_Education--Professional or Industrial_
The "Religious Training of the Freedmen" and the "Education of the
Freedmen" have raised up an army of people more _peculiar_ in many
respects than any other like class in all the history of mankind. They
stand off by themselves; they are not to be approached by any counter
method of "advocating a cause" or "building up the Kingdom of Christ"
in _their_ field. Millions of dollars have been "raised" to root out
the illiteracy and immorality of the Freedmen, and to build up their
shattered manhood. Indeed, there have been times when I have seriously
debated the question, whether the black man had any manhood left,
after the missionaries and religious enthusiasts had done picturing,
or, rather, caricaturing his debased moral and mental condition. He
has been made the victim of the most exalted panegyric by one set of
fanatics, and of the most painful, malignant abuse and detraction by
another set. The one has painted him as a sort of angel, and the other
as a sort of devil; when, in fact, he is neither one nor the other;
when, simply, he is a _man_, a member of the common family, possessing
no more virtue nor vice than his brother, the brother who has managed
to so impose upon himself that he is pretty thoroughly convinced that
nature expended all its most choice materials in the construction of
his class. But this is simply the work of the devil, who delights in
throwing cayenne pepper into the eyes of good men.
The aspects of the work which has been done in the South for the
colored people by "missionaries," so to term them, by the assistance
of large sums of money donated by philanthropic men and women, are
very many-sided indeed. I would in no wise underrate the magnitude of
the work performed, nor attribute to those who have been the agents in
disbursing these unparalleled benefactions motives other than of the
purest and loftiest, in a majority of cases; but I think the time has
arrived when we may disrobe the matter of the romance which writers
have industriously woven about it. In the early stages of the work a
few men and women of large fortunes, who had been "born with a silver
spoon in their mouths," may have gone South to labor for humanity and
the Master, may have left comfortable firesides and congenial
companionships to make their homes among strangers who shut them out
from their affections and sympathies because they had come to labor
for the poor and the despised. Examples of this lofty devotion to a
good cause there undoubtedly were in the days long ago; but the bulk
of the work was performed by persons, male and female, to whom
employment, an opportunity to make an honest living in an honest way,
was a godsend. That they possessed much bravery to undertake a work
which shut them out from the sympathy and social recognition of those
who may be called their equals, is not denied; but that they were the
pampered children of fortune, laboring simply for God and humanity,
which zealous persons have painted them to be in newspapers and
magazines, religious and other, is simply making a mountain out of a
mole-hill. They were neither millionaires nor paupers, but they were
educated men and women, like thousands throughout the North and West,
who went into the field to labor because it was rich unto the harvest
and the laborers were few. To say that salaries offered were not
accepted always with promptness would be to get on the wrong side of a
correct statement of fact. There are hundreds and thousands of
educated men and women in the North and West to-day "waiting for
something to turn up," and who would not hesitate a moment to embrace
an opportunity, honorable and lucrative, which should present itself.
There was little romance in the undertaking; there was far less in the
work to be performed. I simply desire to protest against the
correctness of the distorted pictures drawn ostensibly to magnify the
sacrifices, which were many, and to belittle the rewards, which were
great, in the performance of an ordinary piece of work, by a class of
persons now rapidly disappearing from the scenes that once knew them.
Their work is fast being transferred to the hands of colored men and
women--the pupil is taking the place of the master; the demand drawing
upon the colored--not the white--supply, because "birds of a feather
flock together," more especially when one class is composed of
chickens and the other of chicken-hawks. When lines are drawn, men
unconsciously, as it were, keep on their own side. So, in colored
churches and schools the whites are at a discount because it is easier
and more congenial to employ colored help. Colored people are like
white people. When they see nothing but white ministers in the white
churches they conclude that it is best to have nothing but colored
ministers in their own pulpits, and they are perfectly consistent and
logical in their conclusion; the rule which actuates mankind in such
matters being, not the biblical one, which enjoins that we do unto
others as we _would have them_ do unto us, but, rather, do unto others
as _they do_ unto us; and this latter rule would seem to be better
adapted for worldly success than the former, because it has more of
the practical than the theoretical about it, and is more earthly than
heavenly in its observance. The same is true of schools and school
teachers. The colored people everywhere are constantly clamoring for
colored teachers, since the rank injustice of _separate_ schools is
forced upon them.
