INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION ~
The name most closely associated with Industrial Education is that of Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute. Washington espoused the philosophy that black people needed not only to learn academics, but to become skill in industrial labor, such as farming, carpentry, brickmaking, etc. to assure them a job when they returned to their communities. When he founded the Tuskegee Institute, he had his students do all the manual labor of building the buildings for the school, from digging the foundation to making and laying the bricks to installing the electrical fixtures. His critics, among them W.E.B. DuBois, claimed that he was contributing to keeping African-Americans subordinate to whites in the social order by training them to be manual laborers. Booker T. Washington felt that he was teaching his students not only self-reliance but "how to lift labour up from mere drudgery and toil, ...to love work for it's own sake. ....how to make the forces of nature - air, water, steam, electricity, horse-power - assist them in their labour." (Up from Slavery, Ch. X)
Monday, March 3, 2008
Industrial Education
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1 comment:
A good post.
Washington wasn't just training manual laborers. He was training people to be businessmen and skilled workers. What he didn't offer was courses in high culture: Greek, French, Philosophy, etc. DuBois felt that higher education was essential for the education of what he called the "talented tenth."
Industrial Education is still a part of our modern educational system. The balance between liberal arts and industrial arts is still being decided.
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