THE TRAINING OF THE TEACHER, AS THE POINT OF
ATTACK IN NEGRO EDUCATION
Copyright, 1908, Charles M. Thomas, in Charge of Science and Hygiene
Normal School, No. 2, Washington, D. C,
(AN EXCERPT)
Special Problems in the Education of Africans American Children
In the "Psychology of Peoples," Gustave LeBon says, "Ten years are enough
in which to give a negro the totality of notions of a European, but 1,000 years would
scarcely be sufficient to make a negro think and act as a European would in the
different circumstances of life." That such is the truth is the negro's condition
rather than his fault, but that such is not generally recognized in the activities which
constitute his education may be the cause of the general dissatisfaction with the
results of that process by which it was thought to have turned him into a darker-
hued 'white man.
While the successive hordes of the North were contending with each other for
the more favorable grazing lands and combating the seasonal changes which forced
them to become thrifty and provident or to die, the African was rocked in the lap of
luxuriant and bountiful Nature, which took from him in stamina and initiative what
was given in provender. The African's reactions for 10,000 years were necessarily
so different from the European's as to lead the African to comprehend the world
as a place as different from the European's world as the Christians' Heaven is unlike
HeU.
Wherever, in the Dark Continent, the conditions were similar to conditions in
Europe, the reactions were similar, for any other program would have brought
extermination from this world of cause and effect; and the advanced social organiza¬
tions of the African tribes occupying grazing lands to-day prove the contention. Not
only with human beings, but in the whole realm of live objects, environment demands
adjustment, or emigration, or death; and the long occupancy of the Dark Continent
by the African shows not only marked adjustment, but the power to resist hostile
and unfavorable environmental conditions; for thousands there were and are who
could not and cannot resist those conditions even with the aid of science.
It must not be forgotten that it was that same African who was brought to
America to adapt himself to different and severe conditions, at the terrible price
Nature always demands for such readjustment. And it should be recalled in every
discussion of race questions that from that African have come hordes to add color
to the pale skin of the almost equally readjusted European in America; to add
millions to his coffers, strength to his laboring arm, intricate difficulties to his
multiform social problems, harmony to his music, and fervor and reality to his
religion.
After 250 years of toil in bondage, the rehabilitated African became an American
by a naturalizing process which was not only legal, but sanctioned by the best blood
of all races, colors, and social grades, flowing not simply in his veins, but bathing
the earth itself as if to wash .out the stain of his bondage.
Is there any good reason why the children of that African-American should not
offer some special problems in their education?
In the first place, there is the problem of establishing the "earth sense," or the
problem of locality. The children of African-American parentage are restricted
almost exclusively to the sixteen former slave states and the District of Columbia.
Eighty-five per cent, of the nine millions live in that area. The proportion of those
who have strayed beyond that region, and, later, have returned to uplift their
brothers, is so small as to be almost a proof of their unworthiness to receive the
training which has been given them.
As a result of such fixity of population the children of the race must get as
best they may, some notion of the whole wide world, while they themselves live in
a section which corresponds in many ways with that land in the memory of their
ancestral souls. Few are troubled with "wanderlust." Few are explorers. Few
leave home except to wander to some spot which seems by its glare to offer greater
ease or increased opportunities for indulgences. The few who wander, through
curiosity or the desire to learn of the world beyond, and later return to make home
better, are the saving remnant without which there is little hope for progress in
any race.
Children of the African-American are in an undeveloped section, while the country
has almost boundless resources. Can those children grasp the problems of produc¬
tion and distribution with their minds accustomed for generations to the bounty of
Nature? How shall such fundamental ideas be presented? How are they being
presented where those children are being taught?
Though citizens of a Nation which owes its existence to the result of humanity's
tendency to universal freedom and a more perfect social state, the children of
African-American parentage have few rights which men feel bound to respect.
How shall those children be led to appreciate the struggle for liberty and the suc¬
cessive solutions of the problems of justice so that they may not unconsciously
become a menace to the perpetuity of the ideas of America, land of the free?
How shall they conduct themselves so that their brothers of the lighter hue shall
not arrogate to themselves an authority and a disregard for the law, and all law,
which shall eventually destroy the very temple of liberty? How is that problem
being solved where those children are being taught? Can it be presented so as
to be interpreted by the children, except on a basis of African-American history
and literature? Is any African-American adequately and properly prepared to take
his place in American civilization when he has been trained irrespective of the
customs and the movements of both of the races from which he is sprung?
