kill. Such training educates.

But that would indeed be a sorry program of education which blinked the
fact that the student must be rendered responsive to the nobler ideals
of the human race, that his eyes must be opened to the immanent values
of life. If a clear title to forty acres and a mule represents the
extreme upper limit of a black man's ambition, why call him a man? If a
bank-account represents the sum of his happiness, that happiness lacks
humanity. If you would educate for life, you must arouse spiritual
interests. "The life is more than meat, and the body than raiment."
Through history and literature the Tuskegee student is brought to
develop a criticism, an appreciation of life and the worthier ends of
human striving. To such a discipline, however elementary, the critic
will not, I take it, begrudge the name "education."

And if the reader wavers in contemplating the problems of trudging
Negroes, remember that the type of Negro who is a menace to the
community is he who, in moments of leisure, responds to somewhat grosser
incentives than the poetry of Longfellow, the romance of Hawthorne, and
the philosophy of Emerson. I would reassure your idealism with this
counsel of prudence.

Another question presses: Does the value of Tuskegee lie in the fact
that the school equips for happy lives merely as many persons as are
subjected to the immediate play of its influences; that its circle of
efficiency includes only as many as are enrolled in its various courses?
To that question every teacher in the school and the mass of graduates
and students would give an emphatic, a decisive, No! The real value of
the school lies in the service rendered to the people of the communities
where our young folks go to live and labor. Now, work in wood and iron,
however assiduously prosecuted, never erected in any human being's heart
a passion for social service; a finer material must be used, a material
finer than gold. And so the plan and deeper intent of Tuskegee Institute
are incapable of realization without the incentives supplied by history
and literature.

Finally, there is a trade for which the academic studies, supplemented
by specific normal instruction, are the direct preparation--teaching
school. In the census year there were over 21,000 Negro school-teachers
in the United States, and in the decade 1890-1900 the ratio of increase
was more than twice as rapid as that of the Negro population; but,
nevertheless, there