Hampton Model Essay ⋆ Education Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Founded in 1868 by Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Hampton Institute established the model for education among Southern Blacks. Born in Hawai‘i to American missionaries, Armstrong grew up in a family immersed in the islands’ religious, social, and educational life. His father had served as the islands’ Superintendent of Public Instruction, helping to found the islands’ Hilo Boarding and Manual Labor School. In Armstrong’s opinion, this type of school would also best meet the needs of Southern Blacks by addressing the problems of emancipation, enfranchisement, and the Christian civilizing of dark-skinned people like the Hawaiians of his youth. This entry examines the Hampton model of industrial education, which was born out of Armstrong’s early life experiences and reflected his worldview, his social class, and his values.
Armstrong intended that the Hampton Institute’s concentration on industrial education, along with its focus on character building, morality, and religion, would serve as the model to help solve the South’s “Negro problem.” Freed slaves and their children would be transformed into responsible, self-reliant citizens who were to be trained as efficient laborers for the region’s new industries. The school’s pedagogy was designed to teach Blacks to concentrate on economic development through agriculture and to reject political power as an avenue to prosperity and equality.
Armstrong expected to spread this view throughout the Black community in the churches and schools. So his chief aim at Hampton was to train conservative teachers who would socialize or civilize the Black population. The teachers’ primary role was to adjust their Black students to a subservient role in Southern society. To that end, Armstrong established a normal school, which offered, in addition to its academic curriculum, manual labor training as a method to building character.
Armstrong established a farm and other industries where the students learned a manual skill while earning money for their school expenses—both with the primary aim of character building through manual labor. Twenty years after its founding, the financially unprofitable manual labor training gave way to technical instruction in certain trades. With Armstrong’s death in 1893, the emphasis shifted from head, heart, and hand to hand, heart, and head. This revision of the school’s curriculum was instigated by Armstrong’s successor Howard Frissell, one of his closest associates and the school’s chaplain.
Within two years of Armstrong’s death, Frissell began awarding trade certificates, opened a trade school, and developed an entrance examination based on taking a trade. Frissell reported in 1904 that students who put shop work first and their academic work second made greater gains in developing their character and initiative. He became one of America’s leading experts on the Hampton model of education with the development of the industrial school as a part of the school curriculum.
Even though the Hampton model gave birth to many other industrial schools, including Booker T. Washington’s famous Tuskegee Institute, it was not widely supported among the intellectuals in the Black community around the turn of the twentieth century. But it was the rigid and narrow-minded determination of Frissell, Northern industrialists, and Southern political leaders to expand across the region that led to the struggle over how to educate Black people and their leaders, not as accommodationists to the Southern political powers but as challengers and equals in determining their way of life. The Hampton model did not make its way into the secondary and college levels of schooling. It did, however, gain support across the region as the primary means of educating Blacks at normal schools and industrial training schools, such as Voorhees Industrial School in South Carolina, the Mount Meigs School in Alabama, and the St. Paul School in Virginia.
Bibliography:
1. Anderson, J. D. (1988). The education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
2. Watkins, W. H. (2001). White architects of Black education: Ideology and power in America, 1865–1955. New York: Teachers College Press.
3. Wright, S. J. (1949). The development of the HamptonTuskegee pattern of higher education. Phylon, 10(4), 334–342.

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