Booker T. Washington and Education Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Booker T. Washington and Education - Essay Example For instance, Washington accepted segregation of the races, his outward humility, and his opposition to black militancy (Rutkoff and Scott). For this reason, many black intellectuals from Washington’s time were shy about placing him as the spokesperson for the struggle for social recognition. Regardless, Washington’s thoughts on education have remained within the public’s consideration for a number of years, opening the question of how does our current world evaluate, and utilize, what Washington had to contribute to the field of education. Washington was born a Virginian slave in either 1858 or 1859 and, although freed by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, sought employment at age nine in coalmines and salt works. Washington was entirely self-educated: finding the value of knowledge after his first experience with a spelling book. In 1872, Washington moved a few hundred miles to Virginia’s Hampton Institute in Virginia to enhance his education. Washin gton took employment as a janitor in Hampton so that he could pay his tuition, room, and board. Similar to his peers at Hampton, Washington received a lesson in the value of hard work for moral and economic strength. â€Å"He worked his way through school and taught for two years at Hampton after graduating† (Hine, Hine and Harrold 339). Afterward, Washington took up a position as headmaster at a school in Tuskegee, Alabama. Understanding how Washington found himself as the head of a school is crucially important for contextualizing his contributions to the philosophy of education in the early parts of black freedom within the United States. Because Washington employed personal initiative and hard work in reaching a place of dignity, he wanted to share that experience with all black people. His take on education was representative of the fact that he was not an intellectual; rather he was a man that employed action to achieve the means of survival (Rutkoff and Scott). He want ed black people in the south to value the need for industrial education from the perspective as both American and African. Washington emphasized the industrial curriculum as a means of a stepping-stone toward race independence; however, this emphasis does not represent an inherent belief in the incapacity of blacks to master scholarly subjects as well. Rather, â€Å"one man may go into a community prepared to supply the people there an analysis of Greek sentences. The community may or may not at that time be prepared for, or feel the need of, Greek analysis, but it may feel the need of bricks and houses and wagons† (Washington 156-157). Washington’s intent by advocating the industrial curriculum was to grant these blacks the ability to break cycles of perpetual debt brought on by a lack of independence from the sharecropping system, which kept individuals from learning the tools and competences necessary for work that is more skilled. As a man of action, who achieved a high status by working hard and taking the extra step, Washington saw the production of value with one’

Business Ethics Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words - 2

Business Ethics - Essay Example Other research on lobbying behaviour and the effect of a proposed financial accounting standard on pro forma net income provides mixed results. For example, Watts and Zimmerman (1978) report that economic self-interests motivate a large firm to lobby for an accounting standard that reduces pro forma net income. Yet, other studies (Martens and Stevens, 1993; Dechow et al., 1996) find no relationship between lobbying behaviour and the effect of the proposed standard on net income. The present study extends prior research by examining whether economic self-interests affect corporate lobbying on disclosure, especially on Prior to the 1993 Exposure Draft (ED) on FAS 123, Accounting for Stock-Based Compensation, corporations provided relatively little information on the value of stock-based compensation (SBC) held by top management. Essentially, corporations reported the SBC for only the top five executives and only in annual proxy statements as required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The ED proposed recognizing for the first time in annual reports the amount of SBC for all employees. Comment letters to the FASB on FAS 123 almost exclusively opposed recognition of SBC. However, as Walker and Robinson (1993) note, a careful analysis of the substance of comment letters (i.e., analysis beyond simply counting ‘yes/no’ votes on recognition) can provide additional insights into the politics of the standard-setting process. The current analysis of the comment letters reveals that managers supported varying venues and formats of disclosure. Thus, the varying responses to the FASB on the ED for FAS 123 provide a unique opportunity to examine whether economic self-interest motivates lobbying on venues and formats of disclosure of information (Breton Wall Street Journal, 5 November 1993). The results of this study indicate that differences in corporate lobbying positions on disclosure are related to the value of corporate SBC. In