Let me begin by saying that, even though I've read the book, I still don't know how I feel about W.E.B. Du Bois. But I know I like him better than Booker T. Washington.
I don't like Washington simply because I feel that he tends to alienate his own race in his "political" views, or whatever you want to call it. He's too quick to settle for inequality when, quite honestly, the African-American race already has endured such inequality for too long. Though I cannot say that I completely agree with everything Du Bois says, I can say that I agree with Du Bois' acknowledgement of Washington's "triple paradox," or so Du Bois calls it, where Washington advocates "Negro artisans business men and property owners" but not the right to vote; "thrift and self-respect" but expects "silent submission" to their white counterparts; and "common school and industrial training" rather than "higher learning" though even his own institute in Tuskegee needs its teachers to be of "higher learning" (49). In contrast to Washington, Du Bois outlines his three basic requests, as follows: "political power," "insistence on civil rights," and "higher education of the Negro youth" (48). In all honesty, I certainly don't find any of those conditions to be too demanding, so that is exactly why I find it so amazing that Washington would not also want that for his race. I guess that I just dislike how Washington puts so much emphasis on the "economics side" of rising within American culture in that time-period while completely disregarding the individual rights that the people definitely deserve.
I have decided that I will focus my last paper for the class on comparing Washington and Du Bois based on the two texts we've read. I'm not sure what kind of specific take I'll go with, but at any rate it interests me how different they are and yet how influential they are simultaneously during this time in history.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital
Not going to lie, this was pretty heavy reading for me. I'm not too sure that I understood more than 25% of what he was talking about, but there were a few sections that "stuck out" to me... And, that's what I'll focus on since I'm not too sure I'd be able to give a very accurate general account of the text.
There were several important sections that pointed to previous works we've read in class thus far, with the first one being the following from the first page: "I would note that Stetson also fixes upon education as a cause, and possible cure, for crime: a purely 'intellectual' schooling has pushed out 'religious and moral training,' expanding literacy but not moral character (324-3)."
The other excerpt I plan on discussing is from the second page, as follows: "'Going to School... is Idleness, and the longer Boys continue in this easy sort of Life, the more unfit they'll be when grown up for downright Labour...'"
One of the major themes of this class is concerned with the struggle between the idea of the "school culture" and the "shop culture" in terms of education, not only directly referenced in the McMath essay we read at the beginning of the year but also very heavily by Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery. The McMath essay goes into detail about the origins of Georgia Tech and how the school was founded, putting an emphasis on the fact that Tech was originally defined as more of a "shop" school than "intellectual" one, where students used their hands to learn rather than be consumed by their textbooks so they could have a more realistic approach to enginneering and the like once they entered the "real world" after school. Washington also seems to put some stock into this approach by promoting labor from his students at Tuskegee Institute and criticizing the symbolic boy reading French grammar in a garden of weeds. As to my opinion on the issue, I am a proponent of "hands-on" work if it is a matter of personal choice; however, I do not believe I would have been cut out for somewhere like Tuskegee or the early Georgia Tech because I am not a "hands-on" kind of girl... Kind of a tangent, but I'll move on. The point I want to make is that it seems as if the quoted individuals above need to re-evaluate their situations... Lucky for Washington, he no longer had to do hard labor as Founder and President of Tuskegee, so I imagine it wasn't so difficult to make others do it when he did not. Additionally, the individual of the second quote probably came from a decent family, knew he was going to get an intellectual education and did not have to concern himself with the prospect of working in a coal mine or factory for the remainder of his life. Yes, if he did have that to look forward to, he might be a little more sympathetic to those individuals who simply want a taste of something else besides hard labor for the first and last time in their lives. I don't know what kind of point I'm trying to make here... Just want to draw attention to two sections that impacted me, for whatever reason.
Maybe I just wanted to rant. Who knows?
There were several important sections that pointed to previous works we've read in class thus far, with the first one being the following from the first page: "I would note that Stetson also fixes upon education as a cause, and possible cure, for crime: a purely 'intellectual' schooling has pushed out 'religious and moral training,' expanding literacy but not moral character (324-3)."
The other excerpt I plan on discussing is from the second page, as follows: "'Going to School... is Idleness, and the longer Boys continue in this easy sort of Life, the more unfit they'll be when grown up for downright Labour...'"
One of the major themes of this class is concerned with the struggle between the idea of the "school culture" and the "shop culture" in terms of education, not only directly referenced in the McMath essay we read at the beginning of the year but also very heavily by Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery. The McMath essay goes into detail about the origins of Georgia Tech and how the school was founded, putting an emphasis on the fact that Tech was originally defined as more of a "shop" school than "intellectual" one, where students used their hands to learn rather than be consumed by their textbooks so they could have a more realistic approach to enginneering and the like once they entered the "real world" after school. Washington also seems to put some stock into this approach by promoting labor from his students at Tuskegee Institute and criticizing the symbolic boy reading French grammar in a garden of weeds. As to my opinion on the issue, I am a proponent of "hands-on" work if it is a matter of personal choice; however, I do not believe I would have been cut out for somewhere like Tuskegee or the early Georgia Tech because I am not a "hands-on" kind of girl... Kind of a tangent, but I'll move on. The point I want to make is that it seems as if the quoted individuals above need to re-evaluate their situations... Lucky for Washington, he no longer had to do hard labor as Founder and President of Tuskegee, so I imagine it wasn't so difficult to make others do it when he did not. Additionally, the individual of the second quote probably came from a decent family, knew he was going to get an intellectual education and did not have to concern himself with the prospect of working in a coal mine or factory for the remainder of his life. Yes, if he did have that to look forward to, he might be a little more sympathetic to those individuals who simply want a taste of something else besides hard labor for the first and last time in their lives. I don't know what kind of point I'm trying to make here... Just want to draw attention to two sections that impacted me, for whatever reason.
Maybe I just wanted to rant. Who knows?
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