CHAPTER VIII.EDUCATION AND THE RACE.[With most of the present sources of power controlled by the white race it behooves my race as well as the other subject races to learn the wisdom of the weak and to develop to the fullest that organ whereby weakness has been able to overcome strength; namely, the intellect. It is not with our teeth that we will tear the white man out of our ancestral land. It isn’t with our jaws that we can ring from his hard hands consideration and respect. It must be done by the upper and not by the lower parts of our heads. Therefore, I have insisted ever since my entry into the arena of racial discussion that we Negroes must take to reading, study and the development of intelligence as we have never done before. In this respect we must pattern ourselves after the Japanese who have gone to school to Europe but have never used Europe’s education to make them the apes of Europe’s culture. They have absorbed, adopted, transformed and utilized, and we Negroes must do the same. The three editorials in this chapter and the article which follows them were written to indicate from time to time the duty of the transplanted African in this respect.]Reading for KnowledgeSome time ago we wrote an editorial entitled “Read, Read, Read!” We touch upon the same subject again, because in our recent trip to Washington we found thousands of people who are eager to get in touch with the stored-up knowledge which the books contain, but do not know just where to turn for it. In New York the same situation obtains, and no help is afforded by the papers of our race.The reason is that some of our newspaper editors don’t read and don’t know beans themselves. James W. Johnson is one of the notable exceptions. We were cheered up a good deal by noting his recent editorial advice to our “leaders” to read Arthur Henderson’s “The Aims of Labor.” But that was six months after the editor ofThe Voicehad been telling thousands of the “led” all about it and about the British Labor Party and the Russian Bolsheviki in his outdoor talks in Harlem.But there is no doubt that the New Negro is producing a New Leadership and that this new leadership will be based not upon the ignorance of the masses, but upon their intelligence. The old leadership was possible partly because the masses were ignorant. Today the masses include educated laymen who have studied science, theology, history and economics, not, perhaps in college but, nevertheless, deeply and down to date. These young men and women are not going to follow fools and, indeed, are not going to follow any one, blindly. They want a reason for the things that they are asked to do and to respect. The others, the so-called Common People, are beginning to read and understand. As we sat in the great John Wesley A.M.E. Zion Church in Washington one Sunday night, and heard the cultured black minister speak to his people on literature, science, history and sociology, and yet so simply that even the dullest could catch the meat and inspiration of his great ideas, we could not help saying as we went out of the church: “Depend upon it, these people will demand as much from their next minister.” In fact our race will demand as much from all its leaders. And they will demand no less for themselves.So, with a glad heart, we reprint the following paragraphs from our earlier editorial trusting that our readers everywhere may find them helpful:As a people our bent for books is not encouraging. We mostly read trash. And this is true not only of our rank and file but even of our leaders. When we heard Kelly Miller address the Sunrise Club of New York at a Broadway hotel two or three years ago, we were shocked at the ignorance of modern science and modern thought which his remarks displayed. His biology was of the brand of Pliny who lived about eighteen hundred years ago. For him Darwin and Spencer and Jacques Loeb had never existed nor written. His ignorance of the A.B.C.’s of astronomy and geology was pitiful. If this is true of the leaders to whom our reading masses look, what can we expect from those reading masses? The masses must be taught to love good books. But to love them they must first know them. The handicaps placed on us in America are too great to allow us to ignore the help which we can get from that education which we get out of school for ourselves—the only one that is really worth while.Without the New Knowledge the New Negro is no better than the old. And this new knowledge will be found in the books. Therefore, it would be well if every Negro of the new model were to make up his (or her) mind to get the essentials of modern science and modern thought as they are set down in the books which may be easily had. Don’t talk about Darwin and Spencer: read them!To help the good work along we append the following list of books that are essential. When youmasterthese you will have a better “education” than is found in nine-tenths of the graduates of the average American college.