The illiterates themselves had to be educated to an understanding of their opportunity. Not everyone came rushing out to school in every district when the schools first opened. An institution so new as a school where illiterate adults could learn to read and write may easily be misunderstood, criticized and even resented by those who need it most. Considering the mistaken attitude of the educated for generations past on the question of teaching them, it is not at all strange that some of the illiterates, themselves, with minds so befogged and darkened, should have had doubts and misconceptions of the school and what it would do for them. My father, himself a former school teacher, but later a physician, greeted me once in the early days of the movement with the remark, “What fool thing is this you are doing? I hear that you have old Jimmie Thomas and old Dicie Carter going to school.” His was the viewpoint, at the time, of the average educated man. That illiterates could overcome their fears and their pride with such sentiments being expressed around them is a credit both to them and to the teachers who persuaded them that it was within their power to learn to read and write. The change in the public attitude toward illiteracy in the states that have had campaigns has been eminently worth while. Alabama realized this when her progressive program of school legislation passed so readily due to the awakened public sentiment brought about by her crusade; Kentucky was in no mood to provide special officers to enforce her lax and inadequate compulsory attendance laws until the illiteracy campaign had swept over the state and shown her how foul and frightful a thing was illiteracy in either child or adult. Arkansas and other states that wage war on illiteracy talk of it “awakening an educational conscience.” This is one of the purposes of the moonlight school--to awaken the educated to their responsibility, to create in them a desire to redeem the illiterates, as well as to arouse the illiterates to seek their freedom. All of this means more than freeing a state from illiteracy. It means a new appreciation of education, a devotion to it which will not cease with the illiteracy crusade, but will affect the public school system from the elementary school to the university. You cannot teach the illiterates of the district to read and write without increasing the educational spirit of the community and improving the school advantages of the children. You cannot start the educated out on a crusade to redeem their illiterate neighbors without arousing in them a sentiment for better education for their own and their neighbors’ children and for better educational conditions throughout the system for future generations.