Du Bois on Classical Education

Educating Our Children in the Black American Community

Introduction

Obtaining a quality education is the foundation to improving people’s lives and sustainable development. The proverb goes: give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for life. Education is the cornerstone of all growth, economic development, sustainability projects, and solutions to the social, economic and political problems that serve as global challenges today. From poverty, to inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice, the one common denominator that can make a huge difference in them all is education. Education leads to knowledge acquisition and the formation of the character. It is people with character and knowledge, and the ability to engage in critical thinking, who will take the necessary steps to address our most important issues. Therefore, this paper focuses on Goal 4: Quality Education of the Sustainable Development Goals. Obtaining a quality education is the foundation to improving people’s lives and sustainable development.

Children in the Black American Community

Children in the Black American community are currently underserved when it comes to education. In the century and a half that has passed since slavery ended, not much has changed in terms of the education of Black American communities. Du Bois refers to the plight of the Black American as double-consciousness: of being aware of being American on one hand, yet of being aware of being Black and different on the other hand. Du Bois pointed to education as the main issue affecting Black American communities. The thing that made him different from others, such as Booker T. Washington, was that Du Bois was adamant about character education: he believed Black American communities needed to be trained in classical education, because this would help them to form and develop their characters. According to Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk, the reason Black Americans had such a sharp sense of double-consciousness was that they were not educated in the same way White America was: they were not given the same educational opportunities, the same educational foundation, the same knowledge, and the same tools to strengthen their characters. Instead, they were teased with an industrial education—a type of training that would enable them to get a job in the industrial age—but an education that lacked the basic elements of character building. For Du Bois, this was a non-starter: Black American communities needed a moral education rooted in classical education—for it is in the character that all true education starts and ends.

Du Bois believed that it was important for Black Americans to be able to pursue the lofty ideas, for it is these ideas that support true sustainability. Higher education opportunities remain closed to a great extent to many Black Americans because their secondary schools are so poor and inadequately prepare them for undergraduate training. They are not being taught how to think critically, nor or they given a great deal of training in classical education, which is the bedrock of character education (Kristjansson, 2013). As Haynes (2009) explains, “the character of a nation is determined by the character of its people.”

Better Education Leads to Better Outcomes

Higher education leads to better outcomes for people: “College grads see a 17% increase in earnings, compared with a 10% increase for primary and a 7% increase for high school grads” (Children International, 2019). In short, the more educated a person is the more likely he is to be self-sufficient. The problem that Black Communities are facing is that children in the schools within these communities are woefully underprepared to enter into higher education (Yaffe, 2013). Part of the problem is that these schools lack the funds to compete with other wealthier and whiter districts. Part of the problem is that the schools themselves are hampered by a standardized curriculum that emphasizes testing over learning and that places little to no emphasis on classical education, which informs the character. If Du Bois is right and classical education is at the heart of self-empowerment for the Black Community, these schools are missing a golden opportunity to put children on the right path.

Thus, instead of focusing on standardized curriculum that places undue emphasis on testing, teachers in the Black Community need to take the initiative to follow up on the advice given by Du Bois. Character is what makes all the difference in a young person’s life: it is what sets the stage for further advancement as the child grows into an adult. If the character is developed appropriately at a young age, the child will become a self-actualizing adult; and self-actualizing adults are self-learners who are self-motivated and desire to achieve great things because achievement is a reward in and of itself. Quality education is not something that can be obtained by operating within the confines of the standardized format given by the Department of Education: it is something that must be pursued by the individual, and that pursuit is impossible if the character has not been properly formed.

That is why character education is so crucial for children in Black Communities. It is what gives the child the necessary drive, inspiration, formation, and will to pursue the lofty ideas that ultimately tie into sustainability. Teachers in Black Communities have to devote themselves to reading and re-reading Du Bois, and learning for themselves what it means to deliver a solid character education. This alone is what will make them competitive with the more elite schools in wealthier districts where some form of classical education might still be found—particularly in the private schools. Today’s public schools in poor urban areas are emphasizing the wrong topics and areas of study. They need to refocus on the power of character education, which will help to transform these communities and bring children into the promised land of a brighter and more sustainable future.

Virtue Ethics

By teaching children in the Black Community the foundations of Virtue Ethics, these children will be prepared mentally and morally on how to think, act, and respond to life’s challenges. The system of virtue ethics provides a standard by which a person can judge. Much of today’s education pushes children towards a system of Ethical Egoism, which stems from the philosophy of Nietzsche, who advocated a master-slave morality system. He viewed Christian ethics as slave morality. He viewed the Roman system as master morality. He believed, essentially, that might alone is what makes right. His philosophy was that if you want something you should take it and you should not be concerned about what anyone else thinks about it. This philosophy is implicitly a philosophy of violence and hatred. It does not appeal to any of the noble ideas and traditions that have fostered friendship and community, sustainability and peace in the past. Nietzsche’s views represented a terrible break with the past. Yet, as powerful groups looked to justify their hegemony in the modern world, they latched onto the idea of Ethical Egoism in order to justify their self-centered ways. Du Bois would have rejected this outright as the antithesis of classical education and character formation. What is needed, in his view, was the opportunity for Black Americans to train in the system of Virtue Ethics that supported and found support in classical education.

