Chapter VIII: Introduction (1)

DURING the past fifteen years I have tried approximately fifty different programs for “work-study-and-play schools.” The several factors in such a school program can be combined in countless ways. I have not tried to design a system or type of school program as a set form that would constitute a universal ideal school for all children. Rather, I have tried to develop a system of school administration that would make possible the providing of a great variety of school types, so that all cities and all of the children in the several parts of a city may have the kind of school they need.

I have had only two fixed principles since I began establishing work-study-and-play schools at Bluffton, Indiana, in the year 1900.

First: All children should be busy all day long at work, study, and play under right conditions.

Second: Cities can finance an adequate work-study-and-play program only when all the facilities of the entire community for the work, study, and play of children are properly coördinated with the school, the coördinating agent, so that all facilities supplement one another and “peak-loads” are avoided by keeping all facilities of the school plant in use all of the time.

At what children work, study, and play; how they work, study, and play; when and where they work, study, and play; what facilities are provided for work, study, and play; and the total and relative amount of time given to work, study, and play;—these may vary with every city and with every school in a city. No set system can possibly meet the needs of all children, nor could a set system be uniformly provided with the existing child-welfare facilities.

It is not desirable or possible uniformly to establish one particular scheme of departmentalizing work between teachers or of rotating classes between different types of facilities. The only important thing is so to departmentalize teaching and so to rotate classes that the teachers may render the greatest service with the least expenditure of energy, and that the maximum use may be secured from the school plant and other child-welfare facilities.

WILLIAM WIRT.

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THE GARY SCHOOLS

I

THE COMMUNITY SETTING

TO set the Gary schools in their proper perspective, one must discount at the start any prevailing impression that the distinctive traits are due to peculiar local conditions, or to the enlightened philanthropy of the United States Steel Corporation, which founded the town in 1906 as the site for its new plant, the most complete system of steel mills west of Pittsburg. For to the steel officials the building of the town was incidental to the creation of the plant. Gary in consequence is far less of a “satellite city” than other made-to-order towns. The opportunity to plan the city, provide fundamental necessities for community life, determine the character of the housing, and predestine the lines of growth, all in the best and most enlightened way, was taken advantage of by the Steel Corporation only in part. Very little of the marvelous science and engineering skill that went into the making of the steel plant went into the even more important task of creating a model city. Several hundred houses were built, it is true, for the skilled labor and officialdom of the plants, but practically no attempt was made to house the low-paid unskilled labor. The result has been the development of large tracts by land speculators, and all the problems of congestion and bad housing and sanitation that curse the larger industrial cities. The connection of the Steel Corporation with the town has been throughout that of any land and development company. Communal problems have all been thrown upon the people themselves to solve. The new community was incorporated as soon as possible as a municipality under the laws of the State of Indiana, and has organized all its municipal functions, including the public schools, in entire independence of the Steel Corporation, with which it has had no more political or institutional connection than any ordinary American town has with its local industrial interests. The Corporation has by no means paid more than its share of the local taxes, and the schools, in particular, have not only been quite free from the Corporation influence or support, but have even at times run so far counter to the approval of the Corporation officials that the school administration has had difficulty in acquiring its needed sites for new schools. It can be emphatically said that the schools of Gary are no more the product of peculiar conditions than are the schools of numberless rapidly growing Western towns.

The mushroom growth of Gary has not meant a peculiar kind of a town, but simply the telescoping into a few years of the typical municipal evils of graft, franchise fights, saloon dominance, insufficient housing and health regulation, election frauds, and lack of social cohesion. Its dramatic growth has not prevented its becoming a very typical American city. In April, 1906, Gary was a waste of sand-dunes and scrub-oak swamps at the southern end of Lake Michigan. Three years later it had a steel plant covering an area of a square mile and capable of employing 140,000 men; it had a population of 12,000; 15 miles of paved streets, 25 miles of cement sidewalks, $2,000,000 worth of residences, sewer, water, gas, and electric facilities; it had 2 banks, 6 hotels, 3 dailies, 2 schools, 10 church denominations, 46 lawyers, 24 physicians—in short, all the paraphernalia of the modern city. The visitor who goes to-day to Gary finds a typically varied American city, rather better built than the average, and rather unusually favored in its open spaces. Situated within thirty miles of Chicago, the city presents a rather pleasing contrast to the long chain of industrial towns that stretches for miles in every direction across the treeless prairie. With a well-built business section, lines of residence streets, handsome public buildings and churches, electric cars and taxi-cabs, Gary has a settled air of community life unusual even for an older town. It has almost the aspect of a commercial rather than an industrial center. It is the focus of the county trade, and the extent of its business and middle-class residential districts is somewhat larger than in neighboring towns. The steel mills and subsidiary plants are massed along the lake and the artificially constructed harbor. The great immigrant population, largely of cheap and illiterate proletarian labor from southeastern Europe, inhabits the congested district of the South Side. The mills are separated from the town by a small river which forms almost a moat for the great industrial fortress. The town is laid out in checkerboard fashion, with a wide main avenue a hundred feet wide and cross-streets sixty feet wide. Alleys run the long way of the blocks, and contain the sewer and water mains. Ethnologically the population is very mixed. Thirty nationalities are said to be represented in the schools, but this large foreign population is a familiar phenomenon in the American industrial town. A rough census taken in 1908 gave the foreign population of Gary as fifty-six per cent of the whole. In 1912 it was only forty per cent, or a decrease of sixteen per cent. The alien influx has not destroyed the essentially characteristic American features of the city. The native American element has always predominated politically and socially. For an American city of its size to-day, Gary represents, not a specialized community, but a fairly harmonious distribution of social classes, races, occupations, and interests. It is essentially a normal, variedly functioning, independent community, and the schools have been developed to meet the needs of a modern varied urban community.

