T.R. Fehrenbach - author and columnist in San Antonio's main newspaper. He maintains contact through mysa.com.

Fehrenbach excerpt from the "History of Texas and the Texans"

Like the newspaper publishers and printing presses, the schoolmasters and curriculum were imported from the older states. Although there had been no official provisions for public schools until 1854, when the windfall from the New Mexico boundary settlement was made available, the frontier counties as well as the older regions already had an adequate educational system. The settlers worried much about the education of their children, both boys and girls. As soon as a dozen or more families were located in any region or new-made county, the farmers tried to organize a school. A building was thrown up or made available; a schoolmaster was imported from the East. Every family shared the costs of the teacher’s salary, which as often as not was paid in land or kind. No schoolteacher in Texas went hungry or failed to find a place of honor at any table.

In the antebellum period the courts held that the creation of county school districts, and the assessment of general taxes for education, was unconstitutional. It was not, however, considered illegal for the state to reimburse parents for each child enrolled in a recognized school. The government paid out, beginning in 1854, sixty-two cents per year per student, without regard to the nature of the school: private, parochial, or “field.” This amount was raised to $1.50 in 1855. Most Texans in the rural areas attended “field schools”—a school which families in a community or region had established by providing a building and hiring a teacher, on their own. Thus there were no direct taxes, and the state monies went a long way toward paying the cost of instructors. Books were not a great problem, because only a few—primers, readers, and simple arithmetic texts—were used. The system was both public and private, but it created no constitutional or social problems. The population was remarkably homogeneous, almost tribal in its culture, and the education provided was sufficient for the time and place.

Those small groups outside the Anglo mass, Roman Catholics or Mexicans, either had their own schools organized the same way or were indifferent to education. No true public school system was established prior to the War Between the States. And since there was so little foreign immigration, the notion of the public school as an “Americanizing agency” simply never arose. Boys and girls went to school to learn certain essentials to fit them for their future life, not as part of any planned social process. The graduate of a field school, with a grade school education, was completely fitted to extend American civilization as he knew it further west. Culture and philosophy were not Anglo-American concerns. Neither had any real function on a frontier where everyone had to work. Yet an enormous amount of both was transmitted through the Holy Scriptures, which were used as a text in most schools. And the Protestant or “American” ethic was preserved and enhanced also by these local schools, quite unconsciously, because it was the ethic and culture of the land; teachers and pupils shared it and had learned it before they even went to school. It was this last that eventually made Roman Catholic immigrants increasingly concerned about “public” education, and led the clergy to establish its own schools in a long and in the end futile attempt to isolate Catholic children from Anglo culture.

The historical role of the English Bible in this Texas has increasingly been overlooked. But the King James Version afforded this stultified civilization on the fringes of the 19th-century Western world with a great part of the basic culture it required. It gave the frontier farmer what later Soviet poets tried to transmit and preserve in Russia under Communism: a basic folklore, philosophy, and literature. It was, in fact, almost the only literature most families possessed.

The Old Testament fitted easily into the 19th-century Texas world. Its revelations of the human condition were held, even by the nonreligious, to be entirely valid and timelessly true. The young Texan read of evil that was ancient and ever-present, requiring eternal discipline of man; he learned of false prophets and lying sycophants, of licentious Jezebels and foolish kings, of mighty warriors and wise men. He absorbed an unflattering impression of such intellectual tribes as Scribes and Pharisees. And although few could articulate it or explain it, Texans gained a timeless portrait of man’s world, of the rise and fall of peoples, of bondage and deliverance, of God’s patience and wrath, and man’s enduring inhumanity to man. Visitors were often surprised to find Texans, who had no apparent cultivation, able to strip vanities and euphoric philosophies from better-educated men. As a cultural, folkloric instrument the Holy Bible played its part, in a way no official history or intellectually fabricated philosophy ever could.

Lone Star - The History of Texas and the Texans, pg 303,4
By T.R. Fehrenbach
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 68-25222
Macmillan

Updated March 28, 2009