An investigation of trade and industrial schools, conducted for the International harvester company of America

Preface

I wish to acknowledge my, indebtedness to the authorities of the several institutions, described in the following reports, for their courteous co-operation in providing me with information concerning their work.

With the exception of statements taken from the catalogs and reports published by the schools, all the facts upon which these reports are based were gathered from visits of one or more days, to the schools and institutions themselves. The article on Factory Education, found in the appendix, is reprinted through the courtesy of the Editor of The Commons.

HENRY BRUERE.

Chicago, July, 1904.

Author

2d copy r)?cepted Order Div.

Part I. Southern Industrial Trade Schools

Page.

Letter to Mr. John G. Wood - - - - - - 4

Introduction -------- 5

Report on Berea College, Berea, Ky. ----- 7

Report on Atlanta University, Atlanta, Ga. _ . - 9

Report on Spelman Seminary, Atlanta, Ga. - - - - 12

Report on Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, Ala. - - - 12

Report on Home Industrial School, Asheville, N. C. - - 19

Report on Hampton Institute, Hampton, Va. - - - 20

Mr, John G. Wood, General Superintendent, McCormick Works, International Harvester Co.

Dear Sir: — I hand you herewith reports upon the educational work conducted at the several Southern Institutions, which I visited during my recent investigation of Industrial Schools.

These reports cover the work of Berea College, in Kentucky, several institutions in Atlanta, Ga., Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the Asheville Home School, in Asheville, N. C, and the Hampton Institute, in Hampton, Va.

These schools group themselves naturally in so far as they have to do, primarily, with the education of backward people, either white mountaineers, Indians, or the southern Negro. It will be seen that the purpose of these institutions is to develop from the ranks of unskilled workers, artisans and teachers who shall be of service in raising the tone and economic efficiency of the several communities from which they are drawn.

The second group of institutions has to do with developing special skill and peculiar efficiency in workmen who live in communities industrially more advanced. This group comprises institutions located north of Mason and Dixon's line.

No attempt has been made in these reports to discuss in any way thoroughly the economic conditions which have given rise to the foundation of the schools. On the other hand, it has been assumed that they were meeting actual conditions and an effort has been made, merely, to describe their activities as fully as possible.

It is hoped that by reviewing the work of these institutions the wisdom of developing the industrial educational side of our "Institute" will make itself clearly felt. Respectfully submitted,

HENRY BRUERE. 901 West Twenty-second Street.

Introduction

Industrial education in the South is devised to meet a two-fold need, one primarily social, and the other individual. In the first place, the South needs artisans and skilled workers, who are ready to live under Southern conditions, and will accept less wages than the workmen brought from the North. Burdened with a slowly developing race foreign to them, the Whites of the South are eager to find some solution of the many problems arising from the existence of a large number of Blacks amongst them, who cannot be raised by a process of assimilation, that great principle of development upon which, in the face of the constant wave of immigration of uneducated and largely unskilled people from the lower strata of European civilization, the maintenance of American methods of life and thought are dependent. To find the principle of self-development ior the Negro is the aim of the leaders of the Black race, and its discovery is the growing concern of those Southern Whites who do not believe that the welfare of the South hangs upon keeping the Blacks in a condition of dependent inferiority.

The old idea of educators was that illiteracy and ignorance of any forrn of culture was the largest difference between the people who had attained economic proficiency under slavery and the representative white men who had taught them habits of industry. In an agricultural country such as the South, mere application and steady work develops sufficient skill for the raising of successful harvests, and where labor is as abundant as it is in the South, no special need exists for the training of agricultural laborers. If the Negro could be taught to read and write, and the elements of Christianity, it was thought, he would find opened to him the opportunity for a fuller development of whatever powers he might possess, and on the other hand, in a state of freedom, he was less likely, educated, to prove a danger and menace to Southern civilization.

Education had become a fetish which, especially in the North, was supposed to be the great panacea for social difficulties. What kind of education was not the question. EDUCATION was enough — to read and write, to know this or that truth or half-truth ; while to necessity and competition was relegated the task of training men for economic service. The humanitarian and public-spirited Northern Whites regarded education as the great need of the ex-slaves and their children, and made generous sacrifices to provide them with schools and colleges.

