Daniel said to Nebuchadnezzar: “Thou, O king, sawest and beheld a great
image. His head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms were of
silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, his legs of iron, and his
feet part of iron and part of clay; and a stone smote the image upon the
feet that were of iron and clay and brake them in pieces. Then was the
iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold broken in pieces
together.”
This image might represent America nearly as well as the empire of “the
great king.” In the original democracies of Greece, the freemen met
together in the market place to elect from their friends and
acquaintances the officers who determined the policy of the state. The
weakness of American democracy is that we have not organized this
primitive element or _demos_ on which it is supposed to stand.
Politics in our cities have been corrupt, because there have been no
meetings of the community to discuss community affairs. The individual
has often been reckless in conduct, because he was not acquainted in the
section in which he lived and consequently had no social accountability
to public opinion. Foreigners have come among us and drifted in and out
of the city slum, bearing with them their racial antipathies to each
other, and casting no anchor in the locality because at no time have
they become a real part of a community. We have had no real city
communities or neighborhoods but mere districts of people in no way
organized or related to each other. The feet of the image are of miry
clay.
In the country sections the situation is little better. In the days of
the pioneer the early settlers were drawn together by common dangers and
necessities into a brotherhood of the wilderness. They assisted in
erecting the cabin of the newcomer. The women had their quiltings and
their sewing circles. The whole community met together to marry the
lovers and bury the dead. The school house was the common center, where
Sabbath service, debate, music school, and “spell down” were held.
These conditions have undergone an almost complete change. The
specializing of industry and new machinery have made farmers independent
of their neighbors. The community uses of the public school have fallen
away.
The last few years have seen a rapid advance in the principles of
Democracy through the initiative, referendum and recall, the
presidential primaries and other measures; but the fundamental unit is
still unorganized. The feet are still of miry clay. To secure the
democratic control of the community or district is the greatest problem
of our democracy. This result demands that some agora, forum, or
neighborhood center shall be restored to the people.
If a neighborhood center is to be created, the facilities which the
neighborhood wishes to use must be brought together in a single place.
Thus each facility offered will bring patrons, not to itself alone, but
to all the others as well, as each department in a department store
brings customers to all the others.
A comparatively few years have seen the cities take up as municipal
undertakings the public playground, the municipal gymnasium and bath,
the branch library, and a few scattered beginnings in the way of
municipal camps. While the undertakings have been carried on by the city
and maintained by public funds, they have not been really furnished to
all the people of the city, as a rule, because they have not been
accessible. They have not been placed in communities, they have no
definite clientele. They cut across the lines of the existing
organizations of the people. The individual has no direct touch with the
community that brings him into relationship with them. All of these
facilities are at least as much for the children as adults, but they lie
off the beaten paths of child travel, and hence secure a minimum rather
than a maximum use.
The only public institution that is central to each community is the
school. If this can be made the nucleus around which the other
institutions can be gathered, it may be possible to create again a
modern forum or market place, that will serve the same purpose as did
the old. The large undertakings already under way for the improvement of
the school itself can not be carried to full success without certain
radical improvements in the school equipment. The playground activity
demands larger playgrounds. New York is now paying more than a thousand
teachers every summer to direct the play in its school playgrounds; but
there are very few schools that have an out-door playground fifty feet
square. It is not the same thing to play in a school basement that it is
to play in the open air. The school basement is always sunless, and the
air is not the same as it is in the open. The French requirement for the
lighting of school buildings is that there shall be no other building
within a distance equal to the height of the school. The gymnastic work,
to secure the best results, must be done in the open air, and not in a
dusty gymnasium. In London, all the longer exercises are always taken
out of doors in pleasant weather. Some foreign cities now require a
certain minimum playground space for every child. In Munich this is
twenty-five square feet. In London it is thirty square feet. This would
mean an acre of playground to 1,452 children, not a large amount surely,
and much less than should be taken in the smaller cities. Throughout the
middle states and the West, now generally a block for all new schools is
given. In some cases the usefulness of the ground is being nearly
destroyed by placing the school building in the center, but where the
building is placed at the side or end, as it should be, this ground
becomes available for many school and community uses.
This block should be shaded by trees. It should have grass plots, if
they have to be renewed every year, as Jacob Riis says; and running
around the outside should be a narrow space for children’s gardens where
all the nature work material of the school could be grown. In one corner
should be a school menagerie and benches should be placed under the
trees.
