Since Reconstruction, the aim of African American education had been roughly categorized into two areas: teaching Black people to adopt technical education and gradually work toward civil rights, an idea supported by Booker T. Washington, and focusing on higher education and demanding immediate civil rights, an idea supported by W. E. B. Du Bois. Woodson argued that Black education clung to a defunct machine method based on the misguided assumption that education is merely a process of imparting information. Thus, it failed to inspire Black students and did not force them to look at the reality of life and how they must face it. Theories of racial inferiority were drilled into Black pupils in virtually every classroom they entered. And the more education Blacks received, the more estranged from the masses they became.