Moonlight School, an Interview with author Suzanne Woods Fisher
Suzanne is an award-winning, bestselling author of more than 30 books, including On a Summer Tide and On a Coastal Breeze, as well as the Nantucket Legacy, Amish Beginnings, The Bishop’s Family, The Deacon’s Family, and The Inn at Eagle Hill series, among other novels. She is also the author of several nonfiction books about the Amish, including Amish Peace and Amish Proverbs. She lives in California.
Her recent novel, “The Moonlight School,” is inspired by true events of the Moonlight School in Rowan County, Kentucky, during the early 1900s.
Born and raised in the Kentucky hills, Cora Wilson Stewart, the superintendent of education, understood the plague of illiteracy and came up with a plan to open the schoolhouses to adults on moonlit nights. This movement almost completely eliminated adult literacy in this county and was the catalyst for shocking the nation into taking adult literacy seriously. Even today, the US celebrates National Literacy week.
Over a hundred years later, literacy is still a major problem. The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) states that 21% of Americans (about 42 million people) still fall in the illiterate or functionally illiterate category, and often, a parent’s struggle with literacy is passed down to their children.
Suzanne Woods Fisher has researched this topic and has compared the statistics of literary both during the 1900s and today, and her findings are truly eye-opening.
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