It was equally unfortunate that the teachers who were chosen to carry out this educational policy lacked the preparation adequate to their task. They had any amount of spirit, but an evident lack of understanding as to the meaning of this new education. They failed to unite the qualifications for both the industrial and academic instruction. It was the fault that we find to-day in our industrial schools. Those who were responsible for the literary training knew little of and cared still less for the work in mechanic arts, and those who were employed to teach trades seldom had sufficient education to impart what they knew. The students, too, in their efforts to pursue these uncorrelated courses seldom succeeded in making much advance in either. We have no evidence that many Negroes were equipped for higher service in the manual labor schools. Statistics of 1850 and 1860 show that there was an increase in the number of colored mechanics, especially in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Columbus, the Western Reserve, and Canada.[1] But this was probably due to the decreasing prejudice of the local white mechanics toward the Negro artisans fleeing from the South rather than to formal industrial training.[2]
[Footnote 1: Clarke, Present Condition of the Free People of Color of the United States, 1859, pp. 9, 10, 11, 13, and 29.]
[Footnote 2: Ibid., pp. 9, 10, and 23.]
Schools of this kind tended gradually to abandon the idea of combining labor and learning, leaving such provisions mainly as catalogue fictions. Many of the western colleges were founded as manual labor schools, but the remains of these beginnings are few and insignificant. Oberlin, which was once operated on this basis, still retains the seal of "Learning and Labor," with a college building in the foreground and a field of grain in the distance. A number of our institutions have recitations now in the forenoon that students may devote the afternoon to labor. In some schools Monday instead of Saturday is the open day of the week because this was wash-day for the manual labor colleges. Even after the Civil War some schools had their long vacation in the winter instead of the summer because the latter was the time for manual labor. The people of our day know little about this unsuccessful system.
It is evident, therefore, that the leaders who had up to that time dictated the policy of the social betterment of the colored people had failed to find the key to the situation. This task fell to the lot of Frederick Douglass, who, wiser in his generation than most of his contemporaries, advocated actual vocational training as the greatest leverage for the elevation of the colored people. Douglass was given an opportunity to bring his ideas before the public on the occasion of a visit to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. She was then preparing to go to England in response to an invitation from her admirers, who were anxious to see this famous author of Uncle Tom's Cabin and to give her a testimonial. Thinking that she would receive large sums of money in England she desired to get Mr. Douglass's views as to how it could be most profitably spent for the advancement of the free people of color. She was especially interested in those who had become free by their own exertions. Mrs. Stowe informed her guest that several had suggested the establishment of an educational institution pure and simple, but that she had not been able to concur with them, thinking that it would be better to open an industrial school. Douglass was opposed both to the establishment of such a college as was suggested, and to that of an ordinary industrial school where pupils should merely "earn the means of obtaining an education in books." He desired what we now call the vocational school, "a series of workshops where colored men could learn some of the handicrafts, learn to work in iron, wood, and leather, while incidentally acquiring a plain English education."[1]
[Footnote 1: Douglass, The Life and Times of, p. 248.]
Under Douglass's leadership the movement had a new goal. The learning of trades was no longer to be subsidiary to conventional education. Just the reverse was true. Moreover, it was not to be entrusted to individuals operating on a small scale; it was to be a public effort of larger scope. The aim was to make the education of Negroes so articulate with their needs as to improve their economic condition. Seeing that despite the successful endeavors of many freedmen to acquire higher education that the race was still kept in penury, Douglass believed that by reconstructing their educational policy the friends of the race could teach the colored people to help themselves. Pecuniary embarrassment, he thought, was the cause of all evil to the blacks, "for poverty kept them ignorant and their lack of enlightenment kept them degraded." The deliverance from these evils, he contended, could be effected not by such a fancied or artificial elevation as the mere diffusion of information by institutions beyond the immediate needs of the poor. The awful plight of the Negroes, as he saw it, resulted directly from not having the opportunity to learn trades, and from "narrowing their limits to earn a livelihood." Douglass deplored the fact that even menial employments were rapidly passing away from the colored people. Under the caption of "Learn Trades or Starve," he tried to drive home the truth that if the free people of color did not soon heed his advice, foreigners then immigrating in large numbers would elbow them from all lucrative positions. In his own words, "every day begins with the lesson and ends with the lesson that colored men must find new employments, new modes of usefulness to society, or that they must decay under the pressing wants to which their condition is bringing them."[1]
[Footnote 1: Douglass, The Life and Times of, p. 248.]
Douglass believed in higher education and looked forward to that stage in the development of the Negroes when high schools and colleges could contribute to their progress. He knew, however, that it was foolish to think that persons accustomed to the rougher and harder modes of living could in a single leap from their low condition reach that of professional men. The attainment of such positions, he thought, was contingent upon laying a foundation in things material by passing "through the intermediate gradations of agriculture and the mechanic arts."[1] He was sure that the higher institutions then open to the colored people would be adequate to the task of providing for them all the professional men they then needed, and that the facilities for higher education so far as the schools and colleges in the free States were concerned would increase quite in proportion to the future needs of the race.
[Footnote 1: Ibid., p. 249.]