BUILDING UP A SYSTEM
The system we decided to use at Tuskegee divided the school into two
classes of students: those who worked with their hands two days in the
week, and spent four days in the class room; and the night students,
who, through the first year of their course, worked all day with their
hands and spent their evenings in the class rooms. Of course, the
student who worked ten hours each day was paid more than the one who
laboured only two days in the week. The night-school students were to
earn, not only their board, but something in addition. The surplus
was to be used in paying their expenses in the regular day school
after they had remained in the night school one or two years as they
might elect. The night school, besides other opportunities, gave the
student a chance to get a start in his books and also in some trade or
industry. With this as a foundation, I have rarely seen a student who
was worth much fail to pass through the regular course.
The night school had not been in session many weeks before several
facts began to make themselves prominent. The first was the economic
value of the work of the night students. It was plain that these
students could perform much labour for which we should otherwise have
had to pay out cash to persons not connected with the institution. It
is true that the work at first was crude, but it should be remembered
that in the earlier years the whole school was crude. All work in
laying the foundation for a race is crude.
The economic value of hand work at the Tuskegee Institute can be
illustrated in no better way than by data of the construction of our
buildings. When a friend has given us twenty-five thousand dollars for
a building, instead of having it constructed by an outside contractor,
we have had the students produce the material and do the work as far as
possible, and through this method a large proportion of the money given
for the building passes into the hands of the students, to be used in
gaining an education. The plan has a double value, for, in addition
to the twenty-five thousand dollars which is diverted into channels
through which a large number of students get an education, the school
receives the building for permanent use.
[Illustration: BUILDING A NEW DORMITORY
Students draw plans, dig foundations, make the brick, cut timber, which
they saw and make into joists and frames. The painting, plastering,
plumbing and roofing are also done by the students under the direction
of their instructors.]
Let us value the work at Tuskegee by this test: The plans for the
Slater-Armstrong Memorial Trades' Building, in its main dimensions 283
× 315 feet, and two stories high, were drawn by a coloured man, our
instructor in mechanical drawing. Eight hundred thousand bricks were
required in its construction, and every one of them was manufactured
by our students while learning the trade of brick-making. All the
bricks were laid into the building by students who were being taught
the trade of brickmasonry. The plastering, carpentry work, painting,
and tin-roofing were done by students while learning these trades. The
whole number of students who received training on this building alone
was 196. It is lighted by electricity, and all the electric fixtures
were put in by students who were learning electrical engineering.
The power to operate the machinery in this building comes from a 125
horse-power engine and a 75 horse-power boiler. All this machinery was
not only operated by students who were learning the trade of steam
engineering, but was installed by students under the guidance of their
instructor.
For other examples of the amount of work that our students do in the
direction of self-help, I would mention the fact that they manufactured
2,990,000 bricks during the past twelve months; 1,367 garments of
various kinds have been made in the tailor shop, and 541,837 pieces
have been laundered in the laundry division by the girls.
Agriculture is the industry which we plan to make stand out most
prominently; and we expect more and more to base much of our other
training upon this fundamental industry. There are two reasons why we
have not been able to send out as many students from our agricultural
department as we have desired:
First, agriculture was the industry most disliked by the students and
their parents in the earlier years of the school. It required nearly
ten years to overcome this prejudice.
Second, nearly all of our buildings, seventy-two in number, have been
built by the students, and the building trades have, of necessity, been
emphasised. As soon as the building period slackens, we shall be able
to send out a larger number skilled in all the branches of agriculture.
I have been asked many times about the progress of the students in the
night school as compared with those in the day school. In reality,
there is little difference. A student who studies two hours at night
and works with his hands ten hours during the day, naturally covers
less ground in the text-books than the day student, yet in real sound
growth and the making of manhood, I question whether the day student
has much advantage over the student in the night school. There is
an indescribable something about work with the hands that tends to
develop a student's mind. The night-school students take up their
studies with a degree of enthusiasm and alertness that is not equalled
in the day classes. I have known instances where a student seemed so
dull or stupid that he made practically no progress in the study of
books. He was away from the books entirely for a few months and put
to work at a trade; at the end of a few months he has returned to the
class room, and it has been surprising to note how much more easily
he could master the text-books than before. There is something, I
think, in the handling of a tool that has the same relation to close,
accurate thinking that writing with a pen has in the preparation of a
manuscript. Nearly all persons who write much will agree, I think, that
one can produce much more satisfactory work by using the pen than by
dictation.
