REPORT ON EDUCATIONAL WORK.
The Committee on the Educational Work of the A. M. A. would respectfully report that they find the history of the past year highly satisfactory and encouraging. It is a record of enlarged accommodations at several of the institutions. Stone Hall, at Atlanta, the fourth of the buildings erected by the munificence of Mrs. Valeria G. Stone, has been completed. New buildings, or very considerable additions to former buildings, have been constructed at Midway, Macon, Talladega, Williamsburg, Hillsboro, Memphis and New Orleans; yet from several quarters the call still comes for more room.
It is a record of increased practical efficiency. Industrial training, which forms so important an adjunct of the work, has been making progress by workshops established at Macon and Memphis, and arrangements for carpentry schools at Tougaloo and Atlanta; while farming education and training in housekeeping go on at various points as heretofore, supplemented at Memphis by instruction in nursing and hygiene; and Hampton continues to teach more vigorously than ever a variety of handicrafts, such as printing, bookbinding, iron and tin work, carpentry and wood turning, the manufacture of sash and doors, shoe and harness making, tailoring and farming. All this is, for the present, a very essential element of the educational work.
It is a record of some degree of expansion, although the main aspect is rather one of consolidation and elevation. The number of teachers has increased by twenty-eight and the number of common schools by four; the number of pupils being but slightly greater than last year. The grade of these institutions is steadily advancing. Among these pupils are found, we are happy to say, ninety theological students—twelve more than were reported last year. The three Teachers’ Institutes, held in as many States, may prove to be the entering wedge of another great instrument of power and quickening influence. The crowded halls and interested audiences of the anniversaries of so many of our Institutions are a striking manifestation of genuine progress. When we remember that the oldest of these institutions has seen but a quarter of a century, and practically but twenty years of life time, and that now we rejoice in eight chartered institutions, comparatively strong and effective, twelve high and normal schools and forty-two common schools, with 279 teachers doing their soul-expanding work, we may well say “What hath God wrought.” Far as it falls short of our desire and our duty, so far and more also does it exceed the boldest reasonable expectations of the dark and cloudy time of the beginning.
But far the most satisfactory statement of the annual report is its record of the religious spirit which guides, controls and pervades this whole educational movement. The information that at seven out of eight of the chartered institutions “special religious interest has been manifest, adding scores and scores of these scholars to the number of the disciples of Christ,” and that, “as yet, but very few have been graduated from our various courses of study who had not become Christians,” is a record of the crowning mercy of God. So may it ever be. The heart and conscience must be quickened with the intellect or there is no good hope for that race, or for any other race. It must be Christian education. The school and the Church must move on together at the South as they started together from Plymouth Rock, and they must extend, as far as possible—certainly must offer—their joint benign influences, not to a portion of the population, but to all classes and races alike. For the part can receive its full benefit only in conjunction with the benefit of the whole. This is no new principle, but the method in which, as our annual reports show, this Association has been proceeding throughout its history. Having always refused to recognize the color-line, it can proceed on no other basis without defeating its own ends, and compromising its own principles. And the recent decision of the Supreme Court has rolled a new burden on the Church.
Hence it is that your committee look with much interest upon the experiment, tried and effectually settled at Berea, and now extending thence among the “mountain whites,” of including all classes and races in the purview of our educational and Christian work. We refer to the movement at Williamsburg, a county-seat on the Cumberland River, which is simply a repetition of the movement at Berea of twenty years ago—with this difference, that the abolition of the color-line, both in church and school, at Williamsburg, is fully accepted beforehand by an actual constituency in that place. Here the establishment of an academy to educate teachers for the common schools of the county—of whom, as of the population, but a small portion are colored persons—went hand in hand with the opening of the church to both races alike, and has led most naturally to the establishment of three adjacent preaching places, and the formation of another church at the nearest railway station. This method, when viewed simply on its own merits, seems to be at once the dictate of a wise Christian economy, and an almost necessary sequence, or rather part, of the work of Christian education. Within the particular regions where this Association is planting its schools, exerting its influence and gaining the confidence of the community, it would seem to have peculiar advantages and a special call to leaven the whole community with the institutions of the gospel; while the molding influence of its Christian schools will be left incomplete, except as permanently embodied, fortified and nourished by surrounding Christian churches, built upon the same fundamental principles. Similar in condition, character and wants to this Whitley County, in Kentucky, is a great area of five hundred miles by two hundred, beginning in Virginia and extending to Alabama, occupied chiefly by a white population numbering nearly two millions, of whom more than half the adults can neither read nor write. It is one of the most needy and neglected regions of our country, and presents a pressing call to Christian philanthropy to enter and occupy.
S. C. Bartlett, Chairman.