Probably the most apparent work accomplished by the school has been the training of teachers for the public schools, hundreds of whom have gone out from our training and are now doing good work in Tennessee and the adjoining States of Arkansas and Mississippi.
Under the direction of the same principal for all but the first two years of its existence, the school has become the centre of many lines of influence extending in many directions and affecting many interests among the people. A library of some three thousand volumes has been gathered and has proved of great value to the students and to the community. Nothing else so directly and surely acts to train to thoughtful and self-respecting lives as an acquaintance with the literature of the English language and with the personalities of the great minds who have produced it.
One of the cherished purposes of the school is to fit up a number of "traveling libraries," each of a score or so of volumes, carefully selected to place at the disposal, in routine order, of graduates of the school teaching in country communities.
The public school teachers (colored) of the county have for years held monthly meetings at Le Moyne Institute, and for the past year have received regular instruction in the teaching of vocal music from the director of music of the school.
GRADUATE TEACHERS, LE MOYNE INSTITUTE.
The Alumni Association is an active and influential organization which acts with the institution in many ways, carrying on a course of lectures each term by prominent men of the community and assisting materially by the contribution of money for its Industrial work. At the present time this association has in hand a fund of over $200, to be used in this way, while, at the same time, it is purchasing a new piano for use in the Music Department. Few of our schools have more loyal supporters among their graduates than Le Moyne. Coherence and co-operation in racial interests are quite lacking and much needed among the colored people, such co-operation as is best illustrated by the Texas movement, described by the Hon. R. L. Smith, of Oakland, Texas, in a recent issue of The Independent. Such work as has been done at Oakland is, in many places, quietly being set on foot, with varying degrees of success, by students and associations of students, who had their training in schools of the American Missionary Association. The immediate aim and end of all our work is the social betterment of the people, and in the end its efficiency will be measured according as it succeeds or fails in this respect.
The history of education in America, written largely during the past thirty years, has few features of wider interest or deeper meaning than the establishment and remarkable development of the "mission schools" among the colored people of the South since their emancipation. The spelling-book followed hard by the teachings of the Bible, constituted the course of instruction at the beginning; this simple beginning has developed into a great system of training and instruction that exemplifies the latest and best methods of education and of school administration known anywhere, from the kindergarten through the common school branches, with manual or industrial training, to the normal school and college. These ideas and methods have very generally been extended and adopted into the common public schools and the higher state institutions, mostly taught and managed by graduates of the mission schools.
