Another handicap was that at that time conditions were seldom sufficiently favorable to enable the employer to derive profit enough from students’ work to compensate for the maintenance of the youth at a manual labor school.  Besides, such a school could not be far-reaching in its results because it could not be so conducted as to accommodate a large number of students.  With a slight change in its aims the manual labor schools might have been more successful in the large urban communities, but the aim of their advocates was to establish them in the country where sufficient land for agricultural training could be had, and where students would not be corrupted by the vices of the city.

It was equally unfortunate that the teachers who were chosen to carry out this educational policy lacked the preparation adequate to their task.  They had any amount of spirit, but an evident lack of understanding as to the meaning of this new education.  They failed to unite the qualifications for both the industrial and academic instruction.  It was the fault that we find to-day in our industrial schools.  Those who were responsible for the literary training knew little of and cared still less for the work in mechanic arts, and those who were employed to teach trades seldom had sufficient education to impart what they knew.  The students, too, in their efforts to pursue these uncorrelated courses seldom succeeded in making much advance in either.  We have no evidence that many Negroes were equipped for higher service in the manual labor schools.  Statistics of 1850 and 1860 show that there was an increase in the number of colored mechanics, especially in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Columbus, the Western Reserve, and Canada.[1] But this was probably due to the decreasing prejudice of the local white mechanics toward the Negro artisans fleeing from the South rather than to formal industrial training.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Clarke, Present Condition of the Free People of Color of the United States, 1859, pp. 9, 10, 11, 13, and 29.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., pp. 9, 10, and 23.]

Schools of this kind tended gradually to abandon the idea of combining labor and learning, leaving such provisions mainly as catalogue fictions.  Many of the western colleges were founded as manual labor schools, but the remains of these beginnings are few and insignificant.  Oberlin, which was once operated on this basis, still retains the seal of “Learning and Labor,” with a college building in the foreground and a field of grain in the distance.  A number of our institutions have recitations now in the forenoon that students may devote the afternoon to labor.  In some schools Monday instead of Saturday is the open day of the week because this was wash-day for the manual labor colleges.  Even after the Civil War some schools had their long vacation in the winter instead of the summer because the latter was the time for manual labor.  The people of our day know little about this unsuccessful system.