the reorganization and redirection of negro education || on the need of realism in negro education

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Journal of Negro Education On the Need of Realism in Negro Education Author(s): Charles S. Johnson Source: The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 5, No. 3, The Reorganization and Redirection of Negro Education (Jul., 1936), pp. 375-382 Published by: Journal of Negro Education Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2292110 . Accessed: 07/12/2014 07:08 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Journal of Negro Education is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Negro Education. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 7 Dec 2014 07:08:01 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: The Reorganization and Redirection of Negro Education || On the Need of Realism in Negro Education

Journal of Negro Education

On the Need of Realism in Negro EducationAuthor(s): Charles S. JohnsonSource: The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 5, No. 3, The Reorganization and Redirection ofNegro Education (Jul., 1936), pp. 375-382Published by: Journal of Negro EducationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2292110 .

Accessed: 07/12/2014 07:08

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Journal of Negro Education is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journalof Negro Education.

http://www.jstor.org

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Page 2: The Reorganization and Redirection of Negro Education || On the Need of Realism in Negro Education

CHAPTER VI

On the Need of Realism in Negro Education

CHARLES S. JOHNSON

A great amount of confusion of pur- pose and method in Negro education results from the disposition to regard education itself as a fixed end. It be- comes even more difficult to under- stand the role of education in the life of a people when these ends are ob- scured in abstract formulas. One of the most formidable of the paradoxes encountered in the education of the Negro minority in America is that their unique minority status itself has engendered philosophies which, in sub- stance, blandly deny the fact of this status.

It is true that the patterns of Negro life in America vary widely, from an almost caste-like situation and isola- tion from the dominant currents of American life to a situation in which there is considerable sharing of the American culture. Nowhere, however, is there complete absence of the social implications of this minority racial status, and nowhere is there the per- fection of cultural integration upon which the current educational philos- ophy is founded.

It has been the unwillingness to face this fact that has contributed so large- ly to the insistence that there is no such thing as Negro education; that all citizens, whatever their setting and background, may look forward to the same results from exposure to a stan- dardized educational procedure. The

reluctance is understandable. So long as it is assumed that the cultural en- vironment makes no difference in per- sonality, that the present product of the schools is the best possible; in- deed, that any different educational procedure for Negroes must be in it- self of an inferior order and character, the reluctance to reappraisal will per- sist. No less potent than these is the fear that any revision of procedures, in the light of actual realities of Ne- gro life, will tend toward a perpetua- tion of present Negro status.

The basic error of these assump- tions rests heavily in the misconcep- tions regarding the educative process itself. If this process were a matter of conferring a given mentality, or of providing a bundle of indispensable skills not to be obtained otherwise, there might be some ground for con- cern over tampering with a procedure which represents a sort of common de- nominator of intellectual equipment. In the one case, however, this is im- possible, and in the other impractica- ble, even if possible, by virtue of the rapidly shifting conditions of a tech- nological age.

What has generally been overlooked in the attempts to interpret the func- tion of education has been the fact that it is a method rather than an end in itself; and that this method has to do with relating the individual to his so-

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376 THE JOURNAL OF NEGRO EDUCATION

ciety rather than merely acquiring the method. The stress that has in the past been placed upon educational tech- niques rather than upon the life and culture of the individual helps to ex- plain the present difficulty. Where this is recognized, the inadequacies of pres- ent Negro education take on greater seriousness and meaning. For, poor as the schools are, the educational pro- cedure, which is the excuse for any schools at all, is poorer.

Formal education is only a part of the educational process, and the pur- pose of formal education, which it is the role of the schools to provide, is to bring under intelligent control all of the essential phases of social life. The school, thus, takes its place with the home, the church, the press, the public generally, in transmitting knowledge, standards and values by which social life is regulated. In the school the best of the accumulated ex- perience is passed on by conscious means, and control is provided for the formation of habit and character. The educative process has failed when it has not succeeded in adjusting the in- dividual constructively to his social life. Insofar as this process is a con- scious and artificial one it can be se- lective, and it becomes important in the education of a maladjusted group that its procedures should be adjusted to its cultural needs. Only in such a manner can any material social de- velopment be expected.