During the school hours, the school park should belong to the nurses and
mothers with baby carriages. From three to ten p. m. every school day,
and all through the summer, it should be the playground of the children
and the social center of the adults. In the winter it should be flooded
for skating.
Each of the new public schools of New York contains a gymnasium, but
most of these are on the top floor, and they have to equip another in
the basement for the play center. Each of the new public schools of
Cincinnati contains a gymnasium and a swimming pool, and they are
generally on the ground floor or near it. Most of the new high schools
all over the country contain a gymnasium at least and many of them
swimming pools as well. Wherever these facilities are furnished, they
are generally used by the school during the day and by the public at
night. A number of cities are now building municipal gymnasiums and
baths also, but the children want to use the gymnasium and swimming pool
during the day, the adults want to use them at night, it is not evident
that two sets of gymnasiums and two sets of swimming pools are
necessary.
Berlin has an interesting solution of this problem. They house the
gymnasium in a separate building in the yard. In this way the noise and
dust which is incident to exercise is removed from the school, and it is
possible to give more freedom to the work. In most cases there is a
swimming pool in the basement where the pupils are taught to swim. But
the chief advantage of the gymnasium’s being in a separate building is
that it is thus more accessible to the general public as a free
gymnasium and bath at night.
Our public schools and especially our summer schools are greatly
hampered by the lack of library facilities. The school in order to be
successful must create a love of reading. It cannot do this without
books. At present only a small proportion of the children have access to
a library, and this is often so distant that little use is made of it.
The reason is simple, the library is a strange place and its methods are
unknown. If the child, despite this, manifests his desire to draw out
books, he must often first get some one to be his security for their
return, and this is not always easy for a child of laboring or foreign
parentage. But the school may safely trust the child because he is a
member of the school and known and responsible, when it would not be at
all safe for the public library to give out a book to him.
Parents often have little time or inclination to go to libraries for
books, but depend on their children to provide them with reading. If the
library were a separate building in the school yard or a part of the
school, it would be no task for the children to take out and return as
many books as might be desired in the home. The growing use of the
school as a social center makes it increasingly important that the
branch libraries should be connected with it.
The theaters of Greece and Rome were public institutions. Many of the
best theaters of Europe are subsidized. The dramatic form of
representation is the one that is nearest to having the experience
itself. The socialized theater might undoubtedly be one of the greatest
agencies for good that could come into any community.
In the past the expense of the public theater has been almost
prohibitive; but to the credit of Thomas A. Edison be it said, that he
has brought the theater to every man’s door. Most of our new schools
contain auditoriums, and the state and city departments of public
instruction will soon be required by public sentiment to furnish
educational moving-picture films to every school in the state. With the
addition of the theater the success of the school social center and the
organization of community life is assured.
Besides these activities which should be connected directly with the
school itself, the school is the best dispenser of much of the social
betterment work for children. If each school had a camp in the country,
it could make a much wiser selection of children to be sent there than
any fresh air agency can do. No one child would be sent out successively
by half a dozen different societies to the exclusion of the needy but
timid child. Judging from a very limited experience it has seemed to me
that the children are not at their best in the fresh air camps. Often
away from all their friends and acquaintances they are homesick and feel
that this trip and this camp have no connection with anything else in
their lives.
Besides these great disadvantages under which the present system works,
there are corresponding advantages that are lost to the school. With
such a camp, there would be an opportunity for nature study and
gardening of a most approved kind. Athletics might be so carried on as
to supply many of the deficiencies of the school year, and boy scout
patrols might be organized for all the older boys. But, best of all, the
children would then learn to meet their teachers on a common footing and
the tone of the school would be improved.
This extension of the school would not mean for the most part a large
increase in expense. Already we are getting the larger playgrounds, the
auditoriums, the gymnasiums, and the swimming pools in our new school
buildings, but the cities are also building municipal baths and
gymnasiums, small playgrounds and public libraries in places that have
no relationship to any definite community. It is mostly a question of
locating without duplication the facilities that all need in places
where they will be accessible to all.
We may well ask ourselves if the school is competent to take these new
responsibilities. The answer must be that at present the average school
principal is certainly not competent to take charge of these new phases,
but that men usually rise soon to new responsibilities or new men appear
to take their places. These new relations would bring the school and the
home together, would make the school a part of life, would give the
pupil a new set of associations with his teachers and with study, and in
every way would redound to the good of the school and the community.