William F. Perry is my new hero.

Not because he valued education.

Not because he rose to defend his Alabama homeland.

Not because he became a celebrated brigadier-general in Jefferson Davis' army.

It's because he said this:

"It surely cannot be that the citizens of Alabama will permit this opportunity of contributing so much to the elevation and honor of their State to pass unimproved. They will not be deaf to the mute persuasions of her one hundred thousand ignorant and neglected children, or insensitive to the claims which prosperity holds upon them for an inheritance of intelligence, virtue and freedom."

The year was 1854.

Which, if you're versed in the peculiarities of the state's past, is no insignificant date. Thirty-five years after statehood, and seven years before secession, Alabamians had spent the state's opening decades with a hodgepodge collection of schools. Local governance was the rule. A smattering of counties educated their children well by the standards of the day; others failed, some miserably.

As you'd expect, antebellum politics, never monotonous, played a role. Whigs in Montgomery supported a state-funded (i.e., tax-funded), state-controlled system of public education. Democrats did not; local oversight (i.e., local heavy-handed control where no one could tell them what to do, or how to do it) was their preference.

Those antebellum Democrats lost, thankfully. And in '54, after several years of trying, the state Legislature, through the Public School Act, created the state Department of Education and the position of superintendent. Perry, a native Georgian who'd earned a law degree in Alabama and was living in Talladega, became the state's first superintendent of education.

Since there was no Alabama template for public education, one of Perry's first duties was to establish guidelines the state's public schools would follow. He wrote extensively about state laws that governed operations, the method of taxation that would pay for the schools, and how teachers should be employed.

In that sense, he was a gentler, less-divisive 19th-century version of Paul Hubbert.

Interestingly, Perry laid out intricate procedures for courses of study: Orthography and astronomy were included along with English, arithmetic and geography. Apparently a proponent of teaching the origins of the still youthful United States, Perry even listed a separate course on the U.S. Constitution.

Concerned about the wellbeing of Alabama's antebellum youth, Perry mandated that public schools teach classes on the human body and — there's no polite way to say this — how to keep it clean.

It was 1854, after all.

"No apology is deemed necessary for recommending Physiology and Hygiene as a branch of common school education," Perry wrote. "… Few, indeed, of the pains that rack the human frame, and the distortions that mar its beauty, are necessarily incident to man's condition. Most of them are penalties imposed by nature for the violation of her laws. How important, then, that those laws be obeyed! But to be obeyed, they must be understood."

So, why the history lesson?

Modern-day public education in Alabama is besieged by some, lauded by others and still under-funded, a disastrous plight. Everyone knows the drill: National polls often rank the state's public schools as some of America's worst; thank God for Mississippi, right? Yet, the governor's office and today's William F. Perry, Superintendent Joe Morton, extol the advances made by distance-learning programs, by initiatives in reading and math and science, by a handful of school systems that can measure up against any in the Union.

When thinking of Alabama public education, I routinely retreat to the same place: If we want our schools to be among the nation's best, why don't we make them so? Why do we let politics and our inbred distaste for alternative forms of revenue — a state lottery, for example — keep us from becoming a national leader in all forms of public education? The potential is there; we've seen the possibilities; yet, the need remains great.

Yeah, I know the answer.

That's why I wish William Perry could return for an afternoon, stand before the Legislature and deliver a televised speech that included these poignant words he wrote more than 150 years ago.

"The evils which will likely result from a failure of this (public school) enterprise will consist not merely in the loss of so much time and the useless expenditure of so much treasure, but in the shock which the cause of popular education will receive in the long years of apathy that may follow an unsuccessful attempt."

Long years of apathy? Evils and failure? We've had enough of that, Alabama.