In the second place, the Negro looked upon education as the barrier between him and his white neighbor. He saw that the educated man was not likely to work, or if he worked he received special emoluments and distinction as a member of the professional or mercantile classes. If the Negro were ambitious, and not resigned to a servile condition by long years of comfortable slavery, he sought freedom from drudgery or entrance into the professional ranks by means of acquiring the magic power of reading and writing. The result was that schools that had been devised for a race of men, and a condition of civilization, in which every child was to be given an equal chance for attaining the highest social or economic positions in the community, were established for the Negro. The Negro was to be given "an equal chance" to make his way, and so, wherever the South acquiesced, or money could be provided, schools were opened. This education failed to meet the expectations of its devotees. There are still a few persons in the South, the greater part of whom are Negroes, who believe in the efficacy of literacy as an instrument of civilization. But where faith in_ education remains, it is in education of a new order, in educative training to a definite end rather than in an educative process which seeks, merely, to awaken intelhgent interest in a comparatively wide range of information. (That IS, rather than in a mere educative process which informs but does not develop aptitudes nor awaken them.)

Almost accidentally, in the effort to make Negroes valuable members of the body politic, the educators of the South have discovered a new principle of education, from which a reformation of the general Northern idea of the purpose and ideal of our educational system is likely to follow. It is a singular fact that while we zealously devote our energies and lives to economic practices, our education has been of a nature which primarily aims to relieve a man of work as such; that is, which in its origin assumed that educated men would find in their knowledge a full occupation of their powers, that men who were learned would use their knowledge as a means of livelihood, or because of the possession of an education would be suffered to exist as economic parasites.

Before the Renaissance, education set men apart from the common rnass and, to the common man, the life of the learned was the kind of life for a man to seek. On the awakening of a democratic spirit which reached down to the middle class, the educated man, half coerced, half from motives of philanthropy, devised means of letting the vulgar into their precincts, as far as the vulgar could afford to come. With the increase of numbers within the ranks of the educated, there naturally resulted a compromise with the common necessity for labor. Society could no longer afford to allow every educated, or partly educated man, to spend his days in the pursuit and delight of knowledge. Learning and labor were made to co-exist. This was a condescension on the part of learning, but a necessity for the sake oi living.

Mankind has never thoroughly awakened from the half-illusion that education means happiness. Where we are most civilized, there every child is made to acquire at least a modicum of learning which, until recently, was merely book-learning. We take our education and turn to toil, usually as an escape from the stupid routine of the common school.

The Negroes repeated the error of the Whites, but they are recovering themselves from their mistake. They are learning that mere education, in itself, does not furnish a man with a living wage, and that to secure a living wage a man must render indispensable service to the community in which he lives. While he is at school he must be taught to do those things for which the community is willing to give him wages in return. For the Negro in the South it is necessary that he learn how to use his hands in a skillful fashion, because the white South does not wish the service of the Negro in the learned professions nor, to any great extent, in a clerical capacity. These facts bear upon the lives of the black men in an important way because it is to the white employer or landlord that the Negro must look for an opportunity to exercise his skill. The South wishes to employ the Negro as a mechanic or farmer, and if he can render skilled service in positions of this character it will reward him adequately. The Negro has learned that he cannot foist himself upon the older race, simply because he can read or write as well as his white neighbor, but that he must be prepared to yield the community such service as it demands of him. In order that he may do this successfully schools have been established for his industrial training, and the results which they have produced in raising the tone of the Negroes whom they have trained, and in equipping them for useful careers as artisans and substantial citizens, have won for them, both the confidence of the Black race and the respect and support of the Whites.

The representative schools of this type are the Tuskegee Institute, in Alabama, and the Hampton Institute, in Virginia. The importance of their work will readily be understood from reading the description of their activities in the following pages.

PART I.

BEREA COLLEGE.

Berea, Ky.

There is, at present, wide-spread interest in a law, passed by the Kentucky Legislature at its last session, prohibiting the co-education of the colored and white races by any institution, public or private, having its charter from the State. This law will affect an important educational institution situated in the western margin of the Kentucky mountain region notorious for family feuds and moonshine distilleries. Indeed, it is believed that the law was aimed directly at this institution. At any rate, it is Berea College, which will carry the act before the Supreme Court on the grounds of unconstitutionality.

Berea College was founded before the war, for the support of unionism in the South, and for the promotion of the cause of free speech. Cassius Clay, a distinguished journalist of ante-bellum times, discovered in the mountain people, who were landholders without being owners of slaves, a possible outpost of the anti-slavery movement. The founders of the college met with vehement hostility on the part of these mountain people who, although unionists were anti-Negro, for the doors of this institution were immediately opened to the black folk.

But it is not as an institution for the education of Negroes that Berea College is significant. Not more than lo per cent of its i,ooo students are Negroes, and most of these come from some distance. Its important work lies among the mountain folk themselves, for whom it is the outpost of civilization.

