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Like many other northern clergymen after the Civil War, A.D. Mayo became interested in the role that education could play in rebuilding southern society. From 1880 to 1900 he traveled from Virginia to Texas as an educational missionary advocating the “new education” theories of the 1840s and 1850s. In time he came to be considered one of the most perceptive observers of southern education during the period from the end of Reconstruction to the rise of the Redeemer governments in the 1890s.
Mayo was convinced that the changes in southern society that
Reconstruction had failed to bring about could be realized
under a sound educational system. Learning, he believed, should
be based on individual needs rather than on rote memorization
of facts, and teachers should be recruited from those trained
in the civilizing values. In Southern Women, Mayo
set forth at length the idea that southern white women were
the ideal ones to transmit learning to the young blacks. Stressing
the greatly expanding role of these women because of the war,
Mayo saw them as a kind of elite trained in the ideals and
culture of the Old South, but receptive to the values of the
New South.
In their introduction Dan Carter and Amy Friedlander place Mayo in the context of nineteenth-century intellectual and social currents and provide an interesting perspective on his often surprisingly contemporary-sounding ideas on education.
Dan T. Carter is Educational Foundation University Professor at the University of South Carolina and former president of the Southern Historical Association. He is also the author of The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics; From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963–1994; When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self Reconstruction in the South; and Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South. Amy Friedlander is Special Projects Associate at the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), where she is assigned full-time to the Library of Congress’s national program on long term preservation of digital content.
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