Many of you are to become class-room teachers. Remember that teaching ability is an inward endowment; remember that a morally stunted man or a ribbon-loving woman cannot be an effective teacher. The most searching critic of character I ever knew was a barefoot boy whose laughing eyes danced over the pages of the fourth reader; an intuitive philosopher he! School boy opinion has, I doubt not, many vagaries but on the whole its essential decisions as to teachers are amazingly correct. Whether you teach geography by the Oswego Method, is not greatly to the point; whether you have won the confidence of your class—that is the main issue; and that conquest is not made by the sword of discipline but by the spirit of vigorous goodness.
Moreover the genuine teacher knows that his duty is not bounded by the four walls of the class-room. He is dealing with boys and girls to be sure, but he is dealing with more—with social conditions. The life and work of the community he must study quite as much as he must study the child. Indeed, child and man are largely products of social conditions. The educated teacher, by friendly visits to homes and by cheerful work in churches and societies, will seek to elevate community opinion and the standard of life and work. A crowded unclean home in an undrained street, is almost as much an object of concern to the educated teacher as is a hopeless little dunce who can’t spell “rabbit!” Let us ground child-study in community study.
This knowledge of the life and work of the community will react upon the program of study. The educated teacher, I have said, aims at raising somewhat the level of life in the community. The program of study is an instrument for that end. A school unresponsive to the needs of actual life is a school preparing for Utopia. The universities and the public schools of the Western States illustrate what I mean: for example, the University of California has recently introduced a course in irrigation. And here in the East, Cornell teaches poultry raising. For an unscrubbed population the school should emphasize cleanliness; for a propertyless population, foresight and thrift. Let me speak even more definitely. In this city of Washington, as in other urban communities, the death rate of the Negro population is exceedingly high. This excessive death rate is due to a variety of causes; relatively low economic position is a powerful cause. Thus, one of the largest industrial insurance companies in the United States finds, I learn, that the death rate of Negroes is practically the same as that of whites, in approximately the same industrial occupations; and there is much more evidence to the same effect. In addition to the teaching of hygiene, the school may aim to remedy the conditions expressed in the high death rate, in two ways,—first, through imparting productive capacity by the training of hands; and second, through developing wants by the touching of hearts and arousing of minds.
Already you have a manual training high school and through the grades certain work in carpentry and sewing and cooking. The increasing efficiency of all such work should be welcomed and actively aided by every educated teacher. After a while, let us hope, the schools here will offer from one end to the other, such teaching of the industrial arts as will prepare students worthily to maintain themselves under severe economic stress. Do you realize that, despite the enlargement of educational opportunities in Washington and the growth of the Negro population, there are probably here to-day fewer Negro artisans than there were in 1870? Here is a profound need, and for the schools a rare opportunity. Moreover, the school life of most children is short, not over five or six years. If the school possessed adequate facilities for giving industrial capacity, more parents would be willing and able to let their children remain in school seven and eight and nine years. The schools and the cultivated portion of this community cannot afford to give those who ask for bread a stone. We must send the whole boy to school and not merely his head!
Not for a moment do I decry that important function of the schools, which I have called the development of wants. Human wants are social forces. Corn and cotton are grown to supply certain bodily wants; the fine arts are cultivated in response to certain æsthetic wants; philosophy and pure science are elaborated at the quiet insistence of certain intellectual wants; religion is preached to assuage certain spiritual wants. Every voluntary act is the hand-maid of some want. Now, it is the fundamental business of the schools to enlarge the range of the students’ interests and wants, to stir up a divine discontent. The saddest thing about the Negro peasant in his windowless cabin in Georgia, the saddest thing about the Negroes in the filthy shanties of Mobile, New York, and Washington, is not so much poverty, as slovenly unconcern. What all such people need—be they white or black, red or yellow—is the development of wants—wants for better things. A man of moderately developed wants will exert himself to get a steady job under healthful conditions, to get a comfortable house to live in—three or four sunny, pleasantly furnished rooms and, if possible a garden for vegetables and flowers—yes, he will exert himself to win a wife to make that house a home. Such wants (and they are, you will note, not impossibly spiritual) every school ought to tend to develop.
In short, the development of the wants of sober men and the giving of the skill to buy the means of satisfying those wants—these two things are vital to the work of the school. Let me be clearly understood; the school should of course develop the more spiritual wants, wants for the things that give literature and art and religion their values. These spiritual things are the headwaters of the fullest and deepest and highest enjoyments of life. But these matters have long been emphasized in the traditions of school-men; moreover, when the flesh is weak, the spirit is not very strong. My wish just now is to emphasize the things that lie at the basis of race maintenance and progress.
The considerations brought forward exhibit the opportunities of the teacher and the high significance of the teacher’s work.
Teaching and preaching are very much alike. Phillips Brooks said very truly that preaching is the bringing of truth through personality. Some of you will prepare yourselves to preach; all of you will have to do with preachers. There is no lack of preachers but there is much lack of good preachers. The preacher has the entree to the firesides of the people. The educated preacher, like the educated teacher, realizes the profound effect that the housing of the working classes exerts upon the morals and the efficiency and the happiness of the working classes, the profound effect that surroundings exert upon life and character. The preacher will use some of the influence that issues from his superrational functions to make the homes of the people hygienically as well as morally clean, to make those homes more attractive than the resorts of vice.
Religion and the Church have, from a certain point of view, two main functions,—first to make peace between human society and assumed spiritual beings; and, second, to antagonize anti-social acts and tendencies. The first function, religion performs for a horde of man-eating savages as well as for the congregation of St. Paul’s; the second function religion performs, characteristically in a civilized society, by allying itself with morality. The surprisingly low death rate of Jews wherever found is unquestionably due in large part to this alliance of religion and morality. In our English Bible we find:—
“And God spake all these words, saying,