4.8) The Southern Education Movement

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Del curso dictado por University of Pennsylvania

American Education Reform: History, Policy, Practice

calificaciones

University of Pennsylvania

American Education Reform: History, Policy, Practice

calificaciones

Discover what shapes how we talk about schools today by exploring the history of U.S. education reform. Engage with the main actors, key decisions, and major turning points in this history. See how social forces drive reform. Learn about how the critical tensions embedded in U.S. education policy and practice apply to schools nationally, globally— and where you live.

De la lección

The Progressive Era

This module looks at the Progressive movement writ large; the U.S. settlement movement as a source of urban school reform; the changes “administrative progressives” effected in the governance of urban school districts; the influence of the U.S. Army’s World War I intelligence- testing program on the American school system; social efficiency schooling and its theoretical foundations; the Committee of Ten, 1892–93; the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, 1918; and Booker T.Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.

4.1) Introduction3:58

4.2) Progressive Seedbeds of Education Reform4:31

4.3) Rise of the Administrative Progressives in American School Reform 6:22

4.4) Psychological Testing Movement7:17

4.5) Social Efficiency Schooling 6:15

4.6) The Committee of Ten5:07

4.7) The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education7:00

4.8) The Southern Education Movement 7:59

4.9) Rosenwald Schools and County Training Schools for African Americans6:40

Conoce a los instructores

Dr. John L. Puckett
Professor of Education
Graduate School of Education
Dr. Michael Charles Johanek
Senior Fellow
Graduate School of Education

At the turn of the last century, it was indisputably clear

that Southern whites would invest very little in the education of black children.

Northern industrial philanthropists saw an opportunity

in this inequity to introduce a system of industrial education in black schools,

a system that would redound to the advantage of new South industries.

Prominent Southern politicians and white education reformers aligned themselves

with the industrial philanthropists to spread the gospel of industrial education.

At a region-wide conference held in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1901,

University of Tennessee president Charles W Dabney called for

educating blacks as labor for Southern industries.

Quote, the Negro is in the South to stay, he is a necessity for Southern industries,

and the Southern people must educate and so elevate him or he will drag them down.

We must use common sense in the education of the Negro.

We must recognize in all its relations that momentous fact that the Negro is

a child race at least 2000 years behind the Anglo-Saxon and its development.

Nothing is more ridiculous than the program of the good religious people from

the North who insist upon teaching Latin, Greek, and

philosophy to the Negro students who come to their school, unquote.

The alliance of Northern philanthropists and

white education reformers created the Southern Education Board to propagandize

the gospel of industrial education.

The primary funding mechanism for industrial education programs was

the General Education Board created by the oil mogul John D Rockefeller in 1902.

By 1921, Rockefeller had donated more than $129 million to the board.

In addition to its own philanthropy, the general education board served as

a clearing house to channel funding from other philanthropic organizations.

>> As the historian James Anderson notes,

the philanthropists encountered significant opposition to their

program from African American intellectual leaders,

who interpreted industrial education as a guarantee of black subordination.

This opposition played out in the national debate between Tuskegee's president,

Booker T Washington, and the nation's most prominent black intellectual,

W.E.B. DuBois.

Although both Washington and DuBois advocated higher education for

the training of a black leadership class, DuBois called it the talented tenth,

they differed significantly regarding the purpose of an elite education.

Washington believed that educated black elite should take up the cause of

industrial education for

the vast majority of blacks, whom he regarded as a developing people.

Like teachers should receive their training at industrial normal schools like

Tuskegee.

By contrast, DuBois and his allies in the Niagara movement envisioned a liberally

educated black leadership class that would assert itself in politics and campaign for

voting rights, equal education opportunities, and

the dismantling of the South's system of racial apartheid.

Black teachers were to be liberally educated at black colleges.

In this debate, Washington had the industrial philanthropists on his side,

but he was caught between a rock and a hard place.

Whereas Washington viewed industrial education as an evolutionary means toward

black economic independence, the learning of trades for

example, white supremacists saw it as a means of keeping blacks in place in

the bottom rungs of agriculture and industry.

Southern whites preferred the term training to education.

>> In the postbellum era,

Northern missionary societies founded higher education institutions for blacks.

Among others, Atlanta University, Morehouse College for men, and

Spelman College for women, and Clark University, all in Atlanta,

Fisk University in Nashville, and Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church established colleges,

as did other black religious philanthropies.

Howard University in Washington, DC was established by a local missionary

society as a non-sectarian co-educational institution.

The black feeders schools for these colleges were private elementary and

secondary schools sponsored by the missionary societies,

according to historian Adam Fairclough.

Several decades passed before the private colleges, universities, and

normal schools were able to reap the benefits of higher grade,

private elementary and secondary schools.

For example, Atlanta University, which Fairclough hails as the quote,

flagship of black higher education, taught most of its students at the elementary or

grammar school level until the mid 1890s.

As they became fully functioning collegiate institutions at the turn

of the 20th century, private black colleges and universities were highly

regimented institutions that emphasized moral character and

Protestant piety, an emphasis that helped to placate Southern whites.

Their primary mission though was classical liberal education., including Latin and

Greek, ancient history, modern foreign languages and literature,

an emphasis that had enormous symbolic value as a marker of high aspirations and

emancipatory thinking.

And an assertion of equality with whites in an era of militant white supremacy.

The leaders and graduates of these institutions made a very brave statement.

>> The private colleges aimed to educate what W.E.B.

DuBois called the talented tenth.

Yet, as a proportion of the total black college age population,

the number of graduates of these institutions who became teachers and

professional and business leaders in their communities was miniscule.

As Fairclough notes, quote, by 1900 a mere

2,331 blacks had earned the degree of AB or BS.

Whites were six times more likely than blacks to earn a college degree, and

four times as likely to receive a high school education, end quote.

The financial burden on black farming families to send a son or

daughter to a college or university was enormous.

Many students had to be self-supporting while in college,

which often meant irregular attendance.

Only a relative handful could sustain the commitment to graduate with a normal

certificate or college degree, either of which qualified them for

teaching in the better public and private black schools.

Evidently, a little education went a long way.

Fairclough observes that, quote, many thousands of teachers

in rural black schools were normal school or college dropouts.

>> During the Redeemer period from the 1870s to around 1890, a handful of

the former Confederate states established state normal schools for blacks.

By the 1910s, every Southern and border state operated A&M,

agricultural and mechanic, or land grant colleges for blacks,

with the state legislature supplementing their own negligible contributions

with federal subsidies provided by the Morrill Act of 1890.

These institutions had normal departments, but only one,

Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University,

had a real collegiate department with only 12 students.

We'll return to black higher education in a later module, where we look at legal

precedence for the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v Board of Education.

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