It must be emphasized that neither the demands of a peculiar type of industrial community nor the work of benevolent philanthropy created the schools of Gary. They have been developed in response to the typically current needs of a normal American municipality. They have had to meet the same situations which all American cities are confronting in their effort to educate “all the children of all the people.”

Organized under a school administration consisting of a board of education with three members working in conjunction with a superintendent of schools, the school system depends for support entirely upon local taxation and the usual sources of revenue, and enjoys no unusual municipal or financial advantages. On the contrary, the enterprise of providing public schools for the town of Gary was one of peculiar difficulty. The new and rapidly growing town required the immediate creation of a school plant, in addition to the annual cost of instruction and maintenance. The community was poor. A large proportion of the people, being recently arrived immigrants, owned no taxable property. The plants of the Steel Corporation, the most valuable property in the community, were habitually undervalued in the assessments. The state laws, moreover, provide that school revenues for any given year are to be obtained on an assessment made almost two years before. The result in a new city like Gary, where the population had been doubling each year, was, therefore, that current school revenues had to be based on assessment values obtained when the population was only one quarter as great.

In the face of all these formidable difficulties the success of the Gary school system seems little short of amazing. In the short space of eight years the population has increased from three hundred to over thirty thousand. No ordinary city would attempt to supply school facilities to a population which doubled every year. The mere physical problem of providing seats for the children would be insurmountable. A city which followed the conventional school plan would be swamped. At the present time, with their much slower yearly increase of population, half of the cities of over one hundred thousand in this country have insufficient sittings for their children.

Yet with its leaping movement of population the city of Gary has been able to provide not only full-time instruction for every child, but actually a longer school day. It has not only done this, but it has provided evening school instruction for an even greater number of adults. There is something pardonable in the Gary boast that every third person in the city goes to school. And Gary has succeeded not only in giving this universal schooling, but in making it what is probably the most varied and stimulating elementary public-school instruction in the United States, with an equipment in buildings and facilities for work, study, and play which is surpassed, if anywhere, only in specially favored communities. All this has been done with a normal tax-rate, and at a _per-capita_ cost of both construction and maintenance no greater than that in the city of Chicago and the city of New York, with their many overcrowded and poorly equipped school-buildings. The Gary schools, at the same time, have paid the highest teachers’ salaries in the State. The entire achievement has been as brilliant as the difficulties confronted were formidable.

It is these remarkable results that have focused the attention of so many educators on Gary, and it will be the purpose of this book to expound the “unique and ingenious synthesis of educational influences” which has made them possible. If, then, in the course of eight years, the schools of Gary have acquired a wide reputation as a momentous educational experiment which has passed into successful demonstration, the fact must be laid entirely to the abilities of the school authorities, and not to any adventitious factors of the community situation or of private assistance. The dominating factor was the personal genius of the superintendent, William Wirt, who was called to Gary in 1908 from Bluffton, Indiana, where he had been in charge of the public schools, and where he had partly worked out some of the ideas which he was later to develop so comprehensively in the Gary schools. When it is objected that the Gary plan is an experiment, and that eight years are scarcely sufficient time to pronounce upon its merits, it must be remembered that the real experimental stage of the Gary plan consisted in the eight years in Bluffton. Mr. Wirt came to Gary with his educational ideas matured after this long testing. He was brought to Gary by the unusually progressive mayor and school board of the new town, for the express purpose of working out on a large scale the principles which they had seen in concrete application at Bluffton. Against the financial meagerness of the town’s resources and the obstructiveness of the founders must, therefore, be set the advantage of having a virgin field in which to work. The superintendent and school board were able in a remarkably short time to build up a public interest and support which has been a very large asset. The people of Gary seem proud of their schools, and seem to appreciate the comprehensive educational and recreational facilities which through them are provided for both children and adults. Few educational experiments have been so successful in technique and in popular support. The Gary schools represent the fruit of a very unusual combination of educational philosophy, economic engineering, and political sagacity. Circumstances seem to have conspired to produce a school system which unites a very remarkable school plant with a synthesis of novel plans of operation which are fertile in suggestion to school men, if they do not tend to revolutionize many methods of financing public schools as well as methods of administration and teaching.