At the heart of virtue ethics is character formation. It posits that the most moral course of action is that which educates and develops the character. It discerns what is good by appealing to a universal standard. It is objective in its outlook, unlike other philosophical systems of today that rely mainly on subjective perspectives to determine right from wrong. In subjective or relative systems, what is right for one person might be viewed as wrong for another—and so there is no agreement among anyone. When there is no agreement, there can be no community—and where there is no community, there can be no real sustainability. Sustainability thus relies and depends upon objectivity and objective solutions and standards that are universal. Ethical Egoism does not teach this viewpoint. It teaches one to filter everything through the self and take what one sees as good for one’s own self-interest. Virtue Ethics teaches the opposite: it teaches one to filter everything through the objective standard, so as to conform oneself to the high standard and follow its path to the lofty ideas that make people great (Gong, 2010). This is the lofty idea path that Du Bois recommended.

Finally, Gong (2010) points out that virtue is what makes the global community possible. Virtue is the habit of acting morally. Communities have to be rooted in virtue in order for them to maintain any cohesion or solidarity. For sustainability to be achieved, it will require communities to work together rather apart. That means communities of virtuous citizens will have to be developed. Today, virtue is seen as something that will naturally come as a result of standardized public education—but Freire (2000) argues that opposite is actually true. Today’s standardized public school education produces oppression and reinforces a culture of enslavement to an oligarchic enterprise in which the elite rule the rest of the world. Education should liberate, not oppress. But judging from today’s results, education is doing just as Freire (2000) predicted. Everyone knows that more quality education is needed. But no one seems to understand how to achieve.

Du Bois understood it a century ago and he articulated the point clearly: quality education begins with classical education because it is here that the mind and heart are formed to a sufficient degree that individuals become empowered and liberated from the master-slave system of morality that enabled the peculiar institution to proliferate in America in the first place. The ruling class of elites who do not want to compete with future generations use standardized public education as a means of limiting the potential of the children of the next generation (Freire, 2000). For that reason, today’s teachers within the Black Community have to be mindful about the forces at work that are trying to prevent them from giving a quality education to their children. If these teachers were to embrace the message that Du Bois gave them in The Souls of Black Folk, a new dawn would emerge and a brighter future would be possible for the Black Community.

Educating with a Purpose

Today’s system of education has no purpose but to show testing scores that match a threshold good enough to secure funds from the government. This is not an education but an excuse for education: without the funds, the schools know they cannot operate—but they are operating for the sole purpose of receiving funds. Education of children is a secondary concern if at all.

That needs to change. Quality education is not going to be found in the system as it has been developed. The best schools in the country are privately operated: they work outside the system forced upon the rest of the poorer public. The great achievers come from these schools, where the focus is on education that matters. There is no reason schools in the Black Community cannot have the same success. It has nothing to do with not having quality teachers because they cannot be afforded. It has everything to do with the teachers that they do possess not taking the initiative to focus on education that matters.

Education that matters is not to be found in the memorization of facts that will enable a child to pass a test so that the school can show to the government that it is succeeding at the government’s program and therefore is entitled to funds. Education that matters is education that develops the character of the child so that the child can grow up to think critically, think independently, and act morally in a world desperately in need of leaders. Teachers in Black Communities have a great responsibility to educate themselves on this matter. They must not be afraid to challenge the system or to reject the offerings of the government. Let the schools fund themselves by first committing themselves to the community. This is possible. Schools with teachers who show that they care about the character education of the child will show incredible results in a short amount of time. This will in turn attract the esteem of everyone in the community. Support will come. Schools should not feel that they cannot operate without assistance from the government. Poor schools can produce the greatest results, but the focus has to be on educating the mind and the heart through classical education.

Even if the teachers themselves have not received this education in their own careers, they can start to obtain it by educating themselves. Classical education is not something that only the wealthy can afford. It is there for everyone and can be found for free and pursued on one’s own initiative. But children need to be guided in this pursuit. They need educators who have gone through the courses themselves and who know how to communicate the lessons. Even if the teachers do not have all the answers, they should not be afraid of getting into these subjects. Socrates did not have all the answers when he began teaching the Athenian youth. Part of his purpose was to open a dialogue with others so that they could seek the truth of things together. The more they talked and sought to know in an objective manner, the more they understood and the more enlightened they became. Socrates inspired Plato and from that educational tradition came Aristotle. Those three—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—reshaped the whole of the Western world by focusing on a philosophy of education that emphasized the universal truths.

None of them needed the permission of the state to ask the questions they asked. None of them looked for funding. Socrates taught wherever he was, and his only insistence was that those who took part in his dialogues worked with him to understand the truth of the things they were discussing. Children have a natural inclination to want to know what is true. It is only in our age of relativism that the adults tasked with educating them prevent them from understanding truth from an objective perspective. Yet without this objective perspective, truth is meaningless, and all education fails to have any purpose from that point on. Without truth, there is no need for anyone to commit to a lofty idea. There is no chance of anyone trying to find solutions to problems that matter to the whole community. Without truth, there is only a jungle in which it is every man for himself. This is the type of world being created by today’s schools, regardless of what their mottos might be.

Classical education makes it possible for learners to develop a deep down appreciation for objective truth. Children learn to use logic, rhetoric, critical thinking skills, and language to engage in persuasive debate. They learn how to create an argument. They learn how to read, write, and think in ways that inspires others. They learn to act with conviction and in a moral manner. True sustainability depends upon them developing these characteristics. Sitting in a classroom so as to memorize test questions so that a school can show the government it is raising good parrots has nothing whatsoever to do with quality education. Following that same course again and again will always yield the same results.