Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

NEW PROGRAMS
AND EXPERIMENTATION
The new courses proposed earlier
do not complete the academic reforms
which are needed. New curricula
must prepare Negro students
for occupations previously closed
to them . Many predominantly Negro
colleges, starving financially,
cannot afford the additional expense
of new programs, no matter
how desirable they may be .
For example, if only five students
seek training for college personnel
positions, an impoverished
institution may argue that it cannot
afford to offer such a program .
Instead, it will continue to prepare
the fifty students interested in elementary
and secondary school
counseling . Thus, colleges, economically
forced to perpetuate the
traditional, fail to prepare Negro
students for new occupations .
The Black University may suffer
similar financial hardships ; vet it
must offer new programs . Otherwise,
it will betray its students and,
in fact, may lose prospective students
to larger universities which
can afford such programs .
The Black University also must
discard the characteristic conservativism
of most Negro institutions .
Fearing criticism for failure, Negro
institutions rarely have gambled
on educational experiments .
Many of the so-called experiments
in curriculum and method merely
revive antiquated and abandoned
practices . Or these "experiments"
abandon academic standards under
NEGRO DIGEST March 1968
the pretext of respecting the socalled
culture of the Negro .
Experimentation must be encouraged
. There should be experiments
in methods of teaching, experiments
with non-graded courses,
experiments with tutorial sessions .
But experiments must be conducted
systematically . Control
groups should be compared with
the experimental groups, and student
performance should be tested
and evaluated . Always, the experiment
should be designed to discover
the most effective means of
achieving desired results, never
merely to confirm the validity of a
pre-determined hypothesis . Possibly,
experimentation will prove that
many students cannot reach the required
level of competence within
four years . If so, the students must
be retained longer . College education,
thus, will not be envisioned
as four years of courses producing
a diploma as automatically as nine
months of development produce a
child . Instead, it should be viewed
as the movement toward a goal, the
duration determined by the knowledge,
stamina, and quickness of the
student .
The need for new programs and
experimentation is a problem for
all of higher education, not merely
for Negro institutions . I must reemphasize,
however, that the term
"experiment" or "curriculum development"
should not mask a condescending
acceptance of inadequate
performance by Negroes . For
example, some educators currently
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