I am an earnest advocate of manual training and trade teaching for black boys, and for white boys, too.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of practical skills and trade education for youth of all backgrounds.
W. E. B. Du Bois advocates for the value of manual training and vocational education not only for black boys but also for white boys, highlighting the necessity of equipping all young people with practical skills that will empower them in the workforce. He believed that such education would help bridge societal gaps and promote equity in opportunities, asserting that education should be inclusive and beneficial for everyone.
In practice
During a school board meeting, I may quote this to support the introduction of vocational programs.
Before the Civil War, the Negro was certainly as efficient a workman as the raw immigrant from Ireland or Germany. But, whereas the Irishmen found economic opportunity wide and daily growing wider, the Negro found public opinion determined to 'keep him in his place.'
Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools - intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it - this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life.
School houses do not teach themselves - piles of brick and mortar and machinery do not send out men. It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.
Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
For most people, it is enough for the world to know that they aspire. The world does not ask what their aspirations are, trusting that those aspirations are for the best and greatest things. But with regard to the Negroes in America, there is a feeling that their aspirations in some way are not consistent with the great ideals.
For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
Regardless of zip code, talent and IQ are evenly distributed, so we need to make sure that opportunity is evenly distributed, too.
So few grow, because so few study.
The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing; it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.
I want to go back to my country to help other girls. We need to support girls to see other possibilities for themselves, to have a vision for their own future.
People in my neighborhood are so disconnected from the fresh food supply that kids don't know an eggplant from a sweet potato. We have to show them how to get grounded in the truest sense of the word.
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