“Modern Science and Modern Thought,” by Samuel Laing; “The Origin of Species” and “The Descent of Man,” by Charles Darwin; “The Principles of Sociology” and “First Principles,” by Herbert Spencer; “The Childhood of the World” and “The Childhood of Religion,” by Edward Clodd; “Anthropology,” by E. B. Tylor (very easy to read and a work of standard information on Races, Culture and the origins of Religion, Art and Science); Buckle’s “History of Civilization”; Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”; “The Martyrdom of Man,” by Winwood Reade; the books on Africa by Livingstone and Mungo Park, and “The Mind of Primitive Man,” by Franz Boas. —Sept., 1918.Education and the RaceIn the dark days of Russia, when the iron heel of Czarist despotism was heaviest on the necks of the people, those who wished to rule decreed that the people should remain ignorant. Loyalty to interests that were opposed to theirs was the prevailing public sentiment of the masses. In vain did the pioneers of freedom for the masses perish under the knout and the rigors of Siberia. They sacrificed to move the masses, but the masses, strong in their love of liberty, lacked the head to guide the moving feet to any successful issue. It was then that Leo Tolstoi and the other intelligentsia began to carry knowledge to the masses. Not only in the province of Tula, but in every large city, young men of university experience would assemble in secret classes of instruction, teaching them to read, to write, to know, to think and to love knowledge. Most of this work was underground at first. But it took. Thousands of educated persons gave themselves to this work-without pay: their only hope of reward lay in the future effectiveness of an instructed mass movement.What were the results? As knowledge spread, enthusiasm was backed by brains. The Russian revolution began to be sure of itself. The workingmen of the cities studied the thing that they were “up against,” gauged their own weakness and strength as well as their opponents’. The despotism of the Czar could not provoke them to a mass movement before they were ready and had the means; and when at last they moved, they swept not only the Czar’s regime but the whole exploiting system upon which it stood into utter oblivion.What does this mean to the Negro of the Western world? It may mean much, or little: that depends on him. If other men’s experiences have value for the New Negro Manhood Movement it will seek now to profit by them and to bottom the new fervor of faith in itself with the solid support of knowledge. The chains snap from the limbs of the young giant as he rises, stretches himself, and sits up to take notice. But let him, for his future’s sake, insist on taking notice. To drop the figure of speech, we Negroes who have shown ourmanhoodmust back it by ourmind. This world, at present, is a white man’s world—even in Africa. We, being what we are, want to shake loose the chains of his control from our corner of it. We must either accept his domination and our inferiority, or we must contend against it. But we go up to win; and whether we carry on that contest with ballots, bullets or business, we can not win from the white man unless we know at least as much as the white man knows. For, after all, knowledgeispower.But that isn’t all. What kind of knowledge is it that enables white men to rule black men’s lands? Is it the knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, philosophy or literature? It isn’t. It is the knowledge of explosives and deadly compounds: that is chemistry. It is the knowledge which can build ships, bridges, railroads and factories: that is engineering. It is the knowledge which harnesses the visible and invisible forces of the earth and air and water: that is science, modern science. And that is what the New Negro must enlist upon his side. Let us, like the Japanese, become a race of knowledge-getters, preserving our racial soul, but digesting into it all that we can glean or grasp, so that when Israel goes up out of bondage he will be “skilled in all the learning of the Egyptians” and competent to control his destiny.Those who have knowledge must come down from their Sinais and give it to the common people. Theirs is the great duty to simplify and make clear, to light the lamps of knowledge that the eyes of their race may see; that the feet of their people may not stumble. This is the task of the Talented Tenth.To the masses of our people we say: Read! Get the reading habit; spend your spare time not so much in training the feet to dance, as in training the head to think. And, at the very outset, draw the line between books of opinion and books of information. Saturate your minds with the latter and you will be forming your own opinions, which will be worth ten times more to you than the opinions of the greatest minds on earth. Go to school whenever you can. If you can’t go in the day, go at night. But remember always that the best college is that on your bookshelf: the best education is that on the inside of your own head. For in this work-a-day world people ask first, not “Where were you educated?” but “What do you know?” and next, “What can you do with it?” And if we of the Negro race can master modern knowledge—the kind that counts—we will be able to win for ourselves the priceless gifts of freedom and power, and we will be able to hold them against the world.The Racial Roots of CultureEducation is the name which we give to that process by which the ripened generation brings to bear upon the