In his thinking about the things he knows the black man comes to the
same conclusion as the white man when he thinks about the same things.
The black man does not think about electricity or the differential
calculus because he knows nothing about these matters, neither, and for
the same reason, does the European peasant wherever he may still be
found in his primitive state. It has been alleged in America and in
South Africa that Negro and Bantu children, when compared with European
children in both countries, show not only comparative slowness in the
study of arithmetic, but that they are on the whole less accurate in
their work, and this I readily believe, for the reason that the home
surroundings of the black children are seldom as favourable to the
development of speed and exactness as they are among Europeans. It is
not considered "good form" among Natives to do things in a hurry,
slowness is regarded as essential to good manners; moreover the craving
for speed and exactitude is everywhere a feature of high-pressure city
life rather than of life in the country. The town artisan of to-day must
be quick and accurate, whereas the agricultural labourer is found
satisfactory so long as he is a steady worker, and the home atmosphere
of the two types is bound to be affected by these considerations. The
home atmosphere of the ordinary Bantu family in process of acquiring the
ways of Western civilisation will be more like that of the agricultural
labourer than of the town artisan or shopkeeper, and it is conceded on
every hand that the home influence has a direct and important bearing on
the children's progress in school. Take as an example the children of
the back-veld Dutch in South Africa. I have been told by many of their
teachers that the difficulty in teaching these children is not so much
to make them work as to rouse them to a sense of the importance of speed
and accuracy, and yet we often see children from this class growing into
men and women of very high intellectual ability.