Chapter III: Part 3

When the inventive school superintendent or professor of education speaks of “experimental education,” he is thinking, not of the “model school,” but of the new standard tests in the fundamental subjects by which the work of large masses of public school children is being regularly measured and compared. The city school survey has elaborated a technique of intellectual measurements which is giving us very rapidly a genuine quantitative science of education. A report like Professor Judd’s in the “Cleveland Survey”--“Measuring the Work of the Public Schools”--is a storehouse of suggestiveness for all who like to see how mathematics can be fruitfully applied to living. These statistical studies measure accurately the performance of children in the different grades and at different ages in the specific literate skills which everybody needs even to start fairly in the race of opportunity. The standard tests have been worked out experimentally with great numbers of school-children so that average norms of accomplishment can be set for any class or any individual. Rates of speed and quality of handwriting, and their relation to each other; ability to spell common words; rate and capacity of accurate figuring; rate and quality of silent and oral reading;--these are the aptitudes that are rigidly measured by the tests. The children are treated as segregated arithmetical minds, reading minds, spelling minds, as units of intellectual behavior. The tests are not “examinations,” for they do not aim to show any absolute attainment of “knowledge.” Their value is in the comparison they afford of individual skill, and of deviations from a norm of effectiveness. In the mass of scores you have an intellectual relief map of your class, your school, your city system.

Now nothing could apparently be more deadly and mechanical than this treating of living children as if they were narrowly isolated minds. In this “experimental education” we are evidently in another world from the “experimental school.” Yet out of these tests emerge the most important implications for modern education. Out of this “experimental education” we at last get a scientific basis for the “modern school.” For we have irrefutable proof of the enormous diversity of minds and aptitudes. We have a demonstration of the utter foolishness of subjecting children to a uniform educational process. We have accurate proof of the fallacy of the “average” in education. These tests are added proof of the unscientific character of the typical public school on that very technical and administrative side which has been most carefully developed. The graded school was a brilliant invention for its time, but the bases of classification are shown by these new tests to be absurd. Children are now classified, for purposes of education, largely by age and average standing. The tests show that neither category has the slightest relevance for effective learning. We classify things for the purpose of doing something to them. Any classification which does not assist manipulation is worse than useless. But mere numerical age is no clue whatsoever to mental or even physiological age, and minds with the same average may plot out very differently for every individual one of the various skills and interests that elementary training involves. Our educational grading has been as sentimental and sterile as the ancient philosophers’ classification of matter into earth, water, fire, air. Such a conception of the world was interesting, but there was nothing you could do with it. All the school has done with its classifying has been to get the children into groups where they could be dosed with an orderly sequence of lessons. There has been no handle by which their heterogeneous minds and wills could be taken hold of and directed. The rule of the classroom is necessarily military, because such diverse people could only be unified in the most objective and external and coercive way. No internal control would be possible. So the teacher must devote a large part of her educational energy to the mere business of policing. When she actually “taught,” it was only the average child that she could really address--the fairly bright mediocrity. The other pupils wasted their time almost in direct proportion to their deviation above or below that average. Children passed up through their educational life on the basis of an “average mark,” which represented nothing whatever but a number. The standard tests have shown repeatedly that ability is so unevenly distributed that the brightest fourth-year children overlap the poorest eighth-year children. However children may average, scarcely two children in the same class will ever be found to have the identical capacity in the different subjects. The tests reveal not only that children differ, but just how curiously and widely they do differ.

The traditional classification is enough to wreck any educational system, even without the deadness of the curriculum. With the progressive congestion of the public schools, teaching has become more and more impossible. The traditional system of grading has successfully resisted most improvement in teaching, and vitiated the newer values that have been brought into the school. If children, clearly not defective, cannot learn arithmetic, read slowly and unintelligently, spell chaotically and write a slovenly hand, question the grading system. Never have there been such admirable techniques for teaching these fundamental things. But the classification defies them. The “class” gives the teacher no leverage for improving the children’s skill. An unscientific grading is as much a barrier to altering minds as it is to changing materials.

These truths seem elementary and obvious, yet we had to wait for this “experimental education” to shake complacency in the “graded school.” Now if we accept these tests we have to conclude that it is useless to grade children for education unless those “grades” correspond accurately and specifically to the capacities of the children. Work must be done in each specific subject with--and only with--those who have approximately the same capacity. The “average” is totally unknown in that “real life” which we are constantly forced to set up in antithesis to the school. In no function of life is any one going to be judged by a composite ability to read, write, spell, figure. One succeeds not through any average skill or average information, but through the ability to throw all one’s skill and all one’s intelligence where it is demanded. A measurement of intelligence by averages will always produce just that ineffectiveness and vagueness for which the products of the public school are censured at present.

