The Barber School of the B.I.S.

ECHOES FROM THE HILLS
By Bill & Jean Venrick
Copyrighted 2008
THE BARBER SCHOOL at Fairfield School for Boys
(Throughout the text, Fairfield School for Boys may be referred to as “FSB” or the “BIS” which are acronyms for the official name of the school through the years.)
Having a bad hair day does not just apply to the feminine gender. Ever since 1907* the BIS has made it a point to be sure their boys “look good”. “Looking good” makes a person “feel good about themselves”, at least this is the opinion of the popular TV personality, Carol Burnett. Carol Burnett tells the story about trying to interest her daughters in dressing up and going some place. The reaction she received was less than cordial and she temporarily gave up the idea (probably waiting for an inspiration that was yet to come). Sometime later Carol knocked on one of her daughter’s door and suggested they play dress up. This little game went on for sometime until one of the girls said, “Let’s go someplace!” Light bulb comes ON! The daughter, who only minutes before had no interest in going someplace, now that she looked nice, wanted to go someplace. So, embedded deep into the minds of the supervisors of the Boys Industrial School (BIS) was the need to provide a means, be it ever so small as a haircut, errant boys could “feel good” or “look good. Albert Einstein could have had these principles in mind when he said, “Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.” *Before 1907 the Family Officer was the official barber for the boys.
The Barber School was the only educational program that the teachers and instructors could be guaranteed they would have a dependable group of boys they could teach. You see, the average stay (or term) of boys assigned to the institution was about 7 months. During this time the educational needs of each boy were trying to be addressed and a state of flux was always present. Vocational programs for approximately twenty fields were in constant and continual class sessions as well as regular educational requirements such as elementary and high school. If a boy attempted to run-away, that would extend his stay (or term) and thus interrupt whatever educational program in which he was involved. A boy in the metal shop, for example, might be there only a few months, and before whatever he was in class was officially finished, he might be pardoned and “go back home” whether or not he was finished with the shop class in which he was enrolled. This scenario of change, multiplied by whatever the population was, became the only constant. Once, in a dinner meeting of some of the former employees, the teachers admitted this was the biggest disappointment they had to deal with – how many of the boys would finish their class.

The Barber School had an answer to this dilemma. Barbering is an occupation that is a bit more involved than learning how to tuck a bunch of hair into one hand and delicately clip extended hair away so the continued work would end as a good hair cut. Students of barbering, for years, would study for a year to learn much more than how to cut hair. They had to study anatomy of the head so they could determine where a specific drop of blood came from – a knowledge of the arteries, veins and nerves was a vital part of the barber’s education. Classroom assignments helped the boys learn the psychological nuances of the trade as well. Mike Tharp, and his fellow instructors knew you could not train a boy to become a barber unless they could convince the boy to sign a contract that he would be willing to stay however long it would take to finish a 9-1/2 month program. In short, if a boy was only sentenced for 7 months, that means he would be signing a contract guaranteeing he would stay no less than two additional months. Any 16 year old boy with an 8th grade eduction could apply for the barber school. Immediately this developed a different breed of boys and one of the features or perks for students of the Barber Shop School would be they were classified as Honor Boys and they got to stay in the Dixon Honor Dorm. Remember the story about Carol Burnett? Give a boy or girl a reason to dress up and dressing up becomes natural.
Sure this sounds simple, and it was good for most, but occasionally one of the boys could just not stand the discipline and he would become a run-away but usually even such run-aways “came back” and honored his contract. So the concept of a guaranteed appearance in a classroom became the key to at least one of the vocational educational programs.
It almost seems strange that if this is all it took, why could it not work in the other trades, such as masonry, sheet metal, machine shop or carpentry. The answer to that problem was to work up some kind of guarantee that the boy would finish what he started. In itself, that very principle was already lacking in many of the boys – they had not finished their education, let alone finish maturing into men with character. At the beginning of a boy’s decision to choose barbering as a trade, there was a 30-day Trial Program and if, at the end of this trial, he could either continue or drop out of the program. The goal of becoming a Certified Barber in the State of Ohio clearly created a different kind of academic program for some boys at the institution.
Education has become a stumbling block in our nation for years and it usually becomes a political football that boards of education kick around whenever a bond issue or levy runs out. Usually their main ploy is to use the phrase “our children”. Well, truth involves the children, but how education is wrought is an entirely different matter. The concept of how to educate, unfortunately, is a consistently reoccurring issue – no doubt, for centuries. The sad fact is, for example, whenever any “new way” is developed, e.g, the “new math” popular for a while (1956-60), if a student could not grasp the concept, he grew to hate math. We have to ask, “What is so wrong with working with proven methods instead of continually dreaming up new ideas and abandoning the tested and tried methods?”