I would interject just here a few words on the _separate-school
system_. Aside from the manifest injustice of setting up two
schoolhouses in the same ward or district--injustice to the children
in the spirit, false from every standpoint, that one child is better
than another--the _double expense_ of maintaining two schools is
obvious, and is sufficiently absurd to repel the sympathy or practical
philanthropy of any man, Christian or Infidel. Why should the people
be called upon to support _two_ schools within speaking distance of
each other to preserve an infamous distinction, a sneaking caste
prejudice? Why! Because the people are wise in their own
conceit--perfectly rational upon all other questions save the _color
question_. The South is weighted down with debt, almost as poor as the
proverbial "Job's turkey," and yet she supports a dual school system
simple to gratify a _prejudice_. I notice with surprise that among the
bills pending before Congress to give national aid to education it is
not proposed to interfere with the irregular and ruinous dual caste
schools; thereby, in effect, giving the national assent to a system
repugnant to the genius of the constitution. But it is nothing new
under the sun for the Congress of the Nation to aid and abet
institutions and theories anti-republican and pernicious in all their
ramifications.
Perhaps no people ever had more advantages to dedicate and prepare
themselves for the ministry of Christ than the colored people of the
South. The religious "idea" has been so thoroughly worked that other
branches of study, other callings than the ministry, have paled into
insignificance. The Cross of Christ has been held up before the
colored youth as if the whole end and aim of life was to preach the
Gospel, as if the philosophy of heaven superseded in practical
importance the philosophy of life. The persistence with which this one
"idea" has been forced upon colored students has produced the reverse
of what was anticipated in a large number of cases, and very
naturally. It is a false theory to suppose all the people of any one
class to be specially fitted for only one branch of industry: for I
maintain that preaching has largely become a trade or profession, in
which the churches with large salaries have become prizes to be
contended for with almost as much zeal and partisanship as the prizes
in politics. This is true not only of colored ministers but white ones
as well. It is no disparagement of colored ministers to say that day
by day they grow more and more in favor of serving churches with fair
salaries than in carrying around the cross as itinerants, without any
special place to lay their heads when the storms blow and the rains
descend. In this they do but pattern after white clergymen, who do not
always set examples that angels would be justified in imitating.
Colored people are naturally sociable, and intensely religious in
their disposition. Their excellent social qualities make them the best
of companions. They are musical, humorous and generous to a fault.
Coupled with their strong religious bias, these attractive qualities
will in time lift them to the highest possible grade in our dwarfed
civilization, where the fittest does not always survive; the
drossiest, flimsiest, most selfish and superficial often occupying the
high places, social and political. But I have still higher aspirations
for my race. There is hope for any people who are social in
disposition, for this supposes the largest capacity for mutual
friendships, therefore of co-operation, out of which the highest
civilization is possible to be evolved; while a love of music and the
possession of musical and humorous talent is, undeniably, indicative
of genius and prospective culture and refinement of the most approved
standard.
Indeed, the constant evolution of negro character is one of the most
marked and encouraging social phenomena of the times; it constantly
tends upwards, in moral, mental development and material betterment.
Those who contend that the negro is standing still, or "_relapsing
into barbarism_," are the falsest of false prophets. They resolutely
shut their eyes to facts all around them, and devote columns upon
columns of newspaper, magazine and book argument--imaginary
pictures--to the immorality, mental sterility and innate improvidence
of this people; and they do this for various reasons, none of them
honorable, many of them really disreputable. In dealing with this
negro problem they always start off upon a false premise; their
conclusions must, necessarily, be false. In the first place,
disregarding the fact that the negroes of the South are nothing more
nor less than the laboring class of the people, the same in many
particulars as the English and Irish peasantry, they proceed to regard
them as intruders in the community--as a people who continually take
from but add nothing to the wealth of the community.
It is nothing unusual to see newspaper articles stating in the most
positive terms that the schools maintained by the State for the
education of the blacks are supported out of the taxes paid by _white
men_; and, very recently, it was spoken of as a most laudable act of
justice and generosity that the State of Georgia paid out annually for
the maintenance of colored schools more money than _the aggregate
taxes paid into the treasury_ of the State by the Negro property
owners of the State; while the grand commonwealth of Kentucky only
appropriates for the maintenance of colored schools such moneys as are
paid into the State treasury by the colored people. Can the philosophy
of taxation be reduced to a more hurtful, a more demoralizing
absurdity!