The fallacy of the educational “average” involves another fallacy, equally obvious but equally prevalent. This is the fallacy of the “partially perfect.” The school ranks the seventy per cent. child equal to the hundred per cent. child. Children pass to more difficult work on an admitted basis of imperfect accomplishment. But for any real effectiveness in the world it is not enough to be habitually only seventy per cent. right. Whenever you need to be literate, the world demands that you be actually literate. If you have information, you are either useless or dangerous unless your information is accurate. It is better not to know arithmetic at all than persistently to make only seven hits out of ten. For all practical purposes your child is as much a failure at seventy per cent. as he is at zero per cent. It will avail him little to be able to read and write and figure at a rate and an excellence only seventy per cent. of the standard. In any situation which requires these elementary skills he will be almost as much handicapped as if he were entirely illiterate. It is time that the school faced the bitter truth that life demands an approximate perfection in whatever one tries to do. Education must shape all its technique towards this approximate perfection. It is not necessary that all should do the same thing. But it is necessary that what one pretends to do one should succeed gradually in doing. The individual who is allowed to persist continuously on a level of imperfect accomplishment is not being educated. For him education is a failure. He should either drop his technique, or ways should be found to improve him towards mastery. What children are learning at any one time they should be learning with a sense of control. The more difficult should not be confronted till the less difficult has been absorbed. And this controlled progress will be possible only in a school where children work with their equals. Classification in education should be based only on specific proficiency.

The new “experimental education” is engaged in making dramatic in the schools these truths. It is a force even more revolutionary than the idealism of the “experimental school.” The situation suggested by the “curve of distribution” is one of the most momentous facts to be reckoned with by us of to-day. It is making over our theories of democracy, social reform and social progress. To work out its manifold implications in the school is to touch the very nerve of our democratic future.

XIII

THE ORGANIC SCHOOL

The Fairhope Summer School, which has just closed its season (Sept., 1915), at Greenwich, Connecticut, has given to Northern people an opportunity to see at work Mrs. Marietta Johnson’s widely known ideal of “organic education.” Just as the Gary plan has shown how the city school may give a varied training to great masses of children with a freedom and flexibility never believed possible, so Mrs. Johnson has demonstrated how the small community, or even household, by using the natural environment and the natural needs as laboratory and workshop, may adjust the child to life far more accurately than any formal school. No school carries out more carefully Professor Dewey’s dictum that the child can only be educated by concerning himself with what has meaning to him as a child, and not what is to have meaning to him later as an adult.

In the organic school, children grow up naturally and healthfully, playing out-of-doors, following their curiosities, learning as their life makes demands upon them. The teacher is there to answer their questions, to sharpen their wits, to name for them and analyze the flowers and soil and trees, to show how to plant vegetables and build little coops or houses. In their winter school at the single-tax colony of Fairhope, Alabama, on the shores of Mobile Bay, the children can be out in the open air almost every day. The land is a complete geological, botanical, and physical laboratory, and the household a natural classroom where they learn to live. The school grew, in fact, quite naturally out of the household, and the necessity for some sort of school in a community where there was none. Mrs. Johnson, with her teacher’s genius, simply sharpened and arranged her intercourse with the children around her, and presently had a school which has become one of the most interesting in the country.

Its very informality is its charm and success. The hundred or more children are not classified in grades, but in “life-classes,” which correspond roughly to those three periods in child life--the first seven years of growth, the years to adolescence, and early adolescence. The first class is really an outgrowth of the nursery. In the cool rooms of the Fairhope Summer School one comes upon little farmhouses and villages and doll-houses of building-blocks, which form the basis for getting acquainted with the village the children lived in. The next group is characterized by a tough practicality, a capacity for drill and persistence, and this “life-class” was found in the wood-working shop and garden. Literary studies are taken up very late by the third class, whose recitations are rather informal discussions in an outdoor cluster around the teacher. Only when a broad background of acquaintance with real things is obtained, practical powers of observation acquired, and an actual need felt for learning what books can tell, are the conventional school studies begun. In the organic school there is thus some chance left to the children for getting real meanings and not mere words and phrases which they may glibly repeat. Reading and writing are not taught by drill, but are picked up by the child from the teacher or the other children, in the Rousseauan fashion, whenever he finds that he is missing something very important and interesting in not having this skill.

Learning in this kind of school becomes as natural as eating. One learns when one is hungry to understand what is going on in the world. Such schools, it will be said, are all very well as an ideal, but where can teachers be found to direct them? Certainly many of Mrs. Johnson’s children could teach others in the way they have learned themselves. The way to get teachers for this free organic education in the “schools of to-morrow” is clearly to teach more children in the same way.

