Carver's teaching and vision for education (1896 on).

Chapter 7 - Equipment

 
Professor Carver’s first Agriculture class in his shack of a classroom was made up of thirteen young men who, it is quite safe to say, did not register out of eagerness to farm. He was speaking years later at a black college run by one of those thirteen, Martin Menafee, when he suggested half humorously that some of his early students might have been fooled into registering. “So many of us,” he said, “like high-sounding titles and big names. Our first impression of a school is a place where we can study… so-called high things... For example, a young man is asked if he wants farming and says… emphatically, ‘No,… I get enough of that at home.’ ‘Well, I will give you agriculture, how about that?’ ‘Yes, sir, I will take that,’ and he goes to work perfectly satisfied.”

The farming they had gotten at home had most often been the blistering heat and labor of cotton picking, toil their parents had done on slave plantations where field workers had the lowest status. Booker Washington told of finding that “the chief ambition among a large proportion” of Tuskegee’s first students had been “to get an education so that they would not have to work any longer with their hands.” This was not laziness; they had simply been saturated with the tragically damaging notion in the U.S. that working with one’s hands is menial.

 
Washington went on to say that the students “were all willing to learn the right thing as soon as it was shown them what was right.” They had accepted the rightness of carpentry, tailoring and millinery as manual skills they could use to rise; but farming bore the brunt of all of America’s class stigmas. “People… have come to think of the farmer,” Carver lamented, “as a man with a great wide-crowned hat… huge rough boots all covered with dust or mud;… trousers coarse,… untidy and… stained with soil,… manners awkward, uncouth and ludicrous, and… of very limited intelligence… On the contrary,” he argued, “to be a farmer… requires the highest intelligence—and the highest type of intelligence… He who would be a farmer must deal with,… understand, and… acquire… mastery over all the puzzling forces of nature.”

Menafee said that from that first day, Carver had him “inspired along agricultural lines.” “It was… a great mystery… among the students,” marveled another class member, “how he came to know so much of people and things… We could not find… anything from nature—… a blade of grass, a leaf,… a kind of soil—… that he could not explain or analyze.” To test him, he recalled, some of the boys “brought to him a bug… we had made up by taking the head of one beetle, the wings of another, and the body of still another. When we… asked him to tell us what kind of bug it was, he examined it and casually and immediately replied, ‘It looks to me like a kind of humbug.’”

 
It was the day of small beginnings,” Carver recalled. “I had nothing much to work with.” The microscope and its case from his I.A.C. professors being all there was to his lab, he wrote to them that they could “scarcely appreciate” the usefulness of their gift to him. “I had to make my own apparatus,” he recalled. “I went to the trash pile… and started my laboratory with bottles, old fruit jars and any other thing… I could use.” Cracked china bowls and heavy teacups he made serve as mortars; he restored old lanterns, converted small-necked ink bottles into Bunsen burners, poked holes in pieces of tin to make screens for grading and sampling soils, used bits of reed for pipettes and hung up a horseshoe for a classroom bell. “The equipment,” he said, “had to be in the head of the man and not in the laboratory.”

“A make-believe education,” Booker Washington once declared, “may suffice for a white man, but a Negro who has to carve out his own destiny must be taught order, system, and persistent useful effort.” Carver observed colleges and academies awarding young men and women, he said “titles, badges, diplomas and newspaper puffs,… only to find later on that many proved to be of little service to the world, other than… making an improved dummy out of their bodies for the tailor and dressmaker,… the milliner and hat-maker… to display their fashions upon… Too many of us”, he said, “get wisdom without the understanding of what it is for; then we become”—he pointed to his head—“top heavy… In plain language,” he went on, “John or Mary… is really a bigger fool now than when we sent him or her to school… They filled the head with a great deal of profound profundity called wisdom and failed to get sufficient understanding to hitch… [it] onto the… practical problems of life which arise daily... on the farm, in the shops,… kitchen,… classroom, office, [and] factory. The study of equilateral parallax and the theory of atoms,” he concluded, “will not get you anywhere, if you stop there, but you must know where they belong—hitch them all to something; something that the world wants done, and there will always be a place for you.”