The field of education and its foibles created a virtual pathological study (of the boys) who came to the Fairfield School for Boys, regardless of the criminal reason they were there. Education in our society has been played with, adjusted, re-programmed, put in committees, you name it and it is a description of education as our academic society is seen today. T. J. Ray, a former and now retired professor of the University of Mississippi put it this way:
“Teachers are very important people. Not because they have degrees, appointments and publications lists. Not even because they know more about their subjects than their students do. Their lives are significant because they are trusted with the sacred duty of helping others, usually younger and less experienced, to prepare for a complex adult world. Teachers are variously cantankerous, snobbish, erudite, obtuse, cynical, Socratic, or superfluous. Students are often rebellious, dense, naive, eager, and innocent. And jointly and separately they fail each other. But the primary hope for mankind rests with teachers–not with family, church, or government–with the teacher and his students. There can be no more precious moment in human existence than when a teacher leads a student to know a truth.
“Some aspects of education have gotten worse. Standardized tests have almost eliminated the need of teacher evaluation of students, and teachers spend far too much time under the shadow of those tests. Dropout rates are higher, and strange experiments are being trotted out in an effort to keep kids in school. While [this] essay was more about public education, its essence was and is applicable to the college level, where things are as bleak as in lower grade levels. In a craze to have large and larger student bodies in order to get more and more money from the State, colleges have very steadily and readily admitted people who would have been turned away not many decades ago. Now a major state university has gone so far as to admit a student who cannot read or write. That might be surprising
were it not so patently clear that the tail (athletics) has come to wag the dog (academics).”
The above comments from T. J. RAY, Professor of English at the University of Mississippi, were written in an essay he first wrote in 1975 and later revised in 2006; hence the problems and principles covered in his comments and the issues in the historical environment at the FSB Barber School are evidence that essentially, the problems that confronted Mike Tharp and the other instructors (by theory teachers at the Ohio State University). The boys at FSB were already products of a faulty educational system (in some ways). Obviously not every educator will see this issue the same way because there have always been “smart kids” and then “the rest of the kids”. The real smart kids, the college bound students, have a built in drive that will not allow anything to stand in their way — they’re self-starters. But it is the average students who are affected by such educational faux pas and the average kids will struggle for years because of flawed theories. Unfortunately the aggregate of incriminating flaws in our system unmistakably points towards issues some leaders of education have simply failed to acknowledge. (Anyone needing further proof of these summations could read “The End of Education” by Neil Postman. Postman’s book has a demonstrative sub-title: “Redefining the value of school”. Perhaps there is some wisdom in the criticism leveled against teachers by George Bernard Shaw: “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.” Postman further cites another caustic thought against professional educators when quoting Lewis Perelman, who argued that “modern information technologies have rendered schools entirely irrelevant, since there’s now much more information available outside the classroom than inside.”)
In 1964, Mike Tharp started his career at the Fairfield School for Boys (FSB); being just under 21 himself, Mike was pushing the envelope a bit but by the time he was really an apprentice-barber-instructor he was 21. (Some old-timers in Lancaster, Ohio, just might remember a red-haired barber at the Fountain Square Barber Shop [behind Kresge's] as that is where Mike was working when recruited for the FSB Barber Shop School.) There were only nine chairs in the FSB Barber Shop when Mike started but a new 15 chair barber shop was just being finished as a part of a new vocational barbering program. Union qualifications for State Barber Schools required instructors to go through an apprentice program and Mike was one of two Vocational Instructors who had to complete a four week and an eight-hour In Service Training program at the new FSB Barber Shop for two years themselves. Upon fulfilling those requirements Mr. Tharp became a certified Barber School Teacher, moving up from Vocational Instructor to Vocational Teacher. When the vocational educational program for the FSB Barber School was being updated, in classes for the instructors at Ohio State University, whose professors were using their education prowess as a lever and were insisting their principles as used in “regular” classrooms were necessary but Tharp and fellow instructors, taking the class, were able to prove the concepts by the university professor were simply not applicable in the classrooms at the FSB. These boys already had two strikes against them and the system needed to do everything in its power to teach these boys something, and that something was a viable trade in which they could officially become a part when they left the institution. Furthermore, even the principles and methods used in regular public schools were certainly not applicable when dealing with students in an institution like a reform school.
