Booker T. Washington

In this we have been successful to a degree that makes me feel safe in saying that the season now has a new meaning, not only through all that immediate region, but, in a measure, wherever our graduates have gone.

In the school we made a special effort to teach our students the meaning of Christmas, and to give them lessons in its proper observance.

It was often pathetic to note the gifts of the older coloured people, most of whom had spent their best days in slavery.

When they saw that I was not afraid or ashamed to work, they began to assist with more enthusiasm.

Since this was true, we wanted to be careful not to educate our students out of sympathy with agricultural life, so that they would be attracted from the country to the cities, and yield to the temptation of trying to live by their wits.

Aside from this, we wanted to give them such a practical knowledge of some one industry, together with the spirit of industry, thrift, and economy, that they would be sure of knowing how to make a living after they had left us.

I had to summon a good deal of courage to take a student who had been studying cube root and “banking and discount,” and explain to him that the wisest thing for him to do first was thoroughly master the multiplication table.

While they could locate the Desert of Sahara or the capital of China on an artificial globe, I found out that the girls could not locate the proper places for the knives and forks on an actual dinner-table, or the places on which the bread…

They were all willing to learn the right thing as soon as it was shown them what was right.

Notwithstanding what I have said about them in these respects, I have never seen a more earnest and willing company of young men and women than these students were.

One subject which they liked to talk about, and tell me that they had mastered, in arithmetic, was “banking and discount,” but I soon found out that neither they nor almost any one in the neighbourhood in which they had lived had ever had…

The students who came first seemed to be fond of memorizing long and complicated “rules” in grammar and mathematics, but had little thought or knowledge of applying these rules to their everyday affairs of their life.