These mountain folk spread over the Appalachian Plateau in eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, western Virginia and North Carolina in the westward movement of population occurring after the Revolutionary War. By mere accident they came into a country which was without the main channel of migration, a region unconnected by highway or water-course with the western lowlands. Isolated here these people have remained in the stage of development to which their great-grandfathers had attained; they practice the household arts of weaving, dyeing and spinning; they use open flambeaux for lamps; they do not read or write; they live in log cabins of their own making, and dig a precarious livelihood from the exhausted hillsides.

The State has left them to their own devices. No compulsory education law required their children to grow out of the depth of their parents' ignorance. There are no means of communication over wide stretches of territory, save the beds of creeks and the saddle horse. Newspapers are just commencing to work their way among the people, but in places there is not a printing press to be found throughout five counties.

Until recently schools were maintained only during the three summer months ; now a five-months' term is required by law, but no child is forced to attend school, and a great many do not. The children are numerous, the people being barbarously prolific, consequently the population increases steadily while the standard of life is correspondingly lowered.

I came in contact with a number of the mountaineers both at the school and out in the hills. They are a strong, handsome people. Scotch-Irish and English in blood; in every respect splendid material for American citizenship. During the Civil War their qualities asserted themselves. Both in the Union army and among the Confederates they won the reputation of first-class fighting men. In the great w^ar these "backward frontiersmen" supported the government which their grandfathers had fought to establish.

Among these people Berea College exists as a great social settlement. In Berea, children over 15 years of age are taught the elementary branches ; older boys and girls, with the necessary preliminary education, are prepared to go back among the mountains to teach again what they learn at Berea ; and a small handful are given the regular academic training and sent out into the world. But the aim of the institution is to equip the mountain girls and boys for continued life and service among the mountaineers ; to send back to the hills educated men and women who will gradually lift the mass of the people out of ignorance without destroying their virile originality. No effort is made to vulgarly americanize the mountain folk; they are encouraged, on the other hand, to continue their weaving and rug making and to remain contented with their log cabins and crude conveniences. No more commendable effort is being made anywhere to join education with simple, dignified, wholesome living.

Berea makes it possible for anyone to secure an education. A native told me a lad may come from the mountains with two or three dollars in his pocket, which to him is a very large sum of money, and find the doors of Berea open to him. But he is made to pay his way in work. He may earn his board in the college brick-yards, or in the college lumber camp, coming to school at night, or working and attending school alternately; or he may pay his way in part by service about the college buildings. The tuition is nominal and the cost of living low.

Girls are not only taught to teach, but also taught to make good housewives. They learn sewing, dressmaking, cooking, laundering and nursing at Berea, as well as mathematics and history. Boys are taught forestry and various trades. A man may come to Berea an illiterate mountaineer and return, no longer illiterate, but still a mountaineer.

The mountains all about are covered with timber, and vast stores of coal lie under the soil. Here and there outside capitalists have made inroads into the country and are shipping out great quantities of lumber and coal. Forest land is now selling at $10.00 to $17.00 per acre which five years ago could have been bought for 50 cents. Berea College is making an effort to keep the hills in the hands of the mountaineers. Through its agriculture department it teaches the elements of forestry to the boys, and by its publications and extension work it communicates this intelligence directly to the mountaineers.

This extension work deserves conspicuous notice. Men instructors and advanced students in the school journey about on horse-back, teaching history or civil government, and giving stereopticon lectures to the isolated mountain people; and so the strands of intelligent influence are spread to the remote corners of the region. New students come in from outlying districts, learning in this way of the existence of the college, and the sphere of its influence is thereby constantly widened.

The educational problem at' Berea resembles the problem of educating factory workers in that it is, primarily, a problem of adaptation. A great many of the students come for only three months in the year, or for one year, and for these Berea must provide means of effective suggestion. Classes in the grades are composed of men and women, black and white, together with young girls and boys. I visited a class in geography where the ages varied from 15 to over 30 in a group of 23 pupils. This wide variation in ages did not represent a difference of intelligence, but, merely, a contrast in opportunities.

On the industrial side of the school the instruction is made absolutely practical throughout. In the laundry the girls wash their own clothes and the school linen. In the carpentry and bricklaying departments the students actually build the school buildings. In the early manual training classes the Sloyd system has been adopted, so from the start every piece has a practical as well as an educational value.

The work of making active and influential American citizens of the backward and unsocial mountain people is entirely in the hands of Berea and other institutions of learning. These people are self-sufficient. They are far from the pressure of immigration, and it is for them to determine what direction their lives shall take. Their first economic problem is to keep their hills in their own hands, and their second, to learn modem methods of intensive farming so that the lands which they have carelessly tilled for years shall be renewed in productiveness. It will be a refreshing thing to come among these mountain people in after years, finding them wide-awake American citizens, but untempted by the cheap attractions of our American city life; contented to live simple, free lives in their blue grass mountains.

