2. OPINIONS ON SCHOLARSHIP OF NEGRO CHILDREN
Progress of the southern Negro.—The retarded Negro child, usually from the South, who is conspicuous in the elementary schools, has been referred to in the section on "Retardation in Elementary Schools." In some schools such children are put in the regular grades, where they receive no special attention and can progress only one year at a time, though most teachers agree that retardation is due to lack of educational opportunity rather than to inability to learn. In other schools there are special rooms for these children where they are advanced through several grades as rapidly as possible.
Doolittle School (85 per cent) had six first-grade rooms for such children. In one of these rooms there were about twenty-five children from twelve to seventeen years of age doing all the lower-grade work up to the sixth. The teacher said that many of these children who were unable to read or write when they came from the South showed remarkable progress in a few months, and in less than a year were able to do fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade work.
"One big girl of thirteen, when she arrived from the South," this teacher said, "pretended to read with her book upside down, but in a little more than a year she was doing sixth-grade work. One twelve-year-old boy from the South, unable to read the primer or write his name, after about nine months of applied work just ate up everything I gave him and during the following year read sixty library books."
A thirteen-year-old girl, just five days in the school, had come from Alabama, where she had never attended school. "There wasn't room for me," she explained. She read for the investigator on the tenth page of the primer, haltingly but with understanding. The teacher was confident that she could put her through several grades next year. She said further:
These children who have been deprived in the South of their rights educationally are very eager. At first they are timid, but they learn very quickly. They're as smart as whips if they'd just get down to business. Without question this is the kind of attention all the colored children from the South need when they enter school in the North. The plan has been successful and should be adopted throughout the school system. One appreciates by comparison the injustice of putting the fifteen-year-old newcomer from the South into second grade, requiring of him only second-grade work over the nine months' period.
Another school, 92 per cent Negro (Farren), has a special room for children from the South. "Our dull children are almost without exception those from the South who have never been to school," said the teacher. "Those children should not be classed as dull, either, for they learn remarkably fast and often catch up to grade."
A teacher of the ungraded room in a school 38 per cent Negro (Forrestville) said:
Practically all of the colored children are from the South, where they have not been in school. Once they get started they learn very rapidly and often catch up to the proper grade if they are not too old when they start school. The older children in this room have good power of concentration and consequently learn much in a short time. Take, for example, a boy twelve years old who came here not two months ago from the South. When he came he had no idea how to write his name. A few days ago he wrote for me a fourth-grade eight-line memory passage with but three mistakes in spelling. Now I call that remarkable. I have taught in this school all my teaching years, and they have been many, and have never seen any child equal this, either white or black.
Capacity for advanced work.—Teachers in the seventh and eighth grades usually found Negro children equal to the work, though in some cases they felt that these children had been pushed out of the lower grade because of crowded conditions before they were ready for the more advanced work. An eighth-grade teacher gave the following statement: