This has been the central post-reconstruction era failing of our people: the propensity to push off onto our children that which we ought to be doing ourselves, so that our children may follow our lead, our example and not we, theirs.
After the Civil War, our people went from, over 90% illiteracy to over 90% literacy in less than one generation, because of adult education during and after the war, acquired by any means necessary: self-help, peer to peer, church schools, missionary-founded schools, government-founded schools, and family home schools.
We must reprise this historic, and unprecedented, example of our forebears, who used their education to acquire 1/3 of the farm land in the South by 1900.
Later, their land was stolen back by murder, legal legerdemain, economic discrimination, chicanery, and racist terror; or, wasted away and lost by the desire of that generation's youth to abandon the rigors of rural life in the South in favor of the alluring "fleshpots" of the North.