This outline of the setting of the Gary schools scarcely puts the background in its correct light. When we speak of the “Gary school” we are really talking about something bigger than the educational system of a small Western city. What we have to deal with is an educational idea, a comprehensive plan for the modern public school, capable of general imitation and adaptation to the needs of other American communities. In this sense it means primarily what Superintendent Wirt thought a public school should be. Being at once a social engineer and educational philosopher, he has succeeded in working out a type-plan of public school which to many educators appears uniquely valuable in American public education. The discussion which follows attempts to describe the Gary schools from this larger point of view. The effort is to show in detail how the plan actually works in the schools of Gary, while at the same time to suggest the larger ideas and principles which have motivated it. The “Gary plan” represents, of course, not only what has been done in Gary, but its further implications and tendencies, as well as the developments and modifications now working out in those schools, such as the group in New York City, which have been put in the hands of the Gary authorities for reorganization.

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II

THE SCHOOL PLANT: EDUCATING THE WHOLE CHILD

THIS children’s community, as worked out by Mr. Wirt in the Gary schools, is a work-study-and-play school of the most varied kind. It represents, in fact, an ideal school plant which was well outlined in Mr. Wirt’s mind when he first came to Gary. Schools like the magnificent Emerson and Froebel plants in Gary, and the new Pestalozzi School, for which plans have already been drawn and the site bought, represent the working-out in concrete form of this ideal. At the same time, it must be understood that the essential features of the Wirt plan are possible in schools which were not built from the ideal plan. Perhaps Mr. Wirt’s greatest triumph in Gary is not these new schools, but the old Jefferson School, which he found when he came to the town, and which, by ingenious remodeling, he turned from a conventional school-building into a completely functioning school. If the Wirt plan is momentous as showing what a really modern public school should embody, it is no less momentous in showing how easily the old type of schoolhouse may be adapted to the varied life of the school community that is the Wirt school.

THE EMERSON SCHOOL
]

It will first be necessary to describe the ideal school plant as represented in the Emerson and Froebel Schools in Gary. This plant carries out a belief in educating the whole child, physically, artistically, manually, scientifically, as well as intellectually. Mr. Wirt believes that by putting in the child’s way all the opportunities for varied development, the child will be able to select those activities for which he is best suited, and thus develop his capacities to their highest power. This can be done only in a school which provides, besides the ordinary classrooms, also playgrounds and gardens, gymnasiums and swimming-pools, special drawing and music studios, science laboratories, MACHINE-SHOPs, and intimate and constant contact with supplementary community activities outside the school. The Wirt school is based on a fourfold unity of interests,—play and exercise, intellectual study, special work in shop and laboratory, etc., and social and expressive activity in auditorium or outside community agency.

Between these activities there is no invidious distinction. The manual and artistic are not subordinated to the intellectual, as in the ordinary school. The “special activities” are not mere trimmings to the “regular work,” but neither is the latter neglected in favor of the former. The ideal of the Wirt plan is that the child should have every day, in some form or other, contact with all the different activities which influence a well-rounded human being, instead of meeting them perfunctorily once or twice a week, as in the ordinary school. This does not mean, of course, that every child is expected to develop into a versatile genius, equally able in science and music and shopwork and history. Most children are sternly limited in their capacities, and will be unable to assimilate more than a small part of what the school offers them. But the Wirt school definitely offers the opportunity. If there are capacities, they have the chance to develop, while no child need lack that speaking acquaintance with the varied interests of work and study which now the old traditional type of school so tragically denies.

It is an essential feature of the Wirt scheme that this varied work be provided for all the children from the earliest possible years. The lavish equipment of the ideal Wirt school plant may be paralleled in other communities than Gary, but it is paralleled only in the case of the secondary schools. It is a notorious fact that, of the children who begin the American public school, only one fifth ever reach even the first year of the high school. So far it is the high school or the highest grammar grades that have received practically all of the advantages of broadening educational endeavor,—vocational training, science laboratory work, the study of civics, domestic science, etc. This means that the vast majority of school-children leave school with nothing but the barest intellectual training, without ever having come in contact with points of view and ways of doing things that are absolutely essential to any understanding or effectiveness in the world above the very lowest. Against this fundamentally undemocratic system, which denies help to those who need it most, the Wirt plan resolutely sets its face.

The ideal Wirt school contains in one school plant the complete school, with all the classes from the kindergarten through the common school and high school.

By this plan both economic and educational advantages are realized. From an economic point of view, it is cheaper to have large, completely equipped centers than to duplicate the equipment in a number of smaller centers. From an educational point of view, it enables pupils to bridge the chasm between the elementary grades and the high school. By ceasing to make the high school a separate institution to be “entered” or “graduated from,” pupils find no place to stop when they have completed the eight grades.

