manners.[1] He loses, too, the education of the master's counsel and directing influence. Unless this is counterbalanced by school education, it will produce degeneracy: for to remove the weight of authority is productive of good only when there has been a growth of individuality that demands a larger sphere of free activity. In case of entering upon village life and mechanical industries greater freedom from authority is demanded, and its effects are healthful; but with the isolated life on the plantation the opposite holds.
The remedy for evils incident to these changes is, as before said, school education, provided it is inclusive enough to furnish industrial and moral as well as intellectual training.
Education, intellectual and moral, is the only means yet discovered that is always sure to help people to help themselves. Any other species of aid may enervate the beneficiary, and lead to a habit of dependence on outside help. But intellectual and moral education develops self-respect, fertility of resources, knowledge of human nature, and aspiration for a better condition in life. It produces that divine discontent which goads on the individual, and will not let him rest.[2]
How does the school produce this important result? In what way can it give to the negro a solid basis for character and accomplishments? The school has undertaken to perform two quite different and opposite educational functions. The first produces intellectual training, and the second the training of the will.
The school, for its intellectual function, causes the pupil to learn certain arts, such as reading and writing, which make possible communication with one's fellow-men, and impart certain rudimentary insights or general elementary ideas with which practical thinking may be done, and the pupil be set on the way to comprehend his environment of nature, and of humanity and history. There is taught in the humblest of schools something of arithmetic, the science and art of numbers, by whose aid material nature is divided and combined,—the most practical of all knowledge of nature because it relates to the fundamental conditions of the existence of nature, the quantitative structure of time and space themselves. A little geography, also, is
- ↑ The increasing isolation of the negro of the South from the whites is so far as his own advancement is concerned, the most significant fact connected with his present condition. In one point only does he come in contact with the white man, and that is in the formal relation of employed to employer. The negro and the white man are driven into this relation of necessity. In their social spheres they are as wide apart as if they inhabited different countries. They have separate churches and separate schools, and it is only a question of time for them to have, in all parts of the South, separate public conveyances. The two races resemble two great streams that flow side by side, never commingling nor converging. There is no disposition to unite. On the contrary, the tendency is to swerve still further apart. This is a fact of supreme importance in its bearing upon the prospects of the negro race in the South, for that race is essentially imitative and adaptive in its character, showing a parasitic loyalty to its environment. In a state of servitude, the negro was disciplined into a fixed and industrious life by the regulations of the system which enslaved him; he was improved in manners and elevated in his general conceptions by his daily association with the individuals of a superior white caste. The semi-military discipline of slavery is gone, and no social or personal tie now unites the home of the negro with that of the white man.—P. A. B.
- ↑ Self-respect is near akin to self-support. Any one who has lived in a foreign land where class distinctions prevail knows how ineffaceable is deference to rank, sometimes approaching servility. The negro seems to assume, to feel, to act on, his inferiority. The action of the government, of party managers, of religious organizations, of givers of pecuniary aid, of administrators of charitable benefactions, has tended to make him look to and rely upon Hercules. Slavery subordinated will, repressed intelligence, did not cultivate individuality or self-determination, and what is needed for the African is a strengthening at weak points so as to build up self-reliant character.—J. L. M. C.
