W.E.B. Du Bois

Teach thinkers to think,—a needed knowledge in a day of loose and careless logic; and they whose lot is gravest must have the carefulest training to think aright.

Neither and both: teach the workers to work and the thinkers to think; make carpenters of carpenters, and philosophers of philosophers, and fops of fools.

We are training not isolated men but a living group of men,—nay, a group within a group.

And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man.

And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living,—not sordid money-getting, not apples of gold.

The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.

Hence arises a new human unity, pulling the ends of earth nearer, and all men, black, yellow, and white.

So here we stand among thoughts of human unity, even through conquest and slavery; the inferiority of black men, even if forced by fraud; a shriek in the night for the freedom of men who themselves are not yet sure of their right to demand…

Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desert and wild we have within our threshold,—a stalwart laboring force, suited to the semi-tropics; if, deaf to the voice of the Zeitgeist, we refuse to use and develop these men, we…

If, on the other hand, seized by the brutal afterthought, we debauch the race thus caught in our talons, selfishly sucking their blood and brains in the future as in the past, what shall save us from national decadence?

Only that saner selfishness, which Education teaches, can find the rights of all in the whirl of work.

But the very voices that cry hail to this good work are, strange to relate, largely silent or antagonistic to the higher education of the Negro.