idea of what activity interests him, and he is allowed to go into shop
or laboratory as observer or helper to the older child. He watches and
asks questions, and the older boy learns by teaching him. If the child
finds that the work does not actually interest him he still has the
chance to change. When he takes up the work in the higher grades he has
served his apprenticeship and is already familiar with the apparatus
and the technique. The teacher does not have to break in a new class
each year. It is almost a self-perpetuating and self-instructing
class. The child has been assimilated to the work as new members in
any profession or trade in society are assimilated. When the child is
exposed from his earliest years to the various vocational activities,
is allowed to come into them just as his curiosity ripens, you have as
perfect a “choice of a vocation” as could be imagined. Only this sort
of opportunity can really be called “vocational training.” The usual
vocation school work takes the child too late, when his curiosity is
likely to be dulled; it puts him into the work without any previous
familiarity. It can scarcely be anything but drudgery. If “capacities
are to be developed,” Mr. Wirt’s scheme gives the surest means of
developing them. It solves the grave problems of “vocational” and
“pre-vocational” training, which are so sorely vexing the professional
educational world, a large part of whose business in life seems to be
to create and have problems.
XVI
APPRENTICES TO THE SCHOOL
Vocational training in the schools of Gary means that whatever work is
necessary in the way of repairing, conserving, beautifying or enhancing
the facilities, is done by the school itself. These large, lavishly
equipped modern school-buildings require a force of mechanics to keep
them in repair. Their shops are the industrial and manual shops for the
school. The children work in them with skilled union workmen, who are
employed not primarily as “manual training” teachers, but as assistants
to the building superintendent. The mechanics teach by allowing the
children to help them as apprentices. They earn their salaries by
repair and construction work, while the children who desire it get an
incomparable vocational training at practically no cost to the town.
Where the ordinary trade-school must have large classes to make the
enterprise pay, the Gary vocational work may be done with the smallest
groups, for the shops are paying for themselves anyway.
Manual training takes on quite a new meaning as you move about,
watching the boys in the carpenter-shop making desks or tables, or
cabinets for the botany collections, or book-racks for the library,
sending them on to the paint-shop when they have finished; boys in
the sheet-metal shop hammering zinc for the roof; young electricians
repairing bells; a couple of plumbers tinkering with pipes; little
groups of serious and absorbedly interested boys in foundry and
forge and pattern-making shop, all coöperating like the parts of a
well-ordered factory. There was obviously enough real work to keep busy
for his hour a day every child who desired training in a trade. Where
school and workshop are thus fused, the need for “continuation” and
“coöperative” courses--where the boy alternates between shop or factory
and school--disappears. The child has the advantages of both.
The ordinary school, and even the specialized vocational school, is
rarely doing more in its industrial, manual, or domestic science work
than playing a rather dreary game with toys. There could scarcely be a
greater contrast between the real shops of the Gary schools and those
ordinary “shops” and kitchens with their dozens of little machines at
which at a given time the entire class does its little stereotyped
“stunt.” In Gary the domestic science room is a real kitchen in which
the daily luncheon is prepared and served at cost to the teachers and
pupils who desire it. The cook is a real cook, and the girls come in
as observers, helpers or workers, just as the boys go into the shops.
The nearest approach to a luxury is the pottery shop, but this is
itself perhaps the best symbol of that fusion of the artistic and
the practical that is the Wirt genius. What are you to say when you
walk into the art studio and find a dozen girls and boys high on a
scaffolding painting a frieze which they have themselves designed,
while others are at work on stained-glass designs to go in varnished
paper on the panels of the door?
There is a genial, joyous quality about all the work that gives every
room a charm--the foundry with its deep shadows, the smooth gray
pottery shop with its turning wheels and bright glazed jugs, the botany
room with its mass of greenery. Even the history room at Emerson School
had the atmosphere which comes from concentrated interest and the slow
accretion of significant material. Emerson itself is a spacious and
dignified building with innumerable little touches of taste that one
usually associates only with the high schools of exceptionally wealthy
and cultivated suburban communities. It is a delightful paradox that so
beautiful a life should appear to be lived where every activity seems
to be motivated by direct utilitarian application. I said that you have
to plow your mind up to understand this kind of a school. Certainly I
have never seen a place which more nearly permitted to seem real that
old ideal of the joy of work which we imagine must have existed back in
guild days. It may be left to the imagination what children trained in
such a school are likely to have to say to the industrial society in
which we live.
The practical work of the school is only limited by local school needs,
but the shoeless condition of some of the Frœbel children inspired the
starting of a shoe shop where old shoes were made over. Both Emerson
and Frœbel have a printery from which come all the blanks, reports,
programs, etc., used in the school, as well as the bulletins and papers
by which the various classes are tempted to preserve the good things
they write. The commercial pupils have charge of all the accounting and
bookkeeping as well as the supplies. The children who work in the shops
are paid in checks, which are calculated on the basis of prevailing
union wages for the working-time. This provides opportunities for
a banking system, which is also in charge of the commercial class.
