One of the few benefits conferred by the Reconstruction governments was a system of general public schools nominally open to every child in city or country; but just as the education of Negroes and Poor Whites was beginning, the schools were separated for the two races, and the Negroes were cut off from Southern white teachers. To start the new system there was no tradition of public school training and management, little sense of public duty in laying sufficient taxes, and the South was very poor. Hence it was about 1885 before the South put into operation a general educational system, supported by public taxation. The most recent statistics available (for 1906) show over 6,000,000 common school pupils in the South, besides 380,000 pupils in private schools, 118,000 pupils in public high schools, and 34,000 more in private secondary schools; 38,000 students in public and private universities, colleges and schools of technology. Every Southern state has now worked out some system of both rural and urban public schools, and several of them have a sizable State school fund which is distributed among the districts. The ordinary type of rural school is practically the district school of the North over again. City schools are graded in the usual fashion. Most states have a State Superintendent of Education, and the more progressive communities like Louisiana are introducing county superintendents with power to compel good schools. Surely with so many people and so much money, all must be happy in the South. It is an educational army, with common school infantry, secondary school cavalry, and in the institutions of higher learning the heavy artillery and the big guns. Yet it is an army in which every division, brigade, and regiment is divided into two camps, in which spear clashes on shield, for hardly anything in the South so brings out into relief the race question as the problem of education, and especially of negro education. The Reconstruction governments made no provision for public high schools, but the growth of towns and cities in the South and the need of preparatory schools for the colleges, and the public sense of the value of secondary education, have compelled the founding of a great number of such schools, both for girls and boys. Normal schools have also developed till there are 45 with over 10,000 students. The colleges are also flourishing; and of professional schools the South has more than 160, with above 12,000 students.