ABSTRACT
As noted earlier in this study, John Hardin Best asserts that historians of education have not sufficiently explored the relationship between southern culture and education. Best argues that although “education and other institutions” of the American South differed from other regions in the United States, they should not be overlooked by education historians.2
Southern culture, he believes, is a distinctive part of the history of the United States and the “non-formal education and formal institutions were a product of the larger culture of the South,” which in turn “influenced and sustained this distinctive culture.” According to Best the “interaction of the culture of the South with southern institutions of learning created the framework essential for understanding education in the forming of the American South.”3
