Up from Slavery: An AutobiographyWashington, Booker T.
History
Up from Slavery: An Autobiography
Washington, Booker T.
African Americans -- Biography; Educators -- United States -- Biography; Tuskegee Institute; Washington, Booker T., 1856-1915
His own teaching at Tuskegee is unique. He lectures to his advanced
students on the art of right living, not out of text-books, but
straight out of life. Then he sends them into the country to visit
Negro families. Such a student will come back with a minute report of
the way in which the family that he has seen lives, what their earnings
are, what they do well and what they do ill; and he will explain how
they might live better. He constructs a definite plan for the
betterment of that particular family out of the resources that they
have. Such a student, if he be bright, will profit more by an
experience like this than he could profit by all the books on sociology
and economics that ever were written. I talked with a boy at Tuskegee
who had made such a study as this, and I could not keep from
contrasting his knowledge and enthusiasm with what I heard in a class
room at a Negro university in one of the Southern cities, which is
conducted on the idea that a college course will save the soul. Here
the class was reciting a lesson from an abstruse text-book on
economics, reciting it by rote, with so obvious a failure to assimilate
it that the waste of labour was pitiful.
I asked Mr. Washington years ago what he regarded as the most important
result of his work, and he replied:
“I do not know which to put first, the effect of Tuskegee’s work on the
Negro, or the effect on the attitude of the white man to the Negro.”
The race divergence under the system of miseducation was fast getting
wider. Under the influence of the Hampton-Tuskegee idea the races are
coming into a closer sympathy and into an honourable and helpful
relation. As the Negro becomes economically independent, he becomes a
responsible part of the Southern life; and the whites so recognize him.
And this must be so from the nature of things. There is nothing
artificial about it. It is development in a perfectly natural way. And
the Southern whites not only so recognize it, but they are imitating it
in the teaching of the neglected masses of their own race. It has thus
come about that the school is taking a more direct and helpful hold on
life in the South than anywhere else in the country. Education is not a
thing apart from life—not a “system,” nor a philosophy; it is direct
teaching how to live and how to work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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