capacity for continuous labor is a requisite of civilized living;
because, indeed, the very first step in social advance must be economic;
because the industrial monopoly with which slavery encompassed black men
has fallen shattered before the trumpet-blast of white labor and eager
competition; and, finally, because no instrument of moral education is
more effective upon the mass of mankind than cheerful and intelligent
work. These ideas powerfully voiced, together with an unusually
magnanimous attitude toward the white South, have set the man who toiled
doggedly up from slavery, upon a hill apart. These things are
distinctive of this man; they suggest his temper, his spirit, his point
of view; but they do not exhaust his interests. Similarly, the
distinctive feature of Tuskegee--adequate provision for industrial
training--sets it upon a hill apart, but by a whimsical perversity
this major feature is in some quarters assumed to be the whole school. A
moment's reflection shows such a view to be mistaken.
[Illustration: ROSCOE C. BRUCE.
Director of the Academic Department.]
The very industries at Tuskegee presuppose a considerable range of
academic study. Tuskegee does not graduate hoe-hands or plowboys.
Agriculture is, of course, fundamental--fundamental in recognition of
the fact that the Negro population is mainly a farming population, and
of the truth that something must be done to stem the swelling tide which
each year sweeps thousands of black men and women and children from the
sunlit monotony of the plantation to the sunless iniquity of the slums,
from a drudgery that is not quite cheerless to a competition that is
altogether merciless. But the teaching of agriculture, even in its
elementary stages, presupposes a considerable amount of academic
preparation. To be sure, a flourishing garden may be made and managed by
bright-eyed tots just out of the kindergarten, but how can commercial
fertilizers be carefully analyzed by a boy who has made no study of
general chemistry? and how can a balanced ration be adjusted by an
illiterate person? Similarly, the girl in the laundry does not make soap
by rote, but by principle; and the girl in the dressmaking-shop does
not cut out her pattern by luck, or guess, or instinct, or rule of
thumb, but by geometry. And so the successful teaching of the industries
demands no mean amount of academic preparation. In this lies the
technical utility of Tuskegee's Academic Department.
Then, too, a public service has been rendered by Hampton and Tuskegee in
showing that industrial training--the system in which the student learns
by doing and is paid for the commodities he produces--may be so managed
as to educate. Among the excellencies of industrial training, I would
state that the severe commercial test in which sentiment plays no part
is applied as consistently to the student's labor as is the force of
gravitation to a falling body. Here we must keep in mind the unavoidably
concrete nature of the product, whether satisfactory or not; the
discipline such training affords in organized endeavor; the stimulus it
offers to all the virtues of a drudgery which, though it repel an
unusually ardent and sensitive temperament, yet wears a precious jewel
in its head; and an exceptionally keen sense of responsibility, since on
occasion large amounts of money and the esteem of the school at large
and the lives of a student's fellows depend upon his circumspection and
skill. Such training educates.
But that would indeed be a sorry program of education which blinked the
fact that the student must be rendered responsive to the nobler ideals
of the human race, that his eyes must be opened to the immanent values
of life. If a clear title to forty acres and a mule represents the
extreme upper limit of a black man's ambition, why call him a man? If a
bank-account represents the sum of his happiness, that happiness lacks
humanity. If you would educate for life, you must arouse spiritual
interests. "The life is more than meat, and the body than raiment."
Through history and literature the Tuskegee student is brought to
develop a criticism, an appreciation of life and the worthier ends of
human striving. To such a discipline, however elementary, the critic
will not, I take it, begrudge the name "education."
And if the reader wavers in contemplating the problems of trudging
Negroes, remember that the type of Negro who is a menace to the
community is he who, in moments of leisure, responds to somewhat grosser
incentives than the poetry of Longfellow, the romance of Hawthorne, and
the philosophy of Emerson. I would reassure your idealism with this
counsel of prudence.
Another question presses: Does the value of Tuskegee lie in the fact
that the school equips for happy lives merely as many persons as are
subjected to the immediate play of its influences; that its circle of
efficiency includes only as many as are enrolled in its various courses?
To that question every teacher in the school and the mass of graduates
and students would give an emphatic, a decisive, No! The real value of
the school lies in the service rendered to the people of the communities
where our young folks go to live and labor. Now, work in wood and iron,
however assiduously prosecuted, never erected in any human being's heart
a passion for social service; a finer material must be used, a material
finer than gold. And so the plan and deeper intent of Tuskegee Institute
are incapable of realization without the incentives supplied by history
and literature.
Finally, there is a trade for which the academic studies, supplemented
by specific normal instruction, are the direct preparation--teaching
school. In the census year there were over 21,000 Negro school-teachers
in the United States, and in the decade 1890-1900 the ratio of increase
was more than twice as rapid as that of the Negro population; but,
nevertheless, there were in 1900 more than twice as many teachers in the
South per 10,000 white children as per 10,000 colored. But such data can
not even approximately indicate the relative amounts of teaching enjoyed
by these two classes of children, for the statistical method can not
express the incalculable disparity in teaching-efficiency.
