On Education
by Anna Julia Cooper (1930)

. . Education has been well defined as the building up of a man, the whole man; which, I take it, implies putting your crude material through | whatever processes insure the highest return of the entire product at its best.

Manifestly nothing can more profitably engage the time and thought | of statesmen and sages than the perfecting of these processes and the improvement of this product. The interest of the commonwealth in the result | is transcendent. The smallest element is as vital to the state as heart's blood. No expenditure is extravagant that enhances the value of the output: no experiment but is suicidal if it results in the waste of any precious material. Indeed, so busy and so efficient are the forces of evil in working up the refuse into engines of deadly execution, it may with truth be said that from the standpoint of the state the most valuable part of all material, reckoned both in direction of what it may become and of what it may be saved from |being, the item most momentous in potentiality is the refuse—the outcast.

“And so our uncomely parts have put on more abundant comeliness," that there be no schism in the body politic. The high cannot say to the low, I have no need of thee”; nor the well-conditioned to the lazzarone: "I have no need of thee.” So long as the wretchedest hovel may culture germs of disease and misery against which the proudest palace is not immune, the submerged tenth take on a terrible significance in the building up of men, and the only salvation lies in leaving the ninety and nine in the wilderness and going after that which is lost. The only sane education, therefore, is that which conserves the very lowest stratum, the best and most economical is that which gives to each individual, according to his capacity, that traning of “head, hand, and heart,” or, more literally, of mind, body and spirit which converts him into a beneficent force in the service of the world. This is the business of schools and this the true cause of the deep and vital interest of all the people in Educational Programs.

Educational Programs

As interested in the education of a neglected people, and as educators in a circumscribed field of work, we are confronted by a peculiar danger at the same time that we are buoyed up and helped by a peculiar inspiration and stimulus to devotion. Whether from force of circumstances or from choice and loving consecration, we are ministers of the Gospel of intelligence, of moral and material uplift to a people whose need is greater than the average need around us by reason of past neglect,—a people who are habitually reasoned about en masse as separate, distinct, and peculiar; a people who must be fitted to make headway in the face of prejudice and proscription the most bitter, the most intense, the most unrelenting the world has ever seen. Every journeyman tinker thinks he can tell you what to do with the Negro; what sort of clothes he should wear, what sort of meat he should | cat, what sort of books he should and should not study: in short, just what sort of education is sane, sensible and “practical” for one of his texture of hair and hide.

! In the presence of this multitude of counsellors the danger is that we lose sight altogether of basic principles as such, and remember that we are educating Negroes before we have yet realized that we are educating men. It cannot be denied that the wisest plan of education for any people should take cognizance of past and present environment, should note the forces against which they must contend, or in unison with which they must labor in the civilization of which they form a part. It should not be ignored, further, that the colored man in America, because of his marked appearance and his unique history, will for a long time need peculiar equipment for the intense, the unrelenting struggle for survival amid which he finds himself in the America of today. The weakest of the races here represented, at the same time the most conspicuous and undisguisable, the black race, has need truly of wise teachers and far-seeing leaders, to help them up the thorny road of life. When studying or planning a program of Negro education we shall need the clearest thought, the wisest counsels, the broadest charity. There is no place for jealousies or for hobbies. . . .

It is well known that the power to think, the power to appreciate, and the power to will the right and make it prevail, is the sum total of thefaculties of the human soul. Education which is truly “educative” must strengthen, develop, “lead out” these faculties in preparation for those special activities which may be called “occupative,” because they give the one line of training necessary for the occupation or trade of the individual. No one will deny that thought-power, will-power, and the power to discern and appreciate proportion and right relation are fundamental needs of the people for whom we toil, as of others. Indeed when we speak of their peculiar weaknesses and special lack to be overcome by education, | think if we analyse our enticism carefully, we shall find the fault resolve itself into one or all of these three faculties still latent or underdeveloped and in need of training.