rising generation the stored-up knowledge and experience of the past and present generations to fit it for the business of life. If we are not to waste money and energy, our educational systems should shape our youth for what we intend them to become.We Negroes, in a world in which we are the under dog, must shape our youth for living in such a world. Shall we shape them mentally to accept the status of under-dog as their predestined lot? Or shall we shape them into men and women fit for a free world? To do the former needs nothing more than continuing as we are. To do the latter is to shape their souls for continued conflict with a theory and practice in which most of the white world that surrounds them are at one.The educational system in the United States and the West Indies was shaped by white people for white youth, and from their point of view, it fits their purpose well. Into this system came the children of Negro parents when chattel slavery was ended—and their relation to the problems of life was obviously different. The white boy and girl draw exclusively from the stored-up knowledge and experience of the past and present generations of white people to fit them for the business of being dominant whites in a world full of colored folk. The examples of valor and virtue on which their minds are fed are exclusively white examples. What wonder, then, that each generation comes to maturity with the idea imbedded in its mind that only white men are valorous and fit to rule and only white women are virtuous and entitled to chivalry, respect and protection? What wonder that they think, almost instinctively, that the Negro’s proper place, nationally and internationally, is that of an inferior? It is only what we should naturally expect.But what seems to escape attention is the fact that the Negro boy and girl, getting the same (though worse) instruction, also get from it the same notion of the Negro’s place and part in life which the white children get. Is it any wonder, then, that they so readily accept the status of inferiors; that they tend to disparage themselves, and think themselves worth while only to the extent to which they look and act and think like the whites? They know nothing of the stored-up knowledge and experience of the past and present generations of Negroes in their ancestral lands, and conclude there is no such store of knowledge and experience. They readily accept the assumption that Negroes have never been anything but slaves and that they never had a glorious past as other fallen peoples like the Greeks and Persians have. And this despite the mass of collected testimony in the works of Barth, Schweinfurth, Mary Kingsley, Lady Lugard, Morel, Ludolphus, Blyden, Ellis, Ratzel, Kidd, Es-Saadi, Casely Hayford and a host of others, Negro and white.A large part of the blame for this deplorable condition must be put upon the Negro colleges like Howard, Fisk, Livingstone and Lincoln in the United States, and Codrington, Harrison and the Mico in the West Indies. These are the institutions in which our cultural ideals and educational systems are fashioned for the shaping of the minds of the future generations of Negroes. It cannot be expected that it shall begin with the common schools; for, in spite of logic, educational ideas and ideals spread from above downwards. If we are ever to enter into the confraternity of colored peoples it should seem the duty of our Negro colleges to drop their silly smatterings of “little Latin and less Greek” and establish modern courses in Hausa and Arabic, for these are the living languages of millions of our brethern in modern Africa. Courses in Negro history and the culture of West African peoples, at least, should be given in every college that claims to be an institution of learning for Negroes. Surely an institution of learning for Negroes should not fail to be also an institution of Negro learning. —The New Negro, Sept. 1919.The New Knowledge for the New NegroQuite a good deal of unnecessary dispute has been going on these days among the guardians of the inner temple as to just which form of worship is necessary at the shrine of the Goddess Knowledge. In plain English, the pundits seem to be at odds in regard to the kind of education which the Negro should have. Of course, it has long been known that the educational experts of white America were at odds with ours on the same subject; now, however, ours seem to be at odds among themselves.The essence of the present conflict is not the easy distinction between “lower” and “higher” education, which really has no meaning in terms of educational principles, but it is rather “the knowledge of things” versus “the knowledge of words.” The same conflict has been waged in England from the days of Huxley’s youth to the later nineties when the London Board Schools were recognized and set the present standard of efficiency for the rest of England. The present form of the question is, “Shall education consist of Latin and Greek, literature and metaphysics, r of modern science, modern languages and modern thought?” The real essence of the question is whether we shall train our children to grapple effectively with the problem of life that lies before them, or to look longingly back upon the