THE MEANING OF NEGRO MINORITY STATUS

The Negro population shares vary- ingly in the American culture, and it also has a social life of its own. With- out such a life there could be, under

present American institutions, little of the internal cohesion and emotional stability by which alone groups sur- vive and thrive. While it may be one of the purposes of this solidarity and self- consciousness eventually to make these very traits unnecessary for sur- vival in American life, they are at present incident to the separate racial group life in America. Present Negro status is an outgrowth of slavery, and the actual cultural backwardness of a substantial portion of this population is related to the historic condition. Aside from the imperfect sharing of the American culture which this status implies, there is the well-known limi- tation of the common physical facili- ties invariably associated with this status.

The conscious aim of Negro life is to improve this status, thus escaping the physical as well as the more in- tangible cultural handicaps of this status. This is, conceivably, one of the functions of education. But escape is not possible merely through denial of the status, nor through denial of the past, nor through the simple adoption of the symbols of freedom. It is at this point that some of the gravest inade- quacies of Negro education appear. Negroes did not, of course, design their own methods of education, and if they had it is quite possible that they would have been greatly influenced by what they regarded as American education. In present practice, however, they get, in physically diminished proportions, a system designed for an average con- dition of American life, a procedure reduced to dogma and doctrine, with little intimate relationship to the real- ities back of the symbols passed on. Learning for them, thus, becomes very

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REALISM IN NEGRO EDUCATION 377

largely rote, with no firm root in their lives. It is characteristic of minority status to glorify the forms of the domi- nant culture without competent grasp of the content. When there is under- standing at all it cannot escape being qualified by a sense of the unreality of the education itself. Such a situa- tion would be expected to fail to stir interest, which is the key to mental growth.

It is strongly to be suspected that what the so-called "intelligence" tests actually revealed, when racial com- parisons were made, was the disparity between form and experience in the education of the two groups. Certain- ly the missing parts of fire engines, unfamiliar animals, the place of man- ufacture of Packard cars, the familiar use of squares and circles, all of which figured in the tests, could not be ex- pected to have generalized meaning for persons whose normal round of life excluded meaningful experience with any of these items of knowledge.

The situation of the Negroes in America with respect to educational methods is not very different from that of the Eurasians who are beginning to face the same issue. The Eurasians, who are a biological and cultural re- sult of Europe in India, are an acute- ly marginal population. Their status between two cultures leaves them rather discouragingly without pride of race and lacking in initiative and con- fidence. Now, after several genera- tions, they look to corrective educa- tion to release them from a psychologi- cal as well as a social rut. To quote Kenneth E. Wallace: There are many who believe that the salva- tion of the Eurasian community lies in edu- cation. It is a judgment with which we must

agree if the word education is used in its widest sense as implied in e-duco-a leading out. The people require to be led out of the ruts into which they have fallen. The in- dividual, the family, the school and all their institutions require to be guided into new channels of thought. Their attitude towards each other, towards religion, towards life as a whole requires to be challenged; and their lethargy must be removed. But it is necessary first to lead them out of their psychological rut. And only knowledge will effect the change-a proper knowledge, that is of themselves, which will give a just ap- praisement of themselves, and a proper knowledge of the facts of history and human life, which will give a balanced sense of values and relations. Then only can pride of race, self-confidence, self-help and inde- pendence, together with all the blessings that follow in their wake, be expected as a result.!

One of the most tragic results of the Negro's present status is what it does to the personality of Negro youth. They reflect, too often and too readily, the influence of the institutions under which they live. Where there is no awareness of their marginality, the disposition is to accept the racial im- plications of the institutions and con- sign themselves spiritually to a hope- less role at the bottom of American society. Education has no meaning for them, and so they leave school. The educational statisticians bear eloquent testimony on this point. Studies of the career interests of Negro high school youth reveal a lack of patterns as well as incentives. Where there is little re- alism in education there can be ex- pected much of disillusionment, of fu- tile bitterness, and of "nothingness" as Gertrude Stein once noted as the most persistent plague of the race.

