In the earliest years of the Harlan area, as on any frontier, education was hard to come by. At first, most children were taught by their parents and were therefore limited to the amount of education the parent had. They were taught from whatever books were at hand. This nearly always included a Kings James version of the Bible and many people who never learned to read did know by heart all or most of the scriptures.

As time went on and population increased, the children from several families would gather together for their schooling, generally by whichever local person had more education than most and was willing to teach them. At some times and places there were subscription schools. Several families would each pay a small amount in cash or goods to pay someone to teach the children. These schools might be held in someone's home, a church or out of doors if there was no where else.

Sometimes a neighborhood would build a simple one-room cabin for school. One-room schoolhouses were still frequent in the mountains in this century, although the schools in and around Mount Pleasant, now the city of Harlan, were larger and met under better conditions beginning shortly after the Civil War when school was held in the county court clerk's office or in the courthouse when court was not in session.

There were no set qualifications for teachers. Until late in the 19th century, they were usually men and if they had a minimum of reading, writing and math, they could teach. Although some of these teachers were well educated, many were able to teach little more than the ABC's, some spelling and simple sums. Thier wages were very small, often little more than their board and keep or possible the use of a cabin and piece of land to farm. It is difficult to determine who many of these early teachers were. It was a secondary occupation for some farmers and they did not think of themselves primarily as teachers and thus did not list it as an occupation in any records. Other teachers were young men who taught for only a few years, saving their wages for a start as a farmer.

One of our earliest settlers, David Fee, is known to have kept a school, probably on Martins Fork. A careful reading of his widow's pension application on his service in the War of 1812 implies that they had the use of a cabin and portion of land on George Brittain's property.

In his journal, Thomas W. Parsons, speaks of the subscription school his father had in about 1834. This school was held in a vacant house belonging to Jesse Coldiron. It was probably furnished only with crude home made benches. According to Parsons, sometimes the school had as many as 40 students including grown men and women, even married ones. In some areas, schools called Moonlight School were held for these grown students.

Attendance at school was irregular. The older students particularly would miss school for the necessary farming and harvesting and many of the younger children were required to help with these chores. Children often had to walk several miles to school and could not attend in bad weather or when flooded streams made the route impassable.

After the Bible, the most common school books used in the earliest days were the Blue Back Speller and McGuffey's Reader. These two books had an enduring popularity as textbooks and were commonly found in schools well into the 20th century. Two other books often used later were Ray's Arithmetic and Harvey's English. A frequent and popular school activity was spelling bees and prizes were often given at the end of a term for the best spellers. Parsons states "the custom in all schools in those days was to have two general spelling lessons a day, at noon and evening."

About 1821, the state legislature passed an act setting aside land in each county for an academy and asking the counties to divide into school districts. As in some of the other counties, the land thus set aside was sold by the county court. Although the county was authorized to use the funds for school purposes, there is no record of an academy being built until late in the century and those facilities were built by churches. These later academies, including the Presbyterian Academy which was built in 1896, included a lot of boarding students who stayed in dormitories or boarded with local families. Prior to these establishments, families who sought additional education for their children had to send them away to school at Berea, Lexington and other places.