Enslaved Africans did not arrive on American shores as blank canvasses or unetched stones ready for the guiding by whites. They already knew how to measure, irrigate, sail, forge, read, write, translate, build, cook and etc. and whatever else they were force to do.
unrelated fun fact: Einstein wrote a letter to a philosopher in 1915 in which he said that there was a very real possibility that had he not read David Hume, he would not have discovered the theory of relativity