Education: Outdoingest Fellers

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"Hit's right smart unhandy to be po'," and live in a mountain cabin on $575 a year, with a woman and six children to keep—and maybe be neighborly and take in a half-dozen extra ones when their parents die. In the three-room cabin there is no heat but from the fireplace, no window, no plumbing. The hill woman is much in childbirth. After six or eight children she may die. The mountaineer takes a second woman, perhaps a third. What becomes of the many young ones, whose blood is of the purest in the U. S.?

Primarily for mountain folk exists Berea College at Berea, Ky. Only 7% of its 1,600 students are admitted from regions outside the Southern Appalachians. Half the students work their way through the Foundation-Junior High School, Academy and College, earn about 76% of their total expenses. No one is too poor to enter. A 16-year-old is not too young; a 63-year-old not too aged. Students are supposed to have $17 for room & board for the first term, but one girl was admitted with 63¢. Tuition costs nothing. Berea's deficits are made up by subscriptions, endowments, sale of student products. There are many friends, locally and elsewhere. In Manhattan last week Berea was seeking new friends and patrons, with an exhibition—its first—of products of the college's nine saleable student industries. On view were buns, toys, candies, furniture, brooms & brushes, homespuns, rugs, pictures and "kivers" (bedspreads). Mountaineers have plenty of time, which is worth practically nothing to them. Berea attempts to advise them, help them farm and keep house, sell their goods for an honest price.

"Labor" is a required course at Berea; during four years every student must work at least ten hours per week. There are standard courses also, from ABC's to A.B. and B.S. degrees. Visitors to classrooms are impressed with such imaginative hillbilly phrases as: "My home is way up the hollow where the valley snuggles in our little cabin," "I like to read what the goneby men have stored away in their lifetime," "a rage of anger," "the outdoingest feller," "the air from the falls keeps the flowers in motion all the time."