past standards of life and thought and consider themselves a special class because of this.If education be, as we assert, a training for life, it must of course have its roots in the past. But so has the art of the blacksmith, the tailor, the carpenter, the bookbinder or the priest. What the classicists really seek is the domination of the form, method and aim of that training by the form, methods and aims of an earlier age.Classics, Clerics and Class CulturePerhaps an explanation of that earlier training may serve to give the real innerness of the classicists’ position so that ordinary people may understand it better than the classicists themselves seem to do. In the Middle Ages, the schools of Western Europe and the subject matter of the education given in them were based upon the Latin “disciplines.” Western Europe had no literature, no learning, no science of its own. It was the church—particularly the monasteries—to which men had to go to get such training as was obtainable in a barbarous age. This training was, of course, given in the tongue of the church which was Latin, the clerical language. The contact of medieval Europeans with the dark-skinned Arabs added Greek and the knowledge of Greek literature and philosophy to the earlier medieval discipline. Imbedded in this was the substance of science nurtured by the Arabs and added to by them.The ruling classes kept their children within the treadmill of these two literatures and languages and it came to be thought that this was the indispensable training for a gentleman. But:—“Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.”**We are in a different age, an age in which the nation, not the church, gives training to all children, and not merely to the children of aristocrats who will grow up to do nothing. The children of the people must become the doers of all that is done in the world of tomorrow, and they must be trained for this doing. Today in England, not Oxford, the home of lost ideals, but such institutions as the University of London, are the sources of that training which gives England its physicians, surgeons, inventors, business men and artists.Classicists Ignorant of Latin and GreekBut the noise of the classicists may be rudely stopped by merely pointing out the hollowness of their watch words. These persons would have us believe that Latin and Greek are, in their eyes, the backbone of any education that is worth while. Very well then, let us take them at their word. I make the broad assertion that not one in one thousand of them can read a page of Greek or Latin that may be set before them. I offer to put under their noses a page of Athenaeus or Horace (to say nothing of more important classical authors) and if they should be able to read and translate it at sight I shall be genuinely surprised. Let the common reader who is a man of today make the test with this little bit of Latin verse:“Exegi momentum acre perenniusRegalique situ pyramidum altius.”Let him ask some classicist to translate off-hand this common school boy’s tag from a most popular author and note whether they can place the author or translate the lines. Here is another:Per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum,Tendimus in Latium.To speak in plain United States, when it comes to the showdown it will be found that those of us who argue in favor of the modern discipline (in so far as we have any knowledge of classical literature) know more about them than those whose sole defence they are.It is said by the classicists that a knowledge of Latin and Greek is necessary to an adequate comprehension of the English language. But so is the knowledge of Sanscrit, Arabic, French and Italian. And when it comes to facility and clearness of expression, it will be found that Huxley’s prose is superior to that of Matthew Arnold, and Brisbane’s superior to that of any professor of the Latin language in Harvard or Yale. So much for the ghost fighters. Requiescant in pace!The Knowledge We NeedNow, what is the knowledge which the New Negro needs most? He needs above all else a knowledge of the wider world and of the long past. But that is history, modern and ancient: History as written by Herodotus and John Bach McMaster; sociology not as conceived by Giddings, but as presented by Spencer and Ward, and anthropology as worked out by Boas and Thomas. The Negro needs also the knowledge of the best thought; but that is literature as conceived, not as a collection of flowers from the tree of life, but as its garnered fruit. And, finally, the Negro needs a knowledge of his own kind, concerning which we shall have something to say later, And the purposes of this knowledge? They are, to know our place in the human processus, to strengthen our minds by contact with the best and most useful thought-products evolved during the long rise of man from anthropoid to scientist; to inspire our souls and to lift our race industrially, commercially, intellectually to the level of the best that there is in the world about us. Fornever until the Negro’s knowledge of nitrates and engineering, of chemistry and agriculture, of history, science and business is on a level, at least, with that of the whites, will the Negro be able to measure arms successfully with them.
