Brawley Benjamin Griffith
Your Negro Neighbor
V
ASPECTS OF NEGRO EDUCATION
No one who really studies the problem has any reason to be discouraged at the results of fifty years of education for the Negro people of America. In 1880 the percentage of illiterates among the race was approximately 70. By 1890 it was 57, by 1900 44.5, and by 1910 the figure had been reduced to 30.4. We may then not unreasonably affirm that at the present time (1918) not more than one-fourth of all the Negroes of the country are illiterate, and this in spite of the fact that thousands of persons who did not have early advantages are still living.
In other ways also may improvement be marked. By reason of a more enlightened sentiment the schoolhouses in more than one vicinity are gradually being improved, civic and social organizations are constantly working for better conditions, and organizations among the institutions themselves look to greater coherence and coördination of effort in the future. The last few years have witnessed not only a continuance of the work of such agencies as the John F. Slater Fund and the General Education Board, but also the beginning of that of the Anna T. Jeanes Fund for the maintenance and assistance of elementary schools for Negroes in the Southern States and of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, a part of whose income also goes to Negro education. Meanwhile among the teachers actively at work have arisen different organizations, notably the Association of Colleges for Negro Youth. This association was formed at Knoxville, Tenn., in November, 1913, by representatives of the following institutions: Howard University, Atlanta University, Wilberforce University, Virginia Union University, Fisk University, Morehouse College, Knoxville College, and Talladega College. Since 1913 Shaw University, Bishop College, and Benedict College have also become members. The general aim of the organization has been to bring more closely together the colleges concerned for the consideration of such subjects as uniform requirements for entrance to college, the requirements for the college degree, the reception of students from other colleges, and other topics of vital interest.
All such things denote progress. And yet, when all consideration is given to the advance that has been made, there are those who feel that with the opportunity still more should have been done. They feel that the past is irrevocable, but that it is not too late to correct certain errors and tendencies for the future.
What is the situation as we actually find it to-day? Go to any one of the most representative institutions, and what do we find? Efficient teachers struggling against most enormous disadvantages and frequently dealing with the crudest possible material. The wonder is that so much has been accomplished in the face of the handicap. It is not enough to reply that in all the schools and colleges of the country the teaching is irregular and the systems too lenient – that there is no human perfection in fact; these Negro colleges are crying for a better chance and they ought to have it. Go into any one of their high school departments (for all are still forced to conduct closely affiliated academies), and the actual attainment of many of the students exhibits more and more the appalling shortcomings of the common schools. How could it be otherwise with a system that operates schools for only four or five months a year and that pays teachers twenty or thirty-five dollars a month? "It was this way, you see," said one young man who presented himself for entrance upon the work of the academy, "we had only a three months' school at my home, and I went one winter and my brother went the next." Said another, "I had a good teacher in arithmetic, but we didn't do much in grammar"; and the grammar may be said to embrace every subject in the common school in which precision is required except arithmetic. Penmanship is completely lacking in neatness and finish, and in nineteen cases out of twenty the students from the country can not spell. Nor can they read. Take them as you come to them, at the supposed completion of the eighth grade, and ask them to read aloud a single paragraph from Irving, or Cooper, or the morning paper, and very few indeed will be able to get through without an apology or serious errors in pronunciation or interpretation.
Grammar and reading and spelling, however, are apparent. Little by little the teacher becomes aware of something more fundamental – the lack of any adequate background for appreciation and culture. No time had the mother at the washtub or in the field for Cinderella or Mother Goose, and the childhood that should have been enriched by lines from Longfellow or Tennyson or the Bible was nodded away by the fire. Youth that craved adventure and inspiration found relief from the deadening routine of the week only in the coarse pleasure of the railroad on Sundays, or the big-meeting that came once a year. A gymnasium, a library, or an art museum the young man coming up to the academy in the city never saw in his life.
Such a background makes neither for accuracy in technical training nor for the foundation of the larger reaches of culture. Within recent years the problem has been even more complicated by the inadequate school facilities in the cities. As the population has shifted from the rural districts to the larger towns, congestion in the schools has resulted, and the lack of an adequate number of seats and the system of half-day sessions have frequently resulted only in the semblance of thorough and efficient training. Nor has the matter been made any better by the tendency in some places still further to degrade the schools.
There is yet a larger question, however, and that is the extent to which the higher schools and colleges themselves are fulfilling their function. We do not forget the work of Atlanta University in the training of common school teachers, nor that of Morehouse College for the Negro Baptists of Georgia, nor that of Spelman Seminary for the homes and Sunday Schools and rural schools of Georgia, when we raise the question if such institutions are really doing all that they should for their respective communities. We do not believe that they are, and we do not believe that the fault is wholly theirs.
All of this takes us back to some very fundamental things. For some years we have heard of a war between classical and industrial ideals, and it has become more and more the fashion to sneer at the sturdy pioneers who sought to instill into the minds of the recently emancipated freedmen the ideas of education that obtained in New England. Homer and Horace, it is affirmed, have no place in the education of a man who is to be a leader in a rural community. The whole utilitarian tendency has recently been strongly represented by the paper, "A Modern School," by Dr. Abraham Flexner, published in the Review of Reviews for April, 1916, and reprinted as a pamphlet by the General Education Board. We read: "Modern education will include nothing simply because tradition recommends it or because its inutility has not been conclusively established. It proceeds in precisely the opposite way: It includes nothing for which an affirmative case can not now be made out."
