Education for Rural Life

A great system of schools and colleges has grown up since emancipation for one of the many races which make up America-a system which includes private schools and colleges as well as the much greater number of public institutions. This peculiar school system has grown with amazing rapidity in seventy years-from practically zero in 1863 to an educational organization today which in 17 Southern states numbers 2,200,000 pupils in 25,000 elementary schools, 150,000 pupils in 2,000 high schools, and 25,000 students in the hundred or more specifically Negro institutions of college and university grade. This phenomenal growth is exceeded in all world history only by the revolutionary development of schools in Japan during the same period, when that country was making itself over from oriental feudalism into a modern nation. Another striking feature is that the special schools for this new have so closely followed the pattern adopted for the older branch of the dual school system. The reasons for this are fairly obvious. The missionaries who threw themselves into the building up of the early schools knew only the education they were accustomed to in white institutions. The early Negro mission schools were attempts to reproduce white education. Furthermore, even if they had known anything else or if the idea of differentiation had occurred to them, these fervent friends of the Negro were devoted to and equality to them naturally meant uniformity. It might be expected, however, that the public authorities would provide a very special kind of education for this race which in so many ways was in a peculiar situation in America. Just freed from slavery, almost wholly illiterate, economically dependent, descended from parents of very different cultures from the controlling European pattern-these would seem to be sufficiently unique characteristics to have justified a radically different educational approach. But almost no difference in kind of education followed in practice or even in planning. It is true that Hampton and Tuskegee in their early days put emphasis on the practical skills usable in farming and hand labor. And white Southerners in the early days talked a good deal about the desirability of industrial or farming training for this group rather than intellectual education. But all this was largely talk. Negro schools and colleges are indistinguishable from white institutions in general scope, curriculum, and aims, though they are too often easily marked by lower standards, poorer equipment, and much less financial support. Probably it is a good thing that no attempt was made to build up a different kind of education for the new race. Wherever the Negro has met difference in treatment in America, he

Economic growth · Economics · Geography · Socioeconomics · Sociology · Diverse Educational Innovations Studies · Education Methods and Practices · Education Systems and Policy · Psychology