"Annihilating the Hillbilly"
by Jim Branscome
page 4

     Perhaps if it were possible to estimate the number of mountain children who would be alive and healthy if Appalachia had received and retained a more equitable share of the nation's wealth, certain institutions could be persuaded more easily to invest in saving children.  Until the case is made, however, we all labor under the curse of the prophets and the admonitions of the poets (increasingly, it seems, the only sane people), that the final judgment on civilizations and their institutions rests on how well they treat children, who are--in appeal at least--the "least of these."
 

     The Appalachian child who makes it to school does not find the institution American has charged with equipping youth with basic "survival" skills any better prepared to serve his needs.  The inability and unwillingness of local governments to tax the property and extractive resources of large corporations has resulted in an educational system in Appalachia that can only be compared with that in the so-called "underdeveloped" nations.  Add to this the fundamental resistance of middle-class teachers to acknowledge the unique cultural heritage of the Appalachian youth and you have a laboratory for studying one of the classic, historical struggles between a nation intent on erasing a minority from its midst and a people intent on preserving their identity and life style at any cost to themselves.  In an Appalachian school, the middle class aspiring, teacher is just as insistent that the student be aggressive, obedient, joyless--in short, everything that his culture tells he is not--as is the teacher in the Bureau of Indian Affairs school on a reservation.  No wonder then that as many as 65 percent of the students drop out of school before graduation--a figure 25 percent higher than the national average.
 

     Responding to the fiscal needs of the Appalachian educational system alone is overwhelmingly beyond the capacity of government agencies as they are presently funded.  In 1967, for example, the Office of Education estimated that the construction needs of the 13 Appalachian states represented over 42 percent of the total school construction needs of the entire country.  It would require the additional expenditure of $363 million annually just to raise the per pupil expenditures of Appalachian schools to the national average.  Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, designed to increase the amount of funds available for the teaching of disadvantaged students, will spend more money on an equal number of students in the schools of Westchester, New York, where the number of poor students is about three percent of the student body, than it will in a county in Appalachia where more than half of the student body is poor.  Talent Search, a special college recruitment ad placement program funded by Congress for high-risk students, spends only 3.8 percent of its money in Appalachia, compared to the 10 percent the regions deserves.  Simply to make the Appalachian educational system equal in educational resources to the national will require a political miracle at a time when no miracle workers are to be found.
 

     While Appalachia is heavily populated with institutions of higher learning supported by various religious denominations and state governments, the region's students are not better served here than in the secondary institutions.  Neither is the region's needs for professional and para-professional manpower.  No institution of American society, in fact, is more divorced from Appalachia than the higher educational system which resides within it.

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