XIV

COMMUNITIES FOR CHILDREN

Mr. Wirt’s schools at Gary are genuine public schools, in the sense that they provide for every kind of child in the community and draw into themselves the main aspects of the community life. They are not artificial training-schools for vocations or for life; they are a life itself. “The public school is still merely the old private school publicly supported,” he says. The change of support has not really made it a different kind of a school. It has not really grown up to urban demands. School-boards usually act as if they were handling private property. They gravely discuss “wider use of the school plant” as if this were some gracious extension of privilege. The public does not yet feel that the schools are its own. Organization, administration, instruction, are highly authoritative, doctrinaire. The ideal has been uniformity in methods and product. The educational system has become as autocratic and military as the industrial. As for content, the curriculum is the old medieval one, not transformed, but patched up, in the good old Anglo-Saxon way, as interests which had been the concern of the few were gradually demanded by the many. Art study, nature study, physical education, science, organized play, manual training, have been added to the public school work. But these new interests and activities have become simply additional “subjects,” taught in much the same spirit as the old. The problem of the educator has been, not how may the new activity vitalize and transform the others, but how can it be introduced with the least disturbance to what is already there. The present discussion of professional educators about vocational training shows the same mechanical effort to introduce an alien activity into the traditional curriculum in such manner that the latter may remain intact.

Mr. Wirt’s own school is not a tinkering-up of the present school system. He is not an “educational reformer” making something over. He has plowed up the educational ground. He actually has a new kind of a school. It is not a “school of unspecialized vocational training,” or “a school founded on play,” or an “efficiency school,” or any of the other terms with which it has been designated. It is hard to describe because it defies classification in the old terms. Nothing is more delightful about the Gary schools than the absence of cant. Most of the current educational problems, the books and ideas on pedagogy, educational psychology, supervision, administration, teaching-methods, classroom management, discipline, etc., which fill the attention of the current educational world are here as if they were not. It is a school built up outside the influence of the professors of education, the teachers’ colleges, and the normal school of the land. It is true that there is probably not a single idea operative that is original with Mr. Wirt. Probably there is not a single idea that is not being applied in some school in the country. The novelty is the synthesis, and the democratic spirit that motivates it.

Here is provided for the first time a genuine public school, a school which does reflect all the healthy interests of the community, and where the child does become familiar with its life and with his own interests and vocational opportunities through practical doing of work. The school becomes “a clearing-house for community life.” To enter the Emerson or Frœbel School in Gary--the two superb new buildings constructed by Mr. Wirt--is like coming into a well-ordered city where each citizen is going about his proper business. There is none of that slightly depressing atmosphere of the mild if excellent prison for half-day involuntary labor which is too often the ordinary school. Classes do not seem to be neatly immured in rooms, or to be moving about in lock-step. You are dealing with interested individuals who, singly or in spontaneous groups, are utilizing all the facilities of a lavishly equipped and stimulating community. The tone is of a glorified democratic club, where members avail themselves of privileges which they know are theirs. The schools are public in the same broad sense that the streets and parks are public. The school is the children’s institution. They unaffectedly own it and use it as a mechanic uses his workshop or an artist his studio. To go to the schools in the evening and see the children running and playing in the great broad halls--incomparable playrooms--running in now and then to speak to their parents who are studying in the evening school, is to get a new emotional sense of what a school may be. The children do not seem to be there because education is “compulsory,” or because the parents send them there to get rid of them, but because what can be done there is so interesting that they cannot stay away.

I am unable otherwise to account for their streaming back in such numbers to the voluntary Saturday schools, voluntary for the teachers, too, who are paid extra for their work. Saturday is a glorified pay-day, where one may do anything one likes, from making swords in the wood-shop to studying back work in the classroom. I spent a fascinating hour watching the thronged wood-shop where little boys were fussing with the scraps left from the regular work of the week. It occurred to me then how little real difference there was between the well-to-do home and the very poorest in the way of interesting activities for children. How many homes of the comfortably enlightened classes were fit places to bring up a child? How many even pretend to supply the books and the wood-work and tools and plants and music with which these wonderful buildings were running over? Without interesting activities for children, city homes, both rich and poor, can provide only schools for loafing. As between the street, to which the less well-to-do child emerges for interest, and the vaudeville, the “movie” and the current fads to which the well-to-do child escapes, I think the street is probably the less demoralizing.

This Saturday workshop was a little study in spontaneous discipline. Although the children were unwatched, they worked on their own little jobs as indefatigably as if they were under a drill-master. If any little boy became weary and was moved to interfere with another little boy, he was apt to be brushed off as though he were an irritating fly. Could it be that mischievousness, supposed to be an integral part of child-nature, was simply a product of repression or idleness? Could it be that school discipline was largely an attempt to solve problems which artificial rules were directly manufacturing? Visiting superintendents, appalled at the freedom in the Gary schools, tip-toe about looking for signs of depredation. They do not seem to report any. I decided that these schools had actually acquired the “public” sense. It seemed really true that children, unless they were challenged to inventive wickedness by teachers’ rules and precepts, were no more likely to spoil their school than a lawyer is likely to deface the panels in the library of his club. This children’s community seemed to be enjoying its busy life in the same spirit that the wider public uses its streets and libraries and museums and railroad trains.

