Carter G. Woodson's critique of African-American education systems

Mis-Education of the Negro

Carter G. Woodson was a historian and educator with a prominent role in the Black community and a great interest in issues facing the Black community. Especially in terms of the role of education in the first half of the twentieth century, aspects of the Black experience that impacted the education of Black people, and what they themselves might want to achieve through an education. His book The Mis-Education of the Negro addresses such issues in terms of a number of specific dimensions, such as the impact of slavery on the African-American psyche, the degree to which African-Americans had been mis-educated, the need for greater self-reliance among members of the Black population, that Blacks needed to develop their own social order and not imitate the white order, and the meaning of political education in the African-American community.

The Mis-Education of the Negro

Woodson wrote his book in 1933, and certainly the world has changed greatly since that time. Yet his book still has much to say to the Black community of today, a community still separated from the white majority to a great degree, and still a community both relying on an education for advancement and yet thwarted in gaining full access to the schools and the teachers needed. In some areas, what appeared to be advances would prove to push Black Americans even further down the social and educational scale, as Dr. Jawanza Kunjofu notes in the Introduction with reference to the fact that no one realized that the decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 "would close African-American schools, demote African-American principals to teachers, reduce the number of African-American teachers, that the bus would go one way for long hours requiring early risings and little African-American parental involvement" (Kunjofu vi). The system simply found new ways to discriminate, in essence, and it would be a long time before that system started shifting to create somewhat more equal educational opportunities, though there are still major differences in terms of funding for inner city (and largely Black) schools as opposed to suburban white schools.

Woodson did not live to see many of these changes, and Kunjofu notes this and the many unfortunate facts about Black education today that support much of Woodson's view of the failure of Black education in his time. Indeed, as Kunjofu also points out, even improved education for the Black community has not solved all of the problems of that community, as was once promised, so that the effectiveness of the education is questioned, as are the various promises made and hopes placed on the system. Kunjofu asks,

How do we explain having in excess of two million African-Americans with college degrees, earn almost $600 billion annually, and the African-American community is in shambles? How can foreigners make more money in the Black community than African-Americans? Why do we only spend three percent of our money with African-American businesses? (Kunjofu viii)

The emphasis Woodson places on creating a viable African-American community in and of itself suggest an answer to these questions -- such a community has not been created, and African-Americans continue to try to imitate whites instead. Kunjofu states that Woodson's book asks what the people in this community are being educated for, and Kunjofu reiterates that the oppression of the slave era has simply become a different sort of oppression in later periods, as he writes,

If you are educated by people, White or Black who are victims of White supremacy, you will hate yourself. You will possess a European definition of beauty, a White image of Jesus, despise Black professionals and businesses, and to any length to be accepted by the oppressor. (Kunjofu ix)

Woodson himself begins his book with a statement of the problem in his time, that even the educated African-American has a contemptuous attitude toward his or her own people "because in their own as well as in their mixed schools, Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin and the Teuton and to despise the African" (Woodson 1). The form of education offered in itself generates these feelings of self-hatred among Black students and perpetuates a sense of inferior status in the Black community:

The thought of the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies. If he happens to leave school after he masters the fundamentals, before he finishes high school, or reaches college, he will naturally escape some of this bias and may recover in time to be of service to his people. (Woodson 2)

This statement seems to recommend dropping out as a way of maintaining a sense of self and of the value of the Black community, and indeed Woodson does give this impression when he writes,

Practically all of the successful Negroes in this country are of the uneducated type or of that of Negroes who have had no formal education at all. The large majority of the Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of out best colleges are all but worthless in the development of their people. (Woodson 2)

This is a harsh judgment to offer, but Woodson does have reasons for making it and offers evidence in his book.

Legacy of Slavery

Many in addition to Woodson have noted the legacy of slavery and the way it created an inferior status for the African-American and was perpetuated through White responses in the era after slavery was ended. Woodson blames a number of forces in society, but in particular he singles out theologians for justifying slavery: "They have drifted away from righteousness into an effort to make wrong seem to be right" (Woodson 60). Slavery created a Black population in a country where there was none, so of course slavery has to be seen as directly responsible for all that follows. More than this, though, slavery is seen as a state of mind as much as it was a physical reality, and the state of mind continues after the physical reality has been outlawed. For Woodson, the Negro church has been "the avenue of the oppressor's propaganda" (Woodson 61). In addition, the educate Negro does not lead his or her people but instead leaves them, emulating whites in terms of jobs and other behaviors and leaving the masses to fend for themselves. This is also a legacy of slavery, for they view education as an escape not just from slavery but from the society of other Blacks.

