CHAPTER V 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.
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 Ă— 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.
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.
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.
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.
SHOE SHOP—MAKING AND REPAIRING