African Americans; African Americans -- Politics and government -- 20th century; African Americans -- Social conditions -- To 1964
days, has so dampened the faith of thinking Negroes in recent educational
movements, as the fact that such movements have been accompanied by
ridicule and denouncement and decrying of those very institutions of
higher training which made the Negro public school possible, and make
Negro industrial schools thinkable. It was Fisk, Atlanta, Howard and
Straight, those colleges born of the faith and sacrifice of the
abolitionists, that placed in the black schools of the South the 30,000
teachers and more, which some, who depreciate the work of these higher
schools, are using to teach their own new experiments. If Hampton,
Tuskegee and the hundred other industrial schools prove in the future to
be as successful as they deserve to be, then their success in training
black artisans for the South, will be due primarily to the white colleges
of the North and the black colleges of the South, which trained the
teachers who to-day conduct these institutions. There was a time when the
American people believed pretty devoutly that a log of wood with a boy at
one end and Mark Hopkins at the other, represented the highest ideal of
human training. But in these eager days it would seem that we have changed
all that and think it necessary to add a couple of saw-mills and a hammer
to this outfit, and, at a pinch, to dispense with the services of Mark
Hopkins.
I would not deny, or for a moment seem to deny, the paramount necessity of
teaching the Negro to work, and to work steadily and skillfully; or seem
to depreciate in the slightest degree the important part industrial
schools must play in the accomplishment of these ends, but I _do_ say, and
insist upon it, that it is industrialism drunk with its vision of success,
to imagine that its own work can be accomplished without providing for the
training of broadly cultured men and women to teach its own teachers, and
to teach the teachers of the public schools.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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