Chapter 40: South Carolina

The early immigrants in South Carolina, who came from England, believed that education was a private and personal issue. The prosperous among them paid for their children’s enrollment in private and church schools or employed private tutors to help them¹. There was little public assistance for the colony’s most fortunate children during this time. The Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, a London-based organization created to convert indigenous and black people within the colonies to Christianity², began African slave education in 1701.

The South Carolina General Assembly passed approximately 750 Acts and Joint Resolutions throughout the 1800s, the most noteworthy of which was the new school legislation of 1811, which was the first statute to create “free schools” throughout the state³. Its goal was to put a public school in its forty-four electoral districts. The law allocated $300 per state representative to each district⁴. According to the Report and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the South Carolina legislature, the state had 869 free schools and 9187 pupils registered throughout several districts and parishes by 1841. The newly updated South Carolina State Constitution of 1868 established the Office of Superintendent of Education. It authorized the introduction of a new “school tax” and a “poll tax” to fund free public schools⁵. The South Carolina joint assembly approved a joint resolution authorizing $25,000 for public schools the following year, in 1869. These monies were allocated according to the number of students enrolled⁶.