History and Significance of Dunbar High School

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Recommended: Racial inequality in education sociology

Jean Jacques Rousseau said that plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education. We are born weak, we need strength. We are born totally unprovided, we need aid. We are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education.

Rousseau's philosophy of education was one black people understood in the early days of the country's history; education meant freedom and one would lay down his life in the attempt to obtain learning. Slaves in Colonial America who were not allowed to learn to read and write. The white slaveholders did not want their slaves to know that people were arguing over the expansion of slavery and that some whites thought that Africans should be free. Still, slaves secretly read and wrote under lamps at night or in the woods or other secluded areas during the day. They read anything they could get their hands on; books, pamphlets, newspapers, whatever else they could find.

Some masters’ families, particularly wives and daughters, educated many slave children at night in dimly lit rooms, reading to them by firelight. Some masters started small churches on their plantations or farms and taught slaves to read the bible. The children of freed slaves slipped away to secret schools in churches at great risk to their lives. They did this to get an education that would enable them to get a job. Blacks began to establish their own schools because they were not entirely welcome at white schools, even up North. Finally, they established their crown jewel, a high school that would prepare black children for higher education.

The first high school for black American students opened its doors in 1870, when Congress defeate...

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...ry kept black Americans in a state of oppression. Still, education was cherished as the way to get ahead. Today, a black is president of the United States and there are black politicians elected to the Congress and the Senate. Several Fortune 500 companies are headed by blacks. Admission to any college or university is open to black high school scholars. But now, getting good grades and an education is passé, construed as "acting white." It is as if black education rose from the ash heap of slavery and Jim Crow after the Civil War and, then, was pulled back down into a tar pit of welfare assistance and government dependency.

The M Street/Dunbar High School model cannot be duplicated in the educational and cultural environment of today, but an education model based on its policies and academic standards can be replicated to turn out superior black students.

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