1 Kenneth E. Wallace, The Eurasian Problem, Calcutta and Simla: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1930. Pp. 16-17.

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378 THE JOURNAL OF NEGRO EDUCATION

THE RE-DIRECTION OF NEGRO EDUCATION

1. The simplest way of stating the new conception of Negro education is that it should, wherever possible, be- gin with the familiar and the real in their own lives, rather than in the borrowed experiences of other groups. "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." A lowly status is not bad in itself; it can the more readily be changed as it is made conscious of itself. Knowledge of the larger world and the experiences of other individuals and groups take on vital meaning when they can be re- lated to an experience that has been felt. John Dewey many years ago pointed out the error of considering ed- ucation as "prepartion for life." More soundly, he conceived of education as beginning at birth and continuing until death, with a period of formal school- ing as a phase of the process.

If we need examples of the divorce from reality in common education, they can readily be found in the fu- tile efforts to teach sanitation in filthy school buildings; in the efforts to have pupils commit to memory geographi- cal places without a sense of their own orientation in space; in history that remembers fitfully the dates of bat- tles or the accession of kings in a re- mote and irrelevant stream of other- worldly events; in reading that is scarcely more than the successful join- ing of words. Education begins in ex- perience, and it becomes effective in the measure that this experience can be related to the larger world of knowledge.

Something is evidently wrong when the results of the education of Negroes fail at so many points to deal con-

cretely with the life of the group. The problems of economics are felt more acutely by Negroes than by any other group in America, but so, far only two or three Negroes have projected them- selves effectively into this field of spe- cialization. Tuberculosis is one of the greatest scourges of the race, yet few Negroes trained in medicine are de- voting themselves to this problem of science. The subject of race is a para- mount one, yet there are only two or three Negro ethnologists or anthropol- ogists, and scarcely a half-dozen psy- chologists. Preparation for these fields scarcely requires any equipment which is inaccessible to them. Interestingly enough, the most important contribu- tions to anthropology and ethnology in America have been made by Jews, who have experienced in a much milder form the social handicaps of Negroes.

Apart from the better known pro- fessions, there are now actually oppor- tunities for scientific and social re- search students, statisticans, health officers, sanitary engineers, architects and draughtsmen, designers, organiza- tion executives trained in social work, psychiatrists, social and medical clini- cians, fields which few of these youth have considered as either interesting or possible for them. It would appear, from the listless but preponderant ma- jorities of Negro college graduates who move toward the teaching profession, that an unnatural educational process completes its weary cycle when it merely reproduces itself, however meaninglessly, in the next generation.

2. Negro youth should be given early the basic tools and techniques of a modern technological age. Booker T. Washington stated the elementary

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REALISM IN NEGRO EDUCATION 379

phases of this principle forty years ago, but distortion of it in a battle of schools of thought impeded the growth of the idea as a part of the sound edu- cational philosophy of Negroes. Today Americans have realized the value of preparation for a technological age and have begun to place more and more emphasis upon it. The public school systems have been relieved of the necessity for providing much in this direction for the Negroes, by their own wishes, and as a consequence a lag in another direction of Negro edu- cation has developed.

A problem facing this race today is one of mastering the techniques im- posed by technological changes. It is in this world that the Negro must live by competition with others who are geared to the tempo of a new age. The factors of change which affect the gen- eral population also affect the Negro, and it becomes imperative that, along with an essential psychological adjust- ment from minority status, adjustment be made to these broad cultural changes. Here American education generally lags, and Negro education, which chronically follows it, lags more. F. Stuart Chapin has estimated that man's life span over the past genera- tion has increased about 20 per cent, while the volume of culture has piled up at a far more rapid rate. The at- tempt to meet this change, where it has been made, has consisted of adding new subjects to the curriculum. All the indices of the growth of culture which have been examined indicate that the rate of accumulation far exceeds the gain in expectation of life. Dr. Chapin concludes that new devices are needed for simplification, and "new means for threading one's way selectively

through the increasingly complex net- work of social relations and culture accumulations."