Dr. Shaler,2 the venerable dean of Harvard's Science Department, says: "Man
Jjds reached his present estate through the gateway of his sympathies, and by that
'portal must he be led onward through life." May it not be the ignorance of race
history and thought which has caused some race leaders to confuse '"equality before
the law" with "identically the same?"3 And has not such confusion resulted in the
undoing olf many of their followers ?
With an ancestral and a personal contact with little but the raw materials of
commerce, these African-American children live in a land where machinery all
but breathes while it gives a finished product with speed and accuracy at which
the wide world marvels. How is such a problem of the development of acquired
skill to be interpreted to minds with creative imagination harnessed to the hand
with a string-instrument and the hoe, or spending itself and its powers in voodooism,
conjuration, and the fear of death?
Can there be any wonder at the growth and success of Tuskugee or the inspira¬
tion of Hampton, when such places focus all social influences on the production
of an efficient social unit? Is it any less an education to help a man to help himself
to better his state, than to help him know that he is in need of help? That is the
only difference between the aims of those who favor industrial education for the
African-American children, and those who oppose it.
According to the health reports of the principal Southern cities, African-American
children are predisposed to death from contagious diseases when herded in filthy
living places such as they occupy as a result of their low earning power, yet their
rapid readjustment to new conditions makes them equally healthy when in hygienic
surroundings.4 How shall the problem of the sociological substance rather than its
shadow be interpreted to them, who would rather live fleetingly and ill in the
cities' glare, than long and well in rural communities to which they are accustomed?
2Interpretation of Nature, N. S. Shaler.
3Yale Law Journal, 1903.
'Report of Health Officer, District of Columbia, 1907; vol. iii, page 13.
4Mortality Among Negroes in Cities, Atlanta Univ., 1896.
u s^ran^e that the fear of mob violence in unprotected rural communities
should be stronger than that of more certain death in the crowded districts of the
hostile and unfavorable city ? Is it not because the race has not learned of the
value of life and the means of prolonging it, and is not that a problem in the
education of the children?
Because, guided by the most primitive instincts which make them sensitive to the
more undesirable and uneducative impressions, African-American children retain in
their plastic brains all that is most striking and bizarre, while they are dull and
apathetic in the presence of the stern realities and abiding truths of life. How
shall such problems of the mind be interpreted to children with whom thinking is
synonymous with memory, although they live in the midst of a people who have
mechanical appliances to relieve the mind of its burdens and records which reduce
the element of error to a negligible quantity?
A general apathy makes them indolent and slow in movement, though competing
with people who have harnessed the air and think with the lightning's flash. How
shall such a problem of the will be interpreted to one whose muscular memory of
the fatigue induced by the tropical sun is more potent than the body's subordinate
position in its relation to the mind?
Because they have spent their years where rhyme and intonation have not been
reduced to syllables and labialization, African-American children are slovenly of
speech and careless of statement. How is such a complex problem of the interrela¬
tions of brain, tongue, ear, and throat to be solved to produce that literacy which
characterizes the people who use language as a rapiei" or a sledge, and with it
defend, persuade, or destroy?
It is because the children are sprung from ancestors who were transferred from
barbaric license to the iron-weighted bonds of slavery and thence to the highest
possible freedom of American citizenship, that the emotional basis must be estab;,
lished for their language rather than the ideational basis.5 How is the idea of
citizenship to be developed in those who have hardly dared to call their souls their
own while they live in the midst of those who have written every law around
individual liberty and property rights?6
In considering this grave question, prior to my writing, Prof. DuBois says, in his
"Training of Negroes for Social Power:" "The negro problem is a problem of
ignorance; not simply illiteracy, but an ignorance of the world and its ways, of the
thoughts and experiences of men, an ignorance of self and the possibilities of human
souls. The only remedy for such a condition is the social leadership of the kind
called education by men and women of careful training and broad culture. They
it is we need as teachers and as teachers of teachers. It is, therefore, of crying
necessity among the negroes that the heads of their educational systems, the
teachers of the normal schools, the heads of the secondary schools, the principals
of the public system, shall be unusually well trained, trained not simply in the
common-school branches, not simply in the technique of school management and
normal methods, but trained beyond this, broadly and carefully into the meaning
of their age whose civilization it is their duty to interpret to the youth of this
new race, to the minds of an untrained mass.