The complete school, Mr. Wirt believes, offers important moral gains. “The development of character, habits of industry, reliability, good health, and the growth of intelligence require time,” he says, “and must be a continuous process throughout the entire life of the child.” The complete school gives an opportunity for that coöperation or “apprenticeship” between the younger and older children, which is so important a feature of the Wirt school, and this association breaks down the snobbery of age which causes so much unhappiness in childhood.

It must be admitted that in Gary, owing to the progressive mortality in attendance which is common everywhere, it is possible to realize the complete school only in the Emerson and Froebel plants. At the same time it must be remembered that these schools care for three quarters of the school-children of the town. In the elementary schools which Mr. Wirt is reorganizing in New York, he is asking that there shall be included at least two of the high-school years, in order that the complete school may be approximated as closely as possible. In Gary, they are working for a school which is even more than “complete,” for they aim to include even the first year and perhaps even the second of the ordinary college course. Stretching down boldly past the kindergarten to a nursery for babies, and up into the college itself, the Wirt school thus gives a fundamentally new orientation to education, shows it graphically and practically as a continuous process, and breaks down those artificial barriers by which we measure off “education,” and make it easy for people to “finish” it. The Wirt school seems definitely to forecast the day when the public school will have swallowed the college, and the “higher education” will have become as local and available as the three R’s.

* * * * *

If the school is to educate the whole child, the first need is evidently a place for him to grow. “The best of education,” says Professor Terman, “is but wisely directed growth.” “The activities of a child,” says Professor Dewey, “are the means by which he becomes acquainted with his world, and by which he learns the use and limits of his own powers.” The lack of free activity in the conventional school has been the major cause of those symptoms of morbidity which school hygienists have brought to the attention of educators within the last few years. Over-pressure and confinement have made the school a manufactory for evils which the next generation will look back to with amazement at the blindness of the educational world which permitted it.

The ideal school will make the playground the very center of its life. The school in the Wirt plan covers a site of from ten to twenty acres. Actually the Emerson School in Gary has ten acres; Froebel has twelve; the new Tolleston site covers twenty acres. Of this ideal site of twenty acres, ten acres in front of the school-building are purchased by the city and maintained by it as an open public square or small park. The remaining ten acres are bought by the school for the building site and playgrounds. It is the intention in Gary to have these park-school playgrounds distributed over the city so that few families will live more than half a mile away from one of them.

It is a cardinal principle of the Wirt plan that the parks and playgrounds of a city should be placed as _adjuncts of the schools_. It is the schools that they primarily serve and it is with the schools that they should be grouped. Millions of dollars have been wasted in the public-playground movement in this country through disregard of this fact. There is a good story of a Chicago playground instructor who, when asked if the playgrounds coöperated with the schools, replied, “Sure we do! If we see any kid on here between nine and three, we chase him off!” This is symbolic of the lack of intelligent coöperation between child-welfare agencies. It is this wasteful and ineffective situation which the Wirt plan remedies by boldly annexing park and playground to the school itself. A comparison of the Chicago playgrounds with the Gary school playgrounds shows the immensely greater public service rendered under the Wirt scheme. Chicago has one of the most elaborate systems of recreation parks and field-houses in the country. Yet in a district only _one fortieth_ the size of the Chicago district, one Gary school, providing for both children and adults, gave indoor gymnasium work to three times as many people; shower-baths to one third as many; outdoor gymnasium to an equal number; the use of swimming-pools to half as many; use of the assembly halls to four times as many; and to as many, the use of clubrooms and reading-rooms. Thus, in educating the child’s body, and giving him space to grow and play, the Wirt school enormously increased the opportunities of every one in the district, old and young, to secure the same advantages.

The ideal Wirt school plant, such as the Emerson School in Gary, in its open space of ten acres, besides its playground filled with apparatus, has gardens, tennis courts, ball fields, running tracks, and handball courts. For the younger children there are wading-pools and sandpits. One field is arranged so that it may be flooded in winter for skating. There are two acres of school-gardens, and a cluster of cages and houses for the animals of the school zoo. The outdoor equipment is, in other words, on the scale of a college or a wealthy private school which can afford spacious grounds and provision for every athletic sport. The Gary schools are, however, public schools, and these facilities are open to all the children of all ages and all the time.

THE SWIMMING-POOL AT THE FROEBEL SCHOOL
]

It is customary for our newer high schools to have gymnasiums, but the common school is rarely provided for. In the Wirt school, the common school shares, of course, in the extensive gymnasium equipment. The Emerson School has two gymnasiums, one for boys and one for girls. It has also a large swimming-pool.

