My own experience in outdoor life leads me to hope that the time will soon come when there will be a revolution in our methods of educating children, especially in the schools of the smaller towns and rural districts. I consider it almost a sin to take a number of children whose homes are on farms, and whose parents earn their living by farming, and cage them up, as if they were so many wild beasts, for six or seven hours during the day, in a close room where the air is often impure.
"THE CHILDREN'S HOUSE": CLASS IN NATURE STUDY
I have known teachers to go so far as to frost the windows in a school-room, or have them made high up in the wall, or keep the window curtains down, so that the children could not even see the wonderful world without. For six hours the life of these children is an artificial one. The apparatus which they use is, as a rule, artificial, and they are taught in an artificial manner about artificial things. Even to whisper about the song of a mocking-bird or the chirp of a squirrel in a near-by tree, or to point to a stalk of corn or a wild flower, or to speak about a cow and her calf, or a little colt and its mother grazing in an adjoining field, are sins for which they must be speedily and often severely punished. I have seen teachers keep children caged up on a beautiful, bright day in June, when all Nature was at her best, making them learn—or try to learn—a lesson about hills, or mountains, or lakes, or islands, by means of a map or globe, when the land surrounding the school-house was alive and beautiful with the images of these things. I have seen a teacher work for an hour with children, trying to impress upon them the meaning of the words lake, island, peninsula, when a brook not a quarter of a mile away would have afforded the little ones an opportunity to pull off their shoes and stockings and wade through the water, and find, not one artificial island or lake, on an artificial globe, but dozens of real islands, peninsulas, and bays. Besides the delight of wading through the water, and of being out in the pure bracing air, they would learn by this method more about these natural divisions of the earth in five minutes than they could learn in an hour in books. A reading lesson taught out on the green grass under a spreading oak tree is a lesson needing little effort to hold a boy's attention, to say nothing of the sense of delight and relief which comes to the teacher.
I have seen teachers compel students to puzzle for hours over the problem of the working of the pulley, when not a block from the school-house were workmen with pulleys in actual operation, hoisting bricks for the walls of a new building.
I believe that the time is not far distant when every school in the rural districts and in the small towns will be surrounded by a garden, and that one of the objects of the course of study will be to teach the child something about real country life, and about country occupations.
I am glad to say that at the Tuskegee Institute we erected a school-house in and about which the little children of the town and vicinity are given a knowledge, not only of books, but of the real things which they will be called upon to use in their homes. Since Tuskegee is surrounded by people who earn their living by agriculture, we have near this school-house three acres of ground on which the children are taught to cultivate flowers, shrubbery, vegetables, grains, cotton, and other crops. They are also taught cooking, laundering, sewing, sweeping, and dusting, how to set a table, and how to make a bed—the employments of their daily lives. I have referred to this building as a "school-house," but we do not call it that, because the name is too formal. We have named it "The Children's House." And this principle holds true, for children of a larger growth, and is especially true of the training of the Negro minister who serves the people of the smaller towns and country districts.
In this, as in too many other educational fields, the Negro minister is trained to meet conditions which exist in New York or in Chicago—in a word, it is too often taken for granted that there is no difference between the work to be done by Negro ministers among our people after only thirty-five years of freedom, and that to be done among the white people who have had the advantages of centuries of freedom and development.