less, and
teacherless school came eventually to have all four of these obvious
requisites, but it still lacked a fundamental requirement for the
effective fulfillment of its purpose. It lacked a boarding department
where the students might learn to live. In his tours among the people
Mr. Washington had found the great majority in the plantation
districts living on fat pork and corn bread, and sleeping in
one-room cabins. They planted nothing but cotton, bought their food at
the nearest village or town market instead of raising it, and lived
under conditions where the fundamental laws of hygiene and decent
social intercourse were both unknown and impossible of application.
The young men and women from such homes must be taught how to live in
houses with more than one room, how to keep their persons and their
surroundings clean, how to sleep in a bed between sheets, how not only
to raise but to prepare, serve, and eat a healthful variety of proper
food at regular and stated intervals, to say nothing of a trade by
which to maintain themselves both during their course and after
graduation as well as the usual book learning of the ordinary school.
Obviously they could not be taught these things unless they lived day
and night on the school grounds instead of boarding about with people
whose standards of living were very little if at all higher than those
of their homes. Accordingly volunteers were called for, and the
students made an excavation under their new brick building which was
made into a basement kitchen and dining-room. As Mr. Washington says
in "Up from Slavery," "We had nothing but the students and their
appetites with which to begin a boarding department." As soon as this
boarding department was established it became possible to influence
directly the lives of the students during the entire twenty-four hours
of the day. From then on each student was required to have and to use
a toothbrush. Mr. Washington has since remarked that, in his opinion,
the toothbrush is the most potent single instrument of civilization.
Then, too, it was possible for him to begin to enforce this injunction
taken from one of his now well-known Sunday night talks, "Make a study
of the preparation of food. See to it that a certain ceremony, a
certain importance, be attached to the partaking of the food----" This
exhortation sounds so commonplace as to be scarcely noticed by the
average reader, but just put yourself in the place of one of t