ABSTRACT
The variety of social and political forces to which the New Education offered a refuge helps to explain the movement's appeal to a broad, heterogeneous constituency. Officials at the United States Bureau of Education viewed Hampton, Tuskegee, and the growing number of black agricultural and industrial colleges in the South not only as leading examples of the southern educational movement but as national-level 'pioneers' of the New Education. In 1914 Abraham Flexner and Wallace Buttrick submitted to the General Education Board (GEB) a proposal for rural education in the South that encompassed the entire spectrum of progressive social thought. More schools and better facilities would not alter essential character or spirit of southern education, or the qualities that made it attractive to northern educators and philanthropists. Other agricultural educators went to considerable lengths to distinguish between the role of agriculture in general education and its purely practical function in the technical education of the farmer.
