As the church sent out the school in the early days to become one of its greatest contributors to our national life, so ever since, the church has earnestly sought to supply the neglected with that knowledge which is power.
It is increasingly the aim of the schools founded and maintained by Home Missions to lead to self-realization and self-help, to bring the Christ motive to the inner life, and efficiency and effectiveness to the mastery of outward circumstances through the training of minds and hands.
Among the early Home Mission schools, were those opened to give guidance and direction to the millions of Negroes in their baffling struggle upward from bondage to all that freedom means of ability toward self-direction and development.
"At Kent Home for Negro girls at Greensboro, North Carolina, the schedule of the day's activities shows the scope of such schools.
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"The day's work begins early, breakfast being at 6:30. Busy hands have the house in perfect order, and advance preparations made for dinner by the time the chapel bell rings at 8:30.
"All the work of the Home is done by the girls under the supervision and with the practical assistance of teachers. They are marked and graded in this as in their school work. They are also making creditable progress in general cooking, plain sewing and dressmaking.
"The students in the college range in age from sixteen to sixty years. One of the latter took eleven years to graduate, keeping two girls in school and a large family at home at the same time.
"The taste for reading must needs be cultivated in most of the girls who enter our Homes. The gift of $100 from a former 'Kent girl' and her husband, provides the nucleus of a library made up of such books as girls need and enjoy; better still, it is reaching more than our girls. Neither college nor village has library opportunities for colored people, and so the supply at Kent Home was made available to those outside." [Footnote: Woman's Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church.]
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