Part 4 (1/2)
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
CHAPTER THREE
WAs.h.i.+NGTON: THE EDUCATOR
The Tuskegee Commencement exercises dramatize education. They enable plain men and women to visualize in the concrete that vague word which means so little to them in the abstract. More properly they dramatize the ident.i.ty between real education and actual life. On the platform before the audience is a miniature engine to which steam has been piped, a miniature frame house in course of construction, and a piece of brick wall in process of erection. A young man in jumpers comes onto the platform, starts the engine and blows the whistle, whereupon young men and women come hurrying from all directions, and each turns to his or her appointed task. A young carpenter completes the little house, a young mason finishes the laying of the brick wall, a young farmer leads forth a cow and milks her in full view of the audience, a st.u.r.dy blacksmith shoes a horse, and after this patient, educative animal has been shod he is turned over to a representative of the veterinary division to have his teeth filed. At the same time on the opposite side of the platform one of the girl students is having a dress fitted by one of her cla.s.smates who is a dressmaker. She at length walks proudly from the platform in her completed new gown, while the young dressmaker looks anxiously after her to make sure that it ”hangs right behind.” Other girls are doing was.h.i.+ng and ironing with the drudgery removed in accordance with advanced Tuskegee methods. Still others are hard at work on hats, mats, and dresses, while boys from the tailoring department sit crosslegged working on suits and uniforms. In the background are arranged the finest specimens which scientific agriculture has produced on the farm and mechanical skill has turned out in the shops. The pumpkin, potatoes, corn, cotton, and other agricultural products predominate, because agriculture is the chief industry at Tuskegee just as it is among the Negro people of the South.
This form of commencement exercise is one of Booker Was.h.i.+ngton's contributions to education which has been widely copied by schools for whites as well as blacks. That it appeals to his own people is eloquently attested by the people themselves who come in ever-greater numbers as the commencement days recur. At three o'clock in the morning of this great day vehicles of every description, each loaded to capacity with men, women, and children, begin to roll in in an unbroken line which sometimes extends along the road for three miles.
Some of the teachers at times objected to turning a large area of the Inst.i.tute grounds into a hitching-post station for the horses and mules of this great mult.i.tude, but to all such objections Mr.
Was.h.i.+ngton replied, ”This place belongs to the people and not to us.”
Less than a third of these eight to nine thousand people are able to crowd into the chapel to see the actual graduation exercises, but all can see the graduation procession as it marches through the grounds to the chapel and all are shown through the shops and over the farm and through the special agricultural exhibits, and even through the offices, including that of the princ.i.p.al. It is significant of the respect in which the people hold the Inst.i.tute, and in which they held Booker Was.h.i.+ngton, that in all these years there has never been on these occasions a single instance of drunkenness or disorderly conduct.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Showing some of the teams of farmers attending the Annual Tuskegee Negro Conference.]
In his annual report to the trustees for 1914 Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton said of these commencement exercises: ”One of the problems that constantly confronts us is that of making the school of real service to these people on this one day when they come in such large numbers. For many of them it is the one day in the year when they go to school, and we ought to find a way to make the day of additional value to them. I very much hope that in the near future we shall find it possible to erect some kind of a large pavilion which shall serve the purpose of letting these thousands see something of our exercises and be helped by them.”
The philosophy symbolized by such graduation exercises as we have described may best be shown by quoting Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton's own words in an article ent.i.tled, ”Industrial Education and the Public Schools,”
which was published in the _Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science_ for September of the year 1913. In this article Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton says: ”If I were asked what I believe to be the greatest advance which Negro education has made since emanc.i.p.ation I should say that it has been in two directions: first, the change which has taken place among the ma.s.ses of the Negro people as to what education really is; and, second, the change that has taken place among the ma.s.ses of the white people in the South toward Negro education itself.
”I can perhaps make clear what I mean by a little explanation: the Negro learned in slavery to work but he did not learn to respect labor. On the contrary, the Negro was constantly taught, directly and indirectly during slavery times, that labor was a curse. It was the curse of Canaan, he was told, that condemned the black man to be for all time the slave and servant of the white man. It was the curse of Canaan that made him for all time 'a hewer of wood and drawer of water.' The consequence of this teaching was that, when emanc.i.p.ation came, the Negro thought freedom must, in some way, mean freedom from labor.
