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EDUCATIONAL CRISIS 

BOND

principally by graduates of New England and Middlewestern colleges, and adopted the curricula and formal objectives of the institutions from which they had come. Here, again, we need to remember that mass higher education in this country for all citizens is a relatively recent development. The degree to which various collegiate institutions have committed themselves, in the past, to preparing the Negro for full citizenship has depended upon the political and social commitment of the persons responsible for the foundation and support of these institutions. Such a college as Oberlin was, from its inception, committed to the equalitarian principles of New England abolitionism. In general, the same may be said of the private Negro colleges in the South. Du Bois found the Fisk University from which he graduated in 1888 a community more devoted to the realization of the idea of full and equalitarian participation by everyone in the body political and social, than was characteristic at the Harvard University where he took a second baccalaureate in 1890. The separate Negro state colleges in the South were under political pressures that, of necessity, severely limited the degree to which they could aim at educating their students for full citizenship. Here, again, it should be remembered that the vast majority of these institutions became degree-granting schools only after 1928; and that the Negro student attending integrated colleges was tolerated, more than welcomed; with no effort being made to provide him with an education differing from that purveyed to the dominant majority.
  In sum, if the question be posed-was education in this country originally intended to prepare the Negro for full citizenship, the answer must be a qualified "yes"; for education has been given to "Negroes" under various conditions, and controlling sets of circumstances. The Negro child who attended integrated, or even "de facto" segregated schools in the North or West, was enrolled in a system that had the ostensible objective, and public mandate, of preparing all of its students for full citizenship-whether it was an elementary, or secondary, or collegiate, institution. The legally segregated school was an obvious contradiction of the terms of the broad ideal of equalitarianism, and of "full citizenship"; as the Court's decision stated in 1954, a segregated school was inherently unequal.
  Offsetting this qualified "yes," is the fact that very little "education"was ever applied to the black child, and adult. The microscopic minority, that received any kind of education, was educated by people who, doubtless, had the best of intentions; the fact has been, for


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