A friend of mine--a graduate of Brown University--was for several years
a member of a board which corrected the examination-papers of Negro
candidates for teachers' certificates in a certain Southern State where
the school facilities for the Negro population are exceptionally good;
but he confessed to me that repeatedly not a paper submitted deserved a
passing mark, but the board was "simply compelled to grant certificates
in order to provide teachers enough to go around." Nor is such a dearth
of black pedagogues in the least extraordinary. The mission of Tuskegee
Institute is largely to supply measurably well-equipped teachers for the
schools--teachers able and eager to teach gardening and carpentry as
well as grammar and arithmetic, teachers who seek to organize the social
life of their communities upon wholesome principles, tactfully
restraining grossness and unobtrusively proffering new and nobler
sources of enjoyment. And so the academic studies are wrought into the
essential scheme of Tuskegee's work.
Let us inspect with some closeness the organization of the institution.
The student-body is fundamentally divided into day-students and
night-students. The night-students work in the industries, largely at
common labor, all day and every day, and go to school at night, thus
paying their current board bills, and accumulating such credits at the
Treasurer's office as will later defray their expenses in the
day-school. The day-school students are divided perpendicularly through
the classes into two sections, section No. 1 working in the industries
every other day for three days a week and attending academic classes the
remaining three days, while this situation is exactly reversed for
section No. 2. Thus every week-day half of each day-school class is in
the Academic Department, while the other half is in the Industrial. This
arrangement induces a wholesome rivalry between the students of the two
sections, and effects an equal distribution of the working force and
skill over every week-day.
The day-school students consist, then, of two classes of persons: those
who, as night-students, have accumulated credits sufficient to pay their
way in the day-school, and those whose families are able to pay a
considerable part of their expenses. The earnings of a student in the
day-school can not be large enough to pay his current board bill, but
such a student is ordinarily enjoying the valuable advantage of working
at one of the more skilled trades.
The night-school student, perhaps, because of greater maturity in years
and experience, may be relied upon to apply himself with the utmost
diligence to his academic studies; so, in much less than half the
time-allotment, he advances in his academic studies about half as fast
as the day-school student. This schedule did not spring full-fledged
from the seething brain of any theorist; it is no fatuous imitation of
the educational practise of some remote and presumptively dissimilar
institution; it has, so to say, elaborated itself in adjustment to the
actual needs of the particular situation. This provision boasts not of
novelty, but of utility; though not ideal, it is practicable. But the
central fact is that this Tuskegee Plan, while clearly securing ample
time for the teaching of the industries, makes possible no mean amount
of academic study.
In order more clearly to exhibit the grounds of this proposition, I
shall refer in some slight detail to the course of study in English and
in Mathematics.
Mathematics represents the group of academic studies which possess
direct technical value for the industries; moreover, it is a pretty good
index of the grades comprehended in the Academic Department. In the
lowest class in the day-school--there is one lower in the
night-school--the arithmetical tables are mastered, and fractions
introduced and developed with the use of liquid, dry, surface, and time
measures; whereas in the Senior class algebra is studied through
quadratics and plane geometry through the "area of polygons." That is to
say, the lowest day-school class is about equivalent to a fourth grade
in the North, and the Senior to the first or the second year (barring
the foreign languages) in a Northern high school.
[Illustration: A PORTION OF THE SCHOOL GROUNDS.]
Despite a much smaller time-allotment, our students, roughly speaking,
keep pace with Northern students because they are older and somewhat
more serious, because the course is shortened by the elimination of
uselessly perplexing topics in arithmetic like compound proportion and
cube root, but chiefly because the utility of mathematics is made vivid,
and vigorous interest aroused by its immediate application in class-room
and shop to problems arising in the industries. Our students are not
stuffed like sausages with rules and definitions, mathematical or other;
they ascend to general principles through the analysis of concrete
cases.
English serves to represent the group of studies that exert a
liberalizing influence upon the student, that possess a cultural rather
than a technical value. From oral lessons in language in the lower
classes, the students advance to a modicum of technical grammar in the
middle of the course, and hence to the rhetoric of the Senior year.
Moreover, an unusually large amount of written composition is insisted
upon, the compositions being used not merely to discipline the student
in chaste feeling, consecutive thinking, and efficient expression, but
also to sharpen his powers of observation and to stimulate him to pick
out of his daily experience the elements that are significant. School
readers are used in the lower classes because the readers present
economically and compactly a whole gamut of literary styles and forms.