In the Jefferson School the boiler-room is an integral part of the
machine-shop.
The botany class was responsible for the beautiful and elaborate
conservatory at the entrance of the Emerson School, and for the window
hothouse in the botany room, where practical experiments are made. The
botanists also have charge of the shrubs and trees on the grounds,
and the vegetable gardens which they work communistically all through
the summer. Their study of food and textile products ramified into
the domestic science work, just as the zoology study was fused with
physiology. This latter class had a playground zoo, with foxes and
coyotes, raccoons and prairie-dogs, about whose habits and adventures
they were preparing a brochure, which was already in press at the
printery. When I stepped into the zoology laboratory itself, I found
that I was in an even more animated zoo. Crows, chickens and pigeons
in cages at the back of the room were lusty with vociferous greeting.
The imperturbability of the children amidst this racket showed me how
well aware they were that this was the way a zoology room ought to
behave.
Such a school, where the child works almost unconsciously into a
vocation which appeals to him as neither play nor drudgery, is far
more “vocational” than even the specialized school. The child,
beginning so young in shop or laboratory, and assimilating the work
very gradually, is able to lay deep foundations of interest and
skill. The Gary school is distinctly unspecialized. In a sense it
gives a completely “liberal education.” The child emerges a skilful
amateur. The industrial and scientific work no more “train” him to
take a definite place in the industrial world than the cultural work
trains him to be a college professor. But he should leave school well
equipped to cope with a dynamic, rapidly changing industrial society
which demands above all things versatility, and which scraps methods
and machines as ruthlessly as it does men. Only the man of rounded
training and resourcefulness who can turn his hand quickly to a variety
of occupations has much chance of success. Our public school, in spite
of its fancied “liberal” curriculum, has really been turning out only
very low-grade specialists. It has made no effort to produce the type
of mind most needed to-day--the versatile machinist, the practical
engineer, the mind that adapts and masters mechanism. This is probably
the best intellectual type our society produces. This exactness,
resourcefulness, inventiveness, pragmatic judgment of a mechanism by
its product, the sense of machinery as a means, not an end, are exactly
the qualities that society demands in every profession or trade.
The Gary school is the first I have seen that promises to cultivate
this kind of intelligence. It frankly accepts the machine not in the
usual sense of the vocational schools, as an exacting master that the
child is to learn docilely to obey, but as the basis of our modern
life, by whose means we must make whatever progress we may will. The
machine seems to be a thing to which society is irrevocably pledged.
It is time the school recognized it. In Gary it is with the child from
his earliest years. It is the motive of his scientific study. The
physics teacher at the Emerson School told me that he thought the
fascinating and irresponsible automobile had done more to educate the
younger generation than most of the public schools. Tinkering with an
automobile was a whole scientific training.
I dropped into his physics class, and found a dozen twelve-year-old
girls and their nine-year-old “helpers” studying the motor-cycle. With
that fine disregard for boundaries which characterizes Gary education,
the hour began with a spelling lesson of the names of the parts and
processes of the machine. After the words were learned, the mechanism
was explained to them as they pored over it, and their memory of
vaporization, evaporation, etc., called into play. The motor-cycle
was set going, the girls described its action, and the lesson was
over, as perfect a piece of teaching as I have ever heard. The intense
animation of that little group was all the more piquant for having
as a background the astounded disapprobation of three grave school
superintendents from the East.
To these physics classes the ventilating, heating and electric
systems in the schools are all text-books. The climate is studied.
The shops provide many physics problems. There was a class of boys
having explained to them the physical principles of various types of
machines. The impetuous rush of those little boys as they were sent
into the machine-shop to take apart a lawn-mower, a bicycle, and a
cream-separator, and the look of elation on their faces, would alone
make Gary unforgettable to me. It was evident that this was indeed a
different kind of school.
XVII
THE NATURAL SCHOOL
A surprisingly small amount of administrative machinery for so varied
a system is required by the schools of Gary. Mr. Wirt is the City
Superintendent of Schools. Under him each of the five school buildings
has an executive principal. Two supervisors of instruction look after
the pedagogical work of the system. The director of industrial work has
charge of building repair, and supervises the shops where the children
work under the mechanic-teachers. There is no attempt to segregate the
vocational work. Manual, physical, artistic and academic activities are
administered on an equal footing.
For the teacher the Gary school should be almost as liberating as it
is to the pupil. In the details of courses much initiative is left
to the teacher. It is really an inductive school where courses are
worked out by supervisors consulting together on the basis of classroom
experience. Teachers are encouraged to experiment and develop their
own ideas. Here is the first public school I have ever seen that
resolutely sets itself against uniformity of method or product, that
recognizes differences of individuality.
