Black American Education In The 1800s Essay

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Education in the United States went through great reform in the late 1800s to 1900s. Change didn’t come about easy and educational equality is still a popular debate today. Although educational change was talked about and seemingly in progress, equality still had a long way to go. Differences in racial and social classes became prevalent especially through schooling. Black Americans were limited and restrained with obstacles such as what schools they were allowed to attend, what classes they were to take, and by what the teachers were taught to educate on. Prior to educational reform, slave owners view keeping the enslaved ignorant in order to protect their own futures. In the early 1800s most southern states even had laws in place criminalizing …show more content…
It wasn’t until the Hampton model that normal schools became a part of black American education. These normal schools, such as Hampton, were designed to train common school teacher for the black education system. Schools such as Hampton did not provide any trade certificates but solely on the education of teachers. Ex-slaves however wanted to land industrial jobs and to get away from agricultural. It wasn’t until the 1880s when the Slater Fund led to an increase in black industrial education. Black schools were for the most part underfunded. With the Slater Fund even schools that didn’t find industrial education as necessary, even schools hardly scraping by found it hard to pass up on the extra funding. Many of these schools however didn’t put much focus on industry even though they offered some classes. It wasn’t the change many blacks wanted in order to go into industry, but it was a step towards progress. Missionaries went against the Hampton model by believing the model was taking away from the rights of the black Americans to choose their own path of study. The missionaries focused on training leaders. They believed that blacks were being forced into servitude because of the industrial education movement. These missionaries wanted black Americans to go for a higher education in order to become leaders in the

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