Taxation
Southerners were much more strongly opposed to raising taxes to fund public education than the people of the North.
In the South
The other economic hurdle to public education in the South was taxation. Many Southerners held Cavalier like values in that they were strongly opposed to government interference in personal affairs. They favored minimal restrictions and taxes from the government pertaining to nearly all aspects of life, and education was no exception. In an antebellum Southerner's opinion, "education was a private matter, not a state function; therefore, the state should not spend money on education." This opinion expresses the commonly held belief at the time that education should not be entrusted to the government, nor should the general public have to pay for it. In addition, their was a wide gap between the upper and lower classes in the South. The upper class had no interest in funding education with their tax dollars, as most of the rich sent their children to private schools. Those who were very poor, and often in large amounts of dept from the costs of running a farm, could not afford to pay higher taxes. Simply put, no one in the South was willing to pay for public education.
In the North
The North had a much easier time getting public approval for a tax-funded education system. First, there was a much larger middle class in the North due to the urban economy. These middle class families couldn’t necessarily afford a private education for their children, but were willing to pay for a much cheaper, public one through taxes. There was also far less resistance to public education from those who did not have school aged children. This is because people could more easily see that the economy as a whole would greatly benefit from public education. Horace Mann was a great advocate for this idea, saying that, "If education be equably diffused, it will draw property after it, by the strongest of all attractions; for such a thing never did happen, and never can happen, as that an intelligent and practical body of men should be permanently poor" (Mann, 87). Mann and other advocates of education helped the people of the North to see that public schools would help their economy grow and prosper. This view on taxation helped schools develop much more in the North than in the South.