Negro education, Book

IV. COLLEGE AND PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION.

No type of education is so eagerly sought by the colored people as college education. Yet no educational institutions for colored people are so poorly equipped and so ineffectively organized and administered as the majority of those claiming to give college education. Howard University is an institution of university proportions, but its endowment is negligible. Fisk University is genuinely a college according to most of the standards, but its endowment is not sufficient. Atlanta University, Meharry Medical College, Virginia Union University, Morehouse College, Bishop College, Lincoln University, Benedict College, Talladega College, Tougaloo College, Knoxville College, Shaw University, Claflin College, and a few others are offering instruction of college grade, but the number of college students in most of these institutions is not more than 10 percent of the total enrollment and they are therefore compelled to devote the major portion of their resources to secondary education.

It is evident that the welfare of ten million people, whose existence is beset with so many perplexing problems, requires the best education of all types that society can provide. If college education is of value to any group, surely it is to those who are to be the leaders of the colored people. (Only a broad-minded leadership with a thorough grasp of human development can understand the peculiar difficulties resulting from the close proximity of such widely varying races as the black and the white people of the Southern States. All the wisdom of history is needed to enable the colored teachers and religious leaders to realize that the difficulties of the American Negro have been experienced wherever diverse races have been compelled to live together, that the obstacles confronting the race are not insurmountable, that other peoples have struggled through similar trials and have won a place among the nations of the earth. More and more the leadership of the race is devolving upon its strong and capable men and women. Successful leadership requires the best lessons of economics, sociology, and education. Without such leadership for both the white and colored peoples, race problems will multiply and increase in perplexity and menace to the Nation. The race must have physicians with real skill and the spirit of service to lead against the insanitary conditions that are threatening not only the colored people but also their white neighbors. The Negroes must have religious teachers who can relate religion to individual morals and to the common activities of the community. They must have teachers of secondary schools who have had college training in the modern sciences and in the historical development of civilization.

In their eagerness for college education many of the colored institutions have multiplied the number of so-called college departments, not only to the injury of other divisions of the schools, but also to the serious limitation of real college education. Many of them are endeavoring to maintain college classes for less than 5 percent of their enrollment when the number of teachers is not sufficient to instruct the elementary and secondary classes. In one school visited, large elementary grades were being taught by pupil-teachers, while one well-trained teacher was giving the recitation period to the instruction of one pupil in the Greek language. The principal of another school with about 300 pupils in the eight elementary grades, 100 pupils in the four secondary classes, and 20 pupils in college subjects, assigned five teachers to the elementary classes, six to the secondary and college, one to industries, one to music, one to commercial subjects, and three to the boarding department. In order to maintain the college classes, he substituted instruction in music, science, and elementary subjects for the industrial classes in the main industrial building and sacrificed efficiency both in the elementary and secondary grades. His defense for all this was: “My 35 girls and boys of our college department the present year are worth more than 500 unbaked fellows of the ordinary normal course.”

The duplication of college departments is increased not only by the personal ambition of school presidents but also by the desire of different denominations to have the pupils of their church attend their own colleges. So far as the grade of the work is indicated by the names of the institutions, duplications in the efforts to do college work may be seen in the location of two or more so-called colleges for Negroes in Selma, Ala.; Little Rock, Ark.; Atlanta, Ga.; New Orleans, La.; Holly Springs and Jackson, Miss.; Greensboro, N. C; Columbia and Orangeburg, S. C; Nashville, Tenn.; Austin, Marshall, and Waco, Tex.

The colleges have been further handicapped by the tenacity with which they have clung to the classical form of the curriculum. They have had an almost fatalistic belief not only in the powers of the college, but in the Latin and Greek features of the course. The majority of them seem to have more interest in the traditional forms of education than in adaption to the needs of their pupils and their community. Ingenuously some of their leaders have been urging secondary schools to prepare their pupils for college rather than for life. In all this, to be sure, they are following in the footsteps of the schools for white people. It is only within the past few years that educational leaders of the country have begun to realize that the college curriculum is to be adapted to the needs of the students; that college activities are subject to the tests of service to the community in exactly the same degree as any other activity that seeks social support. There is no doubt that many of these institutions will respond to the test when the educational leaders of the race fully understand the educational trend.

It is not to be understood that the colleges have not made a valuable contribution to the welfare of the colored people and of the South. The early founders of these institutions were men and women of high ideals whose daily life gave to the freedmen a more precious heritage than any type of curriculum could possibly provide. With such teachers, educational forms are of comparatively little importance. These noble men and women were building according to the time in which they were living. The early American colleges had definitely prescribed courses of a highly classical type. In outlining the evolution of the university, Dr. S. P. Capen, of the United States Bureau of Education, has said:

From the origin of the college to the foundation of the graduate schools the college curriculum, aside from the development of separate courses in science and engineering, had undergone but slight changes. A few new subjects had been added to it from time to time. Options between certain studies, as for instance, between a modern and an ancient language or between two elementary sciences, were slowly introduced. In general, however, the college program of studies was fixed and definite centering about a core of Latin, Greek, and mathematics.