[Illustration: DIGGING FOUNDATION FOR A NEW BUILDING ON THE INSTITUTE
GROUNDS]
While speaking of the effect of careful hand training on the
development of character, it is worth while to mention an uncommonly
instructive example. If any one goes into a community North or South,
and asks to have pointed out to him the man of the Negro race of the
old generation, who stands for the best things in the life of the
coloured community, in six cases out of ten, I venture to say, he will
be shown a man who learned a trade during the days of slavery. A few
years ago, James Hale, a Negro, died in Montgomery, Alabama. He spent
the greater part of his life as a slave. He left property valued at
fifty thousand dollars, and bequeathed a generous sum to be used in
providing for an infirmary for the benefit of his race. James Hale
could not read or write a line, yet I do not believe that there is
a white or black man in Montgomery who knew Mr. Hale who will not
agree with me in saying that he was the first coloured citizen of
Montgomery. I have seldom met a man of any race who surpassed him in
sterling qualities. When Mr. Hale was a slave his master took great
pains to have him well trained as a carpenter, contractor and builder.
His master saw that the better the slave was trained in handicraft, the
more dollars he was worth. In my opinion, it was this hand-training,
despite the evil of slavery, that largely resulted in Mr. Hale's fine
development. If Mr. Hale was all this with mere hand training, what
might he have been if his mind had also been carefully educated? Mr.
Hale was simply a type of many men to be found in nearly every part of
the country.
The average manual-training school has for its main object the
imparting of culture to the student; while the economic element is
made secondary. At the Tuskegee Institute we have always emphasised
the trade or economic side of education. With any ignorant and
poverty-stricken race, I believe that the problem of bread-winning
should precede that of culture. For this reason the students who have
attended the night school at Tuskegee have, as a rule, mastered the
principles and practice of agriculture, or have been taught a trade by
means of which we felt sure they could earn a living. With the question
of shelter, food and clothing settled, there is a basis for what are
considered the higher and more important things.
[Illustration: SELECTING FRUIT FOR CANNING]
We have, therefore, emphasised the earning value of education rather
than the finished manual training, being careful at the same time
to lay the foundations of thorough moral, mental and religious
instruction. In following this method something may be lost of the
accuracy and finish which could be obtained if a course in manual
training preceded the industrial course, but the fact that the student
is taught the principles of house-building in building a real house,
and not a play house, gives him a self-reliance and confidence in his
ability to make a living, that manual training alone could not give.
The boy in the conditions surrounding the average Negro youth, leaving
school with manual training alone, finds himself little better off than
he was before, so far as his immediate and pressing problem of earning
a living is concerned. He and those dependent upon him want at once
food, shelter, clothing and the opportunity to live properly in a home.
Industrial education takes into consideration the economic element in
production in a way that manual training does not, and this is of great
value to a race just beginning its career.
While I am speaking of the comparative value of manual training and
industrial education, there is one other difference between them to
which I ought to call attention. The proportion of students who
complete an industrial or trade course is likely to be smaller than
the proportion completing a literary or manual training course. For
example, a boy comes to Tuskegee Institute, as has often happened, from
a district where he has been earning fifty cents a day. At Tuskegee he
works at the brickmason's trade for nine months. He cannot master the
trade during this time, but he gets a start in it. At the end of the
nine-months' session, if he returns home, this student finds himself
in demand in the community, at wages which range from one dollar and a
half to two dollars a day. Unless he is a man of extraordinarily strong
character, he will be likely to yield to the temptation to remain at
home, and become a rather commonplace mason, instead of returning and
finishing his trade, in order that he may become a master workman. So
far I have been unable to discover any remedy that will completely
offset this tendency. The most effective cure for it, so far as my
experience is concerned, is an appeal to the pride of the student.
