The Washington bee., 1909-01-23
INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION
Continued from first page

they were begun to continue and
finish the work that had been inciden-
tally begun by the Civil War. They
felt it was their mission to free the
slaves. The war had brought these
slaves physical freedom; the schools
were to give them moral and IN
tellectual freedom. Calhoun had said
that if the time ever came when a
Negro could master the intrlcacieS
of the Greek language he would ad-
nit that he had been wrong IN his
notions about slavery. The schools
established directly after the war
were eager, apparently, to@stake up
the challenge. They wanted to prov
the capacity of the Negro to study
and learn everything that the white
man had studied and learned.
1t had been said of the Negro in
slavery that he was intellectually in
ferior to the white man; that he was
unable to learn the things that the
white man had learned. Consciously
or unconsciously the desire to COM
plete his emancipation, in the way
| | have indicated, influenced very
largely the work of these other
schools.
l do not wish to lessen or dispar-
age in any way the importance of
the work that was accomplished by
these first Negro schools. The work
was necessary. | am convinced that
the most precious gift that freedom
brought to the Negro, the thing that
has helped him more than anything
to realize that he was actually free,
has been the opportunity given him
to learn to read. All this, as l have
said, was in the direction of eman-
cipating the Negro; it gave him his
moral and intellectual freedom; but
it did not actually fit him to live in
the new world which emancipation
had brought him. This important
task was first taken up in a practi-
cal way by industrial schools.
Let me illustrate little farther
some of the ways in which some of
the schools and colleges founded di-
rectly after the war failed to prepare
their students for the actual life that
was before them. 1t was the idea
of the men who founded the Negro
colleges directly after the war that
it was necessary and important to ed
ucate men and women to be the lead
ers and teachers of their race. No
doubt it was important that the men
and women who were to be the lead
ers of the race should have the very
highest and best education that Il
was possible to give them, but there
were a great many things, as we car
see now, that they might have and
should have learned that would have
been more valuable than the little
smattering of Greek and Latin that
they obtained.
For instance, the men who became
the political leaders Of the race dur
ing the reconstruction period needed
to know less the languages than they
did the political history of Greece,
of Rome, and of Europe. In all of
these countries there had been sla-
very, and every state of Europe had,
at some time in its history, heen
compelled to face the social, the po-
litical, and the economical problems
that grew out of the transition of its
labOring class from a condition OF
slavery, in some form or other, tC
a condition of freedom. But the
Freedmen in the Negro colleges had
no opportunity to study these things
They learned the outward form OF
J the Greek and Latin language, but
they learned very little of the history
that was behind the language and be-
hind the literature which they stud
led
The young colored men who en-
tered the colleges right after the waf
were not prepared to learn these
things, even if the colleges had been
prepared to teach them. They were
not prepared because they knew at
that time almost nothing about their
own life; almost nothing about the
problems which beset them on every
hand. Not knowing these things they
were not prepared to interpret the
history and understand the signih-
/