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In his Appeal, David Walker holds education to be
instrumental in upsetting the foundations of black oppression in
America. Here, he decries what he considers to be low intellectual
standards among African Americans claiming to be educated and exhorts
his readers to seek out knowledge of substance.
I promiscuously fell in conversation once, with an elderly coloured man
on the topics of education, and of the great prevalency of ignorance
among us: Said he, "I know that our people are very ignorant but my son
has a good education: I spent a great deal of money on his education: he
can write as well as any white man, and I assure you that no one can
fool him," &c. Said I, what else can your son do, besides writing a good
hand? Can he post a set of books in a mercantile manner? Can he write a
neat piece of composition in prose or in verse? To these interrogations
he answered in the negative. Said I, did your son learn, while he was at
school, the width and depth of English Grammar? To which he also replied
in the negative, telling me his son did not learn those things. Your
son, said I, then, has hardly any learning at all -- he is almost as
ignorant, and more so, than many of those who never went to school one
day in all their lives. My friend got a little put out, and so walking
off, said that his son could write as well as any white man. Most of the
coloured people, when they speak of education of one among us who can
write a neat hand, and, who perhaps knows nothing but to scribble and
puff pretty fair on s small scrap of paper, immaterial whether his words
are grammatical, or spelt correctly, or not; if it only looks beautiful,
they say he has as good an education as any white man - he can write as
well as any white man, &c. The poor, ignorant creature, hearing, this,
he is ashamed, forever after, to let any person see him humbling himself
to another for knowledge but going about trying to deceive those who are
more ignorant than himself, he at last falls an ignorant victim to death
in wretchedness. I pray that the Lord may undeceive my ignorant
brethren, and permit them to throw away pretensions, and seek after the
substance of learning. i would crawl on my hands and knees through mud
and mire, to the feet of a learned man, where I would sit and humbly
supplicate him to instill into me, that which neither devils nor tyrants
could remove, only with my life -- for coloured people to acquire
learning in this country, makes tyrants quake and tremble on their sandy
foundation.
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