148 CHAPTER 5: Historical Development of American Education
Bettmann/Corbis
As a student at Hampton Institute, Washington endorsed industrial education, the educational philosophy of Armstrong, his mentor. Armstrong believed that African American youth should be trained as skilled domestic servants, farmers, and vocational workers in trades rather than educated for the professions (Photo 5.2). Washington subscribed to Armstrong’s philosophy of moral and economic “uplift” through work. In 1881, Washington was appointed principal of the educational institute that the Alabama legislature had established for African Americans at Tuskegee. Washington shaped the Tuskegee curriculum according to his belief that southern African Americans were a landless agricultural class. He wanted to create an economic base—primarily in farming but also in vocational trades—that would provide jobs. Even if they were low-level jobs, Washington believed they would build an economic foundation that African Americans could use to climb slowly upward. Thus, Tuskegee’s curriculum emphasized basic academic, agricultural, and occupational skills; the values of hard work; and the dignity of labor. It encouraged students to become elementary-school teachers, farmers, and artisans, but discouraged entry to higher education and participation in law and politics. Entry into professional education and political action, Washington believed, were premature and would conflict with the South’s dominant white power structure. Washington, a dynamic and popular platform speaker, developed a symbiotic racial theory that blacks and whites were mutually dependent economically but could remain separate socially. In 1885, Washington voiced his philosophy to an approving white audience at the Cotton Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, when he said, “In all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”50 Today, Washington is a controversial figure in history. Defenders say he made the best of a bad situation and that, although he compromised on racial issues, he preserved and slowly advanced African Americans’ educational opportunities. Critics see Washington as the head of a large educational machine that he ruthlessly controlled
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Photo 5.2 Students at the Tuskegee Institution in Alabama, where Booker T. Washington emphasized industrial education.
Booker T. Washington, Selected Speeches of Booker T. Washington (New York: Doubleday, 1932); and Washington, Character Building (Radford, VA: Wilder Publications, 2008).
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