KENTUCKY MOUNTAIN SCHOOLS.
By Ion Clifford
[Ion Clifford, in the Pilgrim.] ONE of the chief difficulties with the district schools in the Kentucky mountains, according to the testimony of the teachers themselves, lies in the indifference, not the poverty, of the parents. The majority of the latter neither read nor write, and are often actually averse to the education of their children. Thus, a school district including about a hundred children will frequently give an average attendance of not more than thirty scholars, and to increase the number practically means to educate the parents into seeing the value of a school at all. The man who goes out to his day's work with ax at side and rifle on shoulder, as all his ancestors have done before him, questions the utility of confining his child for months to a laborious struggle with book and pencil, especially if he has to buy the latter. This sentiment, or lack of sentiment, is the bane of the educator who strives to lift up the standard of his profession here, and to this condition, together with the faulty teaching prevailing in the schools themselves, is being attributed more and more the lawlessness and crime that have made these mountain regions notorious and given them the undisputed right to the title, won in the first chapter of their history and never since reversed, "The Dark and Bloody Ground."