| Abstrakt: |
In 1902, the publishing company, Doubleday, Page & Co., published a collection of Sunday evening talks by Booker T. Washington to students and faculty at Tuskegee Institute.1 The collection, Character Building, offers Washington's thoughts on various topics, such as helping others, how to deal with challenges, influencing others by example, calling things by their right names, education that educates, the importance of being reliable, the highest education, keeping your word, the gospel of service, the cultivation of stable habits, individual responsibility, character as shown in service to others, getting down to mother earth, and a number of other topics.2 The title of this article is taken from Washington's (1902/2008) talk, "to would-be teachers." In the following example, Washington shows how in the early days of establishing Tuskegee, he was able to convince students to clear land by doing it himself: Nearly all the work of getting the new location ready for school purposes was done by the students after school was over in the afternoon. (p. 9) It is important to remember that Tuskegee was founded eighteen years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.3 I mention this because Washington (1902/2008) set up Tuskegee to help black people find a way out of a slavelike dependence mentality. APPLYING WASHINGTON'S APPROACH TO CHARACTER BUILDING In this section, I apply Washington's (1902/ 2008) notion of character building to a modern issue to learn how it deals with issues outside of its time. [Extracted from the article] |
