OBJECTIONS TO EDUCATION

In the two previous chapters white and negro education have been described as parts of the social and governmental system of the South; there, as in the North, the tacit presumption is that education is desirable, that it is essential for moral and material progress, that both the parents and the community must make great sacrifices to secure it. White education hardly needs defense in the South; most of the people wish to see the opportunities of life open to promising young people, believe in the spread of ideas, and look on education as the foundation of the republic.

Does the principle, as in the North, apply to all the elements of population? Is the education of the Negro as clearly necessary as that of the White? Should the same method apply to the training of the two races? On the contrary, there is in most Southern white minds hesitation as to the degree of education suitable for the blacks; and a widespread disbelief in any but rudimentary training, and that to be directed toward industrial rather than intellectual ends.

The first objection to negro education is that the race is incapable of any but elementary education and that all beyond is wasted effort. Has the Negro as a race an inferior intellectual quality, a disability to respond to opportunities? With all the effort to educate the race, and with due regard to the fact that the proportion who can read and write is rapidly rising, the Negroes are alarmingly ignorant, the most illiterate group in the whole United States; and therefore they need special attention. In addition, they are subjected to the smallest degree of home training, and enjoy the smallest touch with those concentrated forces of public opinion which force the community upward. Some of the Negroes seek intellectual life at home, for occasionally you see a family grouped about the fire with the father reading a book to them; but hardly any of the rural people and probably few of the townsmen own a shelf of books and magazines and newspapers. Their journalism is in general rather crude. A class of patent inside newspapers is carried on by the heads of one or the other negro order; and they contain good advice, news of the order, advertisements of patent hair dressings which “make harsh, stubborn, kinky, curly hair soft, pliant and glossy”; and descriptions of the experiments of surgeons in making black skin white by the use of X-rays. Some of these papers are well edited, and all of them have discovered the great secret of modern journalism, which is to put as many proper names as possible into the paper.

One difficulty with the negro newspaper is that it cannot fill up entirely with colored news; and on general questions and the progress of the world the regular white newspapers, with their greater resources, are certain to be more readable. Still, few Negroes outside the cities read either weekly or daily papers regularly; and one of the necessities for raising the race is to cultivate the newspaper habit. To be sure, there is a type of highly successful white journalism that does not edify the white race. Yet even a bad newspaper cannot help telling people what is going on in the world. In spite of its freight of crime, such a paper carries people out of themselves, makes them feel a greater interest for mankind, brings in a throng of new impressions and experiences, helps to educate them.

Outside of newspapers the Negroes have access to the written works of members of their own race, which are at the same time a proof of literary capacity and a means of teaching the people. Of course it is always urged that such men as Booker Washington, the educator and uplifter; Dunbar, the pathetic humorist; Chesnutt, author of stories of Southern life that rival Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page; DuBois, who in literary power is one of the most notable Americans of this generation; Kelly Miller, the keen satirist; and Sinclair, the defender of his people—prove nothing as to the genius of the races because they are mulattoes; but they and their associates are listed among the Negroes, included in the censure on negro colleges, and furnish the most powerful argument for the education of at least a part of the race. Few men of genius among the Negroes are pure blacks; but it is not true that the lighter the color the more genius they possess. So far as the effects of a prolonged and thorough education are concerned, those men from any point of view prove that the mulattoes, who are perhaps a fifth of the whole, are entitled to a thorough education. Has not DuBois the right to say:

“I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?”

On the other hand, the history of the last thirty-five years proves conclusively that the great mass of negro children can assimilate the ordinary education of the common schools. Mr. Glenn, recently Superintendent of Education in Georgia, declares that “the negro is ... teachable and susceptible to the same kind of mental improvement characteristic to any other race,” and Thomas Nelson Page admits that the “Negro may individually attain a fair, and in uncommon instances a considerable degree, of mental development.” About three fourths of the young people have already learned to read.

Many people intimately acquainted with the race assert that, although about as quick and receptive as white children up to twelve or fourteen years of age, the negro children advance no further; that their minds thenceforward show an arrested development. Certainly anyone who visits their schools, city or rural, public or private, is struck with the slowness of the average child of all ages to take in new impressions, and with the intellectual helplessness of many of the older children. Whether this is due to the backwardness of the race, or to the uncouthness of home life, or to the want of other kinds of stimulus outside of school, is hard to determine. That there is any general arrested development is contradicted by thousands of capable youths, mulatto and full blood.

The very slowness of the black children is a reason for giving them the best educational chance that they can take. That is why the Southern Education Association which met in 1907 passed a unanimous resolution that: “We endorse the accepted policy of the States of the South in providing educational facilities for the youth of the negro race, believing that whatever the ultimate solution of this grievous problem may be, education must be an important factor in that solution.”