On the elementary level it seems es- sential, along with the simple tools of learning such as are provided in the familiar three "R's," that rigid disci- pline be instilled in the skillful co- ordination of mind, hand, and eye. Dr. Flexner has well drawn a distinc- tion between education and training. A man or youth may be trained to make a broom or a pair of shoes or a box, without being educated in mech- anics or woodcraft, or the fabrication of fibers. It is futile to provide a train- ing in an archaic trade merely be- cause it is simple. It is likewise futile to attempt to impart a specific skill for the intensely specialized and rap- idly changing processes of modern in- dustry. What seems to be required now is the development in Negro youth of a technique of manipulation, with the thoroughness attempted by the liberal arts colleges in developing an undif- ferentiated cultural competence. And, as is the presumption of the liberal arts colleges, this technique may be transferred and applied to the specific task demanding it. It was just such a highly developed and undifferentiated technical aptitude that enabled the Japanese to reorganize their entire cul- ture on Western lines within scarcely more than two generations. This edu- cational emphasis, this sense for ac- curacy, precision, craftsmanship, and creative art should begin for Negro youth in the elementary grades.

3. Negro youth should be provided early with a sound reinterpretation of their own history and traditions, and they should be given the benefit of stimulating racial patterns of effort

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380 THE JOURNAL OF NEGRO EDUCATION

and success. Sound character training must be based upon self-respect, and sound social development must be founded upon self-confidence. This means that Negro youth should be aware not merely of the general stream of history, which embodies the guiding traditions of the culture which they share, but of the role of their intimate group in this history.

Distortions in this sphere are possi- ble in many directions, from glorifica- tion of a fanciful racial origin to self- commiseration and apology for filling a role in history which most of the texts regard with blunt contempt, or which they neglect to regard at all. The lack of both a tradition and a his- tory is a serious enough handicap to youth, but the absorption of senti- ments which encourage self-disparage- ment is of even deeper injury. A nota- ble example of this problem is brought to attention in a recent issue of the Journal of Negro History by Lawrence Reddick in his study of history text books in use by Negroes in sixteen Southern states.

The picture of slavery which the average pupil in these sixteen states received gave no recognition to the vi- tal importance of Negro man-power in the conquest of nature in the New World, but revived the romantic role of the slave holder. Docile Negroes with strong backs were imported from Africa. Even kings and queens encour- aged the slave trade, which was car- ried on in New England ships. Because of the warm climate, soil, and the in- vention of the cotton gin, slavery spread in the South and tended to dis- appear in the North. The life of the slave was pictured as simple and coarse but not hard, for the Negroes

were good natured and sang songs dur- ing and after their work.

Discussions of Reconstruction re- viled the Negro legislators and the governments in which they partici- pated. One of these texts, called A His- tory of the People of the United States carried this interesting interpretation of history: The Negroes, guided by their white leaders, formed an association known as the Loyal League, for the purpose of keeping the white race under foot. They committed murder, arson, and crimes of every kind. The white people could get no protection from the courts, for judges and jurors were under the control of those who had made all the trouble. Organizations were there- fore formed among the whites for self-pro- tection. . . . The Ku Klux Klan was the most famous of these organizations.

The Negro since the Civil War is ig- nored almost entirely. A few of the more liberal texts have a paragraph or two on the Negro's progress and mention Booker T. Washington in a few lines.

The prefaces of most of these text- books, significantly enough, announce as a part of their purpose to give the young Americans pride in their her- itage. The Negro child learns his his- tory frequently from many teachers who know little about their own his- tory, and are themselves a part of the backward traditions of their group. They accept accounts in Southern textbooks and pass them on to their pupils. One of G. Stanley Hall's fun- damental postulates was that the emo- tional life is far more fundamental than the intellectual. Emotion fur- nishes the motivation for the develop- ment of the intellect. The Negro youth must be given a conception of his role and of his past that can aid in influ-

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REALISM IN NEGRO EDUCATION 381

encing his behavior and his ambitions. And it is increasingly the school that must render this service.

