Lesson from Lanieve
Posted on Friday, May 9, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/225172/
In the bend where U. S. 63 passes Paul’s
Switch between Bono and Walnut
Ridge, there’s a gravel road that peels off northwesterly toward a small white church. I’ve driven that stretch of highway countless times as it joins Jonesboro with the communities of my old schoolage stomping grounds. But for all the years I spent driving from Walnut Ridge to Jonesboro and back, first as a highschooler, then as a college student, and finally as a work commuter, it was only in the past year that I ever noticed a dilapidated house hidden in the grove of trees next to the little white church. I vowed to stop someday for a closer look, but it was only in the last month that I finally made the detour down the lonely country road to see it. As I pulled up in front of the grove and got a better look at the structure, I could see it was very old and large and made of stone with a gray slate roof. I also could see that it wasn’t a house, but a school. The front double doorway was recessed beneath an arched entryway with the inscription “Lanieve School” carved above it.
Lanieve, it turns out, is one of the unofficial names of the local community around Paul’s Switch. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas described Lanieve School as one of several rural subscription schools in the area in the late 19 th century, along with Fifty-Six School, Old Trinity School and Shiloh. This building didn’t appear to be quite that old. Perhaps it was built later, as Lanieve School was growing.
There was a hint of an old driveway winding around to the right of the school, and as I walked up in the cool morning air, the still-budding trees cast spotty shade on the building, making the stone seem even more speckled. At the right rear was a side entrance, similar to the front, complete with arched entry, but in glancing up at the carving, I saw “Lanieve Church.”
Of course, I thought as I climbed the wide, crumbling steps and looked into the large room. This building doubled as the community church and school, the former on one end and the latter on the other.
I had traveled only about a quartermile off the five-lane highway but back 100 years or so in time as I stepped into the old Lanieve Church sanctuary. The boards of the hardwood floor were buckled and broken, and the pressed-tin ceiling hung loose in places.
At the back of the room was the chancel—it probably doubled as a stage for school plays or assemblies—still sporting an arch above it and weather-beaten wainscoting around it. Two doorways led into the adjoining schoolrooms. Crumbled plaster lay against the walls as if swept there, and the stillness and quiet was appropriate; this was a tomb, a sepulcher of sorts, still harboring the sacred relic of early American education as a partnership of faith and learning.
Looking around, I imagined the youngsters of yesteryear celebrating what would have been a magnificent edifice in its heyday on this agricultural patch near the railroad. Neither they nor their parents would have questioned the school sharing a facility with the church at all. Indeed, it’s likely that in Lanieve, as in countless other rural communities of that era, the people actually lived as French social philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville adroitly described them —“ a population of bold adventurers... who penetrates the wilds of a New World with the Bible, an ax and a file of newspapers. ”
“Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention,” he wrote in his 1838 book, “Democracy in America.” He went on to observe that Americans “combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.”
Would anything be more natural for a population possessing an indissoluble alliance of politics and religion, as de Tocqueville termed it, than to economically combine a school and church building ? Yet today we’re falsely taught that the separation of church and state is tantamount to that of religion and school.
Lanieve is a lesson refuting such revisionism. But how many people venture forth to discover the seeds that unlock such hidden truths ? It took me years, and then still was pure chance. I thought I was visiting the ruins of a stately home. Perhaps providence rekindles our remembrances that way. In reading about old schools, I came across Horace Mann’s “Twelfth Annual Report,” as submitted in his capacity as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1848. Mann is widely regarded as the father of American public education for his school reforms and pedagogical ideas. I still
believe he got a great
many things wrong, but unlike today’s secularists, he nevertheless voiced a belief system that echoed America’s collective historical record. “It will be said that this grand result in practical morals is a consummation of blessedness that can never be attained without religion, and that no community will ever be religious without a religious education,” he wrote. “Both these propositions I regard as eternal and immutable truths.” Vigorously applying secularist ideology to public education is remiss, indeed; perhaps irreparably so, if Mann was right. —–––––•–––––—Dana D. Kelley is a free-lance writer from Jonesboro.