been made, there are those who feel that with the opportunity still more should have been done. They feel that the past is irrevocable, but that it is not too late to correct certain errors and tendencies for the future.

What is the situation as we actually find it to-day? Go to any one of the most representative institutions, and what do we find? Efficient teachers struggling against most enormous disadvantages and frequently dealing with the crudest possible material. The wonder is that so much has been accomplished in the face of the handicap. It is not enough to reply that in all the schools and colleges of the country the teaching is irregular and the systems too lenient—that there is no human perfection in fact; these Negro colleges are crying for a better chance and they ought to have it. Go into any one of their high school departments (for all are still forced to conduct closely affiliated academies), and the actual attainment of many of the students exhibits more and more the appalling shortcomings of the common schools. How could it be otherwise with a system that operates schools for only four or five months a year and that pays teachers twenty or thirty-five dollars a month? "It was this way, you see," said one young man who presented himself for entrance upon the work of the academy, "we had only a three months' school at my home, and I went one winter and my brother went the next." Said another, "I had a good teacher in arithmetic, but we didn't do much in grammar"; and the grammar may be said to embrace every subject in the common school in which precision is required except arithmetic. Penmanship is completely lacking in neatness and finish, and in nineteen cases out of twenty the students from the country can not spell. Nor can they read. Take them as you come to them, at the supposed completion of the eighth grade, and ask them to read aloud a single paragraph from Irving, or Cooper, or the morning paper, and very few indeed will be able to get through without an apology or serious errors in pronunciation or interpretation.

Grammar and reading and spelling, however, are apparent. Little by little the teacher becomes aware of something more fundamental—the lack of any adequate background for appreciation and culture. No time had the mother at the washtub or in the field for Cinderella or Mother Goose, and the childhood that should have been enriched by lines from Longfellow or Tennyson or the Bible was nodded away by the fire. Youth that craved adventure and inspiration found relief from the deadening routine of the week only in the coarse pleasure of the railroad on Sundays, or the big-meeting that came once a year. A gymnasium, a library, or an art museum the young man coming up to the academy in the city never saw in his life.

Such a background makes neither for accuracy in technical training nor for the foundation of the larger reaches of culture. Within recent years the problem has been even more complicated by the inadequate school facilities in the cities. As the population has shifted from the rural districts to the larger towns, congestion in the schools has resulted, and the lack of an adequate number of seats and the system of half-day sessions have frequently resulted only in the semblance of thorough and efficient training. Nor has the matter been made any better by the tendency in some places still further to degrade the schools.

There is yet a larger question, however, and that is the extent to which the higher schools and colleges themselves are fulfilling their function. We do not forget the work of Atlanta University in the training of common school teachers, nor that of Morehouse College for the Negro Baptists of Georgia, nor that of Spelman Seminary for the homes and Sunday Schools and rural schools of Georgia, when we raise the question if such institutions are really doing all that they should for their respective communities. We do not believe that they are, and we do not believe that the fault is wholly theirs.

All of this takes us back to some very fundamental things. For some years we have heard of a war between classical and industrial ideals, and it has become more and more the fashion to sneer at the sturdy pioneers who sought to instill into the minds of the recently emancipated freedmen the ideas of education that obtained in New England. Homer and Horace, it is affirmed, have no place in the education of a man who is to be a leader in a rural community. The whole utilitarian tendency has recently been strongly represented by the paper, "A Modern School," by Dr. Abraham Flexner, published in the Review of Reviews for April, 1916, and reprinted as a pamphlet by the General Education Board. We read: "Modern education will include nothing simply because tradition recommends it or because its inutility has not been conclusively established. It proceeds in precisely the opposite way: It includes nothing for which an affirmative case can not now be made out."

Now hardly any one will be found to object to this principle, though when education in the large is considered many distinguished educators feel that in arriving at its large aim the "Modern School" is not altogether fair to some of the more traditional subjects in the curriculum. So far as higher education for the Negro is concerned, however, there is one point at which the utilitarians persistently misunderstand those who do not wholly agree with them. No one better appreciates the value of genuine industrial education than the teachers in the Southern colleges. What they do oppose, however, is that sort of large legislation which says that because the Negro is mainly an agricultural race, his children as a whole should have that sort of education which will make of them good farmers and domestics. Such a program offers no outlet at all for the boy of unusual talent and would ultimately irrevocably bind the whole race in the chains of serfs.

What then should be the aim of Negro education? We affirm that each boy should receive such education as would not only enable him to develop his individual powers to their highest point, but also enable him to fulfill his function most serviceably as a citizen of a great free republic. Such an aim it seems not altogether unreasonable to ask. Many Negroes will undoubtedly for many years find their true economic place as domestic servants, many will be and should be farmhands; but no scheme of education whatsoever should be devised that would logically force every Negro boy or girl into such occupations as these whatever may be the individual capacity or desire.

In Negro schools accordingly we ask first of all for that education which will understand that all individuals are not alike and that will so plan the course of study for each student as to enable him ultimately to be of most service to his fellowmen. Logically no set program of study can do this. The student's playtime as well as his work time should be most carefully supervised. Here is a budding machinist. His true bent should, by some scientific test, be manifest to his principal or dean after just a few months of acquaintance. A special course of study should be built up for him. His reading should be so studied as to vary articles on mechanics with such fiction as would awaken his imagination. He should be taken to visit great industrial plants so as to see how they are operated, and any inventive faculty that he possesses should be encouraged. Here again is a bookish lad, one who seems to study always and who never wants to play. One instructor would inspire him along the line of history or literature or art, as the case might require, while the physical director would (without the boy's realizing it) seek until he found