Putting the Most Into Life

by Booker T. Washington

A Word to Prospective Teachers About Putting the Most into Their Work

The large problem of the teacher is not to impart knowledge and maintain discipline. The larger problem is to bring school life and real life into closer contact. With the average teacher, as with the average student, there is very little connection between the school and life as it is actually lived every day outside the school-room; and as long as this is true there will be ground for reasonable and just criticism.

In the primary school, the intermediary school and the high school there is often little, if any, connection between life as it is lived in the shop, on the farm, in business and in the home. It cannot but prove of mutual advantage if the teacher can bring school life into actual touch with the life of the people about him. The interest of the parents will be increased just in proportion as they find that the teacher is making his instruction stimulate and vitalize conditions outside the school-room.

It is difficult for the parent of the country child to note the results of education through the usual processes and channels of knowledge. Colored parents depend upon seeing the results of education in ways not true of the white parent. It is important then that the colored teacher in this generation should give special attention to bringing school life into closer touch with real life. Any education is to my mind “high” which enables the individual to do the very best work for the people by whom he is surrounded. Any education is “low” that does not make for character and effective service.

The average teacher in the public schools is very likely to yield to the temptation of thinking that he is educating an individual when he is teaching him to reason out examples in Arithmetic, to prove propositions in Geometry and to recite pages of History. He conceives this to be the end of education. Herein is the sad deficiency in many teachers who are not able to use History, Arithmetic, Geometry as means to an end. They get the idea that the student who has mastered a certain number of pages in a text-book is educated, forgetting that text-books are at best but tools, and in many cases ineffective tools, for the development of man. Modern educators are getting more and more away from books. Now this will be hard for the average teacher who has worked out all the problems in Arithmetic and proved them by the answers in the book, but I believe that the best educational thought tends toward the study of real things and not mere books.

One of the ways of bringing the school into closer touch with society is to make school surroundings, including the grounds and buildings, as homelike and as attractive as possible. The school-rooms are in too many cases cold and barren. In schools of this sort there is little connection between the home and the school. I believe that the teacher should study the home surroundings of his pupils and become more intimately acquainted with the parents. When teachers are able to make their school-rooms inviting and are able to project their influence into the home life of the pupils, there will be few absentees or truants. A child cannot be expected to leave a comfortable, attractive and convenient home to go into a dull, inconvenient, uncomfortable school-room, nor can it be expected that pupils will leave comfortable chairs at home and go into school-rooms where they must sit on stools with their feet six or eight inches from the floor.

It is hardly necessary to say that the teacher should set the example for the student in the matter of cleanliness and neatness. The teacher who would preach against grease spots, rents in clothes and buttonless jackets must see to it that he is himself without fault in these respects. When I go into a school and notice that the instructor has buttons off his coat, I am at once convinced that he is not the right teacher. I do not believe that there is much that the student can learn at that school that can be put into practice in real life. I believe that the teacher should not only set an example himself, but that he should go further than this: he should see that every boy and girl in his school is familiar with the practical applications of soap and water, and knows the work of the tooth-brush and the darning-needle. Some parents may at first resent this encroachment upon their special domain, but persistence in an endeavor of this sort will finally cause the parents to look upon the teacher as a new force in the community. The average parent cannot appreciate how many examples Johnny has worked that day, how many questions in History he has answered; but when he says, “Mother, I cannot go back to that school until all the buttons are sewed on my coat,” the parent will at once become conscious of school influence in the home. This will be the best kind of advertisement. The button propaganda tends to make the teacher a power in the community. A few lessons in applied Chemistry will not be amiss. Take grease spots, for example. The teacher who with tact can teach his pupils to keep even threadbare clothes neatly brushed and free from grease spots is extending the school influence into the home and is adding immeasurably to the self-respect of the home.

In the school-houses in the city, and in many of the larger towns and country districts, janitors do all the work of cleaning. This may be necessary in city schools, where it is not possible for the children to do all the work of beautifying and cleaning the school building, but when all this work is done by outsiders the children are robbed of part of their instruction and they thus lose a very important lesson in cleanliness and order which it is the duty of the teacher to give. Think of the time lost in the average family looking for the broom when the time comes to sweep the floor. At this time all business suspends. Mother cries out first, “Where is the broom?” The older sister cries to John and Susie and Jane, “Where is the broom?” and that kind of thing goes on every day in the week and year. It takes the average family from ten to twelve minutes every day to find the broom. Now, we should teach a different lesson in our schools. We can teach in the first place that there are two ways for the broom to be put up, a proper and an improper way. We can teach the children that there is a place for the dust-pan and the dust-cloth and the match-box. The match-box is another thing that suspends business. Every night when the matches are wanted, everything goes helter-skelter. This is a larger problem than the broom, there being absolutely no light on the subject. The children should be taught that there must be a definite place for the broom and for the match-box, and it is surprising how quickly these lessons will be taken from the school-room into the home. Even the listless parents will be roused to interest by such practical teaching. The child who goes to school in a room that is clean and attractive will not long be content to live in a home that is dirty and disorderly.

I was recently in a school-room in South Carolina. The teacher had a reputation for being a well-fitted instructor, and I expected much of him. He was teaching the children by the latest methods. The children sang well, they recited their lessons well, but the fact that one third of the plastering was missing made the greatest impression on me. I could not detect the slightest attempt on the part of the teacher or students to see that the plastering was restored. I should have suspended school a day or two until the plastering could be replaced, rather than teach day after day by silent approval a lesson of disorder. If the teacher is careless, the pupils will accept his standards and go through life in an indifferent, slipshod manner. If from the first day they enter school they are surrounded with object lessons of order and cleanliness, more will have been done to educate them in a large and helpful way than if they had centred their interest in books alone.

Order and beauty are sacrificed in many of our schools because one third or one fourth of the window-glass is out. Sometimes I have seen obsolete hats and discarded dresses doing duty in the absence of window-glass or window-panes knocked out in order that the stovepipe might be run through the broken place. The child never outlives the impression made by such a sight. The parents will join their children in helping to patch broken plastering if the teacher will take the lead. When the plastering is mended, a few pictures should be placed on the walls, and in this work the parents’ coöperation can be depended upon. Teachers must put not less conscience but more thought into the work for the children to whose lives they are giving direction. By putting into their work more of their better selves, more of their personality, teachers will add not only to their own happiness and usefulness, but will be doing real work toward hastening the coming of that kingdom for which they daily pray.