Contributions Of Booker T Washington

Like the women, the blacks also had a hard time fitting in with the whites in schools and needed to overcome obstacles in order to expand. One of the most influential people in black education was Booker T. Washington. Washington would teach himself the alphabet even though it was strictly frowned upon that a black person got an education. He would spend his nights studying with a teacher from a local black school. In 1870, he started to do housework for an owner of a coal mine. The owner’s wife actually told Washington to continue his studying and imprint the importance of education in him. He would eventually go to Hampton Institute in Virginia in 1872. It was a school made for blacks by the government of Virginia. Then, in 1881, the principal …show more content…
Without his efforts, public education would not have made such a big improvement. William Torrey Harris was originally the chief administrator of the St. Louis Public Schools between 1868 and 1880. Later in his career, he served as the United States Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906. Harris believed in free common public schools. This would mean that he wanted as many kids to go to school as possible. One of the ways he improved the schools themselves was by making the library a common thing in all schools. He would also expand foreign language curriculum, defend the important idea of coeducation (education for all sexes), and made sure that self-education was emphasized in school’s curriculums. All these improvements would allow education to become an extremely big part in the importance of freedom and self-direction during schooling. School was supposed to be the guide to the real world. Harris wanted to bring the common academic curriculum to the public schools, but he did not want to prepare students for college. He believed schools should teach you how to survive in the real world, the real working class. He thought that the curriculum could be reduced to what he thought of as “the five windows of the soul.” This was what he theorized as the five great divisions in life. The first two were math and geography. Theses were guided towards the understanding of nature. The other three were literature, grammar, and history. This was guided to connect with life itself. He always had school’s education in his best interest and really wanted to help to turn public schools