The Fairfield School for Boys had a fifteen (15) chair barber shop. Their class work was basically two hours of text book and six hours of shop work and this plan was worked out to last twelve months. The boys learned how to cut hair the same way one learns anything else – by doing it! But to become a certified barber, a specific educational program had to be followed. In the 15 years Mike Tharp and his fellow instructor Alfred Sanders were there, they worked 150 boys through the Barber School and when those 150 boys went to Columbus to take their Barber School certification test, not one failed. Ethics and integrity were being taught and yet the words themselves were not, per se, in the lesson plans of the instructors. But those boys knew by nature and life itself, that the only way they could become a barber was to do what they had to do. Unfortunately, although it served as a specific lesson in integrity, there was an incident at the FSB, when one of the instructors became involved in a plot of escape for one of the boys. This incident alone served as a certain object lesson that rules were meant for everyone–instructors as well as “the boys”. This was “education in progress” and consummately that employee was fired.
At an institution where hundreds of boys were regularly shuffled through there was plenty of work for the barber students. The schedule was simple: Every three weeks, boys from each of the fifteen cottages were in the shop for a hair cut–the barber shop was busy cutting hair five days a week – employees of FSB could also get their hair cut at the shop.
Other incentives were apparent when the boys cut hair for employees of the institution. Each boy of the FSB had an account for any financial benefits they earned. The Barber Shop boys, once they became proficient in cutting hair, routinely cut employees hair and and they received tips. The pricing of a haircut had levels of financial expense tallies and whatever was left would be credited to the financial records of each boy. Any tips given to the boy were turned into the office to go into that boy’s account. When the Barber Shop School boy graduated, those collective amounts were usually more than sufficient to pay for a complete Barbering Kit that was his to keep (Clippers, six combs, hair brush, two razors [straight] and a leather strop, shaving mug and brush, and a haircloth.) Some boys had enough in their special cash fund to purchase two clippers, the one basic clipper was a vibrator type and a motor-driven clipper was a bit better for some work, and all the tools of the trade were carried in a nice attache case which was their personal property when they left the institution.
It needs to be mentioned that those boys learned more than how to cut hair – they were introduced to a level of loyalty and integrity many of the boys never had a chance to learn. An incident was related about a boy not wanting his hair cut and the instructor was called over by the student barber. The instructor immediately took charge by taking the clippers from the student barber, ran them through the unkept hair and said, “He needs one now.” As the instructor turned away, the boy jumped out of the chair and attempted to strike the instructor from behind and the student barber simply bopped the “customer” on the head with his clippers! Naturally there was talk and and a “write up” for the student barber but the instructor straightened out the matter. The student barber obviously was also learning structures of loyalty, and conformity to rules and regulations. No lessons had been taught for such infractions. The barber school curriculum did not include this kind of infraction so the student’s reaction was totally in line with the old-fashioned “respect for authority”, which, for the most part, has been totally replaced with “casual concern for discipline” in most classrooms as well as lack of respect for teachers.
After nine and one-half months (or 1500 hours) in Barber School, those boys had a jump on their peers at the FSB–they had an Ohio State Certificate as proof they were barbers and could have a job in any barber shop in Ohio. Unfortunately some changes were made in the system later to extend the class time to 1800 hours and issues surfaced causing enrollment in the Barber School to fall.
Unique examples and levels of education were uncovered as we researched for this book. Interviewing the person who was Chief Cook in the last few years of FSB, he made a point of fact that in the kitchen, the work could not be set up in classes like the Barber School. The boys who worked in the kitchen were not there to learn how to become a cook. If they learned this lesson it was something they learned on their own, which of course, was possible but the reason for such a confined view was the kitchen crew had a regular job to do and it took many different but related fields of labor. The kitchen crew had to start at 4:00 a.m., and at approximately 6:00 that morning there would be several hundred walking through those doors to eat and everything better be ready. Certainly different from a schedule that ran all day with the Barber School where there was a regular routine to “cut hair” at a specific time throughout the day justs like a commercial barber shop has appointments. (More details about the boys who worked in the kitchen will be found in another part of the book.)
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The research and writing of of the book, “ECHOES FROM THE HILLS”, by Bill & Jean Venrick, continues. Additional chapters are planned to be released as soon as they are finalized.
THE WORDWRIGHT