The school enthusiastically seeks to live up to the ideal of its Principal, that education in the broadest and truest sense is designed to influence individuals to help others; is designed, first, last, and all the time, to transform and energize individuals into life-giving agencies for the uplift of their fellows. Principal Washington's whole educational creed, accepted by Tuskegee Institute teachers and students alike, was recently declared in one of his familiar Sunday-evening "talks" to the students of the institution. Said he:
"Education in the broadest and truest sense will make an individual seek to help all people, regardless of race, regardless of color, regardless of condition. And you will find that the person who is most truly educated is the one who is going to be kindest, and is going to act in the gentlest manner toward persons who are unfortunate, toward the race or the individual that is most despised. The highly educated person is the one who is most considerate of those individuals who are less fortunate. I hope when you go out from here and meet persons who are afflicted by poverty, whether of mind or body, or persons who are unfortunate in any way, that you will show your education by being just as kind and considerate toward those persons as it is possible for you to be. That is the way to test a person with education. You may see ignorant persons, who perhaps think themselves educated, going about the street, and when they meet an individual who is unfortunate—lame, or with a defect of body, mind, or speech—are inclined to laugh at and make sport of that individual. But the highly educated person, the one who is really cultivated, is gentle and sympathetic to every one. Education is meant to make us absolutely honest in dealing with our fellows. I do not care how much arithmetic we have, or how many cities we can locate; it is all useless unless we have an education that makes us absolutely honest. Education is meant to make us give satisfaction, and to get satisfaction out of giving it. It is meant to make us get happiness out of service for our fellows. And until we get to the point where we can get happiness and supreme satisfaction out of helping our fellows, we are not truly educated.... Education is meant to make us appreciate the things that are beautiful in nature. A person is never educated until he is able to go into the swamps and woods and see something that is beautiful in the trees and shrubs there—is able to see something beautiful in the grass and flowers that surround him—is, in short, able to see something beautiful, elevating, and inspiring in everything that God has created. Not only should education enable us to see beauty in these objects which God has put about us, but it is meant to influence us to bring beautiful objects about us. I hope that each one of you, after you graduate, will surround himself at home with what is beautiful, inspiring, and elevating. I do not believe that any person is educated so long as he lives in a dirty, miserable shanty. I do not believe that any person is educated until he has learned to want to live in a clean room made attractive with pictures and books, and with such surroundings as are elevating. In a word, I wish to say again that education is meant to give us that culture, that refinement, that taste, which will make us deal truthfully and sympathetically with our fellow men, and will make us see what is beautiful, elevating, and inspiring in what God has created. I want you to bear in mind that your text-books, with all their contents, are not an end, but a means to an end—a means to help us get the highest, the best, the purest, and the most beautiful things out of life."
The Tuskegee trained boy or girl has set before him every hour in the day, and every day in the year, the substantial educational ideals here set forth. Books, valuable as they are, and nowhere more thoroughly reckoned as such than here, are only a means to an end: this is the gospel preached by the Tuskegee teacher. Life is the great, the eternal thing; the serving of one's fellows, the ministering unto the needy of a groping, developing people—this is the thing not forgotten, but ever constantly enforced by precept and by example.
The many old and time-worn frame buildings are being replaced by finely built and imposing brick and stone structures; the tallow dip and antiquated oil-lamp and gas-jet, as illuminators, have paled before the more brilliant white light of electricity, installed by Tuskegee students and operated by them. Patience and faith!—these are Tuskegee's watchwords and her standard virtues. What can not be accomplished to-day will certainly be accomplished to-morrow.
So, in its larger outlook and household anxieties, Tuskegee Institute teachers are confident that the things taught and enforced by example and precept will justify their efforts in helping to make a dependent people independent, a distracted people confident, and an humble people to thrill with pride in itself and in its best men and women. Thus it is that Tuskegee Institute has never been satisfied with being merely a school, concerned wholly with its recitations and training in shop and field. Every student who carries a diploma from these grounds is urged not to hang that diploma on the wall as an ornament, as an evidence of individual superiority, but to make it mean something constructive and life-giving to every one in the community where he must live and work.
The young men and women who are trained for mission work in foreign countries are not more carefully trained in the spirit of consecration than are these young men and women trained at Tuskegee for the work of creating better economic and social conditions among their own people. It is not necessary to state here what has already been accomplished in many parts of the South by Tuskegee graduates. The selected examples set forth in this book are evidence enough. It is sufficient to say that the Tuskegee Institute is determined to become more and more a distinctive influence among the regenerative agencies that are gradually bringing order out of chaos, and justice, peace, and happiness out of the wretched disorders of a painful past. It is easy to trace the influence of such well-established institutions as Harvard and Yale in the progressive life of the American people. The sons of Harvard and Yale almost dominate civilization in America. In another sense, it is possible for Tuskegee to have a like influence in the many things that must be accomplished in the South, before love and justice shall supplant race prejudice and race antagonism.
This reaching out helpfully in all directions where help is needed is the distinguishing feature of Tuskegee. This race-loving spirit gives it a largeness of view and purpose that saves both its teachers and pupils from being narrow and self-centered. Take from Tuskegee all this "vision splendid," and it will at once shrink into common-place insignificance. "Set your ideals high," says the distinguished man who here is Principal as he was founder, "and in your efforts to reach them you become strong for greater things." It is but truth to say that no institution in all the land, whether for white or black education, stands for higher and more generous ideals.
Unless the young man who goes away from Tuskegee as blacksmith, carpenter, printer, or as any other mechanic, is something more than these, he has been incapable of perceiving and taking in the ideals that go with these accomplishments. He has been taught over and over again to "hitch his wagon to the stars," and if he fail to do so, the fault is in himself, and not in Tuskegee.
As between a poor doctor and a poor carpenter, there is but scant choice. They are both failures and to be avoided. Honor in one is as precious as in the other. Honor and efficiency—these, therefore, are the ideal test of every son and daughter that passes out of these grounds into the larger world of work and responsibility.
What a terrible task it has been and still is to teach the lessons of the upward spirit: "God's in His heaven, all's well with the world." Hope is strength and discouragement is weakness. Everything that is false and unjust and wrong is transitory. Those who are brave enough to solve problems shall be more honored of mankind than those who create problems which they make no effort to solve.