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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 41. The Negro School - 1. Negro Education as Concerted Action - 2. Education in American Thought and Life
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882 An American Dilemma
Negroes to understand the printed and spoken word cannot avoid opening
up contact for them with the wider world, where equalitarian ideas are
prevalent. But in the South there is not much supervision of Negro schools.
And as we shall see later, Southern whites have been prohibited by their
allegiance to the American Creed from making a perfected helot training
out of Negro education.
2. Education in American Thought and Ihfe
Even where the Negro school exists as a separate institution it is, like all
other Negro institutions, patterned on the white American school as a
model. It is different only for reasons connected with the caste situation.
Even in their thinking on education, Negroes are typical, or overtypical,
Americans.
As background for our discussion we shall have to remember the role of
education in American democratic thought and life.’^ Education has always
been the great hope for both individual and
society.***
In the American
Creed it has been the main ground upon which ^‘equality of opportunity
for the individual” and ^^free outlet for ability” could be based. Education
has also been considered as the best way—and the way most compatible
with American individualistic ideals—^to improve society.
Research in, and discussion of, education is prolific. In America, pedagogy
anticipated by several generations the recent trend to environmentalism in
the social sciences^’ and the belief in the changeability of human beings. It
gave a basis for the belief in democratic values and expressed the social
optimism of American liberalism. The major American contribution to
philosophy—the theory of pragmatism—bears visibly the marks of having
been developed in a culture where education was awarded this prominent
role. And it was in line with American cultural potentialities when John
Dewey turned it into a theory of education. No philosopher from another
country would be likely to express himself as he did in the following:
The philosophy of education is one phase of philosophy in general. It may be
seriously questioned whether it is not the most important single phase of general
* Sec Chapter 9, Section 3.
*’To many Americans the great stress on education early in the life of the new nation
has become so commonplace that they do not see anything exceptional in it. Wilkerson, for
instance, observes that the federal Constitution was silent on the question of education
and that so were also many of the earlier state constitutions. (Doxey A. Wilkerson, “The
Negro in American Education,” unpublished manuscript prepared for this study [1940],
Vol. I, pp. lo-ii.) The remarkable thing is, of course, that, on the contrary, some state
constitutions in America did touch the question of public education. There were European
countries where public education was introduced earlier than in America, or equally
early. But nowhere would it have been considered important enough to deserve constitutional
sanction.
* See Chapters 4 and 6.
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