Suppose the same standard of distribution of school funds should be
applied to the city or the State of New York; what would be the
logical result? Should we appropriate annually from nine to twelve
millions of dollars to improve the morals of the people by informing
their intelligence? Would the State be able, after ten years of such
an experiment, to pay the myriads of officials which would be required
to preserve the public peace, to protect life and insure proper
respect for the so-called rights of property? Such an experiment would
in time require the deportation to New York of the entire male adult
population of Ireland, to be turned into the "finest police in the
world," to stem the tide of crime and immorality which such premium
upon ignorance would entail. Since even under the present munificent
and well ordered school system, it is almost impossible to elect a
Board of Aldermen from any other than the _slum_ elements of the
population--the liquor dealers, the gamblers, and men of their kind,
the President of the New York Board of Aldermen at this very writing
being a liquor-dealer, who can estimate the calamity which the
inauguration of the Kentucky system would bring upon the people of New
York--appropriating to the support of the public schools only such
taxes as were paid by the parents of the children who attend them!
And, yet, there is hardly an editor in the South who does not regard
it as so much robbery of the tax-payers to support schools for the
colored people--for the proletarian classes generally, white and
colored. They stoutly maintain that these people really add nothing to
the stock of wealth, really produce nothing, and that, therefore
charity can become no more magnanimous than when it gives, places in
reach of, the poor man the opportunity to educate his child, the
embryo man, the future citizen.
They think it a sounder principle of government to equip and maintain
vast penal systems--with chain gangs, schools of crime, depravity and
death, than to support schools and churches. Millions of money are
squandered annually to curb crime, when a few thousand dollars,
properly applied, would prove to be a more humane, a more profitable
preventive. The poor school teacher is paid _twenty-five dollars per
month_ for three months in the year, while the prison guards is paid
_fifty dollars per month_ for twelve months--ninety days being the
average length given to teach the child in the school and three
hundred and sixty-five being necessary to teach him in the prison,
whence he is frequently graduated a far worse, more hopeless enemy of
society than when he matriculated.
And the brutality of the convict systems of Southern States is equaled
by no similar institutions in the world, if we except the penal system
enforced by Russia in Siberia. The terms of imprisonment for minor
offenses are cruelly excessive, while the food and shelter furnished
and the punishments inflicted would bring the blush of shame to the
cheeks of a savage. The convict systems of Alabama, Georgia, South
Carolina and Arkansas are a burning disgrace to the Christian
civilization which we boast. Nothing short of a semi-barbarous public
opinion would permit them to exist. Governors have "called attention"
to them; legislatures have "investigated" and "resolved" that they
should be purified, and a _few_ newspapers here and there have held
them up to the scorn and contempt of the world; yet they not only grow
worse year by year, but the number of them steadily multiplies. And so
they will. How is it to be otherwise? To prevent such ulcerations upon
the body you must purify the blood. You cannot root them out by
probing; that simply aggravates them.
A system of misrepresentation and vilification of the character and
condition of the Southern Negro has grown up, for the avowed purpose
of enlisting the sympathies of the charitable and philanthropic people
of the country to supply funds for his regeneration and education,
which the government, State and Federal, studiously denies; so that it
is almost impossible to form a correct opinion either of his moral,
mental or material condition. Societies have organized and maintain a
work among that people which requires an annual outlay of millions of
dollars and thousands of employees; and to maintain the work, to keep
up the interest of the charitable, it is necessary to picture, as
black as imagination can conceive it, the present and prospective
condition of the people who are, primarily, the beneficiaries. The
work and its maintenance has really become a heavy strain upon the
patience and generosity of the liberal givers of the land--whose
profuse behests have no parallel in the history of any people. They
have kept it up wellnigh a quarter of a century; and it is no
disparagement to their zeal to say the tax upon them is becoming more
of a burden than a pleasure. They have done in the name of humanity
and of God for the unfortunate needy what the government should have
done for its own purification and perpetuity for the co-equal citizen.
And it is high time that the government should relieve the individual
from the unjust and onerous tax.
