localities in the South which run all year while the common school
only runs from three to eight months.

Indeed, the multiplication of colleges and academies for the "higher
education of colored youth" is one of the most striking phenomena of
the times: as if theology and the classics were the things best suited
to and most urgently needed by a class of persons unprepared in
rudimentary education, and whose immediate aim must be that of the
mechanic and the farmer--to whom the classics, theology and the
sciences, in their extremely impecunious state, are unequivocable
abstractions. There will be those who will denounce me for taking this
view of collegiate and professional preparation; but I maintain that
any education is false which is unsuited to the condition and the
prospects of the student. To educate him for a lawyer when there are
no clients, for medicine when the patients, although numerous, are too
poor to give him a living income, to fill his head with Latin and
Greek as a teacher when the people he is to teach are to be instructed
in the _a b c's_--such education is a waste of time and a senseless
expenditure of money.

I do not inveigh against higher education; I simply maintain that the
sort of education the colored people of the South stand most in need
of is _elementary and industrial_. They should be instructed for the
work to be done. Many a colored farmer boy or mechanic has been
spoiled to make a foppish gambler or loafer, a swaggering pedagogue or
a cranky homiletician. Men may be spoiled by education, even as they
are spoiled by illiteracy. Education is the preparation for a future
work; hence men should be educated with special reference to that
work.