ana, Tennessee and Kentucky is $19,000 less than the yearly income of Harvard University.[1]
A southern state university considers itself fortunate if it receives an annual appropriation of from $50,000 to $75,000; and whereas in the larger universities, like Harvard, the professors teach from five to ten hours per week, it is necessary that they teach from twenty to thirty hours per week in the southern universities. This practically prevents the southern teachers from becoming great scholars in their respective fields, as they are able to do practically nothing in research work, when all of their nervous energy is expended in the class-room. They can, therefore, contribute but little to the future development of the world's knowledge. This dwarfing of mental power is necessarily experienced in every grade of teacher, starting with the university and ending with the lowest primary school or vice versa.
What is naturally to be expected from the conditions just given is conclusively corroborated when we note how seldom an article from a southern scholar appears in the leading journals that are devoted to the propagation of the arts and sciences, and when we observe how seldom a southern writer is quoted by a European savant.
It was a favorite saying of the great French statesman Danton that a state must first have bread and then education, thus making education the next necessity of life after bread.
It must be admitted by all that the southern white people are in great need of better educational facilities; and every one must also grant that it is not right that the south be sapped of its energies to provide wholly for the education of an inferior race, while its own white population is in such need of better education.
The educators (college presidents, etc.) of the south should recognize and make better known to the people the present conditions of the educational world (which conditions should not be hidden under a cloak of self-sufficiency); the statesmen of the south should make them known to the nation; and finally, it is the duty of the nation to rectify these conditions and assume the responsbility of the education of the negro race.
Remark
That the southern people in all the states believe in the education of the negro is shown by the fact that the negro is being educated. Still, there are many people, men of foresight and ability, who say that "education spoils good laborers." This great minority of thinkers are as a rule either unmindful or ignorant of the fact that such arguments have been in vogue regarding the education of the lower classes for
- ↑ See "Educational Endowments of the South," by Elizabeth M. Howe, The Popular Science Monthly, October, 1903.