These readers are importantly supplemented and gradually superseded by
certain classics appropriate to the grades. The classic, whether
Robinson Crusoe, or Ivanhoe, Rip Van Winkle, the House of Seven Gables,
or The Merchant of Venice, presents an artistic whole, and permits the
students to acquire some sense of literary structure. The dominant
motive in literary instruction is, perhaps, esthetic, but I am convinced
that the ethical influence of this instruction at Tuskegee is profound
and abiding.
However liberal the provisions of the academic curriculum, the value of
the department is finally determined by the devotion and ability of the
teachers. Universities and normal schools, and the seasoned staffs of
public-school systems--from these sources, whether in Massachusetts,
California, or Tennessee, Principal Washington has gathered a force of
academic teachers of rare ability and devotion. Eminent for personality
rather than for method, these teachers are no tyros in method. In such
hands the excellent features of the curriculum are raised to the N-th
power.
Finally, academic and industrial teachers are animated with a sentiment
of solidarity, with an esprit de corps, which solves many a problem of
conflicting duty and jurisdiction, and which must impress the student
with the essential unity of Tuskegee's endeavor to equip men and women
for life. The crude, stumbling, sightless plantation-boy who lives in
the environment of Tuskegee for three or four years, departs with an
address, an alertness, a resourcefulness, and above all a spirit of
service, that announce the educated man.
[Illustration: ANOTHER PORTION OF THE SCHOOL GROUNDS.]
IV
WHAT GIRLS ARE TAUGHT, AND HOW
BY MRS. BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
"We wants our baby gal, Mary Lou, to come up to Tuskegee to git
eddicated and learn seamstress; kase we doesn't want her to work lak we
is," says the farmer. "I wish to help you plant this new industry,
broom-making," writes Miss Susan B. Anthony, "because you are trying so
earnestly to teach your girls other means of livelihood besides sewing,
housework, and cooking." This is the problem we have been trying to
solve at Tuskegee for over twenty years: What handiwork can we give our
girls with their academic training that will better fit them to meet the
demand for skilled teachers in the various avenues of the industrial and
academic world now opening so rapidly to women?
[Illustration: MRS. BOOKER T. WASHINGTON.
Director of Industries for Girls.]
Learning to sew, with the ultimate end of becoming a full-fledged
dressmaker, has been the height of ambition with the major part of our
girls when brought to the institution by their horny-handed fathers and
mothers fresh from the soil of Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, or Florida.
After the last gripless hand-shake, with the tremulous, "Take care of
yourself, honey," the hard-working father and mother have turned their
faces homeward, visibly affected by the separation, but resolved to
shoulder the sacrifice of the daughter's much-needed help on the
plantation, which oftentimes is all that they are able to contribute
toward her education.
Not infrequently the girl has begun in the lowest class in night-school.
Her parents send her articles of clothing now and then on Christmas; but
the largest contributions to her wardrobe come from the boxes and
barrels sent to the institution by Northern friends. She has remained in
school during the summer vacation, and within two years has entered
day-school with enough to her credit to finish her education. When the
happy parents return to see their daughter graduated, after six or seven
long years, their faces are radiant because of their realized hopes.
When they see their white-robed daughter transformed from the girl they
brought here clad in the homespun of the old days, and receiving her
certificate, the tears come unchecked, and the moving lips no doubt form
a whispered prayer.
In a recent class there was graduated a young woman of twenty-five. She
came to the school in her eighteenth year from the "piney woods" of
Alabama. She entered the lowest preparatory class in night-school and
was assigned to work in the laundry. She was earnest and faithful in
work and study. She passed on from class to class, remaining at school
to work during the vacation. After two years in the laundry she was
given an opportunity to learn plain sewing in that division. She was
promoted to the Dressmaking Division at the end of the year, and
received her certificate at the close of two years, after working every
day and attending night-school. She spent the last two years of her
school life in the Millinery Division, and received her certificate from
that division with one from the Academic Department on her graduation.
During these two years she taught the sewing-classes in the night-school
of the town of Tuskegee. At the outset she bought the materials used
with $1, left over from the sales of the previous year. From this small
nest-egg as a starter, seventeen girls were supplied with work. But so
efficient and frugal was the young teacher that she sold articles,
bought supplies for her class, and ended the year with $3.45 in the
treasury.
This is just a leaf from the history of one girl. Of the 520 girls
entering the institution during this year (1903-'04), 458 have remained
for the full scholastic year. About 50 per cent came from country
districts all over the United States. A large majority of them asked to
enter the Dressmaking Division to learn that trade; but, after the field
of industries was opened to their view, they were scattered about in the
different divisions, a very large per cent still leaning to the side of
dressmaking and millinery.
