CHAPTER IV Making Education Pay Its Way
I cannot emphasise too often the fact that my experience in building up the Tuskegee Institute has taught me year by year the value of hand work in the building of character. I have frequently found one concrete, definite example illustrating the difference between right and wrong worth more than hours of abstract lecturing on morality. I have told girls many times that a dish is either thoroughly washed and dried or it is not. If a thing is not well done, it is poorly done. Furthermore, I have taught our girls from the beginning of this school that a student who receives pay for properly attending to dishes, and does her work poorly, is guilty of two wrongs. She is guilty of falsehood and guilty of receiving money for doing something which she has not done.
This lesson taught in the kitchen, with the carelessly cleaned utensil in evidence as an illustration, has a power that is hard to resist. Just so the implement left in the field over night has many times been made to teach the same lessons—of warning against untruth and dishonesty. Leaving it there was untruthful, because the student had said by his action that he had properly performed the work of the day; it was dishonest because the school had been robbed of a portion of the value of the implement by reason of the rain and dew falling on it and causing it to rust and depreciate in value.
In the beginning our methods of instruction in farming were primitive and crude, but month by month, and year by year, steady growth encouraged our efforts. One difficulty to which I have not referred was that the land on which we began work was not the richest in the world. When attention was called by the students and others to the poor quality of the soil, I replied that poor soil was the best in which to begin the teaching of agriculture, because this would give us an opportunity to learn to make poor land rich. I told them also that if we could teach the students how to cultivate poor land profitably they would have little difficulty in making more than a living upon fairly good or rich soil.
Apart from the problems found on the school grounds, our methods were at first misunderstood by school officials in high authority throughout the country, and our aims were not appreciated by other schools established in the South for the education of my race. I remember that after I had spoken for an hour at a meeting of a State Teachers' Association, trying to explain the meaning and advantages of industrial education or hand work, a teacher arose and asked the State superintendent, who was present, a very simple question regarding the subject. The superintendent replied that he would have to refer the question to me, as the subject was one that he had never heard discussed before. It happened occasionally that students on their way to the Tuskegee Institute were asked if they were going to an "ox-driving school," the question implying, I suppose, that the main thing taught at Tuskegee was ox-driving. Our critics, however, did not know that at the time we were too poor to own oxen, and that on our little farm we had nothing in the way of draught animals except one poor blind horse which a white friend in Tuskegee had given us.
During the first year the training in agriculture on the school farm consisted of about two hours of work daily for each of the young men students, the remaining time being spent in the class rooms. The outdoor period, during the first school session, was mostly spent in grubbing up stumps, felling trees, building fences, making ditches, and in plowing the ground preparatory to planting a little crop. We had few implements with which to do this work, and most of these were borrowed. The reader will realise how hard it must have been under these conditions to make the student feel that he was acquiring new knowledge of farm life. As I recall it now, I am sure that the main thing that we were able to teach the students in those early days was that book education did not mean a divorce from work with the hands.
Gradually we were able to secure more land for farming purposes and to cultivate what we did have to better advantage. As the school grew, we learned more about the proper fertilisation of the soil, and how to use labor-saving machinery more effectively. It was surprising to note how many of the students believed that farm labour must from its very nature be hard, and that it was not quite the proper thing to use too much labour-saving machinery. Indeed, many of the white planters in certain sections of the South have until recently refused to encourage the use of much agricultural machinery, for the reason, as they stated it, that such assistance would spoil the Negro "farm hands." For some years the Tuskegee Institute did not escape this charge. As our department of farming grew from month to month, I was not afraid to let it be known that I felt certain that one result of any proper system of hand training was to spoil, or get rid of, the ordinary "farm hand." If one will study the industrial development of the South, he will be forced to the conclusion that one of the factors that has most retarded its progress has been and is the "farm hand." This individual has too long controlled the agriculture of the South. With few exceptions, he is ignorant and unskilled, with little conscience. He seldom owns the land which he pretends or tries to cultivate. Too often he is a person who has no permanent abiding place, and if he has one it is probably a miserable one-room cabin. The "farm hand" can be hired for from forty to sixty cents a day. In fact, I have known of cases where such men were hired for twenty-five cents a day and their board; and they were very dear help even at that price.