I do not hesitate to affirm, that while the work done by the
charitable for the black citizen of this Republic has been of the most
incalculable benefit to him, it has also done him injury which it will
take years upon years to eradicate. The misrepresentations resorted
to, to obtain money to "lift him up," have spread broadcast over the
land a feeling of contempt for him as a man and pity for his lowly and
unfortunate condition; so that throughout the North a business man
would much rather _give a thousand dollars_ to aid in the education of
the black heathen than to give a black scholar and gentleman an
opportunity to honestly _earn a hundred dollars_. He has no confidence
in the capacity of the black man. He has seen him pictured a savage,
sunk in ignorance and vice--an object worthy to receive alms, but
incapable of making an honest living. So that when a black man
demonstrates any capacity, shows any signs of originality or genius,
rises just a few inches above the common, he at once becomes an object
rare and wonderful--a "Moses," a "_leader_ of his people."--It is
almost as hard for an educated black man to obtain a position of trust
and profit as it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. The
missionaries, the preachers, and the educators, assisted by the
newspapers and the magazines, have educated the people into the false
opinion that it is safer to "donate" a thousand dollars to a colored
college than it is to give one black man a chance to make an honest
living.
Let us now look at the system of education as it has been operated
among the colored people of the South.
It cannot be denied that much of the fabulous sums of money lavishly
given for the education of the Freedmen of the South, has been
squandered upon experiments, which common sense should have dictated
were altogether impracticable. Perhaps this was sequential in the
early stages of the work, when the instructor was ignorant of the
topography of the country, the temper of the people among whom he was
to labor, and, more important still, when he was totally ignorant of
the particular class upon whom he was to operate--ignorant of their
temperament, receptive capacity and peculiar, aye, unique,
idiosyncrasies. Thus thousands upon thousands of dollars were expended
upon the erection and endowment of "colleges" in many localities where
ordinary common schools were unknown. Each college was, therefore,
necessarily provided with a primary department, where the child of ten
years and the adult of forty struggled in the same classes with the
first elements of rudimentary education. The child and the adult each
felt keenly his position in the college, and a course of cramming was
pursued, injurious to all concerned, to lessen the number in the
primary and to increase the number in the college departments. No man
can estimate the injury thus inflicted upon not only the student but
the cause of education. Even unto to-day there are colleges in
localities in the South which run all year while the common school
only runs from three to eight months.
Indeed, the multiplication of colleges and academies for the "higher
education of colored youth" is one of the most striking phenomena of
the times: as if theology and the classics were the things best suited
to and most urgently needed by a class of persons unprepared in
rudimentary education, and whose immediate aim must be that of the
mechanic and the farmer--to whom the classics, theology and the
sciences, in their extremely impecunious state, are unequivocable
abstractions. There will be those who will denounce me for taking this
view of collegiate and professional preparation; but I maintain that
any education is false which is unsuited to the condition and the
prospects of the student. To educate him for a lawyer when there are
no clients, for medicine when the patients, although numerous, are too
poor to give him a living income, to fill his head with Latin and
Greek as a teacher when the people he is to teach are to be instructed
in the _a b c's_--such education is a waste of time and a senseless
expenditure of money.
I do not inveigh against higher education; I simply maintain that the
sort of education the colored people of the South stand most in need
of is _elementary and industrial_. They should be instructed for the
work to be done. Many a colored farmer boy or mechanic has been
spoiled to make a foppish gambler or loafer, a swaggering pedagogue or
a cranky homiletician. Men may be spoiled by education, even as they
are spoiled by illiteracy. Education is the preparation for a future
work; hence men should be educated with special reference to that
work.
If left to themselves men usually select intuitively the course of
preparation best suited to their tastes and capacities. But the
colored youth of the South have been allured and seduced from their
natural inclination by the premiums placed upon theological, classical
and professional training for the purpose of sustaining the reputation
and continuance of "colleges" and their professorships.
I do not hesitate to say that if the vast sums of money already
expended and now being spent in the equipment and maintenance of
colleges and universities for the so called "higher education" of
colored youth had been expended in the establishment and maintenance
of primary schools and schools of applied science, the race would have
profited vastly more than it has, both mentally and materially, while
the results would have operated far more advantageously to the State,
and satisfactorily to the munificent benefactors.
