Not going to lie, this was pretty heavy reading for me. I'm not too sure that I understood more than 25% of what he was talking about, but there were a few sections that "stuck out" to me... And, that's what I'll focus on since I'm not too sure I'd be able to give a very accurate general account of the text.
There were several important sections that pointed to previous works we've read in class thus far, with the first one being the following from the first page: "I would note that Stetson also fixes upon education as a cause, and possible cure, for crime: a purely 'intellectual' schooling has pushed out 'religious and moral training,' expanding literacy but not moral character (324-3)."
The other excerpt I plan on discussing is from the second page, as follows: "'Going to School... is Idleness, and the longer Boys continue in this easy sort of Life, the more unfit they'll be when grown up for downright Labour...'"
One of the major themes of this class is concerned with the struggle between the idea of the "school culture" and the "shop culture" in terms of education, not only directly referenced in the McMath essay we read at the beginning of the year but also very heavily by Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery. The McMath essay goes into detail about the origins of Georgia Tech and how the school was founded, putting an emphasis on the fact that Tech was originally defined as more of a "shop" school than "intellectual" one, where students used their hands to learn rather than be consumed by their textbooks so they could have a more realistic approach to enginneering and the like once they entered the "real world" after school. Washington also seems to put some stock into this approach by promoting labor from his students at Tuskegee Institute and criticizing the symbolic boy reading French grammar in a garden of weeds. As to my opinion on the issue, I am a proponent of "hands-on" work if it is a matter of personal choice; however, I do not believe I would have been cut out for somewhere like Tuskegee or the early Georgia Tech because I am not a "hands-on" kind of girl... Kind of a tangent, but I'll move on. The point I want to make is that it seems as if the quoted individuals above need to re-evaluate their situations... Lucky for Washington, he no longer had to do hard labor as Founder and President of Tuskegee, so I imagine it wasn't so difficult to make others do it when he did not. Additionally, the individual of the second quote probably came from a decent family, knew he was going to get an intellectual education and did not have to concern himself with the prospect of working in a coal mine or factory for the remainder of his life. Yes, if he did have that to look forward to, he might be a little more sympathetic to those individuals who simply want a taste of something else besides hard labor for the first and last time in their lives. I don't know what kind of point I'm trying to make here... Just want to draw attention to two sections that impacted me, for whatever reason.
Maybe I just wanted to rant. Who knows?
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I think that you bring up a good point, and possible the question of who has the right to decide on what education is the best. Booker T. Washington made the decision that his students would do hard labor, but he no longer had to, however he did as a child and look where it had gotten him. So maybe his reasonings are more valid then the reasonings of the author of the second quote who does not actually understand the true nature of hard labor never having actually worked in that position before. So who truly gets to decide what kind of education is right for students, other then the students, and maybe that is one advantage to college over elementary schooling. People can make the choice of which college they want to attend based on how it is run. You would not have liked Tusegee to begin with, but you would not have choosen it as your school, so are you the ultimate decider on what the best education is?
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