The Limits of the "College Solution"

Booker T. Washington, distinguished graduate of Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, founding president of the Tuskegee Institute, is remembered today as the man who lost a great debate with his arch-rival, W. E. B. Du Bois, champion of civil rights and advocate for the "talented tenth" among African Americans. In his well-known "Atlanta Address," Washington argued that black people less than one generation away from slavery would succeed in a racially polarized world only by pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps through "industry, thrift, intelligence and property." Always the great compromiser, Washington was willing to abandon the quest for the vote, tolerate segregation and discrimination, and refrain from campaigning against racist behavior in exchange for his highest priority: a free basic education for blacks. Training the hands, not the mind, was, he thought, the most expedient way to deliver African Americans from abject poverty. Accordingly, the "Atlanta compromise" proposed limiting blacks to vocational or industrial training, leaving the liberal arts off-limits.

Du Bois and his ally, William Monroe Trotter, utterly rejected Washington's stance, vigorously supported a crusade for civil rights, and insisted that African Americans should pursue a classical education so that they would be prepared to take their place among the nation's leaders. Industrial training of the kind that Booker T. Washington urged would spell a lifetime of subordination. Instead, black elites needed to set their sights as high as possible, an aspiration Du Bois embraced as the first African American recipient of a Harvard doctorate. "Men, we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools," Du Bois wrote.

Intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it — this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life. On this foundation, we may build bread winning, skill of hand and quickness of brain, with never a fear lest the child and man mistake the means of living for the object of life.

The dispute between Washington and Du Bois underlies the quandary we face today: Will the nation's "truly disadvantaged" prosper more if we insist that the right goal is to cultivate the mind through abstract ideas, through education for its own sake, and to secure access to the universal pursuit of the highest credentials? Or does it make more sense to dwell on the practical and ensure that at the end of the day there is a trade, a skill, a viable occupation to be had? When progressive critics in our own time attack vocational education for prematurely tracking the poor toward less prestigious jobs, while advocates for career and technical training push back in favor of pragmatism, we are replaying the debate that began with Washington and Du Bois.

In its own time, the "talented tenth" strategy was not directed toward the needs of the masses. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. reminds us, Du Bois was concerned above all with producing leadership for black America, with finding those "few gifted souls" who had the potential to become "an uncrowned king in his sphere." This was not Booker T's issue. He was thinking about the economic fate of the other nine-tenths. As Washington put the matter, "The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house." He argued that industrial education would benefit his people, and he traded away almost everything else in favor of support for this ambition.

Du Bois carried the day. But his emphasis on the aspirations and cultivation of elites faded away in favor of a universal call to open the doors of educational institutions, provide employment opportunities, desegregate housing, and guarantee the right to vote. Everyone should be able to seek a spot among the ranks of the talented tenth. Accommodating to inequality — as Washington was prepared to do in the name of economic security — was unacceptable. Upward mobility into the professions was the path toward respect.

White America did not see the world so differently. Class intruded everywhere. Blue-collar work paid well, at least during the heyday of industrial unions, but it was not a source of pride. In David Halle's book on New Jersey chemical company employees, America's Working Man, a line worker instructs his eight-year-old kid to wave the father's paycheck in front of his second-grade teacher and ask whether she had anything to say for herself. On the defensive, the blue-collar dad argued that his money trumped her prestige. But it was a hollow stance since the status hierarchy was clear enough. Richard Sennett's landmark book, The Hidden Injuries of Class, draws a poignant portrait of working-class parents who watch with pride as their children go far enough in school to qualify for clean jobs, in banks or office buildings, but he records their private anguish when their offsprings' success stories leave the family behind. Parents imagine their children are ashamed of their roots, hence the upward mobility of the next generation translates into a rebuke and estrangement as much as it does a celebration of success.

On both sides of the race divide, the emphasis on upward mobility reserved self-respect to the white-collar world. That was the goal and it remains so today. The route to the American dream, then, runs right through the gates of the university and into entrepreneurship or the professions. There are few victories short of that end goal. And that helps to account for the trenchant attacks on vocational education as an alternative. To critics, it signals a capitulation to lower status and a denial of the chance for those born among the "truly disadvantaged" to surmount their origins and move up the ladder.

If we inhabited level playing fields, these universal aspirations would make sense and the critique would be warranted. If everyone had a fair shot at such a future, the talented tenth could indeed multiply. But the fields have never been level and have become less so every year since 1973, when economic inequality began to grow rapidly in the United States. As a result, what actually happens to young people coming out of weak schools in poor neighborhoods is that they struggle to reach even the most modest goals and end up unable to lay claim on economic stability at all.

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