absorption theory as applied to America is, it seems to me, chimerical.

But to return to education. It should always be fitted to the stage of
development. It should always mean discipline, the training of the powers
and capacities. The early pioneers who planted civilization on the
Watauga, the Holston, the Kentucky, the Cumberland, had not much broad
learning--they would not have been worse if they had had more but they
had courage, they were trained in self-reliance, virile common sense, and
good judgment, they had inherited the instinct and capacity of
self-government, they were religious, with all their coarseness they had
the fundamental elements of nobility, the domestic virtues, and the
public spirit needed in the foundation of states. Their education in all
the manly arts and crafts of the backwoodsman fitted them very well for
the work they had to do. I should say that the education of the colored
race in America should be fundamental. I have not much confidence in an
ornamental top-dressing of philosophy, theology, and classic learning
upon the foundation of an unformed and unstable mental and moral
condition. Somehow, character must be built up, and character depends
upon industry, upon thrift, upon morals, upon correct ethical
perceptions. To have control of one's powers, to have skill in labor, so
that work in any occupation shall be intelligent, to have self-respect,
which commonly comes from trained capacity, to know how to live, to have
a clean, orderly house, to be grounded in honesty and the domestic
virtues,--these are the essentials of progress. I suppose that the
education to produce these must be an elemental and practical one, one
that fits for the duties of life and not for some imaginary sphere above
them.

To put it in a word, and not denying that there must be schools for
teaching the teachers, with the understanding that the teachers should be