The Froebel School has two gymnasiums and two swimming-pools. The Jefferson School has a large gymnasium, though only the common school is provided for in the Jefferson. The other Gary schools all have gymnasiums proportionate to their size. In the new school plants it is intended to build pergolas about the inner court which will contain open-air classrooms and additional outdoor gymnasium space. Nothing is omitted which will provide the right physical conditions for the child’s growth and development from his earliest years.

Coming to the school-building itself, we find in the Emerson and Froebel Schools architectural creations of unusual beauty and impressiveness. The school-building is built around a great court, with broad halls as wide as streets, and well lighted from the court. These broad halls serve not only as the school streets for the constant passage of the children between their work, but also as centers for the “application” work, or for informal study. They are so wide that all confusion is avoided, and they suggest to the visitor that they serve the school community in the same way that the agora or forum did the ancient city. In the Emerson School the beginning of an art gallery has been made. It suggests the idea that just as the schools ought to absorb the playgrounds, so they ought to absorb the museums and galleries. Pictures and objects of art and interest become unreal and artificial when immured in isolated museums, which can be visited only at special times and with effort. They should be at hand in the school, fertilizing and beautifying every moment of its daily life. The artistic sense can be cultivated only by bringing children into contact daily and almost unconsciously with beautiful things. The schools themselves must be art galleries, and these fine corridors of the Wirt school indicate the way by which a wholly new orientation is to be given to our public galleries by using them as adjuncts to the education of children.

Similarly with museums. The teaching of the Gary schools, based fundamentally on concrete things and processes, needs to be constantly in touch with the objects which it is our custom to store in dead museums. The school museum is an essential feature of the Wirt school. The Wirt plan does not contemplate the taking of children docilely about to visit museums, as some progressive teachers are doing. It contemplates bringing the museums into the schools, so that the children can know the treasures and live with them and learn about them.

And similarly with libraries. Mr. Wirt believes that the school may do the work of the public library much more efficiently and much more economically than the library can itself do it. He has shown in Gary that in a school branch of the public library, library maintenance and circulation cost per book circulation is only about five per cent of the cost in the main library, while the life of the book circulated in sets under the control of the teachers is ten times that of the usual circulation book in the library. In both the Emerson and Froebel Schools there is a branch of the public library, under a library assistant. Children use the library as a part of their regular work under the supervision of the assistant and teachers. All sorts of stereoscopic pictures, photographs, collections of pictures, atlases, etc., can thus be provided, which would be impossible for the classroom. The library becomes the storehouse of the knowledge of the school, and the children learn to recognize it as such. Again, the library is already an important feature of many of the newer high schools throughout the country. In the Wirt school, however, all the elementary classes use it also.

The Wirt school contemplates bringing all the cultural resources of the community to bear on the school. It makes the school the proper and natural depository for whatever the community has to offer in artistic interest or intellectual resource. Like most of the features of the Wirt plan, this consolidation of gallery, museum, and library in the school is as economically efficient as it is educationally valuable.

A word must be said about the auditorium. Few schools have assembly rooms like that in the Froebel School in Gary, with its stage large enough for a full-sized basketball game or athletic contest. The unique rôle of the auditorium in the Wirt school will be described in the next chapter. It assists materially in educating the whole child by giving him opportunities for public expression before the school community.

The classrooms in the ideal Wirt school are much more attractive than the ordinary classrooms, far less formal and far less crowded. In some of them the old-fashioned school desk and seat have been retained, largely, according to Mr. Wirt, to meet the prejudice of the parents. Owing to the frequent change and movement of classes, however, this peculiarly flagrant instrument of educational perversity does little harm. Many of the lower grades have a desk, made in the school, which is a kind of workbench. These desks have vises attached, and loose tops, which can be readily replaced when soiled or worn out. The seat is a four-legged stool, which can be pushed out of the way when the child is using his desk for a workbench. On occasion the children can take up their stools and desktops and go off to work in the halls or garden. Such a room is an ideal classroom, with its hint of the workshop and its lack of rigidity. In the history room in the Emerson School are broad tables that can be used for map-drawing. The idea is to give to each classroom the physical setting and the furniture which will best enable a particular kind of work to be done there. The result is that the classrooms of the Wirt schools have a character of their own, quite different from the colorless and depressing effect of the ordinary classroom. They are not merely rooms where children study together and tamely recite, but essentially workshops where children do interesting things with their minds, just as in the shops they do interesting things with their hands. The history room is a real history laboratory. Maps and charts made by the pupils cover the walls, magazines lie about, pictures and books overflow the tables. The visitor realizes that he is in a room saturated with history, past and present. It is easier to learn in a room where everything appeals to the imagination.

Mr. Wirt says that you never can tell when a child is learning. The time that he makes progress is not necessarily the recitation time. It is the constant impingement of impressions that really educates him, and it is this that the intellectual side of the Wirt school is skillfully designed to cultivate. Music and expression and drawing are taught, not in regular classrooms, but in special studios, which are genuine studios equipped with all the facilities to impress upon the child with what seriousness these things are taken in the Wirt school. Art tends to mean much more to a child brought up in such a school, because he works at it in an impressive environment.