The working-day of the teacher may be longer, but she is relieved of
the burdensome home-work. The nervous strain is lessened also by the
freer method of discipline. There cannot be unruly children unless
children are ruled, and in the Gary school there is apparently no
artificial repression. One found in the classroom as much talking as
there would be in a concert audience, with the same natural motives,
freed of “rules of order,” for quiet. The frequent change of room and
activity in the Gary school prevents, too, that nervous restiveness
which must inevitably come to the child kept long at his desk. The
point is that only in a free and varied school like this can one talk
of effective discipline. When school activities are as attractive as
they are here, deprivation becomes punishment. There is at hand an
instrument for inculcating reason into refractoriness which is as
powerful as the stoutest disciplinarian could wish. The ordinary school
tries to keep up a military system of control, without any means,
now that corporal punishment is generally abolished, of punishing
infractions. In a Gary school “being sent home” for misbehavior usually
means being sent to a place infinitely less interesting. But there is
little talk about “mischievous and unruly boys.” Those children who, in
spite of everything, “are not adapted to our kind of school,” may go
to the school farm in the country to work. But this farm is not in any
sense a “reform” school. Delicate children may also be sent there, and
other classes go for a holiday. As to the personal manners prevailing
in such a free school as this, with its absence of moral homily, and
effort to “train character” through obedience and discipline, I can
only repeat the words of an Italian boy who had recently come from
orthodox schools elsewhere: “But they’re so polite!”
I was glad to see that there was no nonsense at Gary about schemes
of “self-government,” which can be little more than a humiliating
pretension in any school. A kindly judge did once institute “Boyville”
in a Gary school, with a parody of municipal functions, but its
unreality soon relegated it to limbo. Spontaneous organization there
is, but it grows out of real work. The boys’ ninth grade English
class, for instance, has organized itself as the Emerson Improvement
Association, and its work revolves around the speaking and writing
necessary in conducting the affairs of the organization. There seem
to be no “extra-curricular” activities, which create so many problems
elsewhere. Athletic teams and sports are connected with the gymnasium
work. Other societies spring up naturally out of the school interests.
Problems of “fraternities” and the control of athletics which confront
so many high schools are thus naturally avoided.
The Gary school not only lightens this strain of discipline for
the teacher and cultivates her initiative, but serves as a kind of
training-school for the teachers themselves. The new-coming teacher
learns by acting as helper or “apprentice” to the older teacher, just
as the children in shop or laboratory learn from one another. The
result is an uncommon and appealing equality between teachers and
children, without imposed authority on one side or subservience on the
other. Beside Mr. Wirt Mme. Montessori seems almost a beginner, so
daringly has he carried the principles of self-instruction up through
the higher grades. Even visiting teachers and superintendents who
wish to learn the theory and practice of the Gary school must learn
in the same way. Mr. Wirt does not lecture to them. He allows them
also to come into the school for a few months as helpers to teacher or
principal. Everybody who has anything to do with a Gary school must
evidently learn by doing the real work itself. Nothing shows more
clearly the whole-knit fiber of Mr. Wirt’s philosophy than this new
kind of “normal” school for visiting teachers.
I was pleased with the absence of self-display. Advertising has come
from the outside. The teachers seem innocent of the great number of
things they are doing which a large part of the orthodox educational
world believes to be impossible. You are talked with frankly and
genially, but nothing is done to impress you. You are left to
interpret it all for yourself. Those who miss the spirit will find
weaknesses. Professional educators hold up hands of horror at the
“looseness” of the teaching. They miss the dramatic effect of the
“well-conducted recitation”--the drawing-out of the pupil’s memory,
or the appeals to glib guesses at what the teacher wants. They judge
by the old-fashioned standard of how the teacher is teaching rather
than the new one of what the child is learning. My complaint would be
rather that there was still too much teaching that is conventional,
particularly in the lower grades. And I have an animus against the
deadly desks and seats which are still in use in too many of the
classrooms. But the significant thing is that this kind of a school is
not static or completed, but a constantly growing organism. The only
limit to which it may grow lies in the imagination and initiative of
teachers and pupils. And the school cannot be judged in cross-section.
Even when it starts with so admirable an equipment, its life has just
begun. For the mechanical and artistic, manual work and intellectual
study, are all directed towards enriching the physical body and the
spiritual life and atmosphere of the school. This intensive cultivation
of resources produces that “embryonic community life” which is
Professor Dewey’s ideal, where in actual work the child senses the
occupations and interests of the larger society into which he is to
enter.
Mr. Wirt’s schools would be unworthy of discussion were they not
capable of imitation generally in American towns and cities. Already
a number of communities have copied the essential features, and Mr.
