What Peculiar Organization and Direction Should Characterize the Education of Negroes?

Abstract

The subject I have chosen for this statement seems to me to express the issues in this symposium more frankly and clearly than is done in the question stated in the title of this issue of the Yearbook of the JOURNAL OF NEGRO EDUCATION. Ten years ago a prominent British educator from South Africa in a conference with the writer and others connected with a division of Negro education in one of the Southern states expressed himself as being seriously disappointed to discover in America that the pattern for the education of Negroes was much of a piece with the pattern of education of white Americans. For the general philosophy and techniques applied to American education he had only the severest criticism of their formalism and their inadequacy for meeting the educational needs of white Americans; and he could not understand why the officials of the separate Negro school systems in the South did not take advantage of circumstances to create a new educational pattern. In his opinion, this special pattern should be designed both to avoid the mistakes of the education of white Americans, and to provide for adequate exploitation of the distinct cultural background of the American Negro and the realization of his peculiar present needs. To him the arguments that we were educating Americans and not Africans were hopelessly ridiculous. And the fact should not be overlooked here that there are numerous Americans, not all white, who contend that the diluted African, several generations removed from his native jungles, still displays many distinctly racial traits. There are, however, few people, if any, in America who now offer a serious argument for special educational treatment of the Negro based upon the theory of the existence in the American Negro of racial traits so distinctly different from those of his white American neighbors as to be, in themselves alone, a sufficient cause for specialized education. The British educator, who was undoubtedly sincere, had come hopefully to America to find in the education of the Negro in the new world some helpful ideas for his job of educating natives living on their native soil under British 'domination. What really should concern Americans is that this man apparently found in the American plan of education no rational technique for varying educational offerings to meet special group needs.