Service by the Educated Negro: Address of Roscoe Conkling Bruce of Tuskegee Institute at the Commencement Exercises of the M Street High School Metropolitan A. M. E. Church Washington, D.C., June 16, 1903 — John Shaqi
Service by the Educated Negro: Address of Roscoe Conkling Bruce of Tuskegee Institute at the Commencement Exercises of the M Street High School Metropolitan A. M. E. Church Washington, D.C., June 16, 1903Bruce, Roscoe Conkling
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Service by the Educated Negro: Address of Roscoe Conkling Bruce of Tuskegee Institute at the Commencement Exercises of the M Street High School Metropolitan A. M. E. Church Washington, D.C., June 16, 1903
Bruce, Roscoe Conkling
African Americans; African Americans -- Education
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!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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