Wirt is at present occupied in remodeling a few of the New York City
schools, successfully, too, in spite of the fact that New York, on
account of its rapid growth, its great alien population, and its
political cross-currents, presents perhaps the most formidable school
problems in the country. The only substantial difficulty in remodeling
schools according to the Gary scheme is the matter of playgrounds. Even
this is surmountable, for most cities have parks or usable vacant lots
within reach of the school. Mr. Wirt’s great triumph in Gary is the
old Jefferson School which he found when he came to the town. This was
an orthodox ten-room building built by the city fathers to accommodate
Gary children for many generations. By turning the spacious attic into
a gymnasium, transforming five of the classrooms into music and art
studios and nature-study laboratories, by building a jack-of-all-trades
workshop around the engine-room in the cellar, a domestic-science
kitchen in an unused corner, and by appropriating a nearby park space,
he transformed a perfectly ordinary school building, whose prototype
may be found in every town in the land, into a full-fledged, varied
and smoothly-functioning Wirt school. Through the “rotation of crops”
system, this school, built for three hundred and sixty children,
actually accommodates over eight hundred, and gives them every
facility, if less elaborately, of the specially designed new schools.
Perhaps I may here recapitulate. The mere prosaic business economy
of the Wirt scheme is enough to recommend it. No school board can
afford to neglect a plan which not only saves money to the taxpayers,
but provides better facilities, more varied equipment and better
educational opportunities than even well-to-do communities can at
present afford. The Wirt school solves the vexing “part-time” problem.
Gary is the only city I know that has room (March, 1915) in its present
buildings for at least one-third more children than there now are to go
to school.
In the second place, the plan solves most of the problems of vocational
and industrial training which now confront the public school. It
catches the child’s curiosity and skill on the upstroke. It makes no
separation of manual from intellectual work, and avoids that sinister
caste-feeling which seems to be creeping into the vocational movement.
And from the point of view of economy again, the scheme of devoting
industrial work to actual care of the school-plant enables the school
to provide a great variety of occupations almost without additional
cost to the community.
In the third place, the plan provides a large measure of individual
instruction. It is a school for every kind of a child. The flexibility
of schedules, the coöperation of outside agencies like the churches,
the varied activities, give opportunity for the fullest development of
differing interests and capacities.
In the fourth place, the plan carries out throughout the school life
the educational truth that learning can only come through doing. The
habits and attitudes of careful scientific observation, or purposeful
interesting activity which is neither work nor play, the social,
democratic, and coöperative background which such a school cultivates,
are exactly the qualities we need for our younger generation in
American society.
Such a school carries out the best ideals of American democracy, as I
see them, in an extremely effective way. Its philosophy is American,
its democratic organization is American. It is one of the institutions
that our American culture should be proudest of. Perhaps professional
educators, accustomed to other concepts and military methods and
administrative illusions, will not welcome this kind of school. But
teachers hampered by drill and routine will want it, and so will
parents and children.
XVIII
THE DEMOCRATIC SCHOOL
A recent article in the “New York Times” (Oct. 17, 1915) by Dr. Thomas
S. Baker, Headmaster of the Tome School, contains an able pedagogical
criticism of the Gary school which is typical of the general attitude
towards the Gary idea on the part of conservative schoolmen. Nothing
could bring out more clearly the difference in educational values
between this professional teaching opinion and the broad social
vision of Superintendent Wirt. Dr. Baker admits the impressive social
effectiveness of the plan. It is “the last development in socializing
the schools.” Mr. Wirt is “not only an educator, but also a social
reformer, a city worker.” But Dr. Baker’s argument is really the
specialized pedagogical one against the social. Where Mr. Wirt sees the
school as a community center, a children’s world, Dr. Baker sees it
as an educational factory. “The social value of the Gary schools,” he
says, “is beyond question. Its pedagogic excellence has still to be
determined.” From his point of view, a school is not so much a place to
train effective citizens as to make “thorough scholars.” He questions
whether “these side issues in the scheme of child-training”--the
gymnasia, shops, laboratories, which the Gary school contains--“are
really essential in mental development.” He is afraid that the young
citizens of Gary learn more from their industrial shops and science
laboratories than from their books.
Dr. Baker’s guarded argument is really a glorification of “intellectual
discipline” as against an intelligent capacity to lead an organic
life in a modern society which needs above all things resourceful
adaptation and social appreciations. It is a question of ideals, and
no more important issue was ever put to a people than this one of how
we want our next generation trained. The school is not only the one
institution which assimilates all the people, but it is the most easily
modifiable. It is not only the easiest lever of social progress but the
most effective, for it deals with relatively plastic human material. To
decide what kind of a school we want is almost to decide what kind of a
society we want.