This supremely democratic public sense is the motive of Mr. Wirt’s genius. All this richness of opportunity--the playgrounds, gymnasia, swimming-pools, gardens, science laboratories, work-shops, libraries, conservatories--which this school provides so lavishly, is possible to the public of a small and relatively poor city like Gary, exactly because the schools are managed like any other public service. The modern educational ideal, “to provide a desk and seat for every child,” is as absurd as would be one to provide a seat in the park for every inhabitant. No public service is used by more than a fraction of the people at any one time. Mr. Wirt provides the coveted “desk and seat” for about one-quarter of the children. While they are studying the traditional three R’s, etc., the rest of the school is distributed in shop and playgrounds, gymnasium and studio, or at home. By an ingenious redistribution of the groups throughout the course of an eight-hour day, Mr. Wirt is able not only to give every child the opportunity of the varied facilities every day, but he is able to accommodate in one school building twice the ordinary number of children. The insoluble “part-time” problems of city schools disappear. The Gary school has two complete schools, each with its set of teachers, functioning together in the same building all day long. In the lower grades the child spends two hours daily in the classroom, an hour in laboratory or shop, half-an-hour in studio, and half-an-hour in gymnasium, an hour in auditorium, and the rest of the day in study, play or outside activity. The older child has three hours for formal instruction, and two hours for more intensive shop or studio work. Children are passing back and forth constantly between home and school, each with his or her own scheme of work, and all the school is being used all the time.

The amount of money thus saved in school buildings alone is so large that even a town like Gary, with relatively meager school revenues, can afford not only the varied equipment, but also luxuries like special school physicians and nurses, and special teachers for special subjects. Mr. Wirt has been accused of “business efficiency,” but this is scarcely the term for so artistically elegant a scheme of economy. When you reflect that it is just because the traditional classrooms are provided for only a proportion of the children that all of them have the varied daily opportunities of many-sided work and play, you are likely to call this “economy,” in the old golden Greek sense of the wise management of household resources, so that every member may share alike in the activity and the wealth. Such economy is creative; it enriches, not impoverishes. I have said that Mr. Wirt thought in terms of the rural community, but it is of the rural community and its creative economy, expanded to fill and reorganize the life of the modern city. The school trains the child by letting him do the things the city does. His education is an acclimatization to the wider social life.

A truly public school would let nothing communal remain alien to itself. In the chemistry class at the Emerson School I actually found the children helping in the necessary chemical work for the city. The class was simply an extension of the municipal laboratory. Gary, of course, has the good fortune or the good sense to have as chemistry teacher the municipal chemist. The older children act as his assistants. With him the class tests the city water, the various milk supplies of the town. Under the inspector, they visit dairies, workshops, bakeries and food-stores. Last year they published a milk bulletin containing general information and reports of their tests. I could not see that it was essentially inferior in quality to one that an agricultural school might have issued. When I came upon this class it was testing sugars and candies, from the different shops of the town, for purity and for use of coloring matter. Another class was experimenting with soft drinks, studying questions of solution, suspension and crystallization, with ramifications, I was told, towards the physiological effect of certain products. The children were practically deputy food inspectors, and made reports on the official blanks. The chemist assured me that he had not lost a case in prosecuting for violation of the pure food laws. In East Chicago, where school-children were ostensibly not trained as a vigilance committee in scientific investigations, the chemist could not get a single conviction.

The children also test the materials supplied to the school, the coal, cement, etc., to see whether they come up to specifications. I saw a group trying to make soap for the use of the school. The chemist assured me--college-trained ignoramus that I was amidst this youthful expertness--that there was scarcely a principle of the science, theoretical or practical, that he could not develop from this work, all so directly motivated by the daily life around the children. I wish I could convey the fine caliber of this young chemist as he stood in his laboratory with the children working around him, his clear poise between the theoretical and the practical making him for me the ideal symbol of science working ceaselessly at the world around to make it cleaner and healthier and more livable.

That chemistry class in Gary has a high and momentous significance to me. It was distinctly not play, as all other laboratory work in school or college that I have seen has been play. I was surprised to find how completely the doing of real work banished the amateur atmosphere and at the same time made the work infinitely more interesting. Mr. Wirt says the child is a natural scientist, indefatigably curious and resourceful, quick and accurate. The little children actually seem to achieve less breakage than the older. What kind of a community we are going to have when any large proportion of the children grow up to observe and test the physical conditions under which they live--when they get the scientific-deputy-inspector habit, so to say--and what would happen to some forms of political jugglery if a younger generation got used to thinking in terms of qualitative and quantitative tests, I leave to the imagination. But it seemed to me that that chemistry class was one of the most important activities in the United States to-day.

