Standardizing the Negro college

Abstract

We are witnessing what might appropriately be called a renaissance in college education for negroes in the United States. This new birth is significant; it is fraught with many vital consequences, as well as with opportunities for ingenuity in educational engineering. The newer philosophers of negro education have discovered the established negro college to be rolling along in a rut which, as it seems to them, carries training in such institutions counter to real effectiveness. Hence, a movement has begun, fostered by such scholars as G. Victor Cools, Francis G. Sumner, and Horace Mann Bond, to reshape the psychology of negro higher education. The conservative wing of negro educators is equally vigorous in a movement to standardize higher education according to the ideas of that group, but the ideas of these thinkers as to what should be the norm differ widely from the notions of those who represent the newer school of thought. It is the purpose here to discuss briefly, in the light of present conditions, the philosophies of the two schools of thinkers. A brief preliminary statement of the history and the present status of higher schools for negroes is essential to an appreciation and a right interpretation of the comparison of views made in this article. The unfavorable attitude of the South, immediately after the Civil War, toward the education of negroes caused persons of philanthropic and missionary spirit, mostly in the North, to endeavor to provide formal training for the freedmen and their children. The enterprise was carried forward hastily, enthusiastically, even eagerly, with missionary zeal. It was not thoughtfully based on experience (of which, of course, there was none) or on a careful analysis of the facts which, except for the haste, might readily have been observed. Thus, indiscriminately there sprang up, in almost all parts of the South, soon after the war, a multiplicity of schools for negroes. Full faith and credit should be given the spirit out of which such efforts came; but it has brought present negro educators, a half century later, face to face with the most formidable educational problems in the history of education in the United States. Within the period of the first twenty years after the close of the civil