The Negro has had manual education throughout his experience as a slave. For 250 years he was practically the only laborer in the American market. His training was whatever his teachers decreed it should be. His skill represented the best teaching of the section in which he found himself. If he did not reckon a knowledge of machinery among his accomplishments it must be admitted that machinery was very tardily introduced into the Southland. But his methods as a farmer, as a mechanic, as nurse, as domestic, were the result of the best teaching the peculiar institution afforded. What was the lack? What is the need today? Is it not just the power to think, the power to will, the power to appreciate true relation, which have been enumerated as the universal aim of education? The old education made him a “hand,” solely and simply. It deliberately sought to suppress or ignore the soul. We must, whatever else we do, insist on those studies which by the consensus of educators are calculated to train our people to think, which will give them the power of appreciation and make them righteous. In a word we are building men, not chemists or farmers, or cooks, or soldiers, but men ready to serve the body politic in whatever avocation their talent 1s needed. Ths is fundamental. No sort of superstructure can endure on any different foundation. This first for all men—whether for white men, red men, yellow men, or black men, whether for rich men or poor men, high or low, the aim of education for the human soul 1s to train anght, to give power and nght direction to the intellect, the sensibilities, and the will. Certain studies, certain courses, certain exercises have been tested, tried, accepted by the experience of centuries in the steady progress of humanity.

Teachers from Aristotle to the present have sifted and analysed the various branches of learning to get at their relative worth as educative factors. The results of their experiments and analyses are not hidden in dark places. They are universally accepted by teachers and thinkers as a reasonable and proper basis for the education of mankind. The only way to meet those skeptics who still ask with a half sneer “What is the use of this or that study for Negroes?" is with the query “is it good for men?" Has it been selected for curricula universally and has it stood the test for the discipline it gives in the direction of thought-power, power of appreciation, power of willing the right? These are the things we need. If these studies are means to those ends there can be nothing incongruous or unreasonable in trying them on our pupils in all faith as to the divine possibilities in all human development.

As to the second or “occupative™ aim of our work, it cannot be denied that there has been some loss in the past through a certain lack of definiteness on our part. There has been a shifting or wavering of programs coupled with an acrimony in criticizing the other man’s program which promises little in the way of progress or of mutual esteem. This has been partly our fault, partly our misfortune. It has been a misfortune that too often our program has been handed down from above, along with the cash which was to constitute our sinews of war. The Negro, being an “interesting case," all the good old ladies in the country have had a hand in prescribing his medicine, and they mean to see that he takes it. No fumbling with the bedclothes and trying to spit behind the bed! Down it must go. As head nurses we have had litte opportunity to interpose. Those who had the hardihood to object, did so at their peril. The time has come, however, when the educators of Negroes must see that one narrow pattern cannot meet the demands of this people whose life is as varied and whose need is as various as the life and needs of the American people. The time has come for a rational discussion of these needs on the part of those who are interested in the shaping of educational programs, for a frank admission of individual limitations (one man can't do it all—or know it all), and lastly for an intelligent and economic division of labor on the principle of each undertaking that which he does best and standing squarely for that specialty for which his plant, his general equipment and his endowment promise the best result.

There can be no doubt that the colored families are producing children enough to keep all the schools going, from the kindergarten to the universities; the high schools, trade schools, colleges, normal schools, professional schools,—all are needed to minister to the ever broadening demand of this people. Let Fisk, Atlanta, and similar schools have the support and encouragement they need as institutions of higher learning; let Hampton, Tuskegee and similar schools wear their well earned laurels as he correspondingly great trade universities; but let not Atlanta think she must extemporize a tin shop, nor Tuskegee make shift for a chair of oratory under the apprehension that each must aim at what the other is doing well. I feel that I can afford to speak for an occupation concerning which there has been much backwardness in schools for occupations because, perhaps, of certain suppressed odium that may attend the frank avowal of such purpose. I refer to the occupation of domestic servants. There seems a delicacy about deliberately and avowedly setting about the training for domestic service or the frank admission that the training adopted leads to such an end. On this point | can speak more freely than I would probably do if I represented a school of thought that looks towards the occupations but is hampered by this shy sensitiveness and the secret hope that somehow its young people will take a turn in this direction and do credit to their training without ever having planned a course with such a purpose in view.

We hear a great deal about Negroes leaving the rural districts and congregating in cities. Now the great cry of the cities is for trained domestic help. In the Northern cities especially the demand would give an almost fictitious valuation to supply measuring up in every way to the requirement. Just here, it seems to me, some one good school—not all by any means—but some school fitted for that business might undertake to supply the training for this branch of industry—frankly, and with careful planning of program. You and I know what an agonizing wail there is throughout the country on the degeneration of the Negro servant. In fact I believe that most of the sentiment existing today adverse to the race is due to the bad record left by our missionaries—the servants! Most people don't stop to think, and our average American public is just like “most people” in this respect. They tell you that the Negro is more degenerate under freedom than he was under slavery; they extol the virtues, the amiability and reliability of the old time servant class, whom they tell you they loved by reason of their excellencies of character as well as their faithfulness of service,— but now", —and then the howl of despair as the shiftlessness of the up-to-date “girl” is detailed, her untrained, unkempt disorderliness, her unmitigated emptiness of all the qualities that rendered her supposed ancestors loved and respected. And then the conclusion inevitable that the whole race is immeasurably worse conditioned than “before the war”; that some such system as slavery was needed to keep us all from going to the dogs.

