Woodson opens Chapter 2 by articulating how critical it is to locate the failures of the present system “in their historic setting” (22). One of the central issues, in Woodson’s opinion, is that the education system created for Black Americans after Emancipation was “largely a prompting of philanthropy” (22), meaning that it was not prepared to truly educate anyone. Teaching was largely the work of well-intentioned missionaries and the purpose of schools was primarily vocational.

Yet no matter which kind of institution Black students attended, “those who did make some effort to obtain an education, did not actually receive either the industrial or the classical education” (23). Woodson suggests that unfortunately, very few Black people have actually benefited from the education system, regardless of whether the format of schooling was vocational or philosophical.

In Chapter 3, Woodson delineates how this problem of schooling came to exist. Woodson describes the intentionality of a “program of the usual propaganda to engender in whites a race hate of the Negro, and in the Negroes contempt for themselves” (25). Black people became disproportionately underrepresented or entirely eliminated from curricula. Further, Woodson argues that in professional schooling, Black people were put down and given only limited opportunities.