362 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 



trudges back to the school at night with no thought of reward, 

 save that of the joy of service and the emancipation of those en- 

 slaved in the bondage of illiteracy. 



Kentucky will owe her public school teachers a debt that can 

 never be estimated when they shall have wiped out her illiteracy, 

 which they propose to do by 1920, and in many counties will do 

 even before that time. That county in the state which has the 

 largest percentage of illiteracy has taught 1,000 persons in the 

 moonlight schools this year to read and write, while many coun- 

 ties have taught two and three hundred, besides raising the 

 standard of education of many semi-illiterates and others who 

 have enrolled. 



The moonlight school curriculum embraces more than read- 

 ing and writing: It includes arithmetic, history, geography, 

 civics, agriculture, horticulture, home economics and road build- 

 ing. A special method of writing is taught a moonlight school 

 tablet, with indented letters for acquiring the form, and ruled 

 sheets with wide spaces, designed especially for adult pupils. 

 Readers have also been prepared for such beginners, dealing with 

 roads, silos, seed-testing, crop rotation, piping water into the 

 house, value of the daily bath, extermination of the fly, ways of 

 cooking, and such problems as the people are facing every day. 

 For example, a lesson on roads reads : 



This is a road. 



It is a good road. 



It will save my time. 



It will save my team. 



It will save my wagon. 



The good road is my friend. 



I will work for the good road. 



The script lessons follows : "I will work for the good road, ' ' 

 which pledge the student writes ten times, and if the law of 

 suggestion works, he becomes truly a friend and promoter of 

 good roads. 



Moonlight schools are conducted in seventeen states, Okla- 

 homa, Alabama and North Carolina following closely Kentucky's 

 lead. These schools minister equally to illiterate Indians in 



