The New Knowledge for the New Negro
Quite a good deal of unnecessary dispute has been going on these days among the guardians of the inner temple as to just which form of worship is necessary at the shrine of the Goddess Knowledge. In plain English, the pundits seem to be at odds in regard to the kind of education which the Negro should have. Of course, it has long been known that the educational experts of white America were at odds with ours on the same subject; now, however, ours seem to be at odds among themselves.
The essence of the present conflict is not the easy distinction between “lower” and “higher” education, which really has no meaning in terms of educational principles, but it is rather “the knowledge of things” versus “the knowledge of words.” The same conflict has been waged in England from the days of Huxley’s youth to the later nineties when the London Board Schools were recognized and set the present standard of efficiency for the rest of England. The present form of the question is, “Shall education consist of Latin and Greek, literature and metaphysics, r of modern science, modern languages and modern thought?” The real essence of the question is whether we shall train our children to grapple effectively with the problem of life that lies before them, or to look longingly back upon the past standards of life and thought and consider themselves a special class because of this.
If education be, as we assert, a training for life, it must of course have its roots in the past. But so has the art of the blacksmith, the tailor, the carpenter, the bookbinder or the priest. What the classicists really seek is the domination of the form, method and aim of that training by the form, methods and aims of an earlier age.
Classics, Clerics and Class Culture
Perhaps an explanation of that earlier training may serve to give the real innerness of the classicists’ position so that ordinary people may understand it better than the classicists themselves seem to do. In the Middle Ages, the schools of Western Europe and the subject matter of the education given in them were based upon the Latin “disciplines.” Western Europe had no literature, no learning, no science of its own. It was the church—particularly the monasteries—to which men had to go to get such training as was obtainable in a barbarous age. This training was, of course, given in the tongue of the church which was Latin, the clerical language. The contact of medieval Europeans with the dark-skinned Arabs added Greek and the knowledge of Greek literature and philosophy to the earlier medieval discipline. Imbedded in this was the substance of science nurtured by the Arabs and added to by them.
The ruling classes kept their children within the treadmill of these two literatures and languages and it came to be thought that this was the indispensable training for a gentleman. But:—
“Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.”
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We are in a different age, an age in which the nation, not the church, gives training to all children, and not merely to the children of aristocrats who will grow up to do nothing. The children of the people must become the doers of all that is done in the world of tomorrow, and they must be trained for this doing. Today in England, not Oxford, the home of lost ideals, but such institutions as the University of London, are the sources of that training which gives England its physicians, surgeons, inventors, business men and artists.
Classicists Ignorant of Latin and Greek
But the noise of the classicists may be rudely stopped by merely pointing out the hollowness of their watch words. These persons would have us believe that Latin and Greek are, in their eyes, the backbone of any education that is worth while. Very well then, let us take them at their word. I make the broad assertion that not one in one thousand of them can read a page of Greek or Latin that may be set before them. I offer to put under their noses a page of Athenaeus or Horace (to say nothing of more important classical authors) and if they should be able to read and translate it at sight I shall be genuinely surprised. Let the common reader who is a man of today make the test with this little bit of Latin verse:
“Exegi momentum acre perennius
Regalique situ pyramidum altius.”
Let him ask some classicist to translate off-hand this common school boy’s tag from a most popular author and note whether they can place the author or translate the lines. Here is another:
Per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum,
Tendimus in Latium.
To speak in plain United States, when it comes to the showdown it will be found that those of us who argue in favor of the modern discipline (in so far as we have any knowledge of classical literature) know more about them than those whose sole defence they are.
It is said by the classicists that a knowledge of Latin and Greek is necessary to an adequate comprehension of the English language. But so is the knowledge of Sanscrit, Arabic, French and Italian. And when it comes to facility and clearness of expression, it will be found that Huxley’s prose is superior to that of Matthew Arnold, and Brisbane’s superior to that of any professor of the Latin language in Harvard or Yale. So much for the ghost fighters. Requiescant in pace!
The Knowledge We Need
Now, what is the knowledge which the New Negro needs most? He needs above all else a knowledge of the wider world and of the long past. But that is history, modern and ancient: History as written by Herodotus and John Bach McMaster; sociology not as conceived by Giddings, but as presented by Spencer and Ward, and anthropology as worked out by Boas and Thomas. The Negro needs also the knowledge of the best thought; but that is literature as conceived, not as a collection of flowers from the tree of life, but as its garnered fruit. And, finally, the Negro needs a knowledge of his own kind, concerning which we shall have something to say later, And the purposes of this knowledge? They are, to know our place in the human processus, to strengthen our minds by contact with the best and most useful thought-products evolved during the long rise of man from anthropoid to scientist; to inspire our souls and to lift our race industrially, commercially, intellectually to the level of the best that there is in the world about us. For never until the Negro’s knowledge of nitrates and engineering, of chemistry and agriculture, of history, science and business is on a level, at least, with that of the whites, will the Negro be able to measure arms successfully with them.