Home Missions in ActionAllen, Edith H. (Edith Hedden)
History
Home Missions in Action
Allen, Edith H. (Edith Hedden)
Home missions
Sections in the North thus neglected may also be found, as some of
the islands on the coast of Maine and other more or less isolated
regions of New England, New York, and other states will testify.
There have been great gaps where the government has failed to
make adequate educational provision among the Indian tribes. The
Spanish-speaking people are also exceptional in their educational
needs. Though the government has done much, yet Cuba and Porto
Rico are among the places where conditions make necessary special
educational effort.
The vast number of non-English-speaking adult foreigners calls for
unusual educational provisions.
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.
* * * * *
"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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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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