While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
The growth of this institution under the charge of its originator was
described seven years ago in this Magazine, since which time it has
attracted the attention of leading thinkers upon education and race
problems in this and other countries, and become widely known as an
exponent of the value of manual-labor training in education of men and
women-certainly as far as the black race is concerned. Twelve years
have proved its mission in the South to be no "fool's errand." Eastern
school to continue the education begun at St. Augustine.
It was fortunate not only for these poor prisoners, it maybe, but
for the whole Indian than question, that the officer under whose
charge they were put, and who had assisted in their capture, Captain
R. H. Pratt,
of the Tenth Cavalry, U.S.A., was a mail with room in his nature for
the united strength and humanity which are at the bottom of this work,
whose results have placed him at the head of the most important single
movement ever made in. be half of Indian education.
Group of Indian Young men after Education
Delicate womanly hands of both North and South,
enlisted by the captain's earnestness, freely joined to help his work
when the dark minds were roused to some curiosity as to the mystery of
the gay-colored alphabet he had hung on their prison wall. And when,
at the end of three years, the United States decided to send the
prisoners home, some would not let go their work. The War Department's
permission was secured for as many of the prisoners to remain as were
willing to go to school, and could be provided for by private
benevolence. Twenty-two of the youngest thus staid, and of these
seven-teen were received at Hampton Institute, on request of Captain
Pratt, for the sake of its industrial training.
It was not, therefore, in utter dismay treat the
inmates of Hampton were roused from their slumbers one April night by
a Steamboat's war-whoop, heralding the midnight raid of sixty
ex-warriors upon their peaceful shores, and hastened out to meet the
invaders with hot coffee instead of rifle-balls, to welcome some of
them as new students, and bid the rest godspeed to their homes in
Indian Territory.
The bearing of the new effort upon the whole question
of Indian management was early recognized at Washington. By special
act of Congress authorizing the Secretary of War to detail au army
officer for special duty with regard to Indian education, Captain
Pratt's valuable assistance was secured in inaugurating the work at
Hampton. The Indian Commissioner, the Secretaries of War and the
Interior and the President were among the most interested visitors to
the Indian class-rooms and workshops, and have given the enterprise
all the sympathy and patience for preliminary steps. A peripatetic
class was thus devised to relieve the tedium of the school-room, and
had, to speak literally and figuratively, quite a run. It usually
began with leap-frog, and then went gaily on to find its " books in the running brooks, sermons
in stones," etc. Geography is taught with molding sand and iron
raised dissecting maps; arithmetic at first with blocks. The Indians
are particularly fond of each, and the advanced class is quite expert
in adding up columns of figures as long as a ledger page, and equal to
practical problems of every-day trade and simple business accounts.
"Look at me; I will give you the road."
Thus helped by
willing hands, red, white, and black, and joined from time to time by
companions, from their own and other tribes, till they now number over
seventy, the Indian students have been two years on the new road, and
Hampton now has contrasts to show as convincing, if not as dramatic,
as those of St. Augustine. It is difficult, indeed, to associate the
gaunt young gamins that. sat about in listless heaps two
years ago with the bright, busy groups of boys and girls at study or
play, or singing over their work.
The effort has been for a natural,
all-round growth rather than a rapid one. Books, of course, are for
a long time of no avail, and object-teaching, pictures, and
blackboards take their place, with every other device that ingenuity
is equal to, often on the spur of the moment, to keep up the
interest and attention of the undisciplined minds that, with the
best intentions and strong desire to know English.
Nothing, however, can equal the charm of the printed
page. It has the old mystery of "the paper that talks." "If I can not
read when I go home," said a young brave, "my people will laugh at
me." The gratitude of the St. Augustines over their first test-book in
geography was touching. Reading, writing, and spelling are taught
together by the word method and charts. Later, attractive little
primaries have been very useful, and unbound numbers of children's
magazines, such as are used in the Quincy schools. Most of the Dakotas
can now read at sight as simple English as is found in these, and are
beginning to take pleasure in reading or in listening to easy versions
of our childhood classics of Robinson Crusoe, and
Christopher Columbus, and George Washington with his little hatchet.
One of their teachers who tried the hatchet story on them in
preparation for the 22d of February says: " Such attentive listeners I
never saw before. They were perfectly enraptured. They understood
everything, even to the moral. A few days after this I was annoyed by
talking in the class. When I asked who did it, every one blamed his
neighbor. I said, `Now, boys, don't tell a lie. Who will be a George
Washington?' Two boys at once stood up and said, 'We did it."'