Since writing the above, I find in a very recent number of
Judge Tourgèe's magazine, _The Continent_, the following reflections
upon the subject, contributed to that excellent periodical by Prof.
George F. Magoun of Iowa College. Mr. Magoun says:
May I offer one suggestion which observation a few years
since among the freedmen and much reflection, with
comparisons made in foreign countries, have impressed upon
me? It is this, that the key of the future for the black men
of the South is _industrial_ education. The laboring men of
other lands cannot hold their own in skilled labor save as
they receive such education, and this of a constantly
advancing type. The English House of Commons moved two years
since for a Royal Commission to study the technical schools
of the continent, and the report respecting France made by
this commission has been republished at Washington by the
United States Commissioner of Education. In our two leading
northwestern cities, St. Louis and Chicago, splendid manual
training-schools have been formed, and east and west the
question of elementary manual training in public schools is
up for discussion and decision. All this for _white_
laboring men. As long ago as December, 1879, the Legislature
of Tennessee authorized a brief manual of the Elementary
Principles of Agriculture to be "taught in the public
schools of the State," for the benefit of _white_ farmers
again. The Professor of Chemistry in the Vanderbilt
University, Nashville, prepared the book--107 pages. Where
in all this is there anything for the educational
improvement of the black laborer just where he needs
education most? The labor of the South is subject in these
years to a marvelous revolution. The only opportunity the
freedman has to rise is by furnishing such skilled labor as
the great changes going on in that splendid section of the
land require. How can he furnish it, unless the education
given him is chiefly industrial and technical? Some very
pertinent statements of the situation are made in the
_Princeton Review_ for May. They confirm all that you have
said.[12] As to the various bills before Congress, the
writer says: "Immediate assistance should be rendered to the
ex-slave States in the development of an education suited to
their political and _industrial_ needs." Can this be an
education in Latin and Greek?"(The writer contends earnestly
for retaining these studies in classical college and academy
courses for students of all colors.) Can it be anything else
than training in elementary industry, such as is now
demanded for our Northern common-schools? If the
denominational freedmen's schools find this a necessity, is
it anything less for the Southern public schools act which
is contemplated in the bills before Congress?
Mr. Magoun reasons wisely. If the colored men of the South are to
continue their grip as the wage-workers and wealth-producers of that
section they must bring to their employments common intelligence and
skill; and these are to be obtained in the South as in the North, by
apprenticeship and in schools specially provided for the purpose.
Instead of spending three to seven years in mastering higher
education, which presupposes favorable conditions, colored youth
should spend those years in acquiring a "common school education," and
in mastering some trade by which to make an honest livelihood when
they step forth into the world of fierce competition.
Some may ask: Shall we, then, not have some scholars, men learned in
all that higher education gives? Of course; and we should have them.
Men fitted by nature for special pursuits in life will make
preparation for that work. Water will find its level. Genius cannot be
repressed. It will find an audience, even though the singer be Robert
Burns at his plow in the remoteness of Ayr, or the philosophic Æsop in
the humble garb of a Greek pedant's slave. Genius will take care of
itself; it is the mass of mankind that must be led by the hand as we
lead a small boy. It is therefore that I plead, that the masses of the
colored race should receive such preparation for the fierce
competition of every day life that the odds shall not be against them.
I do not plead for the few, who will take care of themselves, but for
the many who must be guided and protected lest they fall a prey to the
more hardy or unscrupulous.
Mr. Magoun follows out his train of thought in the following logical
deductions:
Plainly, if this opportunity for furnishing the skilled
labor of the South hereafter (as he has furnished the
unskilled heretofore) slips away from the black man, he can
never rise. In the race for property, influence, and all
success in life, the industrially educated white
man--whatever may be said of Southern white men "hating to
work"--will outstrip him. Before an ecclesiastical body of
representative colored men at Memphis, in the autumn of
1880, I urged this consideration, when asked to advise them
about education, as the one most germane to their interests;
and preachers and laymen, and their white teachers,
approved every word, and gave me most hearty thanks. I
counseled aspiring young men to abstain from unsuitable
attempts at merely literary training; from overlooking the
intermediate links of culture in striving after something
"beyond their measure;" from expecting any more to be shot
up into the United States Senatorships, etc., by a
revolution which had already wellnigh spent its first
exceptional force (as a few extraordinary persons are thrown
up into extraordinary distinction in the beginning of
revolutions); from ambitious rejection of the steady,
thorough, toilsome methods of fitting themselves for
immediate practical duties and nearer spheres, by which
alone any class is really and healthfully elevated. To shirk
elementary preparation and aspire after the results of
scholarship without its painstaking processes is THE
_temptation of colored students_, as I know by having taught
them daily in college classes. I rejoice in every such
student who really climbs the heights of learning with
exceeding joy. But a far greater proportion than has thus
far submitted to thorough-going preparation for skilled
labor must do so, or there is no great future for them in
this land as a race.