XV

REALLY PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Characteristic of the “public sense” of the Gary schools is the class in history and geography, which I found at work getting an imaginative background of the larger social world. To the news-board in the hall they brought clippings that seemed important. The history room was smothered in maps and charts, most of them made by the children themselves. There was a great red Indiana ballot, a chart of the State Senate, a diagram of State administration, a table showing the evolution of American political parties, war-maps and pictures. The place was a workshop, with broad tables for map drawings, and a fine spread of magazines and papers. “Laboratory” work in history, tried so timorously in some of our most daring colleges, was in full swing in a Gary high school class.

When I visited the room the class was concerning itself with reports on “The city as a healthful place to live in,” with special emphasis on parks, because the town had been waging its campaign for the new water-front park. Little outlines on Greek and Roman cities, medieval and modern cities, had been worked up in the school library--bountifully equipped as a branch of the city public library. I had walked into a true course on town-planning, at once the most fascinating and significant of current social interests and the study that packs into itself more historical, sociological and geographical stimulation than almost any I know. A class that had gone through those reports would have the materials for exactly the social background that our current imaginations need; and, moreover, all those materials would be firmly placed in the community setting.

There is a charming communal self-consciousness about Gary, and this sort of history is the thing that feeds it. One class had been working on a comparison of Athenian and Spartan education with Gary education. This struck me as peculiarly delightful. Such social introspection we rather badly lack in America, yet it is the only soil in which intellectual virtue can ever grow. The ancient history class has for its purpose: “to improve its members as American citizens by a study of the experiences of the ancient peoples.” This class, after some classroom turbulence, formed a voluntary society which is duly opened and conducted by the president, while the instructor lingers in a leisurely fashion outside. I know of no more admirable reason for historical study than this phrase, the natural expression of the Gary child who wrote the constitution for this class.

They do not seem to know whether they are studying “Civics” or not. They are too busy soaking in from real events a familiarity with history as it is lived and the community as it works. I throw in here an advertisement for the “Literary Digest” and the “Independent,” which the pupils regularly read. They study history backward, so that it explains what is happening to-day. They repeatedly dramatize remote times. They are talking of coöperating with the State historical pageant. It seemed to me that these children were actually learning their social world in the spontaneous natural way that the intelligent child learns it from newspapers and books and from the slow, unconscious widening of horizon for which he must usually look quite outside the school.

If other community institutions have anything educational to offer outside the school, or if parents and children think they have, Mr. Wirt’s school lets the children go to these out of their auditorium or play hour. The churches may have them for religious instruction--there is no Bible-reading or prayer in the Gary schools--and thus avoid the imagined necessity for a special kind of church day-school. Already a Polish parochial school in Gary has lost its reason for being and vanished. Y. M. C. A.’s, neighborhood houses, special music-teachers, etc., may also act as extensions of the school. It will be interesting to see how successfully some of these institutions which purport to form the child’s morals and care for his soul’s destiny prove their supplementary value, and how far they are not simply having joyfully extended to them a long rope by which they may hang themselves.

To Mr. Wirt the school is not more a community than the community is a school. He believes that parks and playgrounds should follow the schools, and in Gary he demands twenty acres for every school plant. He does not rely upon public playgrounds, to which, as experience shows, only a proportion of children can be enticed from the streets, but his playground is a part of the school on equal terms with the other activities. Otherwise these very expensive grounds which cities are providing are apt to be futile. Mr. Wirt’s policy is to make it as easy as possible for the community to use the schools. He does not force people to the opportunities, but he puts them where the people cannot easily evade them. He does not drive children to the public library, but he has a branch put in each school. The Gary schools are open night and day, practically every day in the year. The Indiana law--protector from tyranny--forbids more than ten months of school a year, but allows vacation schools. Sunday sees popular lectures. The Gary schools seem almost as public as the streets.

If the school is to be not only a community embryonic of current society but also a school-community of itself, it must have some forum or theater where everything that is peculiarly interesting in any part of the school may be brought dramatically to the attention of the rest of the school. This Mr. Wirt provides in the auditorium hour, so drearily used in the ordinary school for religious exercises, “speaking pieces,” and moral homilies. In Gary every child goes to “auditorium” for an hour each day, but he listens there to talks by the special teachers about their work, lantern-lectures and dramatic dialogues written by the children themselves from their history or literature work. There may be moving-pictures, instrumental music, gymnastic exhibitions. The initiative and responsibility are left to the teachers. There seems to be no limit to the interest and the possibility of what may go on in this free little secular theater except what the imagination of teachers and children can suggest. There is always singing, and of a most excellent tone. “Auditorium” is one of Mr. Wirt’s novel ideas. It seems to make unreal the old categories of “entertainment” and “edification,” just as the rest of the school seems to damage the conceptions of “work” and “play.” There was a pleasant informality about things, with the girls sewing at the back of the theater, and the young audience breaking into whistling as they marched out to the music of the piano. “Auditorium” ought to be quite as important as Mr. Wirt thinks it is. What school-work might become, lived always in the possible light of its intelligent presentation to the school audience in dramatic form, we do not know, because educators have never been dramatists. The Gary schools have special teachers for expression, but the American spirit is in many ways so inexpressive that the idea can thus far be only a frank and delightful experiment.