Another point of view is represented by the statement of Thomas Nelson Page that the great majority of the Southern Whites “unite further in the opinion that education such as they receive in the public schools, so far from appearing to uplift them, appears to be without any appreciable beneficial effect upon their morals or their standing as citizens.” Governor Vardaman, of Mississippi, as late as 1908 recommended the legislature to strike out all appropriations for negro schools on the ground that “Money spent to-day for the maintenance of the public school for negroes is robbery of the white man and a waste upon the negro. It does him no good, but it does him harm. You take it from the toiling white men and women; you rob the white child of the advantages it would afford him, and you spend it upon the negro in an effort to make of the negro that which God Almighty never intended should be made, and which man cannot accomplish.” He asserts that the most serious negro crime is due to “The manifestation of the negro’s aspiration for social equality, encouraged largely by the character of free education in vogue, which the State is levying tribute upon the white people to maintain.”

In Cordova, S. C., in 1907, a business man who had visited a colored school and spoken encouragingly to the pupils, felt compelled by public sentiment to print an apology and a promise never to do anything so dreadful again. This criticism comes not simply from demagogues like Vardaman or weaklings like the Cordovan; intelligent planters will tell you that they are opposed to negro education because it makes criminals; and think their accusation proven by instances of forgeries by Negroes, which of course they could not have committed had they been unable to write. A superintendent of schools in a Southern city holds that even grammar school education unsteadies the boys so that they leave home and drift away; though he candidly acknowledges that it keeps the girls out of trouble and provides a respectable calling as teachers to many negro women.

Side by side with this feeling of disappointment or hostility, as the case may be, is the conviction of most Southern people that enormous sacrifices have been made for the negro schools. Thomas Dixon, Jr., with his accustomed exactness and candor, wrote a few years ago: “We have spent about $800,000,000 on Negro education since the War.” These figures show a poverty of imagination: it would be just as easy to write “eight thousand millions” as “eight hundred.” The estimate of the Bureau of Education is that in the thirty-five years since 1870 about $155,000,000 has been spent to support common schools for the negro race, which is about a fifth of the amount spent on the white common schools in the same period, and not a hundredth of the supposed present wealth of the South; in addition, heavy expenditures are made out of the public treasury for secondary and higher education in which the Negro has a slender share.

Another more specious complaint with regard to Negro education is that it is an unreasonable burden on the Whites to make them pay for negro education, and repeated attempts have been made to lay it down as a principle that the Negroes shall have for their schools only what they pay in taxes. Thus Governor Hoke Smith, of Georgia, says: “Is it not folly to tax the people of Georgia for the purpose of conducting a plan of education for the Negro which fails to recognize the difference between the Negro and the white man? Negro education should have reference to the Negro’s future work, and especially in the rural districts it is practicable to make that education really the training for farm labor. If it is given this direction it will not be necessary to tax the white man’s property for the purpose. A distribution of the school fund according to the taxes paid by each race would meet the requirements.”

In at least two states this idea has been to some extent carried out. In Kentucky the state school fund is apportioned among the school children without regard to race, but for local purposes the Negroes appear to be thrown on their own payments. And in Maryland, under various statutes from 1865 to 1888, all the taxes collected from Negroes were devoted to negro schools, the state adding a lump sum per annum.

This point of view involves a notion of the purpose of education and the reasons for public schools so different from that which animates the North that it is hard to deal with the question impartially. Massachusetts makes the largest expenditure per capita of its population in the whole Union, almost the largest expenditure per pupil, and certainly the largest aggregate expenditure, except the more populous states of New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio; Massachusetts spends on schools two fifths as much every year as all the fifteen former slaveholding states put together. In that state people think that school taxes are not money spent but money saved: that they get back every cent of their $17,000,000 a year, several times over, in the increased efficiency of the people, in the diminution of crime, in the addition to the happiness of life. Schooling is insurance, schooling is the savings bank that can’t break, schooling is that sane kind of poor relief which prevents poverty. The last thing which any Massachusetts community thinks of reducing is school expenditure!

Furthermore, no principle is so ingrained in the Northern mind as that since education is for the public benefit, every taxpayer must contribute in proportion to his property. The rich corporations in New York or Pittsburg, childless old couples, bachelor owners of great tracts of real estate, wealthy bondholders educating their children in private schools, never dream of disputing the school tax on the ground that they, as individuals, make no demands on the school fund.

