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.