over the school readers seems quite naturally to have been the most valuable part of our education. Our thoughts on the conduct of life have been stimulated by it, and this ethical knowledge is of all knowledge the nearest related to self-preservation.
The school, even in its least efficient form, does something on these lines of intellectual insight. For the most fruitful part of all intellectual education is the acquisition of the general outline and the basal idea,—the categories, so to speak, of the provinces of human learning. This intellectual part of school education could not well be more accurately directed to aid the cause of civilization. For the kind of knowledge and mental discipline that conserves civil life is the knowledge that gives an insight into the dependence of the individual upon society. The school is busied with giving the pupil a knowledge of the conditions of physical nature and human nature; the former in mathematical study, the latter in language study.
The school also educates the will through its discipline. It demands of the pupil that he shall be obedient to the rules of order, and adopt habits that make it possible to combine with one's fellows. The school is a small community, in which many immature wills are combined in such a way as to prevent one from standing in the way of another, while each helps all and all help each. For the pupil learns more by seeing the efforts of his fellows at mastering the lesson than he does by hearing the teacher's explanations. In order to secure concert of action, the semi-mechanical moral habits of regularity, punctuality, silence, and industry are insisted on. Moral education is not accomplished by lectures on morals so much as by a strict training in moral habits. The American school is proverbially strict in the matter of these semi-mechanical moral habits. They constitute the basis of self-control as related to combination with one's fellows. Leave out punctuality and regularity, and no combination is practicable; leave out silence and industry, and the school work is not possible. Without industry and abstention from meddlesomeness (and this is the equivalent of silence in the school) there can be no combination in civil society at large. The school secures peaceful co-operation, repressing the natural quarrelsomeness that exists among boys who are strangers to one another, and insuring civil behavior. Good behavior is the general term that characterizes the ideal aimed at by the school in the matter of will-training. A mastery of the "conventionalities of intelligence," as the "three R's" are called by a thoughtful observer, characterizes in like manner the ideal of its intellectual training.
From these considerations we can see how the common school may work, and does necessarily work, to civilize the intellect and will of the child, and how it must affect any lower race struggling to master the elements of civilization. For this scholastic training gives one the power to comprehend the springs of action that move the races which possess the directive power, and thus he can govern himself. It enables the pupil to see the properties and adaptabilities of material things, and he can subdue nature and convert things into wealth.
Here is the ground for the addition of industrial training to the traditional course of study in the common schools. The negro must learn to manage machinery, and make himself useful to the community in which he lives by becoming a skilled laborer.[1] Every physical peculiarity may be converted by the
- ↑ It is well to understand clearly the formidable character of the obstacles which the negro mechanic will be called upon to overcome before he can acquire, in the mechanical trades, any substantial advantage from the prosperity which may surround him. In the first place, he will encounter race prejudice; employers will prefer mechanics of their own
