This collection contains items related to the Summer School of the South, was a major instrument of regional educational improvement, facilitated by the University of Tennessee, from 1902 to 1918. The Summer School of the South instructing approximately thirty-two thousand teachers in the art of education.

The Summer School was founder by University of Tennessee 11th President Charles W. Dabney, to change what he saw as the lamentable state of southern educational experience. With the 1902 arrival in Knoxville of Philander P. Claxton, agent of the Southern Education Board, Dabney found the man to change this situation. Using money raised locally and nationally, Dabney hired Claxton to create a summer school for teachers--the Summer School of the South--an independent institution that would be located on the University of Tennessee campus.

The dual goals of the Summer School were to improve southern education by improving southern educators and to turn the region's teachers into agitators for more educational resources. When the school opened, more than nineteen hundred teachers were in attendance, and a distinguished faculty had been assembled to instruct them. Of the fifty-one faculty members, eight were present or former university presidents. Further gracing the faculty were the prominent southern writer Walter Hines Page and U.S. Commissioner of Education William T. Harris. Later sessions would also attract such noted instructors as John Dewey, Richard T. Ely, and U. B. Phillips. The Summer School faculty offered teachers a wide variety of subjects to study. Supplementing formal instruction were cultural activities such as performances of classical plays and orchestral music. From 1902 to 1911the Summer School was quite a success with full enrollment and funding. After Claxton's departure in 1911 to become the U.S. commissioner of education, however, the school came under the complete direction of the University of Tennessee which did not the able ability to sustain the program on its own. The next seven years saw a dramatic declined in attendance and after the 1918 session the university closed the school.