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3 Teachers andTeaching If students were the raison d’être of the public schooling system, then teachers— whose numbers more than doubled between 1868 and 1901 from 2,902 to 6,302—were its necessary enablers.1 Their critical importance meant they were always vessels for the expectations and ambitions of others. To most communities teachers were instruments for achieving social and cultural reproduction but, particularly from around the turn of the twentieth century, teachers were foot soldiers in the battle for the reform and development of public schooling. u While the statutory reports prepared annually (or biennially) by the state superintendent showed the numbers of teachers employed in public schools, they did not provide information on the sources of these or the relative importance of each source. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, however, teaching positions in public schools, both black and white, were often a form of charity to the poverty stricken. General James H. Clanton, a Confederate hero who was active in postbellum conservative politics, assisted war veterans and widows to obtain teaching positions in black schools.2 It was common newspaper opinion that such people would save the freedmen from indoctrination by Northerners.3 County superintendents also found such placements for destitute constituents. In Sumter County, Michael C. Kinnard “induced moral, and highly respectable old men, who had taught the white children in former years, to teach colored schools.” In Marengo County, Levi W. Reeves contracted an elderly white man who was very poor but had many mouths to feed. His example, Reeves claimed, would be “advantageous to the colored race.”4 Rural schoolteaching at this time was often just another type of seasonal labor and, as such, the sorts of people willing to do it were often either unqualified or uncommitted and just “making it a stepping stone to something else.”5 Sometimes farmers taught to supplement their income. In the early 1870s the superintendent of Baker (later Chilton) County, James M. Cordirie, issued a Teachers and Teaching 43 teacher’s certificate to a farmer who, having broken his leg, could not work. He was allegedly told to “go on back home and start a school in the community .” The following Monday the farmer started teaching in a stable he had cleaned out for the purpose.6 This was another example of teaching as a form of welfare when little state relief was available. The farmer’s immediate needs trumped questions of suitability. Despite its low occupational status, there were some who actually enjoyed teaching and canvassed on their own behalf for employment. In August 1873, M. H. Savage of Delevan, Wisconsin (home base to more than twenty circus companies), wrote to the state superintendent, then Joseph Speed, requesting a school he might “work up.” He was currently considering the better-paying option of being an agent for P. T. Barnum’s circus but “preferred teaching to any other employment.”7 Canvassing letters were sometimes supported by testimonials. Writing on behalf of a Miss Ethel Ervin, her Baptist pastor said it gave him “very great pleasure to commend in unreserved terms a young lady of irreproachable Christian character, modest almost to a fault, full of lofty ambition and determination to succeed, self-reliant and industrious.”8 By the late nineteenth century there were already specialist employment agencies such as the North West Teachers Agency that promised its clients they would save “all unnecessary trouble and also have the opportunity of securing the best talent possible.”There was also at least one “Colored Teachers’ Agency” in Alabama managed by W.T. Breeding of Montgomery.9 Despite the appointments that were actually made, it was generally recognized that, ideally, teachers should be appropriately qualified. As early as 1869 Dr. Noah B. Cloud, the state superintendent during Reconstruction, advised that nine teacher training or “normal” classes had been held in six locations and that three hundred pupils taught.10 Governmental parsimony in the initial years of Bourbon rule affected the establishment and expansion of publicly funded normal schools. Nevertheless, by 1875 the state was allocating funds for normal school training for white teachers at Florence and for black teachers at Marion, Huntsville, and Sparta.11 Further normal schools for white teachers were later opened atTroy, Livingston, and Jacksonville.The normal schools aimed “to give tone and character to the vocation of the teacher.”12 Some of these schools, which were often more like high schools than tertiary institutions, offered a broad curriculum. In 1887 students at...

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