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

While I have never wished to underestimate the awakening power of purely mental training, I believe that this visible, tangible contact with nature gave me inspirations and ambitions which could not have come in any other way. I favour the most thorough mental training and the highest development of mind, but I want to see these linked with the common things of the universal life about our doors.

It was this experience in using my hands that led me, in spite of all the difficulties in the way, to go to the Hampton Institute, where I had learned that pupils could have not only their minds educated, but their hands trained. When I entered the Hampton Institute few industries were taught there, but these had to do with the fundamentals of every-day life. The hand work began with the duties which lay directly in the path of the student. We were taught to make our own beds, to clean our rooms, to take care of the recitation rooms, and to keep the grounds in order. Then came lessons in raising our food on the farm and the proper methods of cooking and serving it in the school. The instruction in iron and wood-work in the earlier years of the institution was mostly in making and repairing the farming implements and in helping to maintain the buildings.

While much of this work may seem rudimentary, it had great educational value. How well I remember the feeling of stimulus and satisfaction inspired by the sight of a perfectly made bed, the pillows placed always at the right angle, and the edges of the sheets turned over according to rules of neatness and system. The work of the farm had a similar kind of influence upon my views of relative values in education. I soon learned that there was a great difference between studying about things and studying the things themselves, between book instruction and the illumination of practical experience.

This chain of experiences, whose links I have tried to indicate, served as a preparation for the work of training the head, the heart, and the hands which I was to undertake later at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama. When I went to Alabama to begin this work, I spent some time in visiting towns and country districts in order to learn the real conditions and needs of the people. It was my ambition to make the little school which I was about to found a real service in enriching the life of the most lowly and unfortunate. With this end in view, I not only visited the schools, churches, and farms of the people, but slept in their one-roomed cabins and ate at their tables their fare of corn-bread and fried pork.

FIRST BUILDING ERECTED ON SCHOOL GROUNDS

Often while making these visits, both in the towns and in the plantation districts, I found young men and women who had acquired considerable education, but it seemed to be limited to memorising certain rules in grammar and arithmetic. Some of them had studied both the classic and modern languages, and I discovered students who could solve problems in arithmetic and algebra which I could not master. Yet I could not escape the conviction that the more abstract these problems were, and the further they were removed from the life the people were then living, or were to live, the more stress seemed to be placed upon them. One of the saddest features was to find here and there instances of those who had studied what was called "art" or "instrumental music," in other words "the elegant accomplishments," but who were living in houses where there was no sign of beauty or system. There was not the slightest indication that this art or these accomplishments had had or ever would have any influence upon the life in the homes of these people.

Indeed, it did not seem to have occurred to them that such things ought to have any relation to their every-day life. I found young men who could wrestle successfully with the toughest problems in "compound interest or banking" or "foreign exchange," but who had never thought of trying to figure out why their fathers lost money on every bale of cotton raised, and why they were continually mortgaging their crops and falling deeper into debt. I talked with girls who could locate on the map accurately the Alps and the Andes, but who had no idea of the proper position of the knives and forks on the dinner table. I found those who remembered that bananas were grown in certain South and Central American countries, but to whom it had never occurred that they might be a nourishing and appetising food for their breakfast tables.

In a country where pigs, chickens, ducks, geese, berries, peaches, plums, vegetables, nuts, and other wholesome foods could be produced with little effort, school teachers were eating salt pork from Chicago and canned chicken and tomatoes sent from Omaha. While the countryside abounded in all manner of beautiful shrubbery and fragrant flowers, few of these ever found their way into the houses or upon the dinner tables. While in many instances the people had always lived in the country, and would continue to do so, what few text-books I saw in their cabins were full of pictures and reading matter relating to city life. In these text-books I saw pictures of great office buildings, ships, street-cars, warehouses, but not a single picture of a farm scene, a spreading apple-tree, a field of grass or corn, a flock of sheep, or a herd of cows.