[Illustration: AT WORK IN THE SCHOOL'S BRICK-YARD
Getting a kiln ready to fire]
Another question often asked me is, how long it will take an industrial
school to become self-supporting. To this question I always reply
that I know of no industrial school that is self-supporting, nor do
I believe that any school which performs its highest functions as an
industrial school will become so. I believe that it is the duty of all
such schools to make the most of the economic element--to make each
industry pay in dollars and cents just as far as is possible--but the
element of teaching should be made the first consideration, and the
element of production secondary. Very often at the Tuskegee Institute
it would pay the institution better to keep a boy away from the farm
than to have him spend a day at work on it; but the farm is for the
boy, and not the boy for the farm.
An industrial school is continually at work on raw material. When a
student gets to the point where he can build a first-class wagon or
buggy, he is not retained at the school to build these vehicles merely
for their economic value, but is sent out into the world to begin his
life's work; and another student is taken in his place to begin the
work afresh. The cost of teaching the new student and the waste of
material weigh heavily against the cost of production. Hence, it can
easily be seen that it is an almost impossible task to make money out
of an industrial school, or to make it self-supporting. The moment the
idea of "making it pay" is placed uppermost, the institution becomes a
factory, and not a school for training head and hand and heart.
One of the advantages of the night school at Tuskegee is in the
sifting-out process of the student body. Unless a student has real
grit in him and means business, he will not continue very long to work
with his hands ten hours a day for the privilege of studying two hours
at night. Though much of the work done by students at an industrial
school like Tuskegee does not pay, the mere effort at self-help on the
part of the student is of the greatest value in character building.
Most races have come up through contact with the soil, either directly
or indirectly. There is something about the smell of the soil--a
contact with a reality that gives one a strength and development that
can be gained in no other way. In advocating industrial training for
backward or weak races or individuals, I have always kept in mind the
strengthening influence of contact with a real thing, rather than with
a third-rate imitation of a thing.
The great lesson which the race needs to learn in freedom is to work
willingly, cheerfully and efficiently. In laying special stress upon
hand training for a large proportion of my race, I ask no peculiar
education for the Negro, because he is a Negro, but I would advocate
the same training for the German, the Jew, or the Frenchman, were he
in the same relative stage of racial development as the masses of
the Negroes. While insisting upon thorough and high-grade industrial
education for a large proportion of my race, I have always had the
greatest sympathy with first-class college training and have recognised
the fact that the Negro race, like other races, must have thoroughly
trained college men and women. There is a place and a work for such,
just as there is a place and a work for those thoroughly trained with
their hands.
I shall never forget a remark I once heard made by a lady of foreign
birth. She had recently arrived in America, and by chance had landed in
one of our largest American cities. As she was a woman of considerable
importance, she received lavish social attention. For weeks her life
was spent in a round of fashionable dressing, dining, automobiling,
balls, theaters, art museums, card parties, and what not. When she
was quite worn out, a friend took her to visit the Hampton Normal and
Agricultural Institute. There she saw students and teachers at work
in the soil, in wood, in metal, in leather, at work cooking, sewing,
laundering. She saw a company of the most devoted men and women in the
world giving their lives in the most unselfish manner, that they might
help to put a race on its feet. It was then that she exclaimed in my
presence: "What a relief! Here I have found a reality; and I am so glad
that I did not leave America before I saw it."
I think I was able to understand something of her feeling. In the
history of the Negro race since freedom, one of the most difficult
tasks has been to teach the teachers and leaders to exercise
enough patience and foresight to keep the race down to a reality,
instead of yielding to the temptations to grasp after shadows and
superficialities. But the race itself is learning the lesson very fast.
Indeed, the rank and file learn faster than some of the teachers and
leaders.
[Illustration: SHOE SHOP--MAKING AND REPAIRING]