Southern Exceptionalism.

The overall trend in American education by 1850 was toward greater uniformity across state and regional boundaries and less disparity between rural and urban school systems: gradually, a standard system of education was beginning to emerge across the country that shared many essential features. But in one important respect, schooling in midcentury America was moving in the opposite direction, toward greater divergence. The developing confrontation between different social systems in the free-labor North and the slave South manifested itself in sharply diverging outlooks on schooling. The structure of southern society had produced a very different regional system of education than that advocated by northern educational reformers, making many leading southerners not only indifferent but actually hostile to the democratic vision of public education emanating from the Northeast. At precisely the same time that the reform current was gaining prominence...