thing, nor does it have a single definite object, nor is it a mere matter
of schools. Education is that whole system of human training within and
without the school house walls, which molds and develops men. If then we
start out to train an ignorant and unskilled people with a heritage of bad
habits, our system of training must set before itself two great aims--the
one dealing with knowledge and character, the other part seeking to give
the child the technical knowledge necessary for him to earn a living under
the present circumstances. These objects are accomplished in part by the
opening of the common schools on the one, and of the industrial schools on
the other. But only in part, for there must also be trained those who are
to teach these schools--men and women of knowledge and culture and
technical skill who understand modern civilization, and have the training
and aptitude to impart it to the children under them. There must be
teachers, and teachers of teachers, and to attempt to establish any sort
of a system of common and industrial school training, without _first_
(and I say _first_ advisedly) without _first_ providing for the higher
training of the very best teachers, is simply throwing your money to the
winds. 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. Nothing, in these latter
days, has so dampened the faith of thinking Negroes in recent educational
movements, as the fact that such movements have been accompanied by
ridicule and denouncement and decrying of those very institutions of
higher training which made the Negro public school possible, and make
Negro industrial schools thinkable. It was Fisk, Atlanta, Howard and
Straight, those colleges born of the faith and sacrifice of the
abolitionists, that placed in the black schools of the South the 30,000
teachers and more, which some, who depreciate the work of these higher