Tuskegee.  But could this program be expected long to satisfy colored folk?  And was this shifty dodging of the real issue the wisest statesmanship?  No!  The real question in the South is the question of the permanency of present color caste.  The problem, then, of the formal training of our colored children has been strangely complicated by the strong feeling of certain persons as to their future in America and the world.  And the reaction toward this caste education has strengthened the idea of caste education throughout the world.

Let us then return to fundamental ideals.  Children must be trained in a knowledge of what the world is and what it knows and how it does its daily work.  These things cannot be separated:  we cannot teach pure knowledge apart from actual facts, or separate truth from the human mind.  Above all we must not forget that the object of all education is the child itself and not what it does or makes.

It is here that a great movement in America has grievously sinned against the light.  There has arisen among us a movement to make the Public School primarily the hand-maiden of production.  America is conceived of as existing for the sake of its mines, fields and factories, and not those factories, fields and mines as existing for America.  Consequently, the public schools are for training the mass of men as servants and laborers and mechanics to increase the land’s industrial efficiency.

Those who oppose this program, especially if they are black, are accused of despising common toil and humble service.  In fact, we Negroes are but facing in our own children a world problem:  how can we, while maintaining a proper output of goods and furnishing needed services, increase the knowledge of experience of common men and conserve genius for the common weal?  Without wider, deeper intelligence among the masses Democracy cannot accomplish its greater ends.  Without a more careful conservation of human ability and talent the world cannot secure the services which its greater needs call for.  Yet today who goes to college, the Talented or the Rich?  Who goes to high school, the Bright or the Well-to-Do?  Who does the physical work of the world, those whose muscles need the exercise or those whose souls and minds are stupefied with manual toil?  How is the drudgery of the world distributed, by thoughtful justice or the lash of Slavery?

We cannot base the education of future citizens on the present inexcusable inequality of wealth nor on physical differences of race.  We must seek not to make men carpenters but to make carpenters men.

Colored Americans must then with deep determination educate their children in the broadest, highest way.  They must fill the colleges with the talented and fill the fields and shops with the intelligent.  Wisdom is the principal thing.  Therefore, get wisdom.

But why am I talking simply of “colored” children?  Is not the problem of their education simply an intensification of the problem of educating all children?  Look at our plight in the United States, nearly 150 years after the establishment of a government based on human intelligence.