4. Finally, there is a re-direction possible for that function of the school referred to as "character education." In one sense character education is a matter of guiding the formation of a consistent habit pattern in terms of the highest possible social standards and values. Human character is ac- quired. It is not an abstract virtue but a social quality. Once this principle is recognized it is possible to provide for Negro youth a new and valuable reorientation.

Education that can contribute to constructive and satisfying social re- lations can justify itself, in part at least, as character education. This means, then, more stress upon those habits which aid cooperative living and social sharing than upon individ- ual initiative and success. This is as vital to the healthy survival of a mi- nority as it is to individual character.

It is important that the personality of Negro youth should be preserved, and this is possible through habits of self-discipline with reference to the very status which he seeks to improve. Equality for Negroes in the American society means actual superiority; su- periority, however, is not an arguable thing; it is most effective when it is a subjective secret. Negro youth should be made to know that an unfailing self-discipline is to seek a major re- sponsibility which has to be sustained; to expose themselves at intervals be- yond the familiar limits to an unre- stricted test of their powers. It is the sense of social inadequacy which lim- its the self-mastery of Negroes, which defines their limits, poisons ambition

at its source, contents them with achieving merely "well enough for a Negro," shortens the reach of their imaginations, crushes the spirit of cre- ativeness, and holds them firmly to their inadequacy.

Negro youth should be taught to cultivate a stark objectivity about themselves and about their thinking about themselves. This involves rec- ognition of racial differences, with the realization, through science and their own assurance, that the difference is essentially meaningless. They should be led away from the devitalizing shame over circumstances in racial history, with the knowledge that cul- ture itself is not a thing of the germ plasm, and that the history of Negroes is the cycle through which every peo- ple has evolved. They should be taught to recognize and admit racial weak- nesses, on the sound philosophy that unless Negroes are frank about their faults, they cannot expect to be be- lieved when they speak of their vir- tues. They should be taught to ignore public efforts designed to provoke feel- ings of inferiority, on the principle that the sensitiveness itself is a sanc- tion of the status implied. They should be encouraged in the deliberate search- ing for beauty in the hidden lives of their own, on the principle that they are loved best who teach the beauty of their own lives, and are most scorned who most scorn themselves.

Objectively, the sociologists classify Negroes with cripples,-persons with recognized physical handicaps which have social consequences. The crip- ples themselves have the choice either of resigning themselves apologetically to their handicap and selling pencils on the street; or of developing con-

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382 THE JOURNAL OF NEGRO EDUCATION

scious compensations for their defi- ciency. In this sociological sense many persons are "cripples"-the timid, the near-sighted, the too short, the too tall, the ugly, the obese, the nervous, the physically weak, the sensitive, the deaf. If they are wise, they develop healthy compensations.

The difference in accomplishment between two races, as between two men, is essentially a matter of motives. The substance of Adler's whole sys- tem of psychology is that the craving for superiority, accentuated by defect, is satisfied through compensation for inferiority. In this manner it is possi- ble to give new valuations to social circumstances, to make of social handicaps, which are for the moment inescapable, the actual driving force, the urge of superior accomplishment.

Negro youth, recognizing the fact of an unequal economic struggle, may

then either accept the status that goes with inferior economic ability, or com- pensate for this deficiency by actually developing a superior skill. In most parts of the country, all other things being equal, if a Negro and a white worker apply for a position, the white worker will get it. This is a social dis- ability which is unfair, of course, and should be changed. Meanwhile, how- ever, wise Negro education would make it clear that it is futile to await helplessly the slow processes of human nature. Intelligent strategy demands that the Negro youth should assure themselves of that superior compe- tence which in many cases outweighs purely racial advantage. In their very minority status, which so often proves discouraging or limiting, there are the seeds of great power, if only common sense and enough energy are applied to them.

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