[With most of the present sources of power controlled by the white race it behooves my race as well as the other subject races to learn the wisdom of the weak and to develop to the fullest that organ whereby weakness has been able to overcome strength; namely, the intellect. It is not with our teeth that we will tear the white man out of our ancestral land. It isn’t with our jaws that we can ring from his hard hands consideration and respect. It must be done by the upper and not by the lower parts of our heads. Therefore, I have insisted ever since my entry into the arena of racial discussion that we Negroes must take to reading, study and the development of intelligence as we have never done before. In this respect we must pattern ourselves after the Japanese who have gone to school to Europe but have never used Europe’s education to make them the apes of Europe’s culture. They have absorbed, adopted, transformed and utilized, and we Negroes must do the same. The three editorials in this chapter and the article which follows them were written to indicate from time to time the duty of the transplanted African in this respect.]
Some time ago we wrote an editorial entitled “Read, Read, Read!” We touch upon the same subject again, because in our recent trip to Washington we found thousands of people who are eager to get in touch with the stored-up knowledge which the books contain, but do not know just where to turn for it. In New York the same situation obtains, and no help is afforded by the papers of our race.
The reason is that some of our newspaper editors don’t read and don’t know beans themselves. James W. Johnson is one of the notable exceptions. We were cheered up a good deal by noting his recent editorial advice to our “leaders” to read Arthur Henderson’s “The Aims of Labor.” But that was six months after the editor ofThe Voicehad been telling thousands of the “led” all about it and about the British Labor Party and the Russian Bolsheviki in his outdoor talks in Harlem.
But there is no doubt that the New Negro is producing a New Leadership and that this new leadership will be based not upon the ignorance of the masses, but upon their intelligence. The old leadership was possible partly because the masses were ignorant. Today the masses include educated laymen who have studied science, theology, history and economics, not, perhaps in college but, nevertheless, deeply and down to date. These young men and women are not going to follow fools and, indeed, are not going to follow any one, blindly. They want a reason for the things that they are asked to do and to respect. The others, the so-called Common People, are beginning to read and understand. As we sat in the great John Wesley A.M.E. Zion Church in Washington one Sunday night, and heard the cultured black minister speak to his people on literature, science, history and sociology, and yet so simply that even the dullest could catch the meat and inspiration of his great ideas, we could not help saying as we went out of the church: “Depend upon it, these people will demand as much from their next minister.” In fact our race will demand as much from all its leaders. And they will demand no less for themselves.
So, with a glad heart, we reprint the following paragraphs from our earlier editorial trusting that our readers everywhere may find them helpful:
As a people our bent for books is not encouraging. We mostly read trash. And this is true not only of our rank and file but even of our leaders. When we heard Kelly Miller address the Sunrise Club of New York at a Broadway hotel two or three years ago, we were shocked at the ignorance of modern science and modern thought which his remarks displayed. His biology was of the brand of Pliny who lived about eighteen hundred years ago. For him Darwin and Spencer and Jacques Loeb had never existed nor written. His ignorance of the A.B.C.’s of astronomy and geology was pitiful. If this is true of the leaders to whom our reading masses look, what can we expect from those reading masses? The masses must be taught to love good books. But to love them they must first know them. The handicaps placed on us in America are too great to allow us to ignore the help which we can get from that education which we get out of school for ourselves—the only one that is really worth while.
Without the New Knowledge the New Negro is no better than the old. And this new knowledge will be found in the books. Therefore, it would be well if every Negro of the new model were to make up his (or her) mind to get the essentials of modern science and modern thought as they are set down in the books which may be easily had. Don’t talk about Darwin and Spencer: read them!
To help the good work along we append the following list of books that are essential. When youmasterthese you will have a better “education” than is found in nine-tenths of the graduates of the average American college.
