the world a reconstruction of education is struggling
forward, through great uncertainties but under strong pressure of
necessity. It is felt that the old-time book-education, and even its
modern revision--all as yet come vastly short of rightly fitting the
child for manhood or womanhood. We have advanced, but we have still far
to go. To rightly educate "the hand, head and heart," (the watchword of
Tuskegee)--to develop strong, symmetrical character and intelligence,
the sound mind in the sound body,--to train the bread-winner and the
citizen, as well as to open the gates of intellectual freedom and
spiritual power,--this is what we have not quite learned. Socrates and
More and Rousseau and Pestalozzi and Froebel and Armstrong have done
much, but they have left abundant room for their successors. The
millionaire's child, as well as the field-hand's, must wait awhile yet.
So it is small wonder if the Southern public school is still a challenge
to the best wits.

The combined industrial and educational need of the South is excellently
summed up by a sympathetic observer, Ernest Hamlin Abbott:

"The chief industrial problem of the South is, therefore, that of
transforming an indolent peasantry accustomed to dependence into an
active, independent people. This involves an educational problem.
Industrial education is something very different from training a few
hundred girls to cook and sew for others; it is something, even, very
different from supplying a few hundreds of young men with a trade.
Industrial training is this larger undertaking, namely, to train
hundreds of thousands of young people in habits of industry, in
alertness of mind, and in strength of will that shall enable them to
turn to the nearest opportunity for gaining the self-respect that comes
with being of use to the community."

One thing is clear. More than the system is the teacher. Now and always
the first requisite must be instructors of devotion, intelligence,
sympathy, inspiration. To train such, and train them in multitudes,
there must be institutions, ample in intellectual resource and high in
their standards. There can be no fit common schools for the blacks
unless there are worthy normal schools and colleges. Atlanta and its
class are necessary as well as Tuskegee and its class,--and Atlanta
reinforces Tuskegee with a large proportion of its teachers. On broader
grounds, too, the need of the higher education for the black man is
imperative. It