The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe

by Booker T. Washington; Robert Ezra Park

Prague is one of the most ancient cities in Europe. A thing that impressed me with the antiquity of the town was the fact that before the beginning of the Christian era there was a Jewish quarter in this city. Prague is also one of the most modern cities in Europe. Within a comparatively few years large manufacturing plants have multiplied throughout the country. Bohemia makes, among other things, fezzes, and sells them to Turkey; raises beans, and ships them to Boston.

What is most interesting is the fact that this progress has been, to a very large extent, made possible through the education of the masses of the people. The Bohemians are to-day among the best educated people in Europe. For example, among the immigrants who come from Europe to America, 24.2 per cent. over fourteen years of age are unable to read and write. In the case of the German immigrant not more than 5.8 per cent. are unable to read or write. In the case of the Bohemians the percentage of illiteracy is only 3 per cent. There is only one class of immigrants among whom the percentage of illiteracy is lower. Among the Danish immigrants it is 0.8 per cent.

There is no part of the Austrian Empire where education is more generally diffused or where the schools are so well adapted to the actual needs of the people. In addition to the ordinary primary schools and the gymnasia (which correspond to our high schools) there are several higher institutes of technology which prepare students for industry and commerce. Besides these state schools there are a large number of industrial schools that are maintained by cities or by private associations. Some of these are located in the small towns and are closely connected with the local industries. Sometimes they are organized by the members of the different trades and crafts as a supplement to the apprentice system. For example, in a town where the inhabitants are engaged in the clay industry, there will be found schools which give practical courses in the making of vases and crockery. In some of the larger towns commercial and industrial instruction is given in "continuation schools." In these schools girls who have learned needlework in the elementary schools will be taught sewing, dressmaking, and embroidery and lace work. There are also courses in which boys are prepared to work in the sugar-making, brewing, watchmaking, and other manufacturing industries.

In the two institutes of technology in Prague, one of which is for Bohemians and the other for Germans, courses are given which prepare students to be engineers, chemists, machinists, architects, bookkeepers, etc. In connection with these courses there are also special departments where students are prepared to be master workmen in such trades as bricklaying, carpentry, cabinet-making, and stone masonry.

There is much in the life and history of the Bohemian people that is especially interesting to a race or a people like the Negro, that is itself struggling up to a higher and freer level of life and civilization.

Up to 1848 the masses of the Bohemian people were held in a condition of serfdom. Until 1867 they were not allowed to emigrate from the country, and were thus held, as are the Russian peasants to-day, to a certain degree, prisoners in their own country. Most of the land was in the hands of the nobility, who were the descendants of foreigners who came into the country when it was conquered, a century or more before. Even to-day five families own 8 per cent. of all the land in the kingdom, and one tenth of the population owns 36 per cent. of the area of the country. The Emperor and the Catholic Church are also large landowners.

One of the effects of this new education and the new life that has come with it has been to make the land held in larger estates less productive than that which is divided into smaller holdings and cultivated by the men who own it.

It was interesting to me to learn that the Bohemians in their own country suffer from some of the same disadvantages as the Negro in the South. For example, the educational fund is divided between the races—the Germans and the Czechs—just as the money for education is divided in the South between the whites and the blacks, but, as is true in the South, it is not divided equally between the races.

For example, in the city of Prague there is one gymnasium (school) to every 62,000 Czech inhabitants, while the Germans have one gymnasium for every 6,700 inhabitants. Of what are called the real-schools, in which the education is more practical than that of the gymnasia, there is one for every 62,000 Bohemian inhabitants, while the Germans have one for every 10,000 inhabitants. For a number of years past, although the Bohemians represent 70 per cent. of the population, they have received only a little more than one half of the money appropriated for secondary education, both in the gymnasia and the real-schools. The salaries of teachers in the elementary schools range from $155 to $400 per year; in the schools in which the German language is taught, however, teachers receive an added bonus for their services.

To overcome their disadvantages in this direction the Czechs have supplemented the work of the public schools by industrial schools, which are maintained by the contributions of the people in the same way that the Negroes in many parts of the South have supplemented the work of the public schools in order to increase the terms of the school year and to introduce industrial training of various sorts.