The science laboratories for botany, zoölogy, chemistry, physics, are not only well-equipped laboratories, but workshops as well. The botany room in the Gary school has a large conservatory of vines and plants at the end; the zoölogy room has a menagerie of small pets, fowls and birds, guinea-pigs and rabbits. The physics rooms are in contact with a machine room where automobiles and other machines illustrate the practical application of scientific principles. Everywhere the attempt is made to give a dramatic and practical physical setting to the work and study, so that the child may be learning all the time by suggestion and imitation. And everywhere the attempt is made to show that no one activity is any more important than any other. Each activity represents one side of that whole child to educate whom this school plant has been built.

The manual and industrial work is, of course, an essential feature of the Wirt school. The shops are much more extensive than is customary in even the most progressive public school, or even in the special trade school. The Emerson School in Gary has, for instance, a carpentry-shop, cabinet-shop, paint-shop, foundry, forge, machine-shop, printery, sheet-metal shop, electrical shop, sewing-room, and cooking- and dining-rooms, all admirably equipped as regular shops, and not merely as manual-training rooms. The Froebel School has, besides these shops, a plumbing-shop, a laundry, a shoemaking-shop and a pottery-shop. In the smaller schools several shops are combined into one, as at the Jefferson, though the work done is just as genuine as at the ideal plant. The number of shops, or the variety of work, is, as we shall see in the next chapter, limited only by the services which the school demands in the way of repairing or enhancing its physical facilities.

When we have mentioned the room for commercial studies, the supply-store, the kindergartens and nurseries, the draughting-rooms, indoor playrooms, teachers’ room, conservatory, doctor’s room and dental clinic, offices, etc., our survey of the school plant is complete. The arrangement of rooms itself, however, is very significant. As we pass around the second floor of the Froebel School, for instance, we meet, in this order, pottery-shop, laundry, freehand drawing-room, two classrooms, physics laboratory, music and expression studios, conservatory, two classrooms, botany laboratory, and four more classrooms. The shops are not segregated in the basement, but the children in their various activities work side by side. Classrooms are placed next to laboratories, and shops next to studios, in order to impress the pupil with the unity of the program, and in order that the younger pupils may have constantly before their eyes an inviting future and opportunity. All the rooms, moreover, have glass doors, and the shops have windows, so that the children, passing through the halls, may look in and see others at work at unfamiliar tasks. In this way their curiosity is likely to be aroused and the ambition to work at these interesting activities in which they see the older children engaged.

In this juxtaposition of the various activities, therefore, the child has impressed upon him that school life is a unity in breadth, just as the combining of the elementary and secondary school impresses him with the fact that his school life is a unity in length. No opportunity is lost to touch his imagination and excite his curiosity. The school plant itself, in its mere arrangement and construction, it will thus be seen, serves a very important educational purpose. The careful detail with which this has been worked out in these ideal school plants of Gary makes the Wirt school in its physical aspect something very much more significant than a mere collection of facilities. Those facilities fit into one another according to a very comprehensive plan. They form organs of a genuine school life, which educates the whole child.

This fourfold division of study and recitation facilities, studio, workshop, and laboratory facilities, auditorium facilities, and application and play facilities, is essential to the working of the Wirt plan. Where the ideal school plant is impossible, this fourfold plan may yet be possible. As has been said, the greatest triumph of the Wirt plan in Gary is, perhaps, the Jefferson School, a building of conventional style, which had been erected before Mr. Wirt came to Gary. It was an ordinary school-building with ten classrooms and auditorium, but no other facilities. By turning the spacious attic into a gymnasium, by transforming five of the classrooms into music and art studios and nature-study laboratories, by building a general jack-of-all-trades workshop around the engine- and boiler-room in the cellar, by building a domestic-science kitchen in an unused corner, putting lockers into wasted space, and by equipping the playground with apparatus, Mr. Wirt succeeded in transforming an ordinary school-building, whose prototype may be found in almost any town in the land, into a full-fledged, varied, and smoothly running Wirt school. The reorganization of schools in New York City and other places has been done by Mr. Wirt along similar lines.[1]

Footnote 1:

See appendix for detailed description of reorganization of twelve New
York schools.

Where, in most cases, a mere rearrangement of classrooms and the institution of shops and laboratories will transform a school, in others special annexes are necessary. These can be built usually, however, at comparatively small cost. The use of portable houses by the smaller schools of Gary has enabled the small wayside “district school,” hitherto confined entirely to study and recitation, to transform itself into a genuine Wirt school, with its fourfold work and study. Shop, auditorium, and laboratory and studio can be provided in the form of small portable houses, and the capacity of the school as well as its facilities can thus be greatly increased.

