What Purpose Education? Anna Julia Cooper’s and Booker T. Washington’s Differing Views on Education

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article discusses Dr. Anna Julia Haywood Cooper’s and Booker T. Washington’s advocacy for African American education during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cooper and Washington had very different opinions about the purpose and kind of education African Americans should receive. Each saw education as central to African Americans’ success and inclusion in the American nation. Cooper perceived education as an opportunity for self-actualization and a way to resist political oppression and racial discrimination. Washington had a more pragmatic approach to education, seeing it as a utilitarian tool to help create a Black labor class to reconstruct a New South. Cooper’s A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892) and “Educational Programs” (ca. 1930s) and Washington’s Atlanta Exposition speech (1895) and Up from Slavery (1901) provide readers insight into their ideas about the purpose of education. Cooper and Washington were two of the leading voices debating the question, What purpose education? Was education meant to be emancipatory and liberating, as the enslaved and their descendants believed and hoped it would be? Or was it meant to be pragmatic and utilitarian, as those seeking economic solutions to their problems thought it should be? The answers to these questions would have long-lasting effects on the lives of African Americans.