![]() ![]() Conroy is greeted at the island schoolhouse by Mrs. Today, Daufuskie Island is a luxury resort area with swimming pools, condos and championship golf courses a rustic recreational annex to Hilton Head.Ĭrossing the river to Yamacraw by fishing boat, Mr. ![]() It is the real estate market that has changed: until the mid-1970's, only 100 or so people, descendants of slaves, lived on Daufuskie Island in a community as untouched and backward as the Appalachia that Walker Evans and James Agee documented during the Depression. It's not getting better fast: the No Child Left Behind improvements that President Bush campaigned on in 2000 were mostly left behind in the wake of Sept. ![]() Programs like Teach for America attest to the economic and social disparities that still plague communities all over the country. ![]() Not that the American public school system has improved so much in the last four decades. It is a disgrace softened by the romance of rarity. They are raised in cultural isolation and subsistence living that is now mostly found in the third world and a few New Age cults in California. Island children are blank-slate innocents, so thirsty for attention and learning that they listen, awestruck, to a recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. On Yamacraw, the fictional name of Daufuskie Island, there are no television sets, boomboxes or video games filling the educational void. ![]()
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