Booker T. Washington: Advocate for Black Education

Historians David Beito of the University of Alabama and Jonathan Bean of Southern Illinois University have an interesting article on African-American educator and civic leader Booker T. Washington in the March 23 National Review.

To progressives, Washington's creed of self-help, opportunity, business achievement, and rejection of self-pity wasn't politically correct. Washington sought a "blotting out" of racial prejudice in civic and business life. But he didn't think African-Americans should rely for their economic advancement on government aid and political remedies. As Beito and Bean point out, "Liberals don't have much use for Washington." He was simply too bourgeois.

Washington succeeded in life in important measure because of his diligence in school, at the Hampton Institute. He went on to be the first president of the Tuskegee Institute.

Beito and Bean (drawing on the important historical work on Washington of Robert J. Norrell) point out that Washington had "no small role" in the "spectacular" rise in African-American literacy in the American South between the end of the Civil War and the early years of the twentieth century. Among other things, he encouraged philanthropist Julius Rosenwald (of Sears Roebuck) to contribute money toward the building of thousands schools for African-Americans throughout the South.

Washington stressed effort and intellectual disciple in school as necessary to student progress. Beito and Bean quote Washington, in a 1898 letter to a Birmingham newspaper, writing:

Each day convinces me that the salvation of the Negro in this country will be in his cultivation of habits of thrift, economy, honesty, the acquiring of education, Christian character, property, and industrial skill.

That same year, Washington made this point again in a speech in Chicago:

[W]e in the black race [shall acquire] property, habits of thift, economy, intelligence and character, [and each make] himself of individual worth in his own community.

Beito and Bean quote Washington as writing that "any man, white or black, with education" can find a job or create work for himself if he is willing "to begin at the very bottom."

Washington's message was a gospel of self-help through hard work, determination -- and education.

UPDATE (3/21/09) You have to have a subscription to National Review to read its article online. But Beito and Bean have also published a related piece on History News Network (HNN), which unfortunately doesn't cover Washington's views on education as fully.

Character Counts -- And Can Motivate Students

The March 13, 2009 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education has an interview with Stanford education professor Bill Damon on character education.

Damon holds that now and in the past almost all parents and teachers believed that there were certain personal virtues that it was necessary for all students to acquire, including "respect, honesty, diligence, kindness, fair-mindedness, [and] temperance."

But in the 1980s, Damon says, he was troubled about moral relativism that was influencing American intellectuals and that was "beginning to trickle down to schools, the media, and other places that shape the values of our children."

By the end of the 1980s, Damon says:

Self-esteem had become the holy grail of child rearing, and parents were advised to avoid "traumatizing" their (supposedly) fragile children by asserting authority and urging children to strive for excellence, take on challenges, and control their behavior according to ethical strictures.

Lately, Damon notes criticism has come from a different direction. He points out that certain critics of "values clarification" and other character education programs have argued that they can be so weak that they are actually subversive of acquiring the virtues.

In fact, the most searing criticism these days has come from [those who have] the concern that character educators fail to promote moral standards strongly enough. One critic [sociologist James Davison Hunter] has complained that the programs do not deal sufficiently with matters of good and evil and thus are actually leading to "the death of character"!

Damon's current aim is "to make a case for the importance of purpose in youth development":

Students learn bits of knowledge that they may see little use for; and from time to time someone at a school assembly urges them to go and do great things in the world. When it comes to drawing connections between the two — that is, showing students how a math formula or a history lesson could be important for some purpose that a student may wish to pursue — schools too often leave their students flat....

The message of my work is that schools need to give students a better understanding of why they are in school in the first place — that is, how the skills students are learning can help them accomplish their life goals. That is the only way to really motivate students in a lasting way....

Damon says he has found that "men and women who have done exceptionally good work in their careers" could readily answer "questions about what they were trying to accomplish and why....[T]here was an elevated purpose, always on their minds, that drove their daily efforts."