Note — The isolation of some of the Mormon communities in the far west serves to confirm the impression that the mountain people will advance without the difficulty and danger of absorbing new blood. On the other hand, the long years of close intermarriage may render the importation of new blood desirable whenever the people acquire selfconsciousness and set for themselves a social ideal in any way as dominating as the religious organization of the Mormons.

ATLANTA UNIVERSITY.

Atlanta, Ga.

The Atlanta University is an institution for the higher education of Negroes. It was founded in 1867 by Northern friends of the Negroes, and now, as then, derives its main income from Northern contributors. The institution comprises a high school, a regular college course, a normal course, and a technical course. For the year 1903-04 there were 273 students enrolled. Of this number there were 2 graduate students, 7 members of the senior class in the college course, 25 members of the senior class in the normal course, a total of 48 in the college course, with a freshman class of 19, a total of 34 in the normal course and 191 in the high school course. The high school course covers a period of three years. In the first year class there were 94 students, while in the third year there were only 40, showing a decrease of 54 in two years, or over 57 per cent.

Of the whole number of students, 92 were boys and 181 were girls. Of these 127 were boarders and 146 day pupils, representing 29 different counties in Georgia, and 13 different States.

Since 1876 there have been 462 graduates from the institution. Of this number 117 were graduates from the college course, 347 from the normal course. Of the total number of graduates, iii were males and 251 were females. There are living, 91 males and 314 fernales. Of these 405, 241 or 59.05 per cent, are teachers; i is engaged in literary work; 3 are students; 6 are engaged in religious work; 15 in the government service; 11 are undesignated; 108 or 26.7 per cent, are married women with no occupations. There are no artisans in the number; 2 superintendents of housework; i nurse and 2 dressmakers. The apparently significant facts showed by these figures are the large percentage of the graduates who go into teaching as a profession, and the absence of manual workers from the whole number. Here, at any rate, higher education has opened opportunities of brain work as a means of livelihood to men and women who must, otherwise, have had to perform menial or manual labor to earn a living. It is stated that those who attend the university for several years but who do not graduate are also likely to go into teaching as a profession, so great is the demand for Negro teachers for Negroes. The university lays especial emphasis upon the function of teacher training. It offers, in its own words, "an exceptional education for exceptional Negroes to prepare for service among the ignorant and needy masses."

The industrial departments, with the exception of the housekeeping and domestic science courses, are not designed to prepare students for industrial work, but are intended to train industrial teachers. For the men, the shop work resembles the instruction in the manual trainingschools. One year is devoted to wood-working; one-half year to forging; one-half year to mechanical drawing, including architectural and machine drawing.

WOOD-WORKING.

In the bench room are twenty benches and vices; each bench bein^ fitted with a case of wood-working tools, squares, planes, chisels, gauges, saws, hammer, mallet, bits and brace, draw-knife, dividers, oil-stones, etc., and with twelve wood-turning lathes. All boys begin their industrial work here (a good many with reluctance at having to do manual labor), and are instructed in the general principles of wood- working : Marking, sawing, planing, boring, chamfering, mortising, tenoning, grooving, mitering, beveling, and dovetailing. All students are advanced through a carefully graded series of exercises which are fully shown by working models and drawings. Wood-turning is introduced in the latter part of the year.

IRON-WORKING.

In iron-working the students are taught the correct ways of boring, turning, drilling, tappin?^ and finishing iron and steel; the use and care of machines and machine tools; the use and care of engine and boiler.

MECHANICAL DRAWING.

In mechanical drawing the student is taught the use and care of instruments; orthographic projections; including surfaces, intersections, development of helical curves and screw threads ; and arbitrary methods of representing screws, bolts, tapped holes, etc. A short course in machine drawing includes the draughting of parts previously sketched. The course in architectural drawing consists in making plans and the necessary details for a house. This course often proves of practical benefit to teachers going into poor communities where their knowledge of architectural drawing, while elementary, serves them in building school houses and cabins.

Among the women the industrial work is of more immediate practical value. Instruction is given to all girls in the high school and normal courses in sewing, dressmaking, cooking and household management, the more advanced work being supplemented by residence and practice in a Model Home.

SEWING.

Second Year — 72 hours. Different kinds of darning, drafting, cutting and making undergarments, and plain machine work. Girls may buy garments at cost.

Third Year — 60 hours. Dressmaking. Students are expected to be prepared to buy a chart for drafting; also to buy an inexpensive woolen dress, lining and trimmings for practical work.

