on the students desire to learn. Percy though, argued with an example that, “A student who has the desire to get at a dogfish or a Shakespeare sonnet may have the greatest difficulty in salvaging the creature itself from the educational package in which it is presented” (573). Percy suggests that the “educational package” gets in the way for a student to explore because within the educational system, there are always rules which can limit and deny the student their genuine experience of exploring on their own. Percy sees that, “...the citizen of Huxleys’s Brave New World who stumbles across a volume of Shakespeare in some vine-grown ruins and squats on a potsherd to read it is in a fairer way of getting at a sonnet than the Harvard sophomore taking English Poetry II” (Percy, 572). The student’s action was all motivated by personal desire, and thus, received the most from the experience. There was not any expert to tell the student that that was the correct thing to do. Though Percy would define Du Bois’s students as “simple”, Du Bois would have no doubt in describing his students as “complex”. Du Bois believes education is the basis for everything in life, and it is essential to survival in the world. Du Bois would see that if a Negro gets out of the hard life, he/she would be leaving the “beaten track” that exist in their culture and history of the Negro life. Du Bois would deem the experiences on the “beaten track” as something out of the ordinary because the ordinary Negro life does not include education. The black students are expected to work hard jobs to support their family, which leaves no time to go to school. Working for money to support the family is the “beaten track” for the people in Du Bois’s essay. Du Bois predicts that if a student pursues in an education seriously, they would be able to mov...