“Modern Science and Modern Thought,” by Samuel Laing; “The Origin of Species” and “The Descent of Man,” by Charles Darwin; “The Principles of Sociology” and “First Principles,” by Herbert Spencer; “The Childhood of the World” and “The Childhood of Religion,” by Edward Clodd; “Anthropology,” by E. B. Tylor (very easy to read and a work of standard information on Races, Culture and the origins of Religion, Art and Science); Buckle’s “History of Civilization”; Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”; “The Martyrdom of Man,” by Winwood Reade; the books on Africa by Livingstone and Mungo Park, and “The Mind of Primitive Man,” by Franz Boas. —Sept., 1918.
In the dark days of Russia, when the iron heel of Czarist despotism was heaviest on the necks of the people, those who wished to rule decreed that the people should remain ignorant. Loyalty to interests that were opposed to theirs was the prevailing public sentiment of the masses. In vain did the pioneers of freedom for the masses perish under the knout and the rigors of Siberia. They sacrificed to move the masses, but the masses, strong in their love of liberty, lacked the head to guide the moving feet to any successful issue. It was then that Leo Tolstoi and the other intelligentsia began to carry knowledge to the masses. Not only in the province of Tula, but in every large city, young men of university experience would assemble in secret classes of instruction, teaching them to read, to write, to know, to think and to love knowledge. Most of this work was underground at first. But it took. Thousands of educated persons gave themselves to this work-without pay: their only hope of reward lay in the future effectiveness of an instructed mass movement.
What were the results? As knowledge spread, enthusiasm was backed by brains. The Russian revolution began to be sure of itself. The workingmen of the cities studied the thing that they were “up against,” gauged their own weakness and strength as well as their opponents’. The despotism of the Czar could not provoke them to a mass movement before they were ready and had the means; and when at last they moved, they swept not only the Czar’s regime but the whole exploiting system upon which it stood into utter oblivion.
What does this mean to the Negro of the Western world? It may mean much, or little: that depends on him. If other men’s experiences have value for the New Negro Manhood Movement it will seek now to profit by them and to bottom the new fervor of faith in itself with the solid support of knowledge. The chains snap from the limbs of the young giant as he rises, stretches himself, and sits up to take notice. But let him, for his future’s sake, insist on taking notice. To drop the figure of speech, we Negroes who have shown ourmanhoodmust back it by ourmind. This world, at present, is a white man’s world—even in Africa. We, being what we are, want to shake loose the chains of his control from our corner of it. We must either accept his domination and our inferiority, or we must contend against it. But we go up to win; and whether we carry on that contest with ballots, bullets or business, we can not win from the white man unless we know at least as much as the white man knows. For, after all, knowledgeispower.
But that isn’t all. What kind of knowledge is it that enables white men to rule black men’s lands? Is it the knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, philosophy or literature? It isn’t. It is the knowledge of explosives and deadly compounds: that is chemistry. It is the knowledge which can build ships, bridges, railroads and factories: that is engineering. It is the knowledge which harnesses the visible and invisible forces of the earth and air and water: that is science, modern science. And that is what the New Negro must enlist upon his side. Let us, like the Japanese, become a race of knowledge-getters, preserving our racial soul, but digesting into it all that we can glean or grasp, so that when Israel goes up out of bondage he will be “skilled in all the learning of the Egyptians” and competent to control his destiny.
Those who have knowledge must come down from their Sinais and give it to the common people. Theirs is the great duty to simplify and make clear, to light the lamps of knowledge that the eyes of their race may see; that the feet of their people may not stumble. This is the task of the Talented Tenth.
To the masses of our people we say: Read! Get the reading habit; spend your spare time not so much in training the feet to dance, as in training the head to think. And, at the very outset, draw the line between books of opinion and books of information. Saturate your minds with the latter and you will be forming your own opinions, which will be worth ten times more to you than the opinions of the greatest minds on earth. Go to school whenever you can. If you can’t go in the day, go at night. But remember always that the best college is that on your bookshelf: the best education is that on the inside of your own head. For in this work-a-day world people ask first, not “Where were you educated?” but “What do you know?” and next, “What can you do with it?” And if we of the Negro race can master modern knowledge—the kind that counts—we will be able to win for ourselves the priceless gifts of freedom and power, and we will be able to hold them against the world.