”The Negro had also gained in slavery some general notions in regard to education. He observed that the people who had education for the most part belonged to the aristocracy, to the master cla.s.s, while the people who had little or no education were usually of the cla.s.s known as 'poor whites.' In this way education became a.s.sociated in his mind with leisure, with luxury, and freedom from the drudgery of work with the hands....
”In order to make it possible to put Negro education on a sound and rational basis it has been necessary to change the opinion of the ma.s.ses of the Negro people in regard to education and labor. It has been necessary to make them see that education, which did not, directly or indirectly, connect itself with the practical daily interests of daily life could hardly be called education. It has been necessary to make the ma.s.ses of the Negroes see and realize the necessity and importance of applying what they learned in school to the common and ordinary things of life; to see that education, far from being a means of escaping labor, is a means of raising up and dignifying labor and thus indirectly a means of raising up and dignifying the common and ordinary man. It has been necessary to teach the ma.s.ses of the people that the way to build up a race is to begin at the bottom and not at the top, to lift the man furthest down, and thus raise the whole structure of society above him. On the other hand, it has been necessary to demonstrate to the white man in the South that education does not 'spoil' the Negro, as it has been so often predicted that it would. It was necessary to make him actually see that education makes the Negro not an idler or spendthrift, but a more industrious, thrifty, law-abiding, and useful citizen than he otherwise would be.”
The commencement exercises which we have described are one of the numerous means evolved by Booker Was.h.i.+ngton to guide the ma.s.ses of his own people, as well as the Southern whites, to a true conception of the value and meaning of real education for the Negro.
The correlation between the work of farm, shop, and cla.s.sroom, first applied by General Armstrong at Hampton, was developed on an even larger scale by his one-time student, Booker Was.h.i.+ngton. The students at Tuskegee are divided into two groups: the day students who work in the cla.s.sroom half the week and the other half on the farm and in the shops, and the night students who work all day on the farm or in the shops and then attend school at night. The day school students pay a small fee in cash toward their expenses, while the night school students not only pay no fee but by good and diligent work gradually acc.u.mulate a credit at the school bank which, when it becomes sufficiently large, enables them to become day school students. In fact, the great majority of the day students have thus fought their way in from the night school. But all students of both groups thus receive in the course of a week a fairly even balance between theory and practice.
[Ill.u.s.tration: An academic cla.s.s. A problem in brick masonry. Mr.
Was.h.i.+ngton always insisted upon correlation; that is, drawing the problem from the various shops and laboratories.]
In a corner of each of the shops, in which are carried on the forty or more different trades, is a blackboard on which are worked out the actual problems which arise in the course of the work. After school hours one always finds in the shops a certain number of the teachers from the Academic Department looking up problems for their cla.s.ses for the next day. A physics teacher may be found in the blacksmithing shop digging up problems about the tractive strength of wires and the expansion and contraction of metals under heat and cold. A teacher of chemistry may be found in the kitchen of the cooking school unearthing problems relating to the chemistry of food for her cla.s.s the next day. If, on the other hand, you go into a cla.s.sroom you will find the shop is brought into the cla.s.sroom just as the cla.s.sroom has been brought into the shop. For instance, in a certain English cla.s.s the topic a.s.signed for papers was ”a model house” instead of ”bravery” or ”the increase of crime in cities,” or ”the landing of the Pilgrims.”
The boys of the cla.s.s had prepared papers on the architecture and construction of a model house, while the girls' papers were devoted to its interior decoration and furnis.h.i.+ng. One of the girls described a meal for six which she had actually prepared and the six had actually consumed. The meal cost seventy-five cents. The discussion and criticism which followed each paper had all the zest which vitally practical and near-at-hand questions always arouse.
