Today my students discussed the debate re: Black American education between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. du Bois (we are so close to finally starting Quest of the Silver Fleece!). I wanted to share a quotation from Washington's Up from Slavery with #ClassicsTwitter

"They knew about Latin and Greek when they left school, but they seemed to know less about life and its conditions...and they were more inclined to yield to the temptation to become hotel waiters and Pullman-car porters as their life-work" (Chapter V: The Reconstruction Period).

Replace "hotel waiters" and "Pullman-car porters" with "Starbucks barista" and this fits in easily with modern discourse about liberal arts/humanities-inclusive education.

To be fair, here's an opposing perspective from du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk: "The function of the University is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a center of polite society; it is, above all, to be that organ of...

...fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization" ("On the Wings of Atalanta" 16).

Final shout out to Eric Ashley Hairston's The Ebony Column, some chapters of which served as the basis of our discussion today. Of early Black classicists, H writes: "Essentially, they rejected the traditional understanding of the classics as the exclusive foundation and...

...cultural property of white European civilization as well as its role in encouraging and transmitting destructive imperialist and colonialist philosophies. Instead, they offered an alternate vision of the classics as a transforming set of ideals that could produce or develop...

...an African-American-inflected cultus (culture) and civitas (citizenship), and enable a black counter-transmission of a virtuous, intelligent, resilient humanity" ("Introduction" 12).

I look forward to building upon this discussion with my students as we see du Bois' vision for Black classical education unfold in his Quest of the Silver Fleece (which, if you haven't ever read, you probably should).