"There is as Much Dignity in Writing a Poem as in Tilling a Field" by Jill Watts

I'm very pleased to welcome Professor Jill Watts to EditingGenius today. Jill and I met almost a decade ago when I was a very young editor making my way up the ranks and Jill was publishing her wonderful biography on Hattie McDaniel with my boss at the time. I assisted on the project and appreciated not only Jill's insight and intelligence, but also her warmth and generosity of spirit. She is also a masterful writer and when Jill sets out to tell you someone's story, you are immediately drawn in by her words and know pretty soon into the read that the read will be elegant, rich and memorable. I'm very glad to have her with us as today's Guest Blogger. Now, settle in. You're in for a real treat. 

Booker T. Washington

As a writer of African American history who teaches college courses on the topic, I often cover the debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois over their strategies for racial uplift. It usually makes for lively class discussions and students thrash about thinking about the ramifications of Washington’s accommodationist approach to segregation in comparison to Du Bois’s call for immediate social, political, and economic equality. Their papers often reflect a passionate engagement in the dispute.

Central to the debate that raged between the two iconic African American leaders at the turn of the twentieth century was their difference over the direction of education. Washington urged African Americans to focus on economic uplift and to embrace his educational philosophy that focused on vocational training: “No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.” Du Bois stridently disagreed, arguing that an equal and classical education was essential to the fight for human rights. Mere industrial education was not enough, the mind needed to be challenged and trained. “Is life not more than meat, and the body more than raiment?” Du Bois posed in Souls of Black Folk (1903).

W.E.B. Du Bois

History shows that in the end, Du Bois’s position, at least figuratively, won out. The fight over school desegregation, a civil rights cornerstone, centered on equal and shared access to a comprehensive classical education. Tuskegee Institute became Tuskegee University offering a strong liberal arts and general education curriculum. In my classes, there are some students who praise Washington for what they regard as his practicality in facing overwhelming racism and limited opportunity. But most students will side with Du Bois and his demands for full rights without delay. The spirit of their remarks indicates the dispute over equal education, for them, is an old one and that time has proven Washington wrong.

But it seems to me that in many ways the Washington-Du Bois debate remains relevant. The nation continues to struggle publicly with how to address and act against racism. But there is another part of the debate--the division over the nature of education--that has crept almost unnoticed back into our culture. Specifically, we hear rumblings about the direction that university education should take. Some of this is because of the online revolution in learning. But that is only one change faced in higher education. Another equally important one is in the substance of what our students should or should not be learning. In the media, we hear about the death of the humanities, a field proclaimed by some as obsolete in the twenty-first century. Here and there, obituaries appear announcing the passing of the classical educational model that Du Bois so deeply valued.


The passing of the humanities has not been sudden. Enrollments in humanities majors have been declining over the last forty years. A recent New York Times article, “As Interest Fades in Humanities, Colleges Worry” discusses how students are choosing degrees in the sciences and other majors that universities promote as leading to financially secure jobs. In the push for a career-orientated education, students have been dissuaded from selecting philosophy, literature, languages, and history. At our campus, we also note a decrease in social sciences majors like political science and sociology. What is common among all of these degrees is that they are based on the writing intensive curriculum—their decline means that we produce fewer and fewer writers. STEM, nursing, kinesiology, and criminal justice majors are becoming more and more popular. As the Times points out, these degrees are seen as avenues for future jobs and a means to helping the country regain its competitive edge in the world.

This strikes me as being based on a Booker T. Washington style of accommodationist education—the strength of the nation is determined by an educational system producing vocational workers. Students in colleges (and their parents) become easy recruits to that ideology. The students of today are generally careful and conservative; they are not the “Beat Generation”—they are the “Beat Up Generation.” Most of our students work part-time if not full-time. They have repeatedly lost jobs, seen their parents lose jobs, and watched as their family, friends, and neighbors lose their homes. Here in southern California, many of them have been touched by war. The common advice is that their future rests in career training at the university in jobs will that help the nation and make them good consumers.

The flaw here is that the Great Recession that purportedly led to the United States’ decline in competitiveness was not the result of Americans who were improperly educated—forced by out-of-touch, and probably embarrassingly nerdy, humanities professors into a classical education that held the country back. A classical education served generation after generation well. It stressed baseline knowledge in science, math, the arts, humanities and social science. It produced individuals who could contribute a balance from various perspectives. Importantly, it required all students, regardless of major, to become writers and thinkers.

The decline in the nation’s economy had nothing to do with a classical education or the people who chose humanities as majors. The U.S.’s competitiveness was undermined by poor decisions made over the past forty years, (oops . . . that started about the time the humanities began to decline). Three forces weakened the economy and all were decisions made by those who govern the country not by a flood of humanities majors weakening the nation’s workforce with their knowledge of history or passion for interpretation of texts or ability to speak more than one language. Decline happened because of the deregulation of the economy, the reality that in the 1980s, the country crossed the line from being the biggest creditor to the biggest debtor nation, and the eager outsourcing of jobs. In the end, as far as I can tell, there is no correlation between the sun setting on the American economy and people majoring in the humanities.

Conversely, an argument could be made that the United States’ decline in global position could be derived from forty years of attrition in humanities degrees. And, as a corollary, the perpetuation of the idea that humanities are irrelevant, although apparently some think this makes eye-catching news, could be seen as a endangering the country even more. Rather than proclaiming the demise of the field, the next headline should read “Country Made Vulnerable by End of Humanities: National Economy Weakened by Decline in Citizens Who Can Read and Write.”

At the core, the humanities teach all students to write. Not all writers are produced by colleges but all colleges based in classical education produce writers. The essential tool to writing is thinking. In writing and thinking, students become critical—they learn to analyze, dialogue, and interpret. That ability, to create and question, is essential to the progress of peoples and nations. Du Bois, who wrote volumes and volumes, knew this well. This is why the humanities matter; it is because writing matters. Writing empowers the writer. It is both a personal empowerment through self-expression and a communal empowerment gained by the chance to communicate about the human experience through both fiction and non-fiction. To sustain a culture willing to advance and improve, the dignity of writing must survive. And the humanists who teach and study writing and language--the backbone of a classical education--are critical to a vigorous society.

“Education among all kinds of men always has had, and will always have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent,” wrote Du Bois in 1903. “Nevertheless men strive to know.” It is through knowing, through restless thinking and writing, that we advance. Education must not become entrapped by a world where we consign our future generations to trudge daily back and forth to jobs, mostly in service sector, when, if given another choice, they could use their words to sing, celebrate, provoke, and bring change.





Jill Watts is the author of Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood (Amistad, 2005), Mae West: An Icon in Black and White (Oxford, 2001) and God, Harlem U.S.A.: The Father Divine Story (University of California Press, 1992). She is currently working on a book on African Americans serving in the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (known as the Black Cabinet) and is a Professor of History at California State University, San Marcos.
  

She received a B.A. in History (with a minor in Mathematics) from Revelle College at the University of California, San Diego and a M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles. She came to California State University, San Marcos after teaching at Weber State University, UCLA, and Santa Monica College. She has also taught at Cornell University where she received a fellowship from the Society for the Humanities. A recipient of the CSUSM President’s Award for Scholarship and Creative Activity, her research interests include United States social and cultural history, African-American history, film history, and biography.