CHILDREN'S CHILDREN, LE MOYNE INSTITUTE.
All this growth of educational institutions and facilities would have been impossible except that along with it and acting as the underlying cause of and reason for it, there has gone a corresponding development of individuals of the race and of the race collectively, for whose uplifting it has most providentially been brought into existence.
The illustration entitled "Children's Children," accompanying this article, shows a class of children whose grandparents, direct from slavery, began with awkward, faltering steps to tread the "hidden paths of knowledge," and whose parents in their turn were graduated from the Normal department of Le Moyne School.
These grandchildren, one of whom in May, 1900, received from the hands of the principal the same diploma that, more than twenty years before, had been handed her mother, stand a proof positive, that may be read by those who run, of individual and racial development, not to be gainsaid or doubted. They possess a mental horizon far wider and more luminous than that of their grandparents, direct from bondage, and they are responsive to influences and emotions to which both parents and grandparents were strangers.
These "children's children," and there are thousands of them throughout the South, stand now as the hope and promise of the race. They represent practically a new race, with new and higher ideals and aims than their parents or grandparents could know. These ideals are not only those of a wider intellectual life, they reach out to the home, to industrial occupations and up to a purer, more practical form of worship as expressive of the religious life.
If you would come at the fountain and source of this purer, broader, safer life, in all these walks of life, come with me and look through the various departments of Le Moyne Institute, or any one of a large number of similar schools of the American Missionary Association, founded and supported chiefly by the benevolent people of the North. In the line of intellectual awakening a glimpse into classes in history, in literature, science and mathematics, backed up by the influence coming from personal association with trained, Christian instructors, and you will not fail to recognize the means, entirely adequate to produce the result in question before you.
Would you lay your hand on the springs that have transformed the home, step with me to the sewing-room where, month after month and year after year, the children are trained in needlework, in the cutting, fitting and making of the wearing apparel that the home must provide; into the experimental kitchen where every girl at the proper stage of her training is taught the value of various foods and has practice in preparing them, where in fact all that pertains to the administration of the household is carefully studied and practiced under the direction of a skillful instructor.
The well-equipped woodworking shop, with its orderly benches and its system of drafting, of joining and of general construction, is giving the boy the best use of his hands and placing within his reach the power to build his own house and keep it in repair, or to go on to the mastery of a useful trade and through it to the securing of a means of livelihood. The printing office, too, gives yet another line of hand training and at the same time of intellectual accuracy in other directions and studies.
For the special Normal training of teachers the practice of teaching in the lower grades and classes under the supervision of a regular critic teacher, is carried through the greater part of the senior year, after the study of psychology has been mastered and the principles of school management have been taught.
And, finally, throughout the course the Bible, with its hopes and promises, its warnings and denunciations of evil conduct, is constantly taught and its sanctions utilized in the formation and strengthening of character, and in most cases it is found powerful in leading to the choice of the Christian life.