The image of the Black community as agreeing to its own oppression is strong in Woodson, and this is an image seen in other writers from the Black perspective as well. Racism in the United States has been related to the issue of slavery. What followed the slave era was the development of a racist society, with whites setting themselves up as if chosen by God while Blacks were increasingly viewed as inferior in every way, good only for manual labor and requiring whites as overlords for their own protection. Many Americans probably believe that the problem of racism has been virtually eliminated from American life, though there is ample evidence to the contrary. The slave trade developed at the same time as Europe began exploring new realms and encountering new peoples, and it was necessary for the white European to develop some philosophical attitude which placed himself and the "noble savage" he encountered in the wild on some sort of scale. The idea of the noble savage would give way to the view that the savage was simply inferior, but in the beginning explorers like Charles Wheeler saw the savage as closer to nature and thus more noble and happier in contrast to the European. This attitude would be brought to bear in antislavery campaigns as some Europeans fought against the institution, and ennobling the victims was one way of showing how pernicious the institution itself might be. As a consequence, two opposing conceptions developed in Europe:

Henceforward, Europeans would be increasingly divided into two opposed views: one, the traditional, tending to hold that Africa had never possessed cultures that were worthy of respect or even of serious investigation; the other, the scientific, tending to argue the reverse. (Davidson 100)

The slave trade itself drove European attitudes as they came to see the people of Africa not as people but as commodities to be capture, bought, and sold. In the eighteenth century, interestingly, there was more tolerance and acceptance of African ways and of the African people, but the continuation of the slave trade produced a change, as if Europeans could not continue in this trade in human beings and still think of them as human beings:

. . . The judgments of the nineteenth century, the period of outright invasion and occupation, would abound in convictions of a European superiority which was moral as well as material. (Davidson 160)

As long as Europeans were superior in morality they could view their actions in the slave trade as benefiting the enslaved people rather than harming them. Obviously, though, the attitude was a two-edged sword in that a reaction built in which those who saw the moral wrong of slavery and who considered themselves morally superior had to fight against the institution and all it represented.

Attitudes of superiority were used to control the slave population. Some historians paint a picture of a slave population made submissive by the conditions that existed as the slaves had their African heritage destroyed and were made into helpless dependents in the New World. Historians more recently have found a different picture. Considering the harsh punishments meted out to slaves attempting to escape, the vast number that did try and even succeeded shows a rebelliousness at odds with the picture of a submissive population. Fear of slave revolts was a permanent part of plantation life, and there was an intricate and powerful system in place to control the slaves. The slaveowners used this system to maintain their labor supply and their way of life. The system was both subtle and crude and involved every device that social orders use to keep power and wealth in their own hands. The system was both physical and psychological. Slaves were taught discipline and were also impressed over and over with the idea of their own inferiority and to "know their place." They were taught to see Blackness as a sign of subordination, to be awed by the power of the master, to merge their interests with those of the master, and to ignore their own individual needs. Among the means for effecting this were the discipline of hard labor, the breakup of the slave family, the lulling effects of religion, the creation of disunity among the slaves by separating them into field slaves and the more privileged house slaves, and the power of the law and threats of death (Zinn 34-35).

The Reconstruction era after the Civil War was also a period when a number of Blacks rose to prominence in the South while that area was under occupation by federal troops. White reaction against what was seen as a situation imposed by the North was violent, with vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux Klan fighting back, leaving the mass of Black people living in fear of such groups for generations. Hostility toward Blacks in the South increased, and Blacks were disenfranchised, driven from office, and segregated as never before. In the North, discrimination was declining during the same era. As more and more Blacks fled the South, Black ghettoes were created in the North, and segregation became a northern response as well (Sowell 128-130).

Methods of Mis-Education

Woodson would agree with much of this and sees slavery as having created a certain habit of submission and of secondary status so that the primary legacy of slavery is slavery in a different form. Slavery itself educated the Negro to accept this secondary status, and what has continued to maintain this has been the fact that education comes from the White power structure, and even when filtered through Black teachers and administrators, the subject matter continues to center on White achievement and so highlights the seeming lack of Black achievement. Woodson also finds that the education Blacks are given does not prepare them for getting and doing a job, which he says is "the first essential in civilization" (Woodson 38).

Woodson saw this in his time as different from the choices open to white youth, stating that "they can choose their courses more at random and still succeed because of numerous opportunities offered by their people" (Woodson 39). Woodson saw young Blacks in higher education as being influenced to "throw away opportunities which they have and to go in quest of those which they do not find" (Woodson 39). Of course, another might point out that without such aspirations, African-Americans will never change the existing situation and gain such opportunities, but Woodson wanted a more immediate and practical change so that graduates could get jobs and improve the community before seeking any outside opportunities, which in any case Woodson would want to see emerge from Black culture and a Black social order rather than in imitation of what white youth can do.

Political Education

Woodson writes about the failure of political education for the African-American. Woodson says that such education was in fact neglected, and he shows that this was a conscious decision on the part of White society to avoid educating blacks in the constitution as a way of preventing this community from asserting its rights:

If the Negroes were granted the opportunity to peruse this document, they might learn to contend for the rights therein guaranteed; and no Negro teacher who gives attention to such matters of the government is tolerated in those backward districts. (Woodson 84)

in this area of education, then, the issue is not benign neglect or even perpetuating a White image Blacks but a conscious effort to prevent Blacks from asserting their rights as citizens.

One of the results has been the elimination of the Negro from politics, which Woodson sees as damaging to both the Black and the White community:

How the whites can expect to make of the Negroes better citizens by leading them to think that they should have no part in the government of this country is a mystery. (Woodson 90)

If this was indeed a conscious decision on the part of Whites, it is one not thought through completely, which could actually be said of many of the failures of Black education as cited by Woodson.

Conclusion

Woodson's analysis remains cogent today because it helps explain how we got to the position we are at today and because it reflects an awareness of the source of many of the attitudes and false hopes that still continue today. The situation has certainly improved, but the results have not been so far-reaching that Woodson's analysis is no longer applicable. Instead, the situation has only changed cosmetically and not as profoundly as many had hoped it would by this time.