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!
"Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work."
"What thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might."
Public education is at present passing
through a transition stage. The emphasis in
the school courses of previous generations
was upon the culture of the mind and the
appeal was made for a high classical
training, but now that the work on the farms
as well as in the shops is largely done by
costly machinery, the emphasis of school
work is being rapidly transferred to the
hand, and the appeal is for manual or
vocational training and domestic science.
Its aim is to reach and train for a
successful self-supporting career, the great
majority of young people who cannot pursue
their studies beyond the fifth to the eighth
grades.
Our country has made wonderful progress in
the arts and sciences including new
inventions, during the last half century.
The scope of the "Natural Philosophy" and
"Familiar Science" of a few years ago has
been very greatly enlarged.
The country has been spanned and crossed in
every direction by great systems of standard
and interurban railways. Automobiles are in
popular use on the highways and powerful
tractors do the threshing, corn-shelling and
plowing on the farm. Oil engines and
electric motors are in use on the farms and
in the homes of the people. The last of the
good agricultural lands have been opened for
settlement and are now occupied.
Agriculture, animal husbandry, horticulture,
dairying and even housekeeping have been
reduced to a science, by the statement of
essential principles, the same as in
architecture and civil-engineering. Success
in them depends on a practical knowledge of
the art, as well as a theoretical knowledge
of the science.
A few years ago the pressing demand was for
teachers and normal instructors for their
preparation. The demand for teachers in
constantly increasing numbers continues, but
it is now rivaled by the present demand for
young people, who understand the principles
of mechanical construction, whose hands have
been trained to use costly and delicate
machinery aright and properly care for it.
Success and self-support on the farm as well
as elsewhere now require the trained hand as
well as the intelligent mind.
Independent Homes
Self-support is essential to the possession
of a permanent and happy home.
No home can be permanent while there is no
assured means of support. While the father
depends on uncertain day labor and the
mother knows little or nothing of economy in
the household and even less about the care,
training and discipline of children, there
can be but little progress made in the home
or Church life.
Dependent homes mean dependent Churches,
while prosperous homes mean self-supporting
Churches. In this fact is found a great
motive for the Church in her educational
missionary work to make suitable provision
for teaching the young the useful or
necessary arts of life, and some knowledge
of the sciences, while offering to them the
bread and the water of life, through the
establishment of Christian educational
institutions.
Domestic Training
A recent debate in the House of Congress at
Washington developed a unanimous sentiment,
that a good cook is more cultured than a
pianist, and that girls should not be
allowed piano lessons until they learn how
to cook good biscuits. We have read of girls
"whose heads were stuffed with useless
knowledge, but not one in twenty knew the
things that would be serviceable to her
through life. They could not sew or cook."
At Oak Hill it is different. Every girl at
ten begins to take her monthly turn in
learning to cook, mend and sew. She is
taught the art and the rules of these useful
employments the same as those of reading,
writing and arithmetic in the school room.
The business of housekeeping is thus
early introduced to the mind of the child,
to awaken its thoughtfulness and develop
efficiency in the future work of managing a
home. This connects the teaching of the
school with the life of the home. It makes
the instruction a real and practical help
instead of being merely theoretical. It
affords pleasant and profitable employment
to the pupils during spare moments that
would otherwise be lost in idle loafing or
play.
The business of housekeeping is attracting
the attention of schools of learning and of
legislatures more and more every year. Some
states, like Indiana, are making large
investments to promote training in domestic
science in the schools of the state. The
great results achieved in recent years by
health regulations, in checking and
suppressing contagious diseases, have
greatly increased the scope of this
instruction. It now includes in the higher
schools, the new applications of the
principles of nutrition, the chemistry of
cleaning and the laws of hygiene, or health.
Highland Park College
At Highland Park College, Des Moines, Iowa,
having an enrollment of 2,500 young people
in the capital city of one of our most
highly favored states in the valley of the
Mississippi, ninety-five per cent of them
never go beyond the seventh and eighth
grades and only two per cent go to higher
institutions of learning. This eminently
successful institution attracts young people
from all parts of our land and this last
year from twelve foreign countries. 500
young men, one fifth of its enrollment are
in shops. This institution is the embodiment
of the genius and a splendid monument to the
memory of its founder, Dr. O. F. Longwell,
who for twenty-four years served as its
president, having previously secured a
remarkable development of the Western Normal
college at Shenandoah.
Booker T. Washington
The industrial scheme of Booker T.
Washington at Tuskeegee is an intelligent
Negro's idea of what the illiterate negro
needs to help himself. It is undoubtedly the
best scheme to enable him to attain self
support.
Started as a private enterprise its
patronage soon over-taxed its equipment of
buildings and attracted public aid from the
legislature of Alabama, and later large
gifts from many wealthy people in our larger
northern cities, some of whom endeavor to
visit it once a year to note its annual
progress and needs.
The remarkable success of this industrial
institution and the immeasurable amount of
good it has already done, during the
lifetime of its founder, in bettering the
temporal welfare of thousands of colored
people in the south, have tended to make it
the most prominent illustration of practical
and successful industrial education among
the colored people of this or any other
land.
Sam Daly
Sam Daly of Tuscaloosa, an illiterate
janitor of the University of Alabama,
previous to 1903, and died at Atlanta, while
attending the Presbyterian General Assembly
in May 1913, is a splendid illustration of
what one may do for the good of his race.
At the time of his death he left to be
cared for by others a 500 acre farm of his
own, fourteen miles from town on which he
was voluntarily caring for 270 convicted and
vice steeped colored boys from the cities of
that state.
He established an industrial school for boys
on his own farm, to save convicted and bad
boys from prison; received them from the
police judges and conveyed them to the farm.
They had become a nuisance and burden to the
public, but he housed, fed and clothed this
large family without receiving a dollar of
public funds of Jefferson County; and from
the Church, only forty dollars, for a
sleeping room for them and the salary of a
teacher. The rest of their support was
obtained from their daily toil on the farm.
At last the number of boys and the cost of
keeping them became so great, he was
compelled for their sakes to put a mortgage
of eighteen hundred dollars on his farm.
This impelled him to go to the Assembly
(South) to make an appeal for funds.
Unfortunately he suddenly became ill and
died before he was able to make his appeal.
His last words were: "Take care-take good
care ob mah little niggahs!"
He had saved, by industrial occupation and
farming, for good citizenship in Alabama,
three hundred boys convicted of crimes and
misdemeanors. It was a sad disappointment to
him that he was unable to present to the
Assembly an appeal on behalf of those still
under his care.
Sam Daly was a good janitor, but when he
began to make good men of useless and bad
boys, his value to the state of Alabama was
increased many fold. This brief record of
his generous, energetic and heroic work is
made that it may serve as an inspiration to
devise other similar ways of being useful
and helpful.
This site
includes some historical materials that may imply negative stereotypes
reflecting the culture or language of a particular period or place. These
items are presented as part of the historical record and should not be
interpreted to mean that the WebMasters in any way endorse the stereotypes
implied .
Choctaw Freedmen and Oak Hill Industrial
Academy, 1914, Robert Elliott Flickinger
