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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 41. The Negro School - 2. Education in American Thought and Life
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884 An American Dilemma
Campbell observed in the ^seventies that . . the blacks are very anxious
CO learn—more so than the lower whites.”® Bryce remarked some decades
later that ^^there is something pathetic in the eagerness of the Negroes,
parents, young people, and children to obtain education.”® And Baker
wrote at the beginning of this century:
The eagerness of the coloured people for a chance to send their children to school
is something astonishing and pathetic. They will submit to all sorts of inconveniences
in order that their children may get an education.*^
As self-improvement through business or social improvement through
government appeared so much less possible for them, Negroes have come
to affix an even stronger trust in the magic of education. It is true that some
Negroes may lately have lost their faith in education, either because the
schools available to them—in the South—are so inadequate or—in the
North—^because they achieve education but not the things they hoped to do
with it. This attitude of dissatisfaction is probably part of the explanation
why Negro children tend to drop out of high school more than do whites.®
If both sources of dissatisfaction could be removed, there is reason to believe
that American Negroes would revert to their original belief in education.
And, aside from such dissatisfaction and even cynicism, the masses of
Negroes show even today a naive, almost religious faith in education. To
an extent, this faith was misplaced: many Negroes hoped to escape drudgery
through education alone. But it is also true that this faith has been justified
to a large extent: education is one of the things which has given the
Negroes something of a permanent advance in their condition.
The American zeal for education has always been focused on the indi-
vidual’s offortunity. The stress on enforcing a basic minimum standard of
education for all young people in the nation has been less. In education as
in many other fields of culture, America shows great disparity 5
there are
at once many model schools and a considerable amount of illiteracy and
semi-illiteracy. Bryce observed:
If one part of the people is as educated and capable as that of Switzerland, another
is as ignorant and politically untrained as that of Russia.®
And a similar statement holds true today.
This disparity is partly explainable in terms of size of the country and in
terms of the administrative decentralization of the school system. But when
one observes the tremendous differences in amount and qu^ity of education
between some of the cities and some of the rural districts in one single state,
as, for instance, Illinois, he cannot avoid believing that more basic still is
a general toleration by Americans of dissimilar status between regions
• Sec Chapter 43, Section 4.
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