His own teaching at Tuskegee is unique. He lectures to his
advanced students on the art of right living, not out of
text-books, but straight out of life. Then he sends them into the
country to visit Negro families. Such a student will come back
with a minute report of the way in which the family that he has
seen lives, what their earnings are, what they do well and what
they do ill; and he will explain how they might live better. He
constructs a definite plan for the betterment of that particular
family out of the resources that they have. Such a student, if he
be bright, will profit more by an experience like this than he
could profit by all the books on sociology and economics that
ever were written. I talked with a boy at Tuskegee who had made
such a study as this, and I could not keep from contrasting his
knowledge and enthusiasm with what I heard in a class room at a
Negro university in one of the Southern cities, which is
conducted on the idea that a college course will save the soul.
Here the class was reciting a lesson from an abstruse text-book
on economics, reciting it by rote, with so obvious a failure to
assimilate it that the waste of labour was pitiful.
I asked Mr. Washington years ago what he regarded as the most
important result of his work, and he replied:
"I do not know which to put first, the effect of Tuskegee's work
on the Negro, or the effect on the attitude of the white man to
the Negro.
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