Adult Education and the National Urban League

Abstract

We have come a long way since the 1890's, when men like William James held the belief that for all practical purposes, learning stopped for most persons at about age twenty-five. The horizon has been attractively widened for millions of men and women as a result of the comparatively recent discovery that while the rate of learning becomes less as we grow older, the act of learning is seen among the very aged. Acquiring the simple skill of learning to write one's name provided, in the early days of adult education in this country, a pleasing experience which gave a new sense of accomplishment and dignity to the learner. No longer did the adage, You can't teach an old dog new tricks serve as a barrier to acquiring new information and developing hitherto undiscovered appreciations. With the tremendous emphasis, placed on production during World War II, and with the streamlined methods of instruction used in our Armed Forces, we have found that not only can men and women well past twenty-five learn, but that they learn at a surprising rate. Once we had discarded many of the traditional academic experiences, and substituted activities which had definite meaning and urgency, we were able to work miracles in the production lines of American industry. During the entire thirty-five years of its existence, the National Urban League has attempted to demonstrate that desirable social attitudes may be developed among adults, and has insisted that a program of adult education which met the needs of Negroes alone was shortsighted and impractical. Thus as far back as 1910, insistence was placed on the interracial character of the League program, and on the necessity for cooperative action. The Board of Directors and the important committees in each League city included Negro and white persons whose very working together made for an enlightening program of adult education. Following the great exodus of hundreds of thousands of Negroes from South to North during and after World War I, when most of these workers entered industrial plants for the first time, the necessity for a two-fold program of education developed. There was first the creating of such attitudes among management and white workers as permitted the induction of Negroes to develop with a minimum amount of friction. Closely paralleling this type of education, was the approach made to problems directly affecting these Negro workers and their families. Almost overnight, men and women who had lived all their lives in the rural areas of the South were faced with an appalling number of problems. Overcrowding, with its attendant breakdown of desirable family patterns, was in striking evidence in Northern industrial centers. There was no familiarity with the principles or the objectives of organized labor, and the Negro in-migrant, highly insecure in