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Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Mis-Education of the Negro, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism and Education
Mis-Education as Social Control
Failures of Black Leadership
Business and Economic Development
Summary
Analysis
In this chapter, Woodson looks at the history of education for Black people in the United States. This is necessary to understand the problems with the education system in the 1930s (when he’s writing this book). After the American Civil War, philanthropists and the federal government helped create churches and schools for emancipated Black Southerners. During Reconstruction, these schools became publicly funded. But rather than adapting to Black people’s specific needs, these schools taught them about abstract subjects with no relevance to their actual lives. Next, as the nation industrialized, these schools shifted to teaching practical skills, which ignited a fierce debate about which model to follow.
Many of Woodson’s arguments might seem to apply to any point in U.S. history, including the present, but he’s focused on the specific period from 1865–1933. As a historian, he’s particularly interested in how past policy decisions have shaped his present (which also speaks to how policy changes in his time can shape the future). Reconstruction, the period from 1865–1877, was particularly significant because it represented the government’s first attempt to establish public services for free Black Americans. In retrospect, Reconstruction was also incredibly important because it represented a short window of opportunity for Black Americans to advance in U.S. society before white supremacist backlash became widespread. However, Woodson concludes that the Reconstruction-era school system failed because it was designed to teach Black students the exact same curriculum as white students, rather than adapting to their specific needs.
Themes
But neither the industrial nor the classical schools were successful. Rather than teaching their students to use modern machinery, Black industrial schools taught their students outdated techniques that did not help them get jobs. Meanwhile, the classical liberal arts schools have been just as useless. Since most Black people in the early 20th century were poor laborers and farmers, they had no real opportunity to exercise the skills and knowledge that they learned in liberal arts schools. As a result, between the Civil War and the 1930s, Black people found little success as either industrial workers or academic scholars in the United States.
Both the industrial and classical schools taught students to imitate others rather than develop their own technical and critical thinking skills. And more importantly, they taught students to imitate poorly, because they were under-resourced and did not connect these skills to students’ lives. Therefore, the school system ensured that Black students would always remain one step behind their white peers. But Woodson is proposing a different model of education: since Black students’ greatest resource is their own talent, schools should try to recognize and develop this talent.
Themes
