received from his grateful classmates, "A Wooden Spoon," with appropriate remarks. Strange to say, he was generally quite popular. Nobody was jealous of him. always" a good fellow," even if a trifle shiftless and idle. And he bore his honors meekly. Now Louisiana is the most illiterate state in the Union; and I therefore claim for her "the Wooden Spoon" in the great Interstate Educational Exhibition. But, pardon me yet another word about this college parable. Remember the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. The Wooden Spoon man, who was the last at the distribution of honors in college, was not always, nor often, last in the race and the battle of life. If there was in him stuff for the making of a man, he not unfrequently evinced the irony of fate, by proving that the last shall be first. Jena was the forerunner of Sedan. Where strength abides, overthrow is the spur to aspiration and the augury of success. Permit me, therefore, to remind you, fortunate sister commonwealths, that this country is but a young nation. We are as yet awarding mere collegiate honors. The future is a long time. In its decades and centuries and cycles, strange changes will occur. There are some among us who believe that spiritual forces are stronger than matter; that "the heaviest battalion" theory, while true enough in its way, is but the partial statement of a truth; and that will-power and intelligence and spiritual righteousness-the divine and eternal forces-do evolve heavier battalions still against the so-called heaviest. There is no last word here in this world. Do not be astonished, then, if I tell you that there are men resolved and banded together, and animated by a heroic enthusiasm, who are determined that the last shall be first. There are men in Louisiana whom no prospect of worldly advantage, no fear of toil or unpopularity, and no dearth of immediate results, can restrain or tire in a noble ardor to lift that State from the Slough of Despond. The fiat has gone forth. The awakening has begun. Already we see the evidences in city and town and hamlet and remote country side. But the giant has not yet put on his strength, and the labors of the future are, in proportion to those of the past, as a mountain to a molehill. There is a faith that shall remove mountains, and verily this mountain of iguorance shall be removed and thrown down and cast into the sea. My topic is Education in Louisiana. But what is Louisiana? Everybody knows what New England is, with its granite hills, and tidy villages, and teeming and intelligent skilled labor, and seething philanthropy, and active wealth, and everything else which constitutes settled, well-ordered commonwealths and communities, with nothing. to do but take the stitch in time that saves nine. And everybody knows what Chicago is-and St. Louis too; you see I have prudence enough left in me not to name one without the other. Everybody knows what a cyclone-pivot of human energy a big western city like And everybody knows what life on these great plains means, where the Time-Spirit, the Zeit- Geist, sweeps around the horizon, and lays here a finger to mark the site of a city, and touches there a point for an academy, or college, or university, and says, "Let there be light," and lo! the beauties of the earth and the splendors of the heavens are revealed. But who knows Louisiana? Do you, teachers assembled here to-day? Do you, Mr. President? Does the speaker who comes with its message-its pitiful cry-to the learned and wise gathered here? Not I, by my faith! There are secrets in its psychology I have not got at. this is. It is easy enough to say that at the mouth of the great, rolling Mississippi lies a wonderful Delta, fat with a fertility which would shame the Nile and the Ganges. Through its vast marshes thread innumerable creeks and bayous which, with their deposits build up banks higher than the adjacent swamps where the moss-hung cypress towers. Upon these banks are settled the people who till the soil; though, most of all, these are crowded along the shores or coasts of the Great River, till its levees seem to protect one continuous, riparian village, shaded with orange and live oak trees, and blooming with roses. Then into these lower lands push the foot hills of the great Alleghany, or of the Western Upheaval, covered with pine forests, or rolling away in prairies, over which the Acadian spurs his Creole pony after his half wild herds, or in pursuit of the deer. You may amplify this description with the tropical luxuriance of Cable, or of the Creoles, whom he attempts to depict; you may fill in all the details which shall present the material aspects of the country to the eye, and yet you are almost as far as ever from a knowledge of that inner life of the people, which is to furnish the secret cipher to the situation, and without which effort avails naught. Those who hold this key generally do so by virtue of a kinship in thought and sentiment, and are too often useless for help, because saturated with the same spirit which leaves the community almost as immobile as an oriental tribe. It is a curious study to watch the impatient indignation with which a typical Northern enthusiast-one of those who so often expect to mend up the patches of the universe in one life-time--a really energetic doctrinaire-views the stolid content which he means to pierce through and destroy. He must learn that before this can be done he must be rid of the embarrassments of a foreign tongue, and of habits, which are not put on and off like slippers and dressing wrapper, but have come down by immemorial tradition, and have, through heredity, been grafted into the very flesh and bone. This applies to large numbers of persons of French descent. The theory of their church, too, almost, if not quite, prefers their ignorance to contact with undenominational schools, which are distrusted as heretical. Of course this is not universal, as many of our French and Catholic brethren in Louisiana combine the most active intelligence with the highest piety; but such is the tendeney. Below these, in ignorance, lies the great mass of the colored people. I cannot say that they are below the white people in their desire to improve. Therein is the hope for their amelioration. Under the Providence of God, with the equal chance now afforded them in the schools, through the laws and the spirit of equity-yes, of generosity—which animates all our people in Louisiana, we may look forward to the time. when neither white nor black shall be the bondmen of ignorance. Until then we must endure all the evils imposed upon us by a ballot which votes, but does not read-much less think. But we do not despair. We know that there is a solution to the problem. We know the key. Of course, every true teacher knows that there is but one master key to the human soul. It is love. It must open the heart; it must open the mind; at last, it opens the soul. In the case of the teacher we have to name it more specifically-sympathy. But what an appren ticeship this word implies; what close relations, what a clear understanding of all the mental movements, what a powerful spiritual impulse! You may imagine what difficulties intervene in many parts of Louisiana to prevent any general awakening, or the establishment of any effective system of education. When war comes into a country like this around us, the torch may level your cities, and the tread of the invader may leave a desert, but the kindly touch of nature causes your pastures to grow green again, and your fields to yield their increase. But in an alluvial country, protected by dykes and levees, when these are cut, an enemy more merciless than man invades the unhappy land. The walls of the fortress are broken down, and the destroyer enters. Water rules a waste; and, when it retires, the marsh mud occupies its place. Pestilence and Famine follow in the track of war, and years do not repair the disasters of a day. Such has been the fate of Louisiana. War swept our State from end to end. Under the pounding of its hammer, everything was left a wreck -education with the rest. Floods and Pestilence and Poverty came after. But I am not here to recount her misery. It is a sad and pitiful story, how, after war ceased, misgovernment did the rest. A more complete ruin cannot be portrayed. Everything like labor, social industry, and education was completely disorganized. Worse, hope itself was almost gone. The people became demoralized, in the sense of having neither the ability, nor the wish to rise. Thank God, that day is past. We have the wish, we have the hope, we feel in the thews and sinews of our social organization, the pulsations of returning health, of renewed strength, of a potency which shall rise supreme over every difficulty. Did time permit, I think it would prove interesting to you for me to present some sketches of those historical beginnings of education in Louisiana, which are wafted down to us like the faint fragrance of the jasmine on the evening air. It would be a pleasing task to picture those gentle Ursulines, who, in the infancy of the colony-in the year 1727, a century and a half ago, when it was the veriest babe of a state, by their pious teachings laid the foundations of a religious and ethical code, which was gradually to lend its grace to the Creole character. Nor would it be an unprofitable task to recall the labors of those learned ecclesiastics, who, in the spirit of consecration, gave their lives to the cause of sound learning and the greater glory of God. Narrow, indeed, must be the view which is not willing to accord them |