Let us look at the facts. Under slavery there was the most vigilant, the most intelligent, the most successful natural selection known to civilized man to form this class of house servants who were to be in immediate and constant contact of the most intimate sort with the master class. There was absolutely nothing to mar this selection or thwart the most perfect adjustment of it to the needs of the system.

The house servants were the cream by natural endowment first, and by most careful training and contact afterwards. Have these same people, and their children, degenerated since or have they gone up higher? | think the latter. Today they represent the thrift, the mechanical industry, the business intelligence, the professional skill, the well ordered homes, and the carefully nurtured families that are to be found in every town and hamlet where the colored man is known. The whole bed-rock has been lifted up by emancipation, stratum upon stratum, so that they who know the Negro only in their kitchens are too often brought in contact with a level which they never met under the old regime. And yet it is important for our cause, no less than for the employer class, that the quality of domestic service be improved through training and through intelligent comprehension of its circumstances and opportunities. In the first place, the association of the domestic in the home of her employer is by necessity most intimate and responsible. “The help” can by her silent, self-respecting dependableness preach unanswerable sermons before audiences that you and 1 can never reach. She can refute pre-judgments, allay opposition, and mold favorable sentiment without ever opening her lips on the Negro problem; she can in her own person and by her own character offer a solution of that problem which will gainsay all cavil and all criticism, is it not worth while for some school to undertake the work seriously, candidly, devotedly, of sending out a stream into these channels of usefulness so full of promise, so rich in opportunities for the race? The character of the service is important and the service itself when properly appreciated and performed has the same elements of dignity as other services. Browning has stated a universal truth in “Pippa Passes when he says:

All service ranks the same with God—
With God, whose puppets, best and worst,
Are we; there is no last nor first.

Something must be done on both sides, I grant you. Our young girls must be protected from libertines and villains who lie in wait in gorgeous palaces to entrap the innocent. Not only must the girl be trained for the home but the home, too, must be selected and prepared for the new servant—a servant whose treatment shall be worthy [of] her training, a servant whose dignity and whose serviceableness shall justify the expenditure for such a course in our educational program. We may not stem the tide rushing into our large cities. Certainly speech-making has very little to do with such things. But we may direct, guide, and help some in the cities, and, it seems to me, that the consideration of such a program is not unworthy [of] the serious attention of thoughtful educators.

I have dwelt thus at length on the occupation of domestic service for two reasons: first, I hoped to make it clear that 1 have no word or thought adverse to this or any honest toil. Second, I expect to make it just as plain before I am through that neither domestic service nor any other service will ever be considered anything else than menial until it is put on a professional basis by having behind it a thorough course of general education. The conclusion is a corollary to this that the trained domestic, like the trained nurse, will demand the pay, and will deserve the treatment that are accorded intelligent and efficient services professionally rendered in whatever calling of life, and that it is not by persuasive essays on the dignity of labor, but by broadening and dignifying the laborer, that we can secure any respectable number of recruits for this most important field of occupation. Any act performed by an ignorant slattern is menial, while no amount of indignity can really degrade a soul truly in possession of itself through scientific development of its faculties.

And just here is the battleground. The fatal American faculty of cutting corners has taught us to call that program of education “practical” which makes the shortest cut to the nearest dollar in sight. Before childhood has had time to grow, it is harassed with the feverish, mercantile question “what can you do?” Bears sometimes eat their cubs and humans not seldom fatten on child labor, but the crime becomes monstrous when whole communities systematize the stunting and warping of all normal child-development by premature specialization. The Germans understand this better than we. They realize as we do not that the total output of all industry is enhanced by the broader growth of the laborer. In her fierce competition with her foreign foes Germany set herself to building up the man,—a man useful to and to be used by the Fatherland in whatever capacity his services might be needed. To this end primary and secondary education are made the broad basis for technical or industrial training. In other words, technical schools are where colleges are with us and specialization (specializing) does not begin until the child has completed what answers to the high school course.

This places the educative before the occupative—the cultural before the special, the development before the industrial. This is the natural order of any educational program based upon scientific principles of human development.