Taking into account the number of girls working their way through at
their trades by day and attending night-school, they were distributed as
follows: Horticulture, 4; training-kitchen, 13; housekeeping, 38;
dining-room, 29; hospital, 20; kitchen-gardening, 8; poultry-raising, 7;
tailoring, 14; dairying, 10; printing, 6; broom-making, 26;
mattress-making, 18; upholstering, 18; laundering, 54; plain sewing, 72;
millinery, 51; dressmaking, 69. All the girls were required to take
cooking twice a week and 209 of the girls in the normal classes took
basketry.
As the trades were the great attraction in the school curriculum, it was
deemed necessary to separate the school into two divisions, that
students might have an opportunity to receive instruction equally in the
Academic and Industrial Departments. This year this scheme worked
successfully by an arrangement that placed one division in the Academic
Department on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, while the other was at
work, and the other division in the Trades Department on Thursdays,
Fridays, and Saturdays, while the other was in school, and so on
regularly.
Girl life at Tuskegee is strenuous. Though study and work are constantly
to the fore, character is effectively developed with brain and muscle,
and the well-earned recreation-hour comes just frequently enough to lend
the highest source of pleasure. Though the girl usually comes with a
hazy conception of what the days in school will really mean for the
ripening of those powers that she earnestly intends to use for the best
development of herself, there is always a spirit of learning, that she
may be of service to others. That is what counts in the school-days of
the average girl in her struggle for more light.
The girl, coming a stranger from her home in the city or country, is
lost in a crowd of girls new to dormitory life. New surroundings and new
conditions are everywhere. New emotions, new purposes, new resolutions
chase one another in her thoughts, and she becomes a stranger to herself
only to find her bearings first in her own room. Here Maine and
California, far-away Washington and Central America, meet on common
ground. Alabama and Georgia alone feel kinship from geographical
propinquity.
Beds, one double and one single, chairs, a table, mirror, bookcase,
wardrobe, wash-stand, and screen, all manufactured on the grounds,
compose the simple furniture of the room. But a few pictures, a strip of
carpet before each bed, a bright table-covering, soon give the room the
appearance of home, and the untried life has begun. The duty-list
assigns to each girl her work, and perhaps the first lessons in order
and system will be fairly instituted.
How many and varied are the associations that cluster about the life of
the girl in her room, that refuge from a day of discouragement in
schoolroom or workshop, and a haven of peace during the quiet hours of
the Sabbath! Roommate meets roommate, quick to resent and as quick to
forgive--and the petty strife and envy suppressed at birth only serve
to discipline them for the coming days.
Up with the rising bell at five, the duties of the room are almost
finished when the girl leaves her beds to air while she takes her six
o'clock breakfast. Social amenities, the niceties of table-training, and
the tricks of speech that betray the sectional birthright, proclaim to
the ever-observant table-mates the status of each newcomer, and she
rises or falls in estimation just so far as her metal rings true. Thus
another element enters into her life, one that will prove a potent force
in balancing character; for the frankly expressed criticisms of
schoolmates play no small part in the development of students.
If a girl be one of the forty-five waitresses on the eighty-nine tables
of the dining-room, she eats her breakfast as the other students march
out, then finishes her room-duties and is ready for work at ten minutes
of seven wherever she happens to be assigned. If she is a dishwasher,
she does that work, waits for inspection of the table that she has set,
finishes her room-duty, and is admitted into her work division at half
past seven.
Gardening and greenhouse work are becoming so attractive through the
Nature-Study classes of the Academic Department that there are constant
applications for transfers from the sewing divisions to this outside
work. Equipped in an overall gingham apron and sunbonnet of the same
material, the girl begins her duties, and no prouder girl can be found
than she who takes her first basket of early spring vegetables to the
Teachers' Home.
If the day is to be spent with the whole agricultural force of girls
picking strawberries for the tables of the Boarding Department and the
local market, the stage takes the group out to the patch two miles back
on the farm--and that is happiness unalloyed for the schoolgirl. When
she correlates her outing with her school work on the day following,
there is seen nature at first-hand in the class-room.
If other classmates have been working in the Plain-Sewing Division
turning out cotton underwear and plain articles of clothing to supply
the demand of the Salesroom of the institution, the lesson in English
has a natural, practical bearing, arising from the fact that one hour
has been spent with the theory class of the workroom studying the warp
and woof of the materials used, perhaps the sixth or seventh lesson in a
series on cotton, introduced to the class first in its native heath.
Correlation comes in wherever it may, and the association of ideas
obtained in class-room and workroom is closely joined.
The large class of the Dressmaking Division, spending the day from seven
until half past five making the blue uniform dresses, filling orders for
tailor-made dresses in silk and cloth, measuring, drafting, cutting, and
fitting, has many a representative in the schoolroom the succeeding day;
and still more is the lesson varied by the practical illustrations in
Mathematics or the recital of the experiences of the day in the English
classes.