Writing the Southern Agrarian Philosophy of Education
The Land-Grant Tradition and its Southern Detractors
Democracy is a term Americans have been throwing about for quite some time. Although liberty, equality, and brotherhood are more applicable to the French rather than the American Revolution, by the end of the nineteenth century the people of the United States, North and South, became increasingly democratic and egalitarian. Prior to the Civil War, Americans, despite the Age of Jackson, had managed to retain more than a modicum of those colonial hierarchies influenced by a European system of aristocratic patriarchy. It may not have been widespread, but it was powerful. After Confederate defeat, that system began to quickly founder. And this is not simply an American phenomenon. One can trace a somewhat parallel decline of landed aristocracy and privileged gentility at the same time in Europe, especially Britain. Not only can we see in these places a falling away from landed wealth, but also the secularization of society. The combination signaled nothing less than a major shift in the course of Western thinking about the relationship between religion, science, and higher learning.