She has, as Atlanta shows, growing thrift and love of toil; but she lacks that broad knowledge of what the world knows and knew of human living and doing, which she may apply to the thousand problems of real life to-day confronting her.
This passage critiques the South's educational shortcomings despite its economic growth, emphasizing the need for broader knowledge.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.
By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.
Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.
The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the…