Upon such an authority, as well as upon the mother-idea in Dr. Washington's
"Up from Slavery," and upon our own findings the conclusion is indisputable that the
training of children of African-American blood is the training of a backward race,
and that the teachers of such children must begin with them where they find them
and then lead them quickly, surely, accurately and aright to the point where they,
too, may add to the social wealth of the Nation by service to man through love of
God and appreciation and use of Nature. They must interpret the knowledge of
the time no less quickly, surely, accurately and aright so as to lead the children
to the point where they may become in activities, both of expression and of
repression, upright, self-supporting, law-abiding citizens of the Government with
the noblest ideals ever striven for in the whole history of man.
To be a teacher of African-American children is the greatest opportunity for
usefulness granted to men by God, since Moses led the Israelites from Egypt. It
demands knowledge, so as not to teach a lie. It demands power, so as not to be
5Science of Thought, Max Muller.
"Actual Government, Hart.
martyred in making responses to the unvoiced appeals. It demands skill to lead
to the performance of difficult tasks by the learners in a way to lead to their repeti¬
tion when the compulsion is removed. It demands patience to make the teacher
tolerant of . the sham, the trickery „ and the-rmtalettce in the face of the great good
of the offerings and the great rewards awaiting those who appropriate therru It
demands hope to continue laboring in the face of discouragement at "home and
contempt abroad. It detnands personality to be expended in a thousand avenues of
expression, almost; beyond the gift' to ordinary mortals. It is the return in clear¬
-headed, upright, self-supporting, ' refined, honest, respectful, tolerant, ambitious,
happy, useful African-American manhood and womanhood, which is about the
keenest reward a man or woman can get upon this earth of toil.
Such must have been the feeling which lured General Armstrong to give his
life for Hampton. Such is no doubt the feeling which tunes the persuasive voice
of the great leader at Tuskegee, and such is the emotional return to every
man of any race who sees a lowly and backward people slowly rising as a result
of his efforts, sacrifices, or munificence. That feeling inspired the Abolitionists. It
*fired Peabody, Myrtilla Miner, and Dr. Mayo. It shows itself in the labors of Mr.
Ogden, and repays Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller for the slings of the mal-j
contents.
"I came not to be ministered unto, but to minister" is in thought and deed thtf
attitude of each helper in such work. The teachers of children of African-Americalfi
parentage must be Christians, for the children are far and away from what they
must be and will be to help in the work of making America what is is rapidly
becoming in the development of nations.
It is not so much what the children shall be taught, as it is the power, truthful¬
ness, and applicability of the teaching coupled with the unconscious influences of the
character of-the teachers which will bring the children into the whole estate of Amcr-y
ican citizenship of individual usefulness and social service.
To achieve the great end which the teachers of African-American children desire,
it is necessary to have the teachers so trained that they can isolate and treat such
a special problem as the condition of the African-American child. Such teachers
must be trained in Christian homes, by correct habits of early life, by a schooling
which makes no compromise with truth, but insists upon a fact-mastery equivalent
to a record of "Good;" by selection from the whole number which enters the post-
adolescent grades of school systems, by regular and careful elimination of the
unfit, by intensive study of race history, during the pre-adolescent period, by training
for skill in the production of some useful thing to insure independence, by familiarity
with the business methods of the times, by travel, by the inculcation of a rational
pride of race untarnished by foolish assumption of equality, by inculcation of the
scientific habit of mind for the treatment of racial conditions, by courage, persist¬
ence, and an unfaltering trust in the outcome of the tendency of mankind to a
more perfect manhood and womanhood, a more perfect social state.
The publication of the "Occasional Papers," and the performance of other special
work in the Science Department have been greatly facilitated by the kind assistance of
Mr. C. F. Norment
Mr. E. J. Stellwagen
Mr. W. B. Hibbs
Dr. James F. Mitchell
Dr. Geo. W. Cabaniss
Dr. Chas. H. Marshall
Rev. M. W. Clair
Miss M. E. Gibbs
Miss Blenie Bruce
Miss K. U. Alexander
Mr. Bernard Key
Dr. Lucy E. Moten
Dr. C. W. Childs
• Mr. Nat. L. Guy
Mr. John Butler
Sincerely,
Charles M. Thomas
June, 1909 1631 O Street N. W.