Working With the Hands / Being a Sequel to "Up from Slavery," Covering the Author's Experiences in Industrial Training at Tuskegee

by Booker T. Washington

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.