But already the absurdity of beginning at the apex of the educational
fabric instead of at the base is being perceived by those who have in
hand the education of colored youth. A large number of colleges are
adding industrial to their other features, and with much success, and
a larger number of educators are agitating the wisdom of such feature.
Perhaps no educational institution in the Union has done more for the
industrial education of the colored people of the South than the
Hampton (Virginia) Normal and Agricultural Institute under the
management of General S.C. Armstrong. The success of this one
institution in industrial education, and the favor with which it is
regarded by the public, augurs well for the future of such
institutions. That they many multiply is the fervent wish of every man
who apprehends the necessities of the colored people.
In a recent issue of the _New York Globe_, Prof. T. McCants Stewart of
the Liberia (West Africa) College, who is studying the industrial
features of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute for use in
his capacity as a professor among the people of the Lone Star
Republic, photographs in the following manner the great work being
done at Hampton. Prof. Stewart says:
The day after my arrival, I was put into the hands of an
excellent New England gentleman, who was to show me through
the Institute. He took me first to the barn, a large and
substantial building in which are stored the products of the
farm, and in which the stock have their shelter. We ascended
a winding staircase, reached the top, and looked down upon
the Institute grounds with their wide shell-paved walls,
grassplots, flower-beds, orchards, groves and many
buildings--the whole full of life, and giving evidence of
abundant prosperity, and surrounded by a beautiful and
charming country. We came down and began our rounds through
"the little world" in which almost every phase of human life
has its existence.
We went into the shoe-making department. It is in the upper
part of a two-story brick building. On the first floor the
harness-making department is located. We were told that
Frederick Douglass has his harness made here. One certainly
gets good material and honest work; and reasonable prices
are charged. In the shoe department several Indian boys and
youths were at work. There were also three or four colored
boys. They make annually for the United States government
two thousand pairs of shoes for the Indians. They also look
after outside orders, and do all the repairing, etc., of
boots and shoes for the faculty, officers, and
students--making fully five thousand pairs of shoes a year,
if we include the repairing in this estimate. At the head of
this department is a practical shoemaker from Boston. Each
department has a practical man at its head. We visited, not
all the first day, the blacksmith, wheelwright and tin
shops, and looked through the printing office, and the
knitting-room, in which young men are engaged manufacturing
thousands of mittens annually for a firm in Boston. These
two departments are in a commodious brick edifice, called
the "Stone Building." It is the gift of Mrs. Valeria Stone.
One of the most interesting departments is located also in
the "Stone Building"--the sewing-room. In it are nearly a
score, perhaps more, of cheerful, busy girls. The rapid
ticking of the machine is heard, and the merry laugh
followed by gentle whispers gives life to the room. These
young girls are the future wives and mothers; and the large
majority of them will be married to poor men. In the
kitchen, the laundry, and the sewing-room, they are
acquiring a knowledge and habits of industry that will save
their husbands' pennies, and thus keep them from living from
hand to mouth, making an everlasting struggle to save their
nose from the grindstone. In the schoolroom, they are
gathering up those intellectual treasures, which will make
them in a double sense helpmeets unto their husbands.
Standing in the carpenter and paint shops, and in the saw
mill, and seeing Negro youths engaged in the most delicate
kind of work, learning valuable and useful trades, I could
not help from feeling that this is an excellent institution,
and that I would like to have my boys spend three years
here, from fourteen to seventeen, grow strong in the love
for work, and educated to feel the dignity of labor, and
get a trade: then if they have the capacity and desire to
qualify for a "top round in the ladder," for leadership in
the "world's broad field of battle," it will be time enough
to think of Harvard and Yale and Edinburgh, or perhaps
similar African institutions.