I liked particularly in the “auditoriums” I visited the intermingling of children of all ages. This is one of the many ways by which the Gary school breaks down the snobbery of age which causes so much unhappiness in childhood, and fixes the adult mind with so many delusions. I came across a significant editorial in the Emerson School paper which showed me how useful this intermingling was in smashing caste lines that were already forming. The editor acknowledged that the expected objectionableness of the “youngsters” had not asserted itself. One got a real sense of a new sympathy breaking upon these already sophisticating minds of high-school children.

I mention this because it is typical of Mr. Wirt’s genius to obliterate artificial lines and avoid mechanical groupings. His ideal school is one like the Emerson in Gary, a complete school, from kindergarten to college, in the same building, with all the varied facilities used by all classes. The grading is of the utmost flexibility. The traditional twelve grades are followed, but classes work in “rapid,” “average,” or “slow” groups, according as the various children give promise of completing the State-prescribed curriculum in ten, twelve or fourteen years. The child may pass from group to group or from grade to grade at any time on the examination of the supervisor of instruction. The child himself has no sense of being “graded” or even “marked.” Report-cards are rather a concession to parents’ weaknesses. If the child needs additional help, there is the parallel school, so that he may have a double lesson the same day. And the Saturday school offers another opportunity.

All studying is supposed to be done in school hours. The fearful bogey of “home-work” is laid. In this free interchange of groups the child acquires a sense of individuality. Each has practically an individual schedule of work, for the organization of which the executive principal, who devotes all his time to such matters, is responsible. Except in the youngest classes, the children seem to move about individually to their different rooms and shops. By this drastic carrying down of college methods through the grades Mr. Wirt has exploded another hoary superstition that great masses of children in city schools can only be handled by uniform and machine methods, in a lump. Frœbel School in Gary has twenty-five hundred children, most of them very small alien immigrants. Yet the same flexible and free methods are used there, apparently with success. These children, because of the immensely varied equipment, and the possibility of small classes in the shops, are getting something resembling individual instruction. I picked up at random the card of an older girl at Emerson. It read: “Printing, History, Gymnasium, French, Music, Botany, Auditorium, English.” The very shock of that bold “Printing” gives you a realization of the modern school you are in. And this is a girl besides.

Now a program like this, and all this free election and flexibility, would seem wilful and anarchical were it not for the fact that in the Gary school these schedules are the result of a natural and very careful process of selection, made by the child. What the child shall study, outside of the regular classroom work, is neither forced upon it nor aimlessly selected. Take the Emerson School, a beautiful building with laboratories and studios, gymnasia and shops, and put your child into its kindergarten or first grade. He runs about the halls. The shops and studies and laboratories are not segregated, but distributed over the building so as to convey the impression that they are equally significant, and to give every child an opportunity of becoming familiar with them. All the rooms have big glass doors or windows. The child’s own unaided curiosity makes him look in and wonder about what the older children are doing there. One could see children of all ages peering into the foundry or machine-shop or printery.

When the child has reached the third or fourth grade he has a certain idea of what activity interests him, and he is allowed to go into shop or laboratory as observer or helper to the older child. He watches and asks questions, and the older boy learns by teaching him. If the child finds that the work does not actually interest him he still has the chance to change. When he takes up the work in the higher grades he has served his apprenticeship and is already familiar with the apparatus and the technique. The teacher does not have to break in a new class each year. It is almost a self-perpetuating and self-instructing class. The child has been assimilated to the work as new members in any profession or trade in society are assimilated. When the child is exposed from his earliest years to the various vocational activities, is allowed to come into them just as his curiosity ripens, you have as perfect a “choice of a vocation” as could be imagined. Only this sort of opportunity can really be called “vocational training.” The usual vocation school work takes the child too late, when his curiosity is likely to be dulled; it puts him into the work without any previous familiarity. It can scarcely be anything but drudgery. If “capacities are to be developed,” Mr. Wirt’s scheme gives the surest means of developing them. It solves the grave problems of “vocational” and “pre-vocational” training, which are so sorely vexing the professional educational world, a large part of whose business in life seems to be to create and have problems.

XVI

APPRENTICES TO THE SCHOOL

Vocational training in the schools of Gary means that whatever work is necessary in the way of repairing, conserving, beautifying or enhancing the facilities, is done by the school itself. These large, lavishly equipped modern school-buildings require a force of mechanics to keep them in repair. Their shops are the industrial and manual shops for the school. The children work in them with skilled union workmen, who are employed not primarily as “manual training” teachers, but as assistants to the building superintendent. The mechanics teach by allowing the children to help them as apprentices. They earn their salaries by repair and construction work, while the children who desire it get an incomparable vocational training at practically no cost to the town. Where the ordinary trade-school must have large classes to make the enterprise pay, the Gary vocational work may be done with the smallest groups, for the shops are paying for themselves anyway.