Still less would it enter the mind of any Northern community to divide itself into social classes, each of which should maintain its own schools. Such a proposition would go near to bring about a revolution. First of all, the non-taxpayer is a taxpayer; it is the pons asinorum of finance that the poor are more heavily taxed in proportion to their means than any other class of the community, through indirect taxes and the enhanced rents of the real estate which they occupy. As a matter of fact, all the taxes eventually paid by the Negroes in the South probably amount only to a third or a half of the three millions or so spent upon their schools. What of that? Are the Southern states the only communities in the country in which a comparatively small part of the population pays most of the taxes; it is altogether probable that in Boston or New York the payers of nine tenths of the taxes do not furnish one tenth of the school children. Who educates the Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, Greek, and Syrian children of those cities? The well-to-do part of the community, and it does it uncomplainingly, with its eyes open, gladly. The South likewise is educating the Negroes principally for the advantage of the white race, for the efficiency of the whole region in which the Whites have the greatest stake, and from which they derive the greater benefit, material and moral.

One of the most obstinate Southern conventional beliefs, widely held, constantly asserted, and diametrically contrary to the facts, is that the Negroes have been spoiled by classical education which has totally unfitted them for ordinary life. Thus even Murphy holds that “We have been giving the Negro an educational system which is but ill adapted even to ourselves. It has been too academic, too much unrelated to practical life, for the children of the Caucasian.” The intelligent man on the cars will tell you that the negro college graduates with their Greek and Latin are spoiling the whole race. Never was there such an advertisement of the vigor of college education; since the official statistics show that the actual number of Negroes studying Greek and Latin in 1906, both in the secondary and higher schools (except the public schools), was 1,077 men and 641 women, a total of 1,718 persons. With some possible additions from those in high schools, and higher institutions, the total number of colored people who are now taking any kind of collegiate training is not above 3,000, of whom only 180 took degrees in 1906; there are also 4,500 normal students, of whom 1,270 graduated. Of professional students there were in all (1906) about 1,900 Negroes, a third of whom were in theology and another third in medicine. Of negro colleges and technical schools and private academies, 127 are enumerated, ranging all the way from the Arkadelphia Baptist Academy with 50 students, up to Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute with 1,621 students; but in all such colleges those ranked as taking a college course are comparatively few.

These figures throw light on the further conventional belief that it is the Northern endowed colleges that have made the trouble in the colored race, through efforts to teach the colored youth that they were the equals of the Whites. By far the greater number of Negroes who are really getting training above the secondary grade in the South are in the state-sustained institutions—many of them, of course, still of low grade; and full credit should be given to the South for developing this type of negro education, of which the North knows little. State Agricultural, Normal or Industrial colleges are to be found in every former slaveholding state, except Arkansas and Tennessee, and together include more than 5,000 students.

The attacks, chiefly from Southern Whites, upon negro college education have of late been transformed into a controversy as to the relative importance of academic and industrial training. The schools of the Tuskegee type furnished manual work to their students apparently not in the first instance because it was thought to be educative, but because they had to earn part of their living. This is apparently the main source of the bitter hostility of Dixon to the work of Tuskegee. The form his criticism takes is that Booker Washington, instead of teaching the Negro to be a good workman, is training him to take independent responsibility; that if he is a good workman he will compete with the Whites, and if he is a good leader he will aim to make the Negroes a force in the community. This line of objection to education of the black is really based upon the belief that they are a race capable of education, that the Negro is not a clod, but may be improved by the systematic efforts of superior men; he has in him the potentiality of vital force.

Meanwhile throughout the country has been running a current in favor of a more practical education than that furnished by the ordinary schools, and the result has been the Technical, Manual Training, and Commercial schools scattered throughout the Northern states. The controversy is not at all confined to questions of negro education. The Southern white people have been well inclined toward the new type of education for Negroes, although on the whole much preferring the academic type for their own children.

A hot discussion has raged as to which of the two systems is most necessary to the Negro. The champions of the academic side dwell upon the right of the Negro to the same type of education as the white man. In many white minds lies a lurking feeling that academic negro training leads to discontent with present conditions; and that industrial training is more likely to bring about contentment with the things that are. In fact, both types are most necessary. The fifty millions poured into the South by Northern generosity would have been worth while if they had done no more than maintain a Hampton which could train a Booker Washington. His ideas of thrift, attention to business, building decent houses, putting money into banks, are ideals specially needed by the negro race; but they also need the DuBois ideal of a share in the world’s accumulated learning; of the development of their minds; of preparation to educate their fellows. That a supply must be kept up of people acquainted with the humanities, having some knowledge of literature, able to express themselves cogently, competent to train the succeeding generations, is as true for the negro race as for any other; if it is a low race it has the greater need for high training for its best members.

