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Show A WOMAN'S GLORIOUS WOUK. A wonderful thing is coming io pass in Kentucky. And. a woman is the miraclo worker. For many years .Kowan county pro-sontcd pro-sontcd a gravo problem to the Kentucky Ken-tucky stale authorities. Of its .10,000 population, iiuOO, or oilo-half, were illiterate il-literate three years ago. Now there is not a person in "Korean county, save only tho labies, who canuot read and write: there is not a homo in TJowaii county into which the newspaper does noL enter. Thr. astonishing part of it all is that gray -haired men aud women 60, 70 and SO years of age to whom the alphabet was ;t thing unknown aud feared, now read the news of the day in their hillside abodes. Mrs. Cora W. Stewart wis superintendent superin-tendent of schools iu Korean county for six years before she found a means of bringing the. light into those thousands, thou-sands, of darkened homes. She called for volunteors and inaugurated a system sys-tem of moonlight schools the day school wan out of tho question on account ac-count of the demands of daily toil, and tho night school was deemed not foaai-ble foaai-ble becauso tho laud was sparsely settled set-tled and the distances wero long and the roads very difficult. The moonlight moon-light school, however, was the solution. On tho first night in tho summer of 1011 when the moonlight schools wcro thrown open, 1200 men and wonieu wont; out of the mountains and the valleys val-leys to school. There wore among thorn men and women bent with ago and loitering along with tho aid of a stick. A year later the enrollment was 1600, and this year it is 2500. It has been Mrs. Stewart's almost inconceivable inconceiv-able experience that, regardless of age, adults learned, to read withiu two to five days, Mrs. Stewart used no text book; tho newspaper was her primer. Her paper was unique. It was 'known as tho Korean-County Messenger and was published pub-lished at Morehead, the county scat. Mrs. Stewart was its editor. Now the nced3 have outgrown the Messenger and a largor paper has taken its placo; Mrs. Stewart has four columns in tho larger paper. In the throe j'cars during which Mrs. Stewart ha6 bent her efforts toward too overthrow of illiteracy, her pupils havo been taught reading, writing, arithmetic, spelling, geography, history, hj'giene, sanitation, domestic science and agriculture. And so illitoracy, tho most deadly foe of human progress, has boon vanquished iu its own fastnesses, and the people live better and aro happier hap-pier aud are striving for higher ideals. Twenty-five other Kentucky counties havo adoptod Mrs. Stewart's ideas. South Carolina has had a year of satisfactory satis-factory oxperience with thorn, and Arkansas, Ar-kansas, Alabama and Virginia are setting set-ting at work to follow Kowan county. Certainly, it is a magnificent work which this woman has done. |
