|
Workers' Education in the FERAHilda W. Smith and Nancy Hart
Publishing Information
|
|
What has the government done for the education of Negro workers? Miss Smith, specialist in Workers Education of the FERA tells us. --The Editor. |
To fill this need, one phase of the Emergency Education Program described elsewhere in Opportunity is the pioneer field of workers' education, which last year reached over 10,000 men and women students in 300 classes. Preliminary indicated that this year the number of students may total over 50,000.
In the broad interpretation of the term, "workers' education offers to men and women wage earners in industry, business, commerce, domestic service and other occupations an opportunity to train themselves in clear thinking through the study of those questions closely related to their daily lives as workers and as citizens. Its primary purpose is to stimulate an active and continued interest in the economic problems of our times and to develop a sense of responsibility for their solution." It is completely separate from vocational training, and although designed for adults, may be distinguished from general adult education in that it is especially adapted to the needs of workers. Most students in workers' education classes have had little formal schooling, and lack confidence in their ability to learn. They have neither the funds nor the background for the ordinary extension course, and are too mature, and have had too much practical experience to be treated as children.
Unlike many conventional curricula, instruction in workers' education classes is focused on current economic and social problems; the subject matter is related to the workers' experience in industry, and immediately applicable to the pressing problems of his daily life. The social sciences, therefore, form the backbone of the educational elementary program, but the student may also follow other interests. English classes in composition, literature, and public speaking are in constant demand by workers seeking better means of expressing their ideas. With little knowledge of the world about them, many workers are eager for some understanding of elementary science; others seek a chance to develop unused talents in the creative arts. Each class is suited to the needs and interests of the particular group, so that as one worker expressed it, "Here I can find what I want to study, taught so that I can understand it, and at a time when I can come."
At present, figures are not available on the number of colored students enrolled in workers' education classes, but there is no color line, and classes are organized wherever the demand exists. To quote from the annual report of the Director of Emergency Education, "It is the desire of the Administration, that all the benefits of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration shall be shared equitably by all elements of the population," and a Federal Specialist in Negro Education, Dr. Ambrose Caliver, has been loaned to the FERA for the last two years. Dr. Caliver has two Negro assistants: Mrs. Bertha Ivy, M.A., Columbia University, and James A. Atkins, a graduate of Denver University, former teacher at Tennessee State College, and one of two colored students at the Denver Training Center.
The Atlanta Training Center for Negro Teachers in Workers' Education, was set up last summer on the campus of Atlanta University as one of sixteen centers in various States. This school, popularly called the "Workers' School," trained forty unemployed teachers so that they might qualify as leaders of workers' education classes. One of the students, Fred Minnis, has been appointed research librarian of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration.
Negroes participated in two other projects sponsored by the FERA Workers' Education Office--the resident schools for unemployed women in Georgia and the District of Columbia, which were part of a program of twenty-eight organized last summer in different parts of the country. The Georgia school, established on the campus of Clark University, near Atlanta, drew most of its staff from the Atlanta Training Center. It gave forty young colored women a chance to recover from the effects of the depression, and learn something of the reasons for their plight. According to the Director, "They had never dreamed that they would be taught economics. They thought we had made a mistake and meant home economics, because economics was taught only in advanced college classes." The District of Columbia Educational Camp gave twenty colored white collar workers similar opportunities.
For the Negro, the New Deal opens up new horizons and presents new problems. The NRA attempts to end wage differentials, but often makes employment more difficult to obtain. The Negro industrial worker in particular, who has usually taken his place in industry only since the war, is now an integral part of the industrial picture, and has advanced beyond the status of strike-breaker or reserve laborer. He finds that his problems as wage-earner are more important than those confronting him as Negro, and to solve these economic problems he seems sure to cast his lot with the labor movement as part of a unified whole.
The American Federation of Labor seems aware of its responsibilities to every labor group under the recovery program. In an article which appeared in this publication in October, President Green declares, "Both white and Negro workers will join ranks in determining and maintaining minimum and maximum standards. When any group however small accepts substandard conditions, the wage structure for all is undermined.... Opportunity for Negro wage earners lies not in undercutting wages for white workers but in cooperating for the elimination of such a differential."
Under the codes, wage-earners are finding leisure for study, and workers' education classes are helping them to discover what role they as workers may play in building a better social order. As one Atlanta student writes, "Before coming to this school.... I had overlooked ... the workers' education movement to acquaint labor with itself, to have it recognize that its 'way out' is not through following the will-o'-the wisp notion of being rich some day, but that the way out is through labor solidarity. .. . Therefore the necessity of breaking race barriers in order to facilitate the movement had not been prominent in my mind. Concentrating on this new outlook . . . has made the laborer's point of view so poignant to me that I must help spread the idea."