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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While the education which we proposed to give at the Tuskegee Institute was not spontaneously welcomed by the white South, it was this training of the hands that furnished the first basis for anything like united and sympathetic interest and action between the two races at the South and the whites at the North and those at the South. Aside from its direct benefits to the Negro race, industrial education, in providing a common ground for understanding and coöperation between the North and South, has meant more to the South and to the cause of education than has been realised.

Many white people of the South saw in the movement to teach young Negroes the necessity and honour of work with the hands a means of leading them gradually and sensibly into their new life of freedom, without too sudden a transition from one extreme to the other. They perceived, too, that the Negroes who were master carpenters and contractors under the guidance of their owners could greatly further the development of the South if their children were not too suddenly removed from the atmosphere and occupations of their fathers, but taught to use the thing in hand as a foundation for still higher growth. Some were far-sighted enough to see that industrial education would enable one generation to secure economic independence, and the next, on this foundation, to obtain a more abstract education, if desired. The individual and community interest of the white people was directly appealed to by industrial education. They perceived that intelligence, coupled with skill, would add wealth, in which both races would increasingly share, to the community and to the State. While crude labour could be managed and made to some degree profitable under the methods of slavery, it could not be so utilised in a state of freedom. Almost every white man in the South was directly interested in agricultural, mechanical, or other manual labour; in the cooking and serving of food, laundering and dairying, poultry-raising, and everything related to housekeeping in general. There was no family whose interest in intelligent and skillful nursing was not now and then quickened by the presence of a trained nurse.