Slavery and Education
The south lacked greatly in this department and did not see any value in increasing their population’s educational needs. The other difference was the economies that they relied on to make livings on. The north was very much industrial and the south was very agrarian. Education was something that was valued very highly in the northern colonies of the United States. An education was considered a means of human capital formation. Investing in this so called human capital was crucial to the economic growth and modernization of their region. Educating young people meant that they would not be in the workplace.
This would only be temporary because once they were educated that meant that they would be a greater asset to whoever they worked for or whatever trade they were skilled in. Having ignorant laborers was not very efficient. Laborers who were educated were more productive and versatile in performing their tasks. In 1830 New England and New York had public school systems that reached out to 75% of the population. Although it reached almost the whole population of those states almost no type of public school system reached outside those sessions.
Even with what they had setup they did not have schools that went past grammar school and if they did there were very few of them. In the sass’s education reforms spread all throughout the North. They were able to formalize the training of teachers and founded a school that would train teachers on how to teach. They were also able to set up a standardized grading system and were able to setup a secondary education level. By 1860 most northern states had public school systems through the eighth grade.
The Southern states had some schools that they were using to educate people in but no formal public school system like the north had founded. The south began modest education reform in the 1 ass’s but nothing that was as substantial as what the north had been doing. Prior to the Civil War there was no public education system of any sorts in the South. The people who were slaves were forbidden to learn how to read or write at all. The white children of the South were educated at home by private tutors or by their parents.
It was not until after the Civil War that the South developed an education system for the people. Even when that was put into the places here were a lot of people who fought against it because the slaves were able to be educated to better themselves. This caused a lot of uproar. Southerners believed that education was a private matter and not a concern for the government. They believed that their children needed to learn what the family values were first and foremost. They believed this because in the South there were plantation MM,’nurse and there were slaves. There was no apparent middle class of people there.
The South thought that their way doing things was going to continue on forever so why would we need to penned time on reading and writing or learning math. They wanted their children’s time spent learning the family business which in most cases was running a plantation of some sorts. The North was producing business executives to run all the industry that was growing up there. The second difference that was evident in the years prior to the Civil War was the economies of the North and South. In the North the economy was very diverse. They had people who were industrialists producing many different goods.
The North also had citizens who were shopkeepers, referrers, teachers, and amongst other things. In the South the economy really hovered around one staple crop, cotton. There were other crops that they grew and profited from, but cotton was the biggest crop that the farmers in the South grew. This difference in the two economies was a big problem. The people in the South felt enslaved to the North because even though they grew the cotton it was shipped up to the North for production purposes. Then when it was made into textiles it would be sent back to the South for purchase.
This was an issue because in the South they invested so much UAPITA into their slaves they could not invest into machinery that would help them turn that cotton into textiles. Turning the cotton into textiles would have helped diversify their economy. It would have also kept textile prices down for the South as well. The North had a strangle hold on the whole country when it came to everything else besides growing cotton. In 1852 people in the South wanted to do something about all of the importing of goods that came from the North. They revived the Southern Commercial Convention which was originally founded in 1837.
Its purpose was to remote the construction of Southern capital of railroads, steamship lines, banks, and other businesses that would help the South become economically independent of the North. This tactic did not work. It had very little success because the South would not modernize in anyway. Southerners still had this penchant for slave labor. Plantation owners invested more in slaves than in the land and other supplies needed to produce the cotton. The South was one dimensional when it came to the economy and the North had many different aspects of it that made it so successful.
These two differences go and in hand. The education system in the North was robust and challenging and actually existed and that is why they had a bigger and better economy than in the South. The South had no formal education system and that is why they only had one form of economy. All they knew how to do was be farmers. They only taught their children how to run the family business which was owning slaves and cultivating crops. The people in the North were educated and knew that in order to have an economy at all they had to invest in machinery and education.
They would go to school and get an education and o down south and outsmart the people down there. Imagine if Eli Whitney never would have gone down to Georgia in 1792. There would be no cotton gin and the Southern economy would not have grown like it did after the development of this wonderful machine. Believe that one of these differences very well could have split the United States. The differences in economy and dependence on one another would have divided the North and South. The North had the South right where they wanted them. They owned a vast majority of the factories that took their prized crop and turned it into a DOD of some sorts.
The South needed the North. Look at how in present times we have went to war over oil. Oil is our cotton. Without it we cannot run our economy. The South needed the North to buy the cotton and turn it into all kinds of different textiles to sell for profit. This could have resulted in a war over price gouging oar shortage in supply. One scenario that I envision is the South trying to drive the price up and the North not wanting to pay that price and then the North invades the South so that they can control that Crop for their own economic gain.
The difference in education is something that do not believe could have caused the country to split. I do believe that the lack of education played a very big role in the lack of economy in the South. If the people down there were more educated than they would know how to diversify and start new businesses so that their region could prosper. A lack of education is something that is glaring when you look at the economy of the South. Look at the city of Detroit where I am from. We depended so deeply on the automotive business that we didn’t diversify and educate ourselves on anything else but that business.