Now hardly any one will be found to object to this principle, though when education in the large is considered many distinguished educators feel that in arriving at its large aim the "Modern School" is not altogether fair to some of the more traditional subjects in the curriculum. So far as higher education for the Negro is concerned, however, there is one point at which the utilitarians persistently misunderstand those who do not wholly agree with them. No one better appreciates the value of genuine industrial education than the teachers in the Southern colleges. What they do oppose, however, is that sort of large legislation which says that because the Negro is mainly an agricultural race, his children as a whole should have that sort of education which will make of them good farmers and domestics. Such a program offers no outlet at all for the boy of unusual talent and would ultimately irrevocably bind the whole race in the chains of serfs.
What then should be the aim of Negro education? We affirm that each boy should receive such education as would not only enable him to develop his individual powers to their highest point, but also enable him to fulfill his function most serviceably as a citizen of a great free republic. Such an aim it seems not altogether unreasonable to ask. Many Negroes will undoubtedly for many years find their true economic place as domestic servants, many will be and should be farmhands; but no scheme of education whatsoever should be devised that would logically force every Negro boy or girl into such occupations as these whatever may be the individual capacity or desire.
In Negro schools accordingly we ask first of all for that education which will understand that all individuals are not alike and that will so plan the course of study for each student as to enable him ultimately to be of most service to his fellowmen. Logically no set program of study can do this. The student's playtime as well as his work time should be most carefully supervised. Here is a budding machinist. His true bent should, by some scientific test, be manifest to his principal or dean after just a few months of acquaintance. A special course of study should be built up for him. His reading should be so studied as to vary articles on mechanics with such fiction as would awaken his imagination. He should be taken to visit great industrial plants so as to see how they are operated, and any inventive faculty that he possesses should be encouraged. Here again is a bookish lad, one who seems to study always and who never wants to play. One instructor would inspire him along the line of history or literature or art, as the case might require, while the physical director would (without the boy's realizing it) seek until he found some form of exercise into which the boy would enter with enthusiasm and which would save him from undue introspection and generally look to his physical well-being. Whatever may be the special field, the training should be absolutely thorough. We should rather see a boy plane a board correctly than have him work a problem in trigonometry incorrectly; and on the other hand we should rather see a student construe Homer with precision than keep a dairy that is not perfectly clean.
Any such education as this of course calls for experts, and we are thus led on to our second point. We ask that the teachers in Negro schools and colleges should in deed and in truth be specialists. He who would teach any American youth in the new day, and certainly any Negro American youth, should be a genuine psychologist and sociologist and a large-hearted Christian man at the same time that he is a most thorough student in his own department. By "specialist" we do not mean a man who in English would count up the infinitives in Gower's poems, but one who in grammar, for instance, could bring from a broad scholarly background such a capacity for illustration as would inspire his students to be honestly more careful in their speaking or writing. The teacher of geometry would be one who could genuinely teach boys to think better; and with the true teacher of Latin, boys would have no desire to be dishonest. Whatever is taught should be dynamic; now as never before it must justify itself in terms of human life. Such instructors for our youth would call for such an outlay for education as has not yet been dreamed of. They could not be ready, however, until they had passed through a long period of preparation; and for such an investment they should later of course be adequately paid. Along with better teachers would go better equipment generally. Mr. Carnegie has given several library buildings, for instance. We wish now that somebody would give some books to put in them. More than one of the Negro colleges have no regular library appropriation. Whenever a book is bought it must be taken out of current funds and thus be stolen from some other legitimate use. And yet some people presume to sneer at what these institutions have done!
The third matter is a large and subtle one. It has to do with the whole moral and spiritual import of the schools in question. One of the amazing things about Negro education in the large in America is that one hears so much about boards and units and courses of study and so little about deeper essentials. Aside from the curriculum, what is the atmosphere that a boy breathes as soon as he sets foot on a college campus? Is he trained in honesty, in politeness, in high ideals of speech, in lofty conceptions of character? Does he have to obey orders? Is he taught to be neat, prompt, and industrious? Such questions are of things too often taken for granted, and too often lacking. We need new emphasis on the whole missionary impulse in education. In the providence of God, but through no effort of his own, the freedman in the decades after the Civil War had the benefit of the labors of consecrated men and women who served, sometimes even without pay, for his salvation. Cravath at Fisk, Graves at Morehouse, Tupper at Shaw, Ware at Atlanta, Armstrong at Hampton, and Packard and Giles at Spelman are names that should ever be recalled with thanksgiving and praise. These men and women were not people of means. They labored often with the most inadequate facilities. And yet somehow they had the key to the eternal verities. They were earnest, efficient, and true, and to them a human soul was worth more than the kingdoms of this world.
Such consecrated workers, however, have now become rarer and rarer. Materialism and commercialism are abroad in the land. Segregation and proscription and injustice abound. We plead now that in all the disappointments and distractions of the new day our teachers shall at least remember the faith and high ideals of the pioneers, and remain close to God.
To train our boys in the virtues of citizenship and at the same time in knowledge of the rights of others; to teach them respect for others at the same time that they cultivate their own self-respect; to teach them the value of scholarship and also to let them know when scholarship must become dynamic; to teach them to work, to love, to sing, to have faith, even when they see wrong all around them – this is a task calling for all one has of Christianity, of scholarship, and of delicacy.
