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THE TRAINING OF THE TEACHER, AS THE POINT OF
ATTACK IN NEGRO EDUCATION

Copyright, 1908, Charles M. Thomas, in Charge of Science and Hygiene
Normal School, No. 2, Washington, D. C.

(AN EXCERPT)

Special Problems in the Education of African American Children

In the "Psychology of Peoples," Gustave LeBon says, "Ten years are enough
in which to give a negro the totality of notions of a European, but 1,000 years would scarcely be sufficient to make a negro think and act as a European would in the
different circumstances of life." That such is the truth is the negro's condition
rather than his fault, but that such is not generally recognised in the activities which
constitute his education may be the cause of the general dissatisfaction with the
results of that process by which it was thought to have turned him into a darker-hued
white man.

While the successive hordes of the North were contending with each other for
the more favorable grazing lands and combating the seasonal changes which forced
them to become thrifty and provident or to die, the African was rocked in the lap of
luxuriant and bountiful Nature, which took from him in stamina and initiative what
was given in provender. The African's reactions for 10,000 years were necessarily
so different from the Europeans as to lead the African to comprehend the world
as a place as different from the European's world as the Christians' Heaven is unlike
Hell.

Wherever, in the Dark Continent, the conditions were similar to conditions in
Europe, the reactions were similar, for any other program would have brought
extermination from this world of cause and effect; and the advanced social organiza-
tions of the African tribes occupying grazing lands to-day prove the contention. Not
only with human beings, but in the whole realm of live objects, environment demands
adjustment, or emigration, or death; and the long occupancy of the Dark Continent
by the African shows not only marked adjustment, but the power to resist hostile
and unfavorable environmental conditions; for thousands there were and are who
could not and cannot resist those conditions even with the aid of science.

It must not be forgotten that it was that same African who was brought to
America to adapt himself to different and severe conditions, at the terrible price
Nature always demands for such readjustment. And it should be recalled in every
discussion of race questions that from that African have come hordes to add color
to the pale skin of the almost equally readjusted European in America; to add
millions to his coffers, strength to his laboring arm, intricate difficulties to his
multiform social problems, harmony to his music, and fervor and reality to his
religion.

After 250 years of toil in bondage, the rehabilitated African became an American
by a naturalizing process which was not only legal, but sanctioned by the best blood
of all races, colors, and social grades, flowing not simply in his veins, but bathing
the earth itself as if to wash out the stain of his bondage.

Is there any good reason why the children of that African-American should not
offer some special problems in their education?

In the first place, there is the problem of establishing the "earth sense" or the
problem of locality. The children of African-American parentage are restricted
almost exclusively to the sixteen former slave states and the District of Columbia.
Eighty-five per cent of the nine millions live in that ares. The proportion of those

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