Education is the name which we give to that process by which the ripened generation brings to bear upon the rising generation the stored-up knowledge and experience of the past and present generations to fit it for the business of life. If we are not to waste money and energy, our educational systems should shape our youth for what we intend them to become.
We Negroes, in a world in which we are the under dog, must shape our youth for living in such a world. Shall we shape them mentally to accept the status of under-dog as their predestined lot? Or shall we shape them into men and women fit for a free world? To do the former needs nothing more than continuing as we are. To do the latter is to shape their souls for continued conflict with a theory and practice in which most of the white world that surrounds them are at one.
The educational system in the United States and the West Indies was shaped by white people for white youth, and from their point of view, it fits their purpose well. Into this system came the children of Negro parents when chattel slavery was ended—and their relation to the problems of life was obviously different. The white boy and girl draw exclusively from the stored-up knowledge and experience of the past and present generations of white people to fit them for the business of being dominant whites in a world full of colored folk. The examples of valor and virtue on which their minds are fed are exclusively white examples. What wonder, then, that each generation comes to maturity with the idea imbedded in its mind that only white men are valorous and fit to rule and only white women are virtuous and entitled to chivalry, respect and protection? What wonder that they think, almost instinctively, that the Negro’s proper place, nationally and internationally, is that of an inferior? It is only what we should naturally expect.
But what seems to escape attention is the fact that the Negro boy and girl, getting the same (though worse) instruction, also get from it the same notion of the Negro’s place and part in life which the white children get. Is it any wonder, then, that they so readily accept the status of inferiors; that they tend to disparage themselves, and think themselves worth while only to the extent to which they look and act and think like the whites? They know nothing of the stored-up knowledge and experience of the past and present generations of Negroes in their ancestral lands, and conclude there is no such store of knowledge and experience. They readily accept the assumption that Negroes have never been anything but slaves and that they never had a glorious past as other fallen peoples like the Greeks and Persians have. And this despite the mass of collected testimony in the works of Barth, Schweinfurth, Mary Kingsley, Lady Lugard, Morel, Ludolphus, Blyden, Ellis, Ratzel, Kidd, Es-Saadi, Casely Hayford and a host of others, Negro and white.
A large part of the blame for this deplorable condition must be put upon the Negro colleges like Howard, Fisk, Livingstone and Lincoln in the United States, and Codrington, Harrison and the Mico in the West Indies. These are the institutions in which our cultural ideals and educational systems are fashioned for the shaping of the minds of the future generations of Negroes. It cannot be expected that it shall begin with the common schools; for, in spite of logic, educational ideas and ideals spread from above downwards. If we are ever to enter into the confraternity of colored peoples it should seem the duty of our Negro colleges to drop their silly smatterings of “little Latin and less Greek” and establish modern courses in Hausa and Arabic, for these are the living languages of millions of our brethern in modern Africa. Courses in Negro history and the culture of West African peoples, at least, should be given in every college that claims to be an institution of learning for Negroes. Surely an institution of learning for Negroes should not fail to be also an institution of Negro learning. —The New Negro, Sept. 1919.
Quite a good deal of unnecessary dispute has been going on these days among the guardians of the inner temple as to just which form of worship is necessary at the shrine of the Goddess Knowledge. In plain English, the pundits seem to be at odds in regard to the kind of education which the Negro should have. Of course, it has long been known that the educational experts of white America were at odds with ours on the same subject; now, however, ours seem to be at odds among themselves.
The essence of the present conflict is not the easy distinction between “lower” and “higher” education, which really has no meaning in terms of educational principles, but it is rather “the knowledge of things” versus “the knowledge of words.” The same conflict has been waged in England from the days of Huxley’s youth to the later nineties when the London Board Schools were recognized and set the present standard of efficiency for the rest of England. The present form of the question is, “Shall education consist of Latin and Greek, literature and metaphysics, r of modern science, modern languages and modern thought?” The real essence of the question is whether we shall train our children to grapple effectively with the problem of life that lies before them, or to look longingly back upon the past standards of life and thought and consider themselves a special class because of this.
