fly because the utility of mathematics is made vivid,
and vigorous interest aroused by its immediate application in class-room
and shop to problems arising in the industries. Our students are not
stuffed like sausages with rules and definitions, mathematical or other;
they ascend to general principles through the analysis of concrete
cases.

English serves to represent the group of studies that exert a
liberalizing influence upon the student, that possess a cultural rather
than a technical value. From oral lessons in language in the lower
classes, the students advance to a modicum of technical grammar in the
middle of the course, and hence to the rhetoric of the Senior year.
Moreover, an unusually large amount of written composition is insisted
upon, the compositions being used not merely to discipline the student
in chaste feeling, consecutive thinking, and efficient expression, but
also to sharpen his powers of observation and to stimulate him to pick
out of his daily experience the elements that are significant. School
readers are used in the lower classes because the readers present
economically and compactly a whole gamut of literary styles and forms.
These readers are importantly supplemented and gradually superseded by
certain classics appropriate to the grades. The classic, whether
Robinson Crusoe, or Ivanhoe, Rip Van Winkle, the House of Seven Gables,
or The Merchant of Venice, presents an artistic whole, and permits the
students to acquire some sense of literary structure. The dominant
motive in literary instruction is, perhaps, esthetic, but I am convinced
that the ethical influence of this instruction at Tuskegee is profound
and abiding.

However liberal the provisions of the academic curriculum, the value of
the department is finally determined by the devotion and ability of the
teachers. Universities and normal schools, and the seasoned staffs of
public-school systems--from these sources, whether in Massachusetts,
California, or Tennessee, Principal Washington has gathered a force of
academic teachers of rare ability and devotion. Eminent for personality
rather than for method, these teachers are no tyros in method. In such
hands the excellent features of the curriculum are raised to the N-th
power.

Finally, academic and industrial teachers are animated with a sentiment
of solidarity, with an esprit de corps, which solves many a problem of
conflicting duty and jurisdiction, and which must impress the s