Manual training takes on quite a new meaning as you move about, watching the boys in the carpenter-shop making desks or tables, or cabinets for the botany collections, or book-racks for the library, sending them on to the paint-shop when they have finished; boys in the sheet-metal shop hammering zinc for the roof; young electricians repairing bells; a couple of plumbers tinkering with pipes; little groups of serious and absorbedly interested boys in foundry and forge and pattern-making shop, all coöperating like the parts of a well-ordered factory. There was obviously enough real work to keep busy for his hour a day every child who desired training in a trade. Where school and workshop are thus fused, the need for “continuation” and “coöperative” courses--where the boy alternates between shop or factory and school--disappears. The child has the advantages of both.

The ordinary school, and even the specialized vocational school, is rarely doing more in its industrial, manual, or domestic science work than playing a rather dreary game with toys. There could scarcely be a greater contrast between the real shops of the Gary schools and those ordinary “shops” and kitchens with their dozens of little machines at which at a given time the entire class does its little stereotyped “stunt.” In Gary the domestic science room is a real kitchen in which the daily luncheon is prepared and served at cost to the teachers and pupils who desire it. The cook is a real cook, and the girls come in as observers, helpers or workers, just as the boys go into the shops. The nearest approach to a luxury is the pottery shop, but this is itself perhaps the best symbol of that fusion of the artistic and the practical that is the Wirt genius. What are you to say when you walk into the art studio and find a dozen girls and boys high on a scaffolding painting a frieze which they have themselves designed, while others are at work on stained-glass designs to go in varnished paper on the panels of the door?

There is a genial, joyous quality about all the work that gives every room a charm--the foundry with its deep shadows, the smooth gray pottery shop with its turning wheels and bright glazed jugs, the botany room with its mass of greenery. Even the history room at Emerson School had the atmosphere which comes from concentrated interest and the slow accretion of significant material. Emerson itself is a spacious and dignified building with innumerable little touches of taste that one usually associates only with the high schools of exceptionally wealthy and cultivated suburban communities. It is a delightful paradox that so beautiful a life should appear to be lived where every activity seems to be motivated by direct utilitarian application. I said that you have to plow your mind up to understand this kind of a school. Certainly I have never seen a place which more nearly permitted to seem real that old ideal of the joy of work which we imagine must have existed back in guild days. It may be left to the imagination what children trained in such a school are likely to have to say to the industrial society in which we live.

The practical work of the school is only limited by local school needs, but the shoeless condition of some of the Frœbel children inspired the starting of a shoe shop where old shoes were made over. Both Emerson and Frœbel have a printery from which come all the blanks, reports, programs, etc., used in the school, as well as the bulletins and papers by which the various classes are tempted to preserve the good things they write. The commercial pupils have charge of all the accounting and bookkeeping as well as the supplies. The children who work in the shops are paid in checks, which are calculated on the basis of prevailing union wages for the working-time. This provides opportunities for a banking system, which is also in charge of the commercial class. In the Jefferson School the boiler-room is an integral part of the machine-shop.

The botany class was responsible for the beautiful and elaborate conservatory at the entrance of the Emerson School, and for the window hothouse in the botany room, where practical experiments are made. The botanists also have charge of the shrubs and trees on the grounds, and the vegetable gardens which they work communistically all through the summer. Their study of food and textile products ramified into the domestic science work, just as the zoology study was fused with physiology. This latter class had a playground zoo, with foxes and coyotes, raccoons and prairie-dogs, about whose habits and adventures they were preparing a brochure, which was already in press at the printery. When I stepped into the zoology laboratory itself, I found that I was in an even more animated zoo. Crows, chickens and pigeons in cages at the back of the room were lusty with vociferous greeting. The imperturbability of the children amidst this racket showed me how well aware they were that this was the way a zoology room ought to behave.

Such a school, where the child works almost unconsciously into a vocation which appeals to him as neither play nor drudgery, is far more “vocational” than even the specialized school. The child, beginning so young in shop or laboratory, and assimilating the work very gradually, is able to lay deep foundations of interest and skill. The Gary school is distinctly unspecialized. In a sense it gives a completely “liberal education.” The child emerges a skilful amateur. The industrial and scientific work no more “train” him to take a definite place in the industrial world than the cultural work trains him to be a college professor. But he should leave school well equipped to cope with a dynamic, rapidly changing industrial society which demands above all things versatility, and which scraps methods and machines as ruthlessly as it does men. Only the man of rounded training and resourcefulness who can turn his hand quickly to a variety of occupations has much chance of success. Our public school, in spite of its fancied “liberal” curriculum, has really been turning out only very low-grade specialists. It has made no effort to produce the type of mind most needed to-day--the versatile machinist, the practical engineer, the mind that adapts and masters mechanism. This is probably the best intellectual type our society produces. This exactness, resourcefulness, inventiveness, pragmatic judgment of a mechanism by its product, the sense of machinery as a means, not an end, are exactly the qualities that society demands in every profession or trade.