COOKINa

Third Year — 60 hours. The care and management of a fire, the structure of a stove, the washing of dishes and cleaning of boards and closets are given careful consideration. The chemistry of cooking is illustrated by simple experiments, and then given practical application in the cooking of eggs, meats, cereals, batters, doughs, soups, etc.

The Model Home was erected in 1899 from contributions from the King's Daughters, and several individuals. It contains rooms for the accommodation of 17 persons, who carry on all the work of the house without the help of servants, and is equipped with modern appliances for teaching cooking.

Atlanta University aims to develop leaders among the Colored race, leaders by reason of larger culture and more rigorous moral character. The graduates are leaders in temperance organizations, sociological associations and teachers' clubs, and are found in the front ranks of every social reform movement. In a large measure they are moulders of public sentiment, and are helping in a quiet way to solve the perplexing problems of the Negro race in the South. Although they are reformers in the best sense of the word, they are an eminently conservative social element.

A very important part of the work of the university consists in the study, by the department of sociology, of institutions and social problems among the Negroes. After an investigation has been conducted by the university, conferences are held for the discussion of the data which has been accumulated. Studies have been made of "The Negro in Business," "Mortality Among Negroes in Cities," "The College-bred Negro," "Some Efforts of American Negroes for Their Own Social Betterment," "Crime Among Negroes," "The Negro Artisan," etc. These studies have elicited wide-spread interest and received the commendation of leading journals and reviews, both in America and abroad. The Boston Herald of February 23, 1903, says in an editorial : "It is not easy to estimate too highly the series of yearly reports that are coming from Atlanta University relative to the condition of the Negro population of the country. They are social studies that treat of matters about which there is to be found nowhere else so carefully gathered and trustworthy information."

The university is controlled by whites, and the majority of the faculty are white, although in the faculty there is a Negro who, in many respects, is the leader of his race in America. Who, at any rate, shares the leadership in the Negro mind with Booker Washington, a man of fine training, keen intellectual attributes and splendid loyalty to his race. Dr. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois.

The following are some excerpts from miscellaneous suggestions to students, published in the annual catalog of the university:

Each pupil should bring a Bible.

All should be provided with warm clothing.

Young women must have rubbers and waterproofs.

The use of silks, velvets or other expensive or showy materials or trimmings is prohibited. Prints, ginghams and plain worsted, with inexpensive lawns and muslins for hot weather, are the most appropriate wear.

No extra dress is required for graduation. Experience has taught that much evil comes from pupils receiving food or large quantities of fruit or candy from home or friends. They are, therefore, not allowed to receive it. Friends will please not send it.

Letters should be directed to the care of the university.

Keeping or using firearms on the premises is forbidden.

Students should arrange so as not to travel on the Sabbath, and friends are earnestly requested not to call upon them on that day.

It is desired to make the school, as far as possible, a home for those who attend. Not only their intellectual, but also their physical, social, moral, and religious culture receives careful attention.

SPELMAN SEMINARY.

Atlanta, Ga.

Spelman Seminary is a Baptist school for Negro girls. It occupies a group of buildings on the outskirts of Atlanta, Ga. The school was founded in 1881 under the name of The Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary. In 1883 the name was changed to Spelman in honor of the parents of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller.^ Since 1888 Mr. Rockefeller has been one of the trustees of the institution, and has invested large sums of mouey in its buildings and grounds.

The whole number of students for the year 1903-1904 was 650. Of this number 336 were boarders and 314 day pupils; 259 were under 16 years of age; 345 between 16 and 25 years of age, and 46 over 25 years of age; 97 girls took cooking in addition to academic work; 16 cooking exclusively; 6 took printing exclusively; 5 music exclusively; 16 nursing exclusively; 15 dressmaking exclusively; =^23 of the students came from Georgia; 117 from 16 different States, while 10 came from South America, the West Indies and Africa,

Spelman is essmtially a Christian institution. Religious work of one sort or another is an important part of the school's activity.

The industrial courses at present given in the seminary are: Sewing, dressmaking, basketry, printing, and agriculture (dairying, truckgardening, poultry-raising, etc.). Of these, printing and dressmaking are elective, the others have definite places on the general program. Millinery will be introduced next fall.

Spelman deserves notice because it is an institution which aims to make cheerful workers, who will look upon every kind of labor as honorable. As an educational institution it must be classified among those establishments, which entered the difficult field of Negro betterment in the South, with a larger share of missionary spirit than educational interest. It is not so much concerned with the solution of the general economic problems, which perhaps are the most difficult for the Negro of to-day, as with the cultivation of private morality. It assumes that a woman of Christian training is likely to be a serviceable woman in whatever community or condition of life she may find herself.