-
2 Thomas Jesse Jones and Negro Education
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
2 Thomas Jesse Jones and Negro Education education reform was the most freely debated aspect of southern race relations after 1910, but most educationists, philanthropists, and state officials concurred on the need to enhance cheap, practical, segregated schooling for black children. michael dennis, among others, has argued that the expansion of industrial education meshed with the models favored by progressive educators and politicians in the south for reasons of racial control and regional economic rehabilitation .1 From 1913 to 1916, Jack Woofter was to become centrally involved in an intensive examination of black education that was so loaded with cultural, pedagogical, and economic prescription that northern black activists denounced its authors, including Woofter, as purveyors of an unwarranted vocational curriculum designed to create a dependent laboring caste. Through his father’s work as dean of education at the University of georgia, Jack Woofter was familiar with arguments surrounding rural education reform in the south and the persistent inability of local, state, and private bodies to fulfill properly the responsibilities they assumed after 1900. He was aware that black schools generally offered a more basic education than white schools, and he probably attributed this to differences in the intellectual capacities of black students and the generally lower educational attainment of their teachers. Until he ventured into the meanest homes in athens as a graduate student, he had little understanding of the scale and stultifying effects of black poverty, or the gulf between the lives of young white middle-class georgians and their african american contemporaries . He learned more than he was able to articulate in Negroes of Athens , Georgia, and he was eager to do more for interracial cooperation, but he was completely unprepared for many of the sharper contrasts between black and white lives that he encountered in rural parts of the south as a Phelps-stokes Fund investigator . His commitment to the idea of regional reform, his aptitude for research, and his appetite for hard, detailed work meant that he became a vital part of the enterprise that created Negro Education, a report that assumed immense significance in the growing tension between white liberals and radical black analysts of southern life. The Phelps-stokes Fund survey of southern black education was based on school visits and questionnaires, state surveys, and conferences, and loosely modeled on abraham Flexner’s critical 1910 report on american medical schools. although 38 Thomas Jesse Jones and Negro Education | 39 Thomas Jesse Jones concentrated on private schools offering elementary education to a total of 70,500 pupils, selective additional inspections were made of the private schools offering education at high school and college level (teaching 13,000 students), and the few public high schools and colleges (with another 13,000 students ). This hardly represented a comprehensive survey of black education and youth in the south: the elementary pupils in private schools represented only 3.5 percent of the two million southern black children aged between six and fourteen years, and total black high school enrolment represented less than 2 percent of those between the ages of fifteen and nineteen. nevertheless, as chief investigator , Jones believed some fundamental truths about southern life would emerge. The schools, he stated, would be judged against “the real educational needs of the people and the extent to which the school work has been adapted to these needs.”2 Jones insisted these “real educational needs” related to agriculture, industry, and domestic service. He favored a highly prescriptive elementary curriculum, with mathematics playing an important corrective part: “to emotional groups, prone to action without adequate thought, thorough practice in mathematical processes is essential.” In secondary education, he prized the social sciences for developing citizenship, business skills, and aesthetic awareness, and wanted normal schools to train teachers capable of delivering the programs devised at Hampton and tuskegee. other tertiary education was for training wise leaders, doctors, and clergymen.3 There was nothing new in this model—ten years earlier the southern methodist episcopal bishop in mississippi, charles Betts galloway, demanded “the rudiments of an education for all, industrial training for the many, and a collegiate training for the few who are to be the teachers and leaders of their people.”4 The novelty lay in Jones’s determination to show what happened to the $3 million given each year by private individuals, charitable boards, and churches to black schools in the south. He noted, “Thoughtful people of the south and of the north, white and colored, have long been puzzled as to the...