The Gary school is the first I have seen that promises to cultivate this kind of intelligence. It frankly accepts the machine not in the usual sense of the vocational schools, as an exacting master that the child is to learn docilely to obey, but as the basis of our modern life, by whose means we must make whatever progress we may will. The machine seems to be a thing to which society is irrevocably pledged. It is time the school recognized it. In Gary it is with the child from his earliest years. It is the motive of his scientific study. The physics teacher at the Emerson School told me that he thought the fascinating and irresponsible automobile had done more to educate the younger generation than most of the public schools. Tinkering with an automobile was a whole scientific training.

I dropped into his physics class, and found a dozen twelve-year-old girls and their nine-year-old “helpers” studying the motor-cycle. With that fine disregard for boundaries which characterizes Gary education, the hour began with a spelling lesson of the names of the parts and processes of the machine. After the words were learned, the mechanism was explained to them as they pored over it, and their memory of vaporization, evaporation, etc., called into play. The motor-cycle was set going, the girls described its action, and the lesson was over, as perfect a piece of teaching as I have ever heard. The intense animation of that little group was all the more piquant for having as a background the astounded disapprobation of three grave school superintendents from the East.

To these physics classes the ventilating, heating and electric systems in the schools are all text-books. The climate is studied. The shops provide many physics problems. There was a class of boys having explained to them the physical principles of various types of machines. The impetuous rush of those little boys as they were sent into the machine-shop to take apart a lawn-mower, a bicycle, and a cream-separator, and the look of elation on their faces, would alone make Gary unforgettable to me. It was evident that this was indeed a different kind of school.

XVII

THE NATURAL SCHOOL

A surprisingly small amount of administrative machinery for so varied a system is required by the schools of Gary. Mr. Wirt is the City Superintendent of Schools. Under him each of the five school buildings has an executive principal. Two supervisors of instruction look after the pedagogical work of the system. The director of industrial work has charge of building repair, and supervises the shops where the children work under the mechanic-teachers. There is no attempt to segregate the vocational work. Manual, physical, artistic and academic activities are administered on an equal footing.

For the teacher the Gary school should be almost as liberating as it is to the pupil. In the details of courses much initiative is left to the teacher. It is really an inductive school where courses are worked out by supervisors consulting together on the basis of classroom experience. Teachers are encouraged to experiment and develop their own ideas. Here is the first public school I have ever seen that resolutely sets itself against uniformity of method or product, that recognizes differences of individuality.

The working-day of the teacher may be longer, but she is relieved of the burdensome home-work. The nervous strain is lessened also by the freer method of discipline. There cannot be unruly children unless children are ruled, and in the Gary school there is apparently no artificial repression. One found in the classroom as much talking as there would be in a concert audience, with the same natural motives, freed of “rules of order,” for quiet. The frequent change of room and activity in the Gary school prevents, too, that nervous restiveness which must inevitably come to the child kept long at his desk. The point is that only in a free and varied school like this can one talk of effective discipline. When school activities are as attractive as they are here, deprivation becomes punishment. There is at hand an instrument for inculcating reason into refractoriness which is as powerful as the stoutest disciplinarian could wish. The ordinary school tries to keep up a military system of control, without any means, now that corporal punishment is generally abolished, of punishing infractions. In a Gary school “being sent home” for misbehavior usually means being sent to a place infinitely less interesting. But there is little talk about “mischievous and unruly boys.” Those children who, in spite of everything, “are not adapted to our kind of school,” may go to the school farm in the country to work. But this farm is not in any sense a “reform” school. Delicate children may also be sent there, and other classes go for a holiday. As to the personal manners prevailing in such a free school as this, with its absence of moral homily, and effort to “train character” through obedience and discipline, I can only repeat the words of an Italian boy who had recently come from orthodox schools elsewhere: “But they’re so polite!”

I was glad to see that there was no nonsense at Gary about schemes of “self-government,” which can be little more than a humiliating pretension in any school. A kindly judge did once institute “Boyville” in a Gary school, with a parody of municipal functions, but its unreality soon relegated it to limbo. Spontaneous organization there is, but it grows out of real work. The boys’ ninth grade English class, for instance, has organized itself as the Emerson Improvement Association, and its work revolves around the speaking and writing necessary in conducting the affairs of the organization. There seem to be no “extra-curricular” activities, which create so many problems elsewhere. Athletic teams and sports are connected with the gymnasium work. Other societies spring up naturally out of the school interests. Problems of “fraternities” and the control of athletics which confront so many high schools are thus naturally avoided.