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

Kingman Album. “Two children holding sheep.” [kingman_014b]

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.

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 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 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 addressed the challenge of retention in mountain residential schools.

Her focus was the story of a young girl, Nance, and her family who struggled and sacrificed to educate the entire family. In de Long’s story the reader follows the family who were self-educated while raising a family and who have come to believe in the promise of learning.

Nance, excited about learning is accepted and enrolled in the educational program at Pine Mountain Settlement School but soon became homesick and fled the School for home. The story is built around the value of an education to the people of the central Appalachians. It captures the sacrifice, the mixed emotions, and the determination of a family within a shifting life-style as they seek to educate the whole family.

Ethel de Long makes a persuasive and poignant argument for a balance of both the deep culture endemic in Appalachia and the need for “book larnin’.”

Her article was re-published in the March and June 1921 issue of Quarterly Magazine of the Southern Industrial Educational Association (pages 3-7), shortly after appearing in the Home Monthly Mission journal, and there it joined articles of a similar educational perspective from a variety of other organizations. The article that follows de Long’s “For the Sake of Learning” takes up the same theme in a snippet of advice regarding the push and pull of culture as measured by the “efficiency” of people and culture. It states

“The efficiency of an illiterate people in competition with an education nation [that] is as the crooked stick against the sulky plow; 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.”

From the Bureau of Education Bulletin, 1917, No. 27.

“For the Sake of Learning” by Ethel de Long Zande is published in the following magazine on pages 3 through 7.