Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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Throughout Working with the Hands, Washington points to many ways that academic and manual training together build upon each other. Washington asserts that even the most rudimentary manual training—such as making one’s bed properly, brushing one’s teeth after meals—teaches students the “habits of applied industry” (22) which lay the foundation for success not only in skilled hand training but also in the academic classroom. Moreover, by grounding intellectual pursuits in real-world situations, as was done at Tuskegee, Washington argues that students receive a deeper grasp of the world about them, making them more enthusiastic about learning. “There was,” Washington observes, “a great difference between studying about things and studying the things themselves, between book instruction and the illumination of practical experience” (12). Washington notes how certain fields of scientific study are particularly suited for helping students learn particular tradescraft—biology for those studying gardening and plant cultivation, physics for those studying construction, chemistry for those working with pesticides, solvents, and fertilizers—but he points out that even academic fields with no obvious practical connections are engaged in productive interplays with shop education. Writing was taught at Tuskegee, for instance, as if the students were apprentices learning a craft through hands-on training: first by learning the working principles of the language and then by applying those principles in assignments that were practiced until made perfect. Assignments were often geared toward understanding practical work, as when a student in a broom-making class wrote an essay (cited by Washington) imagining herself as a broom and describing how she was made.