When the Department of Superintendence of the National Educational a.s.sociation met in Atlanta, Ga., in 1904, many of the delegates, after adjournment, visited the Tuskegee Inst.i.tute. Among these delegates was Prof. Paul Monroe of the Department of History and Principles of Education of the Teachers' College of Columbia University. In recording his impressions of his visit, Professor Monroe says: ”My interest in Tuskegee and a few similar inst.i.tutions is founded on the fact that here I find ill.u.s.trated the two most marked tendencies which are being formulated in the most advanced educational thought, but are being worked out slowly and with great difficulty. These tendencies are: first, the endeavor to draw the subject matter of education, or the 'stuff' of schoolroom work, directly from the life of the pupils; and second, to relate the outcome of education to life's activities, occupations, and duties of the pupil in such a way that the connection is made directly and immediately between schoolroom work and the other activities of the person being educated. This is the ideal at Tuskegee, and, to a much greater extent than in any other inst.i.tution I know of, the practice; so that the inst.i.tution is working along not only the lines of practical endeavor, but of the most advanced educational thought. To such an extent is this true that Tuskegee and Hampton are of quite as great interest to the student of education on account of the illumination they are giving to educational theory as they are to those interested practically in the elevation of the Negro people and in the solution of a serious social problem. May I give just one ill.u.s.tration of a concrete nature coming under my observation while at the school, that will indicate the difference between the work of the school and that which was typical under old conditions, or is yet typical where the newer ideas, as so well grasped by Mr.
Was.h.i.+ngton, are not accepted? In a cla.s.s in English composition two boys, among others, had placed their written work upon the board, one having written upon 'Honor' in the most stilted language, with various historical references which meant nothing to himself or to his cla.s.smates--the whole paragraph evidently being drawn from some outside source; the other wrote upon 'My Trade--Blacksmithing'--and told in a simple and direct way of his day's work, the nature of the general course of training, and the use he expected to make of his training when completed. No better contrast could be found between the old ideas of formal language work, dominated by books and cast into forms not understood or at least not natural to the youth, and the newer ideas of simplicity, directness, and forcefulness in presenting the account of one's own experience. Not only was this contrast an ill.u.s.tration of the ideal of the entire education offered at Tuskegee in opposition to that of the old, formal, 'literary' education as imposed upon the colored race, but it gave in a nutsh.e.l.l a concept of the new education. This one experience drawn from the life of the boy and related directly to his life's duration and circ.u.mstances was education in the truest sense; the other was not save as Mr.
Was.h.i.+ngton made it so in its failure....”
Among the delegates was also Mr. A.L. Rafter, the a.s.sistant Superintendent of Schools of Boston, who in speaking at Tuskegee said: ”What Tuskegee is doing for you we are going to take on home to the North. You are doing what we are talking about.” In general, these foremost educational experts of the dominant race looked to Booker Was.h.i.+ngton and Tuskegee for leaders.h.i.+p instead of expecting him or his school to follow them.
Booker Was.h.i.+ngton not only practised at Tuskegee this close relation between school life and real life--and it is being continued now that he is gone--but preached it whenever and wherever opportunity offered.
Some years ago, in addressing himself to those of his own students who expected to become teachers, he said on this subject among other things: ”... colored parents depend upon seeing the results of education in ways not true of the white parent. It is important that the colored teacher on this account give special attention to bringing school life into closer touch with real life. Any education is to my mind 'high' which enables the individual to do the very best work for the people by whom he is surrounded. Any education is 'low' which does not make for character and effective service.
”The average teacher in the public schools is very likely to yield to the temptation of thinking that he is educating an individual when he is teaching him to reason out examples in arithmetic, to prove propositions in geometry, and to recite pages of history. He conceives this to be the end of education. Herein is the sad deficiency in many teachers who are not able to use history, arithmetic, and geometry as means to an end. They get the idea that the student who has mastered a certain number of pages in a textbook is educated, forgetting that textbooks are at best but tools, and in many cases ineffective tools, for the development of man....
”The average parent cannot appreciate how many examples Johnny has worked out that day, how many questions in history he has answered; but when he says, 'Mother, I cannot go back to that school until all the b.u.t.tons are sewed on my coat,' the parent will at once become conscious of school influence in the home. This will be the best kind of advertis.e.m.e.nt. The b.u.t.ton propaganda tends to make the teacher a power in the community. A few lessons in applied chemistry will not be amiss. Take grease spots, for example. The teacher who with tact can teach his pupils to keep even threadbare clothes neatly brushed and free from grease spots is extending the school influence into the home and is adding immeasurably to the self-respect of the home.”[2]