Mr. George H. Corliss, of Rhode Island, presented to the
school in 1879 a sixty-horse power Corliss engine. Soon
after Mr. C.P. Huntington, of the Missouri & Pacific R.R.,
gave a saw mill, and as a result of these gifts large
industrial operations were begun. The saw mill is certainly
an extensive enterprise. Logs are brought up from the
Carolinas, and boards are sawn out, and in the turning
department fancy fixtures are made for houses, piazzas, etc.
There are two farms. The Normal School farm, and the
Hemenway farm, which is four miles from the Institute. On
the former seventy tons of hay and about one hundred and
twenty tons of ensilaged fodder-corn were raised last year,
besides potatoes, corn, rye, oats, asparagus, and early
vegetables. Five hundred thousand bricks were also made. The
Hemenway farm, of five hundred acres, is in charge of a
graduate and his wife. Its receipts reach nearly three
thousand dollars a year, and the farm promises to do
invaluable service in time towards sustaining this gigantic
work. All of the industries do not pay. For example, the
deficit in the printing office last year was about seven
hundred dollars. This is due to the employment and training
of student labor. The primary aim is not the making of money
but the advancement of the student. After they learn, they
are good, profitable workmen; but they then leave the
Institute to engage in the outside world in the battle of
life. On the farm is a large number of stock, milch cows and
calves, beef cattle, horses and colts, mules, oxen, sheep
and hogs--in all nearly five hundred heads.
In these various industries, the farm, saw mill, machine
shop, knitting, carpentering, harness making, tinsmithing,
blacksmithing, shoe-making, wheel-wrighting, tailoring,
sewing, printing, etc., over five hundred students were
engaged in 1883. They earned over thirty thousand
dollars--an average of seventy dollars each. There is no
question about the fact that this is a "beehive" into which
a bee can enter, if accepted, with nothing but his soul and
his muscle, and get a good education!
Professor Stewart's article carries upon its face the proper reply to
Mr. Magoun's apprehensions and my own deductions, and is the very
strongest argument for a complete and immediate recasting of the
underlying principles upon which nearly all colored colleges are
sustained and operated.
Money contributed for eleemosynary purposes is a sacred trust, and
should so be applied as to net the greatest good not only to the
beneficiary but the donor. The primary object of educational effort
among the colored people thus far has been to purify their perverted
moral nature and to indoctrinate in them correcter ideas of religion
and its obligations; and the effort has not been in vain. Yet I am
constrained to say, the inculcation of these principals has been
altogether a too predominant idea. Material possibilities are rightly
predicated upon correct moral and spiritual bases; but a morally and
spiritually sound training must be sustained by such preparation for
the actual work of life, as we find it in the machine shop, the grain
field, and the commercial pursuits. The moralist and missionary are no
equals for the man whose ideas of honest toil are supplemented by a
common school training and an educated hand. This is exemplified every
day in the ready demand for foreign-born skilled labor over our own
people, usually educated as gentlemen without means, as if they were
to be kid-gloved fellows, not men who must contend for subsistence
with the horny-handed men who have graduated from the machine shops
and factories and the schools of applied sciences of Europe. Indeed,
the absence of the old-time apprentices among the white youth of the
North, as a force in our industrial organization to draw upon, can be
accounted for upon no other ground than that the supply of
foreign-born skilled help so readily fills the demand that employers
find it a useless expenditure of means to graduate the American boy.
Thus may we account for the "grand rush" young men make for the
lighter employments and the professions, creating year after year an
idle floating population of miseducated men, and reducing the
compensation for clerical work below that received by hod-carriers.
This is not a fancy picture; it is an arraignment of the American
system of education, which proceeds upon the assumption that boys are
all "born with a silver spoon in their mouths" and are destined to
reach--not the poor-house, but the Senate House or the White House.
The American system of education proceeds upon a false and pernicious
assumption; and, while I protest against its application generally, I
protest, in this connection, against its application in the case of
the colored youth in particular. What the colored boy, what all boys
of the country need, is _industrial not ornamental_ education; shall
they have it? Let the State and the philanthropists answer.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] Judge Tourgee has for years been urgently and admirably writing
in advocacy of National Aid in Southern Education.