harnesses the visible and invisible forces of the cartlı and air and water : that is science, modern science. And that is what the New Negro must enlist upon his side. Let us, like the Japanese, become a race of knowledge-getters, preserving our racial soul, but digesting into it all that we can glcan or grasp, so that when Isracl goes up out of bondage he will be "skilled in all the learning of the Egyptians" and competent to control his destiny.

Those who have knowledge must come down from their Sinais and give it to the common people. Theirs is the great July 10 simplify and make clear, to light the lamps of knowledge that the eyes of their race may sce; that the feet of their people may not stumble. This is the task of the Talented Tenth,

To the masses of our people we say: Kead! Get the reading liabit; spend your spare time not so much in training the feet to dance, as in training the head to think, And, at the very outset, draw the line between books of opinion and books of information. Saturate your minds with the latter and you will be forming your own opinions, which will be worth teu times more to you than the opinions of the greatest minds on earth. Go to school whenever you can. If you can't go in the day, go at niglit. But remember always that the best college is that on your bookshelf: the best clucation is that on the inside of yonır own head. For in this work-a-day world people ask first. 1101 "Where were yoni cclucated ?" but "What do you know ?" and sext, "What can you do with it?" And if we of the Negro race can master modern knowledge the kind that counts - we will be able to win for ourselves the priceless gifts of freedom and power, and we will be able to hold them against the world.

a

Thc Racial Rools of Culturc. Education is the name which we give to that process by which the ripened generation brings to bear upon the rising generation the storcd-up knowledge and experience of the past and present generations to fit it for the business of life. If we are not to waste money and cnergy, our cducational systemis should shape our youth for what we intend them to becomie.

We Negrocs, in a world in which we are the under dog, must shape our youth for living in such a workel. Shall we shape them mentally to accept the status of under-dog its their predestined lot? Or shall we shape them into men and women fit for a free world? To do the former needs nothing more than continuing as we are. To do the latter is to shape their souls for contimicd conflict with a theory and practice in which most of the white world that surrounds them are at one.

The educational system in the United States and the West Indies was shaped by white people for white youth, and from their point of view, it fits their purpose

well. Into this system came the children of Negro parents when chattel slavery was ended-and their relation to the prollems of life was obviously different. The white boy and girl draw cxclusively from the storcd-up knowledge and experience of the past and present generations of white people to fit them for the business of being dominant whites in a world full of coloreil folk. The examples of valor and virtue on which their minds are fed are cxclusively white examples. What wonder, then, that cach generation comes to maturity with the idea imbedded in its mind that only white men are valorous and fit to rule and only white wonien are virtuous and entitled to chivalry, respect and protection? What wonder that they

think, idomos instinctively, that the Negroo's proper place, nationally and internationally, in that of a111 inferior: It is only what we should naturally espeel.

But what seems to escape attention is the fact that the Negro boy and girl, getting the same (though worse) instruction, also get from it the same notion of thic Negro's place and part in life which the white children get. Is it any wonder, then, that they so readily accept the status of inferiors; that they tend to disparagc themselves, and think themselves worth while only to the extent to which they look and act and think like the whites? They know nothing of the stored-up knowledge and experience of the past and present generations of Negroes in their ancestral lands, and conclude there is no such store of knowledge and experience. They reaclily accept the as. sumption that Negroes have never been anything but slaves and that they never had a glorious past as other fallen peoples like the Greeks and Persians have. And this despite the mass of collected testimony in the works of Barth, Schweinfurtii, Mary Kingsley, Lady Lugard, Morel. Ludolphus, Blyden, Ellis, Ratzel, Kidd, Es-Saadi, (asely Hayford and a host of others, Negro and white.

A large part of the blame for this deplorable condi. tion must be put upon the Negro colleges like Howard, Hisk, Livingstone and Lincoln in the United States, and Codrington, Harrison and the Mico in the West Indies. These are the institutions in which our cultural ideals and educational systems are fashioncd for the shaping of the minds of the future generations of Negroes. It cannot be expected that it shall begin with the common schools; for, in spite of logic, cducational ilcas and ideals spread from above downwards. If we are ever to enter into the confraternity of colored peoples it should seem the duty of our Negro colleges to drop their silly smat

tcrings of "little Latin and less Greek" ind establisle modern courses in Ilausn and Arabic, for these are the living languages of millions of our brothern in modern Africa. Courses in Negru history and the culture of West African peoples, at least, shoukl be given in every college that claims to be an institution of learning for Negrocs. Surely an institution of learning for Negroes should not fail to luc also an institution of Negro Icaruing.

The New Negro, Scpt. 1919.

ours sccm

The New Knopledge for the New Negro. Quite a good dcal of unnecessary dispute has been going on these days among the guardians of the inner temple as to just which form of worship is necessary at the shrine of the Goddess Knowledge. In plain English, thc pundits seem to be at odds in regard to the kind of cducation which the Negro should havc. Of course, it has long been known that the educational cxperts of white America were at odds with ours on the same subject; now, ho

be at odds among themselves.

The essence of the present conflict is not the casy distinction between "lower" and "higher" education, which really has no incaning in terms of educational principles, but it is rather "the : knowledge of things" versus "the knowledge of words." The same condict has been waged in England from the days of Hux. ley's youth to the later ninetics when the London Board Schools were recognized and set the present standard of efficiency for the rest of England. The present form of the question is, "Shall education consist of Latin and Greck, literature and metaphysics, or of modern science, modern languages and modern thought?" The real essence of the question is whethor we shall train our children to grapplc effectively with the problent of llic that lies before them, or to look longingly back upon the past standards of life and thought and consider themselves a special clau because of this.

If education be, as we assert, a training for life, it munt of course have its roots in the past. But so has the art of the

blachsanith, the tailor, the carpenter, the bookbinler or the pricst. What the classicists really seek is the domination of the formni mother and aim of that training by the form, methods and aims of an carlier age,

CLASSICS, CLERICS AND (LASS (ULTURE. l'erhaps an explanation of that carlier training may serve to give the real innerneue of the classicists' position so that orilinary people may understand it briter than the classicists themselves seem to des. In the Middle Whis, thie schools of Western Europe and the subject matter of the cluention given in them were bineet

pon the Latin "alisciplines." Western Europe hadd oro literature, no learning, no science of its own. It was the church -particularly the monasteries to which one had to go to get sucli training is was obtainable in #barbarois age. This training was, of course, given in the longer of the church which was latin, the clerical language The contact of incdieval Europeans with the dark-skinned Arabs adeled Grock and the knowledge of Greck literature imell philosophy to the earlier medieval discipline. Imboculeteel in this was the substance of science nurtured by the Arabs and alldei to by them.

l'he ruling classes kept their children within the treallmill of these two literatures and languages and it came to be thought that this was the indispensable training for a gentleman. But:

"Tompuri mutantur, 1105 ct mutamur in illis,"

We are in a different age, ankle in which the nation, not the church, pivce training to all children, and not merely to the child. rest of aristocrats who will grow vip to do nothing. The children of the people must become the doors of all that is done in the world of tomorrow, and they must be traincil for this doing. Tonding in England, not Oxford, the home of lost ideals, but such institutions as the University of London, are the sources of that training which gives England its physicians, surgeons, inventors, business men and artists.

(LASSICISTS IGNORANT OF LATIN AND GREEK.

Biit the noise of the classicists may be rudely stopped by onerely pointing out the hollowness of their witch words. These personis would have lis believe ilmne latin and (ireck are, in their eyes, the backbone of any education that is worth while. Very well thens, let us take them at their word. I make the brond assertion