ETHEL DE LONG ZANDE WRITING For the Sake of Learning

Pine Mountain Settlement School
Series 07: DIRECTORS
Ethel de Long Zande
Writing
“For the Sake of Learning”
Home Mission Monthly, Nov 1920.

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Reprinted in the Quarterly Magazine of the Southern
Industrial Educational Association, March and June 1921.

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TAGS: Ethel de Long Zande, Southern Industrial Educational Association (SIEA), Central Appalachians, settlement schools, residential education, educators, Hindman Settlement School, Pine Mountain Settlement School, Home Mission Monthly, Practice House, homesickness, post offices, transportation, Appalachian dialect, sheep

ETHEL DE LONG ZANDE “For the Sake of Learning”

ETHEL DE LONG ZANDE:
Co-Founder & Co-Director 1913-1928

Zande, Ethel de Long. “FOR THE SAKE OF LEARNING.” Home Mission Monthly, Vol. XXXV, Issue 1. Nov 1920, p. 1. Reprinted in the Quarterly Magazine of the Southern Industrial Educational Association, Vol. XIII, Nos. 1 & 2. March and June 1921, pp. 3-7.

Ethel de Long Zande had been at Pine Mountain Settlement School as a founder and co-director of the School for seven years when she wrote the following article for the Home Mission Monthly journal in November of 1920. It centers on education in the Southern Appalachians and is based on de Long’s experiences at Pine Mountain Settlement School. In the article, she addresses the challenges of student retention in mountain residential schools.

Her challenge was based on the story of a young girl, Nance, and her family whose struggles and sacrifices to educate the entire family in a sea of poverty, is a moving account of a Pine Mountain family. In de Long’s story, the reader follows a family who were self-educating while raising a family and who came to believe in the promise of additional learning.

Zande describes the excitement of Nance, the young daughter in the family, about learning and her family’s support of her application and acceptance in the educational program at Pine Mountain Settlement School. The struggle of Nance when she soon became homesick and how she fled the Settlement School for home captures the realities of educational awakening in a rural agricultural community.

The story is built around the value of an education to the people of the central Appalachians but captures the physical family sacrifices needed, and the mixed emotions of the whole family within a shifting mountain life-style. Ethel de Long Zande’s story graphically demonstrates how the Settlement School, through the experience of one family member’s educational opportunity can shift the values of an entire family and create both pride and anxiety.

Ethel de Long Zande, as the new educational director at Pine Mountain Settlement School, makes a persuasive and poignant argument for a balance of both the deep culture endemic in Appalachia and the need for “book larnin'” to keep pace with the changing world. Zande’s article made a profound impact on other educators and other schools in the Appalachians. It was re-published in the March and June 1921 issue of Quarterly Magazine of the Southern Industrial Educational Association (pages 3-7), in a longer form shortly after appearing in the Home Mission Monthly journal. Zande’s ideas and observations joined a growing educational perspective from a variety of other educators and organizations.

The second longer publication of the article that follows de Long’s initial publication of “For the Sake of Learning”, takes up the same theme and title of the original article but expands on its persuasive educational values and places it within the current educational debates. While the first article was a snippet of advice regarding the push and pull of culture as measured by the “efficiency” of people and culture, it re-states the growing views such as the following earlier snippet found in the Bureau of Education Bulletin, 1917, No. 27

“The efficiency of an illiterate people in competition with an education nation [that] is as the crooked stick against the sulky cow; the sickle against the reaper; the bullock cart against the express train, the ocean greyhound, and the aeroplane; the pony messenger against the telegraph, telephone and wireless.”

The later, more extensive article, “For the Sake of Learning” by Ethel de Long Zande is re-published in the Quarterly Magazine of the Southern Industrial Educational Association, March and June 1921on pages 3 through 7, as captured below.