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III

WORK, STUDY, AND PLAY: THE SCHOOL AS A COMMUNITY

THE Gary school represents not merely the old public school with certain added modern features, but a definite reorganization. Its aim is to form, with its well-balanced facilities of work, study, and play, a genuine children’s community, where the children’s normal healthy interests are centered, and where they learn, in Professor Dewey’s phrase, “by doing the things that have meaning to them as children.” The Gary school aims to meet the comparative failure of the public school to-day to care for the city child. It tries to take the place of the old household and rural community life which provided for our forefathers the practical education of which the city child in his daily life is deprived to-day.

The full significance of the Gary plan can scarcely be understood unless it is seen against this background. “It is impossible,” says Professor Dewey, “to exaggerate the amount of mental and moral training secured by our forefathers in the course of the ordinary pursuits of life. They were engaged in subduing a new country. Industry was at a premium, and instead of being of a routine nature pioneer conditions required initiative, ingenuity, and pluck.... Production had not yet been concentrated in factories in congested centers, but was distributed through villages.... The occupations of daily life engaged the imagination and enforced knowledge of natural materials and processes.... Children had the discipline that came from sharing in useful activities.... Under such conditions the schools could hardly have done better than devote themselves to books.... But conditions changed, and school materials and methods did not change to keep pace. Population shifted to urban centers. Production became a mass affair carried on in big factories, instead of a household affair.... Industry was no longer a local or neighborhood concern. Manufacturing was split up into a very great variety of separate processes through the economies incident upon extreme division of labor.... The machine worker, unlike the older hand worker, is following blindly the intelligence of others instead of his own knowledge of materials, tools and processes.... Children have lost the moral and practical discipline that once came from sharing in the round of home duties. For a large number there is little alternative, especially in large cities, between irksome child labor and demoralizing child idleness.”

The Gary school is an organized attempt to restore this natural education, adapt it to modern demands, and thus avoid these alternatives so disastrous for the future of the child and the quality of the coming generation. By making the public school as much as possible a self-sustaining child community, Superintendent Wirt believes that all the benefits of this older education can be attained. “We cannot,” he says, “trust the other social institutions to remedy the defects. Not more than one quarter of the urban children attend Sunday-School regularly. This makes an average of only two minutes a day for all the days and all the children. In fact, church, Sunday-School, public library, public playgrounds, Y.M.C.A., Boy Scouts, and all other child-welfare agencies do not occupy the time of all the children of a city for more than an average of ten minutes a day. The practical effect of this is that the streets and alleys and the cheap theaters and other commercialized places of amusement have the children for over five hours a day. The cities are not fit places for the rearing of children, because, as a rule, the streets and alleys have twice the time for educating the children in the wrong direction that the school, church, library, and playground have for educating them in the right direction.”

This is the justification for extending the Gary school day to eight hours and limiting vacations. This is the plan which gives ample time for the intensive use of the remarkable school plant described in the preceding chapter. For in place of using for the special work and play activities a part of the already too few regular school hours per year, the Gary school secures additional time for these activities by appropriating the now worse than wasted “street-and-alley time” of the masses of city children. Saturday school, vacation school, even an all-year school, are features of the Gary plan which carry out this principle of providing a school life for the children for as long a time as they can be induced and encouraged to continue it. The Gary school deliberately seeks to employ and satisfy the children’s time with wholesome and interesting activity.

It aims not only to organize the daily life of the child for the greater part of his time, but it seeks to provide for him in a self-sustaining community. This means that all the work and study converge upon the school life. The things that are done in the Gary school contribute to the usefulness, the beauty, or the interest of the school community. The Gary school is built on the sound psychological theory that only such work as has meaning in the life of the school, as lived by the children themselves then and there, will be really learned and assimilated. The school is not only to be a “preparation for life”: it is to be a life itself, as the old household was a life itself. “The idea that children should study exclusively for eight years, and then work exclusively for the rest of their life,” says Superintendent Wirt, “is really a new idea in civilization. The criticism of the modern public school is directed almost entirely at the helplessness of children who are attempting to enter industrial and commercial life from this exclusive study period of eight, twelve, or sixteen years in the schools, and at the fact that the school is not able to get more than half its children beyond the sixth grade of the common school. Formerly the school plus the home and small shop educated the child. The small shop has been generally eliminated and the home has lost most of its former opportunities. A much greater part of the education of the child must be assumed by the school of the present generation. In place of the school, home, and shop, we have the school and the city street educating the great masses of children. The school must do what the school, home, and small shop formerly did together.”

