as determined to have the
students do not only the agricultural and domestic work, but to
have them erect their own buildings. My plan was to have them, while
performing this service, taught the latest and best methods of labour,
so that the school would not only get the benefit of their efforts,
but the students themselves would be taught to see not only utility in
labour, but beauty and dignity; would be taught, in fact, how to lift
labour up from mere drudgery and toil, and would learn to love work for
its own sake. My plan was not to teach them to work in the old way,
but to show them how to make the forces of nature--air, water, steam,
electricity, horse-power--assist them in their labour.

At first many advised against the experiment of having the buildings
erected by the labour of the students, but I was determined to stick to
it. I told those who doubted the wisdom of the plan that I knew that
our first buildings would not be so comfortable or so complete in their
finish as buildings erected by the experienced hands of outside workmen,
but that in the teaching of civilization, self-help, and self-reliance,
the erection of buildings by the students themselves would more than
compensate for any lack of comfort or fine finish.

I further told those who doubted the wisdom of this plan, that the
majority of our students came to us in poverty, from the cabins of the
cotton, sugar, and rice plantations of the South, and that while I knew
it would please the students very much to place them at once in finely
constructed buildings, I felt that it would be following out a more
natural process of development to teach them how to construct their own
buildings. Mistakes I knew would be made, but these mistakes would teach
us valuable lessons for the future.

During the now nineteen years' existence of the Tuskegee school, the
plan of having the buildings erected by student labour has been adhered
to. In this time forty buildings, counting small and large, have been
built, and all except four are almost wholly the product of student
labour. As an additional result, hundreds of men are now scattered
throughout the South who received their knowledge of mechanics while
being taught how to erect these buildings. Skill and knowledge are now
handed down from one set of students to another in this way, until
at the present time a building of any description or size can be
constructed wholly by our instructors and students, from th