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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 41. The Negro School - 5. “Industrial” versus “Classical” Education of Negroes
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Chapter 41. The Negro School 899
Saxon race will stand tamely by with folded arms while there is danger of its being
done? This is the central point of the whole situation.®^
By and large, in sfite of all the talk about it, no effective industrial training
was ever given the Negroes in the Southern ’public schools
^
except training
for cooking and menial service. The expensive vocational training, which
conflicted so harshly with the interests of the white workers, has never
become much more than a slogan. Negro education has mostly remained
^‘academic” and differs only in its low level of expenditure and effectiveness.
Even at the well-endowed centers of Hampton and Tuskegee, the indus-
trial training offered was in demand almost solely because of a need for
teachers in the lesser schools, rather than because of the needs of modern
industry. This explains why they have been able to realize, in some lines
at least, the vocational idea as well as they have, without coming into
greater conflict with the interests of white workers. The schools to which
those teachers have gone, and are now going, are usually not nearly so well
equipped that they could be called ^Vocational” in any serious meaning of
the term. They usually are poor schools, not deserving much of a classifica-
tion into either ^Vocational” or ^^classical.” A few exceptional schools
excluded, they offer at best some training in domestic service for girls
—
which, for understandable reasons, meets more encouragement and less
fear of competition—or a poor training in the technique of rapidly disap-
pearing handicrafts, sometimes adjusted slightly to modern times by
courses in ^‘automobile repair work” or the like.^^
The discussion of whether Negroes should have a vocational or a liberal
schooling is thus only in part a real issue. Partly it is a cover for the more
general problem as to what extent Negroes should have much education at
all. The lines are blurred because the argument for vocational education
is used both by the people who want to have more education for Negroes
and by those who want to restrict it. The main conflict is between the ever
present equalitarian American Creed, on the one hand, and the caste inter-
est, on the other. The actual situation is different between regions 5
opinions
are divided and confused within almost every individual. Let us, as an
example, have a Southern liberal survey the field of opinions, as he sees it,
and attempt to formulate his own attitude:
It is surprising to note the prejudice with which a great many southern whites
view the whole subject of Negro education. Their sincere opinion that the Negro
should not be given educational opportunities comparable to those which are provided
for the white children is at least partly due to the strong belief that better facilities
in the colored schools would not yield a proper return in human values. This belief
is a heritage from slavery. Of course there is also the attitude that the educated
Negro will lose the humility which has characterized his relations with the southern
white man ever since Reconstruction. The white laboring man is no doubt influenced
in his opposition to beUcr educational facilities for Negroes by the fear that Negroes
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