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."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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