The Future of the American NegroWashington, Booker T.
History
The Future of the American Negro
Washington, Booker T.
African Americans
Much would have been done toward laying a sound foundation for general
prosperity if some attention had been spent in this direction. General
education itself has no bearing on the subject at issue, because,
while there is no well-established public school system in either of
these countries, yet large numbers of men of both Hayti and Santo
Domingo have been educated in France for generations. This is
especially true of Hayti. The education has been altogether in the
direction of _belles lettres_, however, and practically little in the
direction of industrial and scientific education.
It is a matter of common knowledge that Hayti has to send abroad even
to secure engineers for her men-of-war, for plans for her bridges and
other work requiring technical knowledge and skill. I should very much
regret to see any such condition obtain in any large measure as
regards the coloured people in the South, and yet this will be our
fate if industrial education is much longer neglected. We have spent
much time in the South in educating men and women in letters alone,
too, and must now turn our attention more than ever toward educating
them so as to supply their wants and needs. It is more lamentable to
see educated people unable to support themselves than to see
uneducated people in the same condition. Ambition all along this line
must be stimulated.
If educated men and women of the race will see and acknowledge the
necessity of practical industrial training and go to work with a zeal
and determination, their example will be followed by others, who are
now without ambition of any kind.
The race cannot hope to come into its own until the young coloured men
and women make up their minds to assist in the general development
along these lines. The elder men and women trained in the hard school
of slavery, and who so long possessed all of the labour, skilled and
unskilled, of the South, are dying out; their places must be filled by
their children, or we shall lose our hold upon these occupations.
Leaders in these occupations are needed now more than ever.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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