The idea of making the school a self-sustaining community is worked out in the Gary school in the most comprehensive form. The manual-training and industrial shops, for instance, are actually the shops for the school community, and their work goes largely toward the upkeep of the school plant. Vocational training in the Gary school means that whatever work is necessary in the way of repairing, conserving, beautifying, or enhancing the school facilities is done by the pupils themselves. The school, like the old-time industrial home and community, has a large amount of real work that is now being done and must always be done in connection with the equipment of its buildings, grounds, laboratories, shops, etc. The large, lavishly equipped Gary school plants require a force of mechanics to keep them in repair. The usual way of doing this would be to hire outside labor at considerable expense to do the necessary work during school vacations. The Gary schools, on the other hand, which have no long vacations, employ a permanent force of mechanics, and keep them continuously employed throughout the year. Regular union artisans, chosen because of their character, intelligence, and teaching ability, are engaged by the building departments of the school plant. There are carpenters, cabinet-makers, painters, plumbers, sheet-metal workers, engineers, printers, electricians, machinists, foundrymen, etc., sufficient to meet the needs of the schools. This great variety of equipment and maintenance work provides manual activity of a truly educative sort suitable to every stage of the child’s development. The shops of these workmen become the regular manual and industrial training shops of the school. The children work with the artisans in much the same way as old-time apprentices, though, of course, for only a fraction of their time. Just as the child formerly participated in the industrial activities of the household, so now he participates in the real industrial activities of his school. The school artisans, and the nurses, school dentist, and physician, landscape gardener, architect, and draftsman, accountant, storekeeper, office force, lunch-room manager, designer, dress-maker, milliner, all take the place of the father and mother and older brothers and sisters in the old-time, self-sustaining, practically educative household. The children receive all the benefits of doing real work that must be done and of participating in their own school business. And they have the benefit of a completely modern equipment resembling in detail the machinery and processes which they will find when they go out into the larger social community.

In this novel scheme the Gary schools seem to have experienced little difficulty. Superintendent Wirt says that when you have provided a plant where the children may live a complete life eight hours a day in work, study, and play, it is the simplest thing imaginable to permit the children in the workshops, under the direction and with the help of well-trained men and women, to assume the responsibility for the maintenance of the school plant. There can be no exploitation of the children, for masters and pupils are permitted to do only enough work to balance the wages of the masters and the cost of materials. The teacher-workmen would be doing the work whether the children assisted or not. They earn their salaries by their repair and construction work, and the children who desire it get an admirably practical vocational training almost without additional cost to the city. The great expense is avoided of special shop equipment, such as the usual industrial high school or special trade school has for its industrial courses, which are, moreover, wholly unproductive. And the school is able to offer a much greater variety of trades than even the special trade school: for a school plant like the Gary institution will demand for its equipment and maintenance almost every staple trade, industrial and domestic, with the attendant educational opportunities for both boy and girl.

Manual work takes on quite a new meaning when it becomes, as in the Gary schools, productive work for the school community. It is no longer a question of each child doing his “practice” work, his stereotyped “stunt,” in which he soon loses interest. The boys in the Gary carpenter-shop are making desks and tables for the classrooms, cabinets and stools for the laboratories, or bookracks for the library. In the paint-shop they are staining and finishing them; or they are at work on the woodwork of the building, painting or varnishing. The electricians must care for motors, bells, etc., and there is always opportunity for teaching winding, motor construction, and wiring. Plumbing must be installed and kept in repair. Many parts of the plant call for the sheet-metal worker. Foundry and machine workers require in turn a pattern-making shop and draftsmen to furnish plans and specifications. The engineer of the heating, lighting, and ventilating plant gives lessons in firing and in the care of boilers. The printing-shop does all the printing work for the schools,—blanks, forms, reports, charts, etc., besides the illustrated brochures which the pupils of the various departments issue. In the Froebel School there is even a demand for a pottery shop, where the children often discover artistic talent in making the necessary clay utensils for the school. The number and character of the school shops is limited only by the needs of the school community. One year the shoeless condition of some of the children set a demand for a shoe shop, in which old shoes were made over into wearable new ones.

The visitor to the Gary school finds everywhere little groups of busy children, absorbedly interested, working on the different needs of the school, under kindly and intelligent teacher-workmen. He finds that there is enough real work in the school plant to keep occupied for his hour or more a day every child who is interested in manual work—and most children are—or who desires to become familiar with a trade. Such work is highly educational, and it is not drudgery. It is not specialized, nor is it segregated from the academic studies. The industrial work for both boys and girls is an integral part of the school life in which every one who cares for a rounded education must participate in some form or other.

THE PRINTING-SHOP AT THE EMERSON SCHOOL
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There is not a department which does not contribute in some way to the school community life. The caretakers of the grounds are under the supervision of the botany and zoölogy (nature-study) departments. The children work with them in taking charge of and caring for the gardens, lawns, trees, and shrubs. The botany classes care also for the school conservatory and for the smaller experimental conservatory in the botany laboratory. The zoölogy classes have charge of the school zoo as well as the collection of pets in the zoölogy room. Even the drawing classes contribute, the mechanical-drawing pupils in preparing plans for the industrial work and construction, the art classes in decorating the friezes of their room or in designing details for the building.