The two difficulties with manual training for either Whites or Negroes are, first, that it may be simply practice in handicrafts, without intimate knowledge of tools or processes, possessing no more educative value than the apprenticeship of a carpenter or a blacksmith. The other danger is that the manual part will be dilettante; and anyone who has ever visited any large industrial school for Whites realizes how hard it is to keep students busy with things that actually tell. The weekly hours available for shop work where there are large classes are too few to induce skill. Hence manual training may be simply a means of keeping young men and women in elevating associations for a series of years, without much positive education. The success of Hampton and Tuskegee and like institutions is due to a judicious mixture of book learning and hand learning, backed up by the personality of the founders, General Armstrong in Virginia and Booker Washington in Alabama, and of their successors and aids.

Against both industrial and academic training many people in the South feel a strong prejudice, because they believe that both tend to produce leaders who may dangerously organize the fellows of their race. A favorite form of slander has been to charge that the graduates of colleges furnish the criminals, and practically the worst criminals, of the negro race. Never was there a more senseless or a more persistent delusion. The total number of male graduates of all the Southern colleges during the last forty years is not above two thousand, besides perhaps five hundred graduates of Northern colleges who have found their way into the South. Many of those institutions have kept track of their graduates and are able to assert that the cases of serious crime among them are remarkably few, no more in proportion probably than among the graduates of Southern and Northern colleges for Whites. The moral effect of the colleges among Negroes is in the same direction as among Whites; the students include the more determined of the race or the children of the more determined. The negro college students are still only about one in one thousand of the children and young people of the race. The total number of living graduates of negro colleges or other institutions of college grade are not one in two thousand of the Negroes in the South.

It is true that even that number find it hard to establish themselves in professions or callings which can reward them for the sacrifices and efforts of their education. The negro doctors and lawyers have almost no white practice and not the best of negro practice, but there is an opening for thousands of Negroes in the development of the education of their people. The thousandth of the race in secondary schools and the two thousandth or more in colleges are enough to prove that a large number of individuals in the race are capable of and ought to have the advantages of higher training.

The denial to the Negroes of public secondary education at the expense of the state practically means that most of them will not have it at all. It is denied on the ground that it unfits boys and girls for life—exactly the argument which has been unsuccessfully brought against schools of that grade in the Northern states. It is denied on the ground that beyond twelve years of age most of the Negroes are stationary and cannot profit by a secondary education, a conclusion which does not seem justified by the experience of the few high schools and the numerous private and benevolent schools. Still more serious, the denial of secondary education means that the Negroes are deprived of the most obvious means of training for teachers of their own race.

In the last analysis most of the objections to negro education come down to the assertion that it puts the race above the calling whereunto God hath appointed it. The argument goes back to the unconscious presumption that the Negro was created to work the white man’s field, and that even a little knowledge makes him ambitious to do something else.

One thing is certain: that no community can afford to neglect the academic side of education. The schools are to many people the only and the final appeal to the higher side of life, the only touch with the world’s stock of great thoughts. The accusation is brought against the best Northern city schools that they are not practical, because they deal too much with literature and history and science. The negro child, like the white child, needs to have its mind aroused to the large things in the world; needs the education of thinking, as well as of learning; as DuBois puts it: “To seek to make the blacksmith a scholar is almost as silly as the more modern scheme of making the scholar a blacksmith; almost, but not quite.”

On the side of the Negro there are other complaints. One is that his education has not had a fair trial; that the dominant South which lays and expends the taxes has not dealt with the Negro on an equal footing with white children; that the per capita expenditure on the black children in school is probably not more than a third that for white children; that the negro schools have often been exploited by white politicians who have put in their own favorites as teachers; that even where the best intentions prevail, the schools are manned by incompetent teachers; nowhere do the rural colored people enjoy an education to the degree and with the kind of teachers and appliances common in the country districts of the North; the race can hardly be spoiled by education, for it has never had it, not for a single year. Only about a third of the negro children are at school on a given school day. Few of their rural schools hold more than five months, many not more than three, some not at all; and in from sixty to one hundred days in the year, irregularly placed, with teachers on the average not competent for the exceedingly elementary work that they do, the wonder is that children ever go a second day or acquire the rudiments of learning; yet many of them learn to read fluently, to write a good hand, and to do simple arithmetical problems. A race must have some intellectual quickness to pick up anything out of such a poor system. The arguments in favor of negro education have so far been convincing to every Southern community, since negro common schools are maintained and considerable amounts are spent for secondary and higher education.

The arguments against negro education destroy each other; they assume both that the Negro is too little and too much affected by the education that he receives. On one side we are told that he is incapable of anything more than the rudiments; on the other side, that education is a potent force making the Negro dangerous to the world. The incompetent can never be made dangerous by training into competence. Education cannot change the race weaknesses of the Negro; but it can give a better chance to the best endowed.