background makes neither for accuracy in technical training nor for the foundation of the larger reaches of culture. Within recent years the problem has been even more complicated by the inadequate school facilities in the cities. As the population has shifted from the rural districts to the larger towns, congestion in the schools has resulted, and the lack of an adequate number of seats and the system of half-day sessions have frequently resulted only in the semblance of thorough and efficient training. Nor has the matter been made any better by the tendency in some places still further to degrade the schools.

There is yet a larger question, however, and that is the extent to which the higher schools and colleges themselves are [53]fulfilling their function. We do not forget the work of Atlanta University in the training of common school teachers, nor that of Morehouse College for the Negro Baptists of Georgia, nor that of Spelman Seminary for the homes and Sunday Schools and rural schools of Georgia, when we raise the question if such institutions are really doing all that they should for their respective communities. We do not believe that they are, and we do not believe that the fault is wholly theirs.

[53]

All of this takes us back to some very fundamental things. For some years we have heard of a war between classical and industrial ideals, and it has become more and more the fashion to sneer at the sturdy pioneers who sought to instill into the minds of the recently emancipated freedmen the ideas of education that obtained in New England. Homer and Horace, it is affirmed, have no place in the education of a man who is to be a leader in a rural community. The whole utilitarian tendency has recently been strongly represented by the paper, "A Modern School," by Dr. Abraham Flexner, published in the Review of Reviews for April, 1916, and reprinted as a pamphlet by the General Education Board. We read: "Modern education will include nothing simply [54]because tradition recommends it or because its inutility has not been conclusively established. It proceeds in precisely the opposite way: It includes nothing for which an affirmative case can not now be made out."

[54]

Now hardly any one will be found to object to this principle, though when education in the large is considered many distinguished educators feel that in arriving at its large aim the "Modern School" is not altogether fair to some of the more traditional subjects in the curriculum. So far as higher education for the Negro is concerned, however, there 

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