Indeed, the multiplication of colleges and academies for the “higher education of colored youth” is one of the most striking phenomena of the times:  as if theology and the classics were the things best suited to and most urgently needed by a class of persons unprepared in rudimentary education, and whose immediate aim must be that of the mechanic and the farmer—­to whom the classics, theology and the sciences, in their extremely impecunious state, are unequivocable abstractions.  There will be those who will denounce me for taking this view of collegiate and professional preparation; but I maintain that any education is false which is unsuited to the condition and the prospects of the student.  To educate him for a lawyer when there are no clients, for medicine when the patients, although numerous, are too poor to give him a living income, to fill his head with Latin and Greek as a teacher when the people he is to teach are to be instructed in the a b c’s—­such education is a waste of time and a senseless expenditure of money.

I do not inveigh against higher education; I simply maintain that the sort of education the colored people of the South stand most in need of is elementary and industrial.  They should be instructed for the work to be done.  Many a colored farmer boy or mechanic has been spoiled to make a foppish gambler or loafer, a swaggering pedagogue or a cranky homiletician.  Men may be spoiled by education, even as they are spoiled by illiteracy.  Education is the preparation for a future work; hence men should be educated with special reference to that work.

If left to themselves men usually select intuitively the course of preparation best suited to their tastes and capacities.  But the colored youth of the South have been allured and seduced from their natural inclination by the premiums placed upon theological, classical and professional training for the purpose of sustaining the reputation and continuance of “colleges” and their professorships.

I do not hesitate to say that if the vast sums of money already expended and now being spent in the equipment and maintenance of colleges and universities for the so called “higher education” of colored youth had been expended in the establishment and maintenance of primary schools and schools of applied science, the race would have profited vastly more than it has, both mentally and materially, while the results would have operated far more advantageously to the State, and satisfactorily to the munificent benefactors.

Since writing the above, I find in a very recent number of

Judge Tourgee’s magazine, The Continent, the following reflections upon the subject, contributed to that excellent periodical by Prof.  George F. Magoun of Iowa College.  Mr. Magoun says: