It was in the nature of a happy accident that this sane and democratic
proposal came before the public as a practical alternative to the
scheme of turning the grammar schools into adjuncts of capitalist shops
and factories.
It happened that a man named Wirt solved in the schools of Gary,
Indiana, the problem of accommodating two pupils with a desk built for
one. He did this by the simple means of abolishing the private and
exclusive character of the desks. By having one-half the pupils come a
little later and leave a little later than the other half, and use the
desks which the others had just vacated for the gymnasium or workshop
or assembly room, it was found that there were desks enough for all.
And because this plan made it unnecessary to spend some millions of
dollars on new school-buildings, he was invited to come to New York and
put his plan in practice there.
If that had been all there was to the Gary system, it might have been
adopted peacefully enough. But the Gary system was a real and hence
a revolutionary kind of education, and so it met with immediate and
bitter hostility.
It made the child and his needs the center of the whole process of
education. It undertook to give him a chance to learn how to live. It
made the school to a large extent a replica of the world outside. It
gave him machinery and gardens and printing presses to play with and
learn from. And right there it aroused the suspicions of working class
parents, who were afraid their children were not going to get enough
Book-learning. It demanded something of teachers besides routine and
discipline and stoic patience; and though they came with experience
to be its most enthusiastic advocates, they were in prospect roused
to angry opposition. It abolished the semi-sacerdotal dignities of
the school-building, and thus offended a deep-lying superstitious
reverence in a public which regarded education as something set
apart from life. It clashed with the bureaucratic fads of the higher
educational authorities, and provoked them to financial sabotage. And
finally it was dragged into politics, where as the pet project of
an administration of bureaucratic reform officials it was held up to
popular scorn.
But the ideal of education which was implicit in the Gary plan is still
up for judgment.