Читать книгу Working With the Hands. Being a Sequel to "Up from Slavery," Covering the Author's Experiences in Industrial Training at Tuskegee онлайн

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Indeed, it did not seem to have occurred to them that such things ought to have any relation to their every-day life. I found young men who could wrestle successfully with the toughest problems in "compound interest or banking" or "foreign exchange," but who had never thought of trying to figure out why their fathers lost money on every bale of cotton raised, and why they were continually mortgaging their crops and falling deeper into debt. I talked with girls who could locate on the map accurately the Alps and the Andes, but who had no idea of the proper position of the knives and forks on the dinner table. I found those who remembered that bananas were grown in certain South and Central American countries, but to whom it had never occurred that they might be a nourishing and appetising food for their breakfast tables.

In a country where pigs, chickens, ducks, geese, berries, peaches, plums, vegetables, nuts, and other wholesome foods could be produced with little effort, school teachers were eating salt pork from Chicago and canned chicken and tomatoes sent from Omaha. While the countryside abounded in all manner of beautiful shrubbery and fragrant flowers, few of these ever found their way into the houses or upon the dinner tables. While in many instances the people had always lived in the country, and would continue to do so, what few text-books I saw in their cabins were full of pictures and reading matter relating to city life. In these text-books I saw pictures of great office buildings, ships, street-cars, warehouses, but not a single picture of a farm scene, a spreading apple-tree, a field of grass or corn, a flock of sheep, or a herd of cows.