When children get this far they have a good foundation and do their work very well. One of my colored girls is the brightest child in school—arithmetic is hard for her but she works at it. One of my colored boys is seventeen years old. He came here from the South last fall to live with an uncle and to get to a better school. His father wants him to be a doctor and thought he wasn't getting along as well in the South as he would in the North. When the boy came to me he said he had been going to a college[40] in the South. I took him into the eighth grade but saw he didn't have the fundamentals. On close questioning he told me he had been in the seventh grade in that college. Now he is doing excellent work for me. He has much broader interests than the other children. He reads, reads, reads, all the time and is well informed.
Other teachers believed that there was nothing to keep the Negro children from making equal progress with the white, given similar opportunities. "The progress of the colored children in Drake school (30 per cent) cannot be compared with that of the white," said an upper-grade teacher, "because the colored are all from the South and have had the poorest opportunities. But comparing a Negro child and a white child who have had the same advantages in school and equal opportunities for observation and example in the home, the Negro makes the same progress."
"I say that under the same conditions a Negro child will do as well every time as a white," said the teacher of an ungraded room in a school 38 per cent Negro (Forrestville). "Many do as well as the white and live in very poor neglected homes. I think every person who is not prejudiced must admit that the colored do fully as well in school as the white."
An upper-grade teacher in the Felsenthal School (20 per cent) held a similar point of view: "The colored are making wonderful strides. They advance just as rapidly as the white, given equal opportunities. But their background is so slight and so short in years that one cannot fairly compare them. The southern colored child must be studied individually to get his point of view in the school or he gets nowhere in his work."
High-school work.—The principal of Wendell Phillips High School prepared tables showing the numbers of white and Negro children dropping out at the end of each school year. They show that the largest number of Negro children dropped out during the first year, and the largest number of white children during the first and second years, the number of drop-outs being the same for both years. Some children repeat the work so that all of them do not leave school.
One or two teachers in other schools stated concerning Negro children that a "very limited number go beyond the first year." "They cannot grasp the subject," said an English teacher; "they do not understand as the white child does. They lack the mentality."
In the same school the Latin teacher held quite the opposite opinion. "The colored children are in every way equal to the white children. They are just as well equipped mentally and make similar progress. My best student at present is a colored girl. Her choice of English and her vocabulary and construction are far ahead of that of any white student."
Several teachers and principals testified to the brilliancy of individual Negro students who not infrequently had the highest standing in the school. The principal of an elementary school (Crerar) who had formerly had experience in a school largely Negro felt that the junior high school would meet the needs of the Negro children to a large degree:
More of them than the immigrant enter high school but do not stay to finish. I suppose the parents insist upon some high-school training, but it is necessary for the child to go to work before he finishes. Another reason for the dropping out might be the teachers' lack of interest in the child. In the high school you don't find the teachers taking a keen interest in every individual child as you do in the grades, and just what colored children need is a keen interest in them. They do better work.
Academic v. other courses.—A preference of Negro children for academic work was reported by principals and teachers at two high schools. This may be due in part to the fact, testified to by many teachers, that Negro children excel in languages and music and find mathematics and sciences difficult. The usual implication was, however, that Negro children took academic work because they thought it gave them better social standing. A principal who said that "Negroes want to know nothing about industrial training" and that "the girls don't care for sewing and cooking," said on another occasion that the majority of children in auto-mechanics, printing, and household arts were Negroes. He also reported more Negro than white children in the normal course preparing themselves to be teachers, though this was the first year that this had been the case.