Training of the eye to accuracy and the muscles of the hand and arm as in writing and drawing have an early place in any program of general education which, according to all enlightened planning, comprehends the culture of the physical as well as the mental and moral man. But it is well known that with the growing child a too carly concentration of effort in the operation of special muscles is sure to result in partial or total atrophy of others. As a matter of course subsistence is the first problem with man as with every other animal and, if it is not at hand, the child must make shift as he can to get it or perish. But he does not grow in order to subsist; he subsists in order to grow, and if his growth be used up in the means of subsistence, the inevitable result is dwarfage. The natural father stores up this subsistence for the child during the growing or formative period in order that his development may proceed along normal and self-preservative lines. My plea is for the sacredness and inviolability of the growing period of the child. Guard it, nurture it, foster it. Give it the one thing needful, —time. If it costs sacrifice, it is richly worth it.

The state has provided in all advanced American communities free instruction for this period covering altogether about twelve years and roughly divisible into primary and secondary schools, or more accurately into kindergarten and primary, intermediate and secondary which constitute the common school course or what we are proud to call general public education. Superadded to this common course for all should come the special courses or training for a vocation: a Normal course to train for teaching and a technical course to train for certain trades. The latter are the true “higher” schools and are equal in rank as fitting [sic] for earning living. They ought to rank with professional schools, but American communities have not yet put all the professions on a public education basis; although without doubt the way should be provided somehow and somewhere to enable a poor boy of special aptitude to make his way to whatever equipment his talents can best employ in the service of the state, Such common school equipment is and of right ought to be the birthright of every American born child. The Japanese can claim it under treaty obligation. . . .

“We learn by doing” is an educational axiom, but true as it is, it does not mean as it is often attempted to prove that sense travels only from hand to brain. The normal direction of the current would seem logically to go just the other way. Brain power insures hand power, and thought training produces industrial efficiency. We learn by doing when we dissect a crayfish or build a Latin sentence in the secondary school, when we perform chemical reaction in the laboratory or express a thought in French, German, or Spanish, as when we read, write, or draw in the primary grades. Enlightened industrialism does not mean that the body who plows cotton must study nothing but cotton and that he who would drive a mule successfully should have contact only with mules. Indeed it has been well said “if I knew my son would drive a mule all his days, [ should still give him the groundwork of a general education in his youth that would place the greatest possible distance between him and the mule.” Prof. Huxley was one of the most distinguished and enthusiastic exponents of the progressive tendencies of modern education said as early as 1877 before the Working Men's Club and Institute Union in speaking on the subject of technical education:

In my judgment, the preparatory education of the handicraftsman ought to have nothing of what is ordinarily understood by “technical” about it. The workshop is the only real school for a handicraft, The education which precedes that of the workshop should be endrely devoted to the strengthening of the body, the elevation of the moral faculties, and the cultivation of intelligence; and, especially, to the imbuing [of] the mind with a broad and clear view of the laws of the natural world with the components of which the handicraftsman will have to deal. And the earlier the period of life at which the handicraftsman has to enter into actual practice of his craft, the more important is it that he should devote the precious hours of preliminary education to things of the mind, which have no direct and immediate bearing on his branch of industry, though they lie at the foundation of all realities.

In many a hard-fought field the foe has been routed, not by a blunderbuss, but by an epithet. Advocates of the shortcut have made good use of this ruse. In the first place, the modem designation of secondary grade schools as “high schools” has favored the confusion with “higher education" which has already fallen under the disrepute of being “mere culture” or professional or “gentlemanly” training. In any exact thinking, dure is the term for those studies which disclose the child to himself and put him into possession of his dormant faculties. The physician puts the germ of diphtheria or tuberculosis into a “culture” of gelatin or some substance in which the hidden spark 1s nurtured into life and enabled to grow. The gardener calls the little pots of nursery plants “cultures.” But the poor man is almost ashamed to harbor the thought of culturing his offspring and high schools are derided as giving impractical and useless accomplishments for the few who do not have to work and as making “scholars” and high-sounding wind-bags. “You can’t make,” says one conclusively, “‘beet-root sugar out of fine phrases.” This is true. But neither can you make beet-root sugar out of foolish phrases. When you come to think of it the beet-root industry has never been known to be affected by any kind of phrases. But the industries and ideals of a nation cannot but be enriched by the sound of intelligence of all the people derived from thorough general education in its schools.

Any scheme of education should have regard to the whole man—not a special class or race of men, but man as the paragon of creation, possessing in childhood and in youth almost infinite possibilities for physical, moral and mental development. If a child seem poor in inheritance, poor in environment, poor in personal endowment, by so much the more must organized society bring to that child the good tidings of social salvation through the schools. . . .