If education be, as we assert, a training for life, it must of course have its roots in the past. But so has the art of the blacksmith, the tailor, the carpenter, the bookbinder or the priest. What the classicists really seek is the domination of the form, method and aim of that training by the form, methods and aims of an earlier age.
Perhaps an explanation of that earlier training may serve to give the real innerness of the classicists’ position so that ordinary people may understand it better than the classicists themselves seem to do. In the Middle Ages, the schools of Western Europe and the subject matter of the education given in them were based upon the Latin “disciplines.” Western Europe had no literature, no learning, no science of its own. It was the church—particularly the monasteries—to which men had to go to get such training as was obtainable in a barbarous age. This training was, of course, given in the tongue of the church which was Latin, the clerical language. The contact of medieval Europeans with the dark-skinned Arabs added Greek and the knowledge of Greek literature and philosophy to the earlier medieval discipline. Imbedded in this was the substance of science nurtured by the Arabs and added to by them.
The ruling classes kept their children within the treadmill of these two literatures and languages and it came to be thought that this was the indispensable training for a gentleman. But:—
“Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.”
“Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.”
“Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.”
**
We are in a different age, an age in which the nation, not the church, gives training to all children, and not merely to the children of aristocrats who will grow up to do nothing. The children of the people must become the doers of all that is done in the world of tomorrow, and they must be trained for this doing. Today in England, not Oxford, the home of lost ideals, but such institutions as the University of London, are the sources of that training which gives England its physicians, surgeons, inventors, business men and artists.
But the noise of the classicists may be rudely stopped by merely pointing out the hollowness of their watch words. These persons would have us believe that Latin and Greek are, in their eyes, the backbone of any education that is worth while. Very well then, let us take them at their word. I make the broad assertion that not one in one thousand of them can read a page of Greek or Latin that may be set before them. I offer to put under their noses a page of Athenaeus or Horace (to say nothing of more important classical authors) and if they should be able to read and translate it at sight I shall be genuinely surprised. Let the common reader who is a man of today make the test with this little bit of Latin verse:
“Exegi momentum acre perenniusRegalique situ pyramidum altius.”
“Exegi momentum acre perenniusRegalique situ pyramidum altius.”
“Exegi momentum acre perennius
Regalique situ pyramidum altius.”
Let him ask some classicist to translate off-hand this common school boy’s tag from a most popular author and note whether they can place the author or translate the lines. Here is another:
Per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum,Tendimus in Latium.
Per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum,Tendimus in Latium.
Per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum,
Tendimus in Latium.
To speak in plain United States, when it comes to the showdown it will be found that those of us who argue in favor of the modern discipline (in so far as we have any knowledge of classical literature) know more about them than those whose sole defence they are.
It is said by the classicists that a knowledge of Latin and Greek is necessary to an adequate comprehension of the English language. But so is the knowledge of Sanscrit, Arabic, French and Italian. And when it comes to facility and clearness of expression, it will be found that Huxley’s prose is superior to that of Matthew Arnold, and Brisbane’s superior to that of any professor of the Latin language in Harvard or Yale. So much for the ghost fighters. Requiescant in pace!
Now, what is the knowledge which the New Negro needs most? He needs above all else a knowledge of the wider world and of the long past. But that is history, modern and ancient: History as written by Herodotus and John Bach McMaster; sociology not as conceived by Giddings, but as presented by Spencer and Ward, and anthropology as worked out by Boas and Thomas. The Negro needs also the knowledge of the best thought; but that is literature as conceived, not as a collection of flowers from the tree of life, but as its garnered fruit. And, finally, the Negro needs a knowledge of his own kind, concerning which we shall have something to say later, And the purposes of this knowledge? They are, to know our place in the human processus, to strengthen our minds by contact with the best and most useful thought-products evolved during the long rise of man from anthropoid to scientist; to inspire our souls and to lift our race industrially, commercially, intellectually to the level of the best that there is in the world about us. Fornever until the Negro’s knowledge of nitrates and engineering, of chemistry and agriculture, of history, science and business is on a level, at least, with that of the whites, will the Negro be able to measure arms successfully with them.