person correctly, general questions in geography, and to hear them
read would only be to disgust a man who has a taste for reading;
which, to do well, as trifling as it may appear to some, (to the
ignorant in particular) is a great part of learning. Some few of them,
may make out to scribble tolerably well, over a half sheet of paper,
which I believe has hitherto been a powerful obstacle in our way, to
keep us from acquiring knowledge. An ignorant father, who knows no
more than what nature has taught him, together with what little he
acquires by the senses of hearing and seeing, finding his son able to
write a neat hand, sets it down for granted that he has as good
learning as any body; the young, ignorant gump, hearing his father or
mother, who perhaps may be ten times more ignorant, in point of
literature, than himself, extolling his learning, struts about in the
full assurance, that his attainments in literature are sufficient to
take him through the world, when, in fact, he has scarcely any
learning at all!!!!

I promiscuously fell in a conversation once, with an elderly colored
man on the topics of education, and of the great prevalency of
ignorance among us: Said he, "I know that our people are very ignorant
but my son has a good education: he can write as well as any white
man, and I assure you that no one can fool him," etc. Said I, what
else can your son do, besides writing a good hand? Can he post a set
of books in a mercantile manner? Can he write a neat piece of
composition in prose or in verse? To these interrogations he answered
in the negative. Said I, Did your son learn, while he was at school,
the width and depth of English Grammar? to which he also replied in
the negative, telling me his son did not learn those things. Your son,
said I, then, has hardly any learning at all--he is almost as
ignorant, and more so, than many of those who never went to school one