Darkwater: Voices from Within the VeilDu Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt)
General
Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt)
African Americans; United States -- Race relations
Remember, too, that in such frank explanation you are speaking in nine
cases out of ten to a good deal clearer understanding than you think and
that the child-mind has what your tired soul may have lost faith
in,--the Power and the Glory.
Out of little, unspoiled souls rise up wonderful resources and healing
balm. Once the colored child understands the white world's attitude and
the shameful wrong of it, you have furnished it with a great life
motive,--a power and impulse toward good which is the mightiest thing
man has. How many white folk would give their own souls if they might
graft into their children's souls a great, moving, guiding ideal!
With this Power there comes, in the transfiguring soul of childhood, the
Glory: the vision of accomplishment, the lofty ideal. Once let the
strength of the motive work, and it becomes the life task of the parent
to guide and to shape the ideal; to raise it from resentment and revenge
to dignity and self-respect, to breadth and accomplishment, to human
service; to beat back every thought of cringing and surrender.
Here, at last, we can speak with no hesitation, with no lack of faith.
For we know that as the world grows better there will be realized in our
children's lives that for which we fight unfalteringly, but vainly now.
So much for the problem of the home and our own dark children. Now let
us look beyond the pale upon the children of the wide world. What is the
real lesson of the life of Coleridge-Taylor? It is this: humanly
speaking it was sheer accident that this boy developed his genius. We
have a right to assume that hundreds and thousands of boys and girls
today are missing the chance of developing unusual talents because the
chances have been against them; and that indeed the majority of the
children of the world are not being systematically fitted for their life
work and for life itself. Why?
Many seek the reason in the content of the school program. They
feverishly argue the relative values of Greek, mathematics, and manual
training, but fail with singular unanimity in pointing out the
fundamental cause of our failure in human education: That failure is due
to the fact that we aim not at the full development of the child, but
that the world regards and always has regarded education first as a
means of buttressing the established order of things rather than
improving it. And this is the real reason why strife, war, and
revolution have marked the onward march of humanity instead of reason
and sound reform. Instead of seeking to push the coming generation ahead
of our pitiful accomplishment, we insist that it march behind. We say,
morally, that high character is conformity to present public opinion; we
say industrially that the present order is best and that children must
be trained to perpetuate it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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