[Illustration:
THE FROEBEL SCHOOL, GARY, INDIANA
A model Wirt school plant, with all grades, from kindergarten through
the High School Social center and people’s university. Built 1913.
]
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THE GARY SCHOOLS
BY
RANDOLPH S. BOURNE
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
WILLIAM WIRT
SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS
GARY, INDIANA
[Illustration]
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY RANDOLPH S. BOURNE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE • MASSACHUSETTS
U • S • A
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PREFACE
THE public-school system of Gary, Indiana, has attracted during the last
few years the general attention of progressive educators all over the
country as perhaps the most ingenious attempt yet made to meet the
formidable problems of congested urban life and modern vocational
demands which are presented to the administrators of the city school. A
broad educational philosophy has combined with administrative skill to
produce a type of school which represents a fundamental reorganization
of the public school to meet changing social and industrial conditions.
A new balance of school activities, an increased wealth of facilities,
the opening-up of opportunities to the younger children, the institution
of a new kind of vocational training, the fusing of activities into an
organic whole so that the school becomes a children’s community, the
correlation of school activities with community activities, and lastly,
the application of principles of economics to public-school management
which permit greatly increased educational and recreational facilities
not only for children in the schools, but also for adults,—these are the
features of the Gary school system that have aroused the enthusiasm of
many educators, and made it one of the most visited and discussed school
systems in the country. Dr. David Snedden, Commissioner of Education in
Massachusetts, has said that the system of education at Gary “more
adequately meets the needs of city children than any other system of
which the writer has knowledge.” Professor John Dewey declared recently,
at a public meeting in New York City, called to discuss the adoption of
the Gary plan in the New York schools, that “no more important question
affecting the future of the people of New York has come before them for
many years.” The United States Bureau of Education in 1914 published a
report on the Gary schools, made after “a careful and prolonged study at
first hand” extending over a period of two years. In this report
Commissioner P. P. Claxton records his belief that “the superintendent
and board of education of the Gary schools have succeeded in working out
plans for a more economic use of school funds, a fuller and more
effective use of the time of the children, a better adjustment of the
work of the schools to the condition and needs of individual children,
greater economy in supervision, a better correlation of the so-called
‘regular work’ and ‘special activities’ of the school, a more practical
form of industrial education, and at a cost less nearly prohibitive than
is usually found in public schools in the cities of this country.”
Schools in many towns and cities in all parts of the country have been
reorganized on the Gary plan or have been experimenting with it. The
Gary plan has been introduced in the schools of small cities such as
Sewickley, Newcastle, and Swarthmore, Pennsylvania; Kalamazoo, Michigan;
Winetka, Illinois. Kansas City has been experimenting with it. The
Chicago authorities have recently pronounced their two years’ experiment
an unqualified success. Passaic, New Jersey, has a highly successful
Gary school in operation. In Troy, New York, the authorities are
reorganizing the entire school system on the Gary plan. In New York City
two schools were operated for most of the school year, 1914-15,
Superintendent Wirt of Gary having been called in to supervise the
reorganization and advise the Board of Education in their attempt to
meet the “part-time” problems in congested school districts. As a result
of this experiment the Board of Education has recently decided to extend
the Gary plan to two school districts in the Borough of the Bronx,
involving fourteen schools and 46,000 pupils. Superintendent Wirt has
presented figures to show that, by the adoption of the Gary plan and the
expenditure of only $5,000,000 (the cost of a dozen school buildings
which would provide at the maximum for 20,000 children), the New York
authorities could practically relieve their part-time situation which
now involves 132,000 children. Not only has the success of the Gary plan
been striking in the larger cities, but it has proved its adaptability
to the small school as well. Three of the schools of Gary are
practically rural schools in outlying districts, but the principles of
the Gary plan are found applicable there as well as in the recently
erected model school plants. The flexibility of the plan, the ingenuity
and soundness of its economical and educational principles, its
feasibility of imitation, and adaptation to communities the most
diverse, makes its discussion one of national significance.
The material on the Gary plan has been generally confined to bulletins,
magazine articles, and educational reports. One of the best discussions
of the Gary school is to be found in a chapter of Professor Dewey’s
recent book, which contains, in addition, the educational theory and
historical background upon which the Gary plan has been worked out by
Superintendent William Wirt, himself a pupil and disciple of Dewey. I
give here a list of the Gary material which I have used. Some of it is
generally available, some not. I am much indebted to these
investigators. I have even plagiarized from myself.
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_Books and Bulletins_:—
John Dewey and Evelyn Dewey: _Schools of To-Morrow_. New York: E. P.
Dutton & Co.
William Paxton Burris: _The Public School System of Gary, Indiana_.
Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Education (1914), No. 18.
(To be obtained free of charge from the Commissioner of Education,
Washington, D.C.) An excellent and very enthusiastic report of a
long investigation of the Gary schools.
Graham Romeyn Taylor: _Satellite Cities_. New York: D. Appleton & Co.
Chapters VI and VII of this book contain a comprehensive account of
the history and social conditions of the city of Gary up to date.
_Magazine articles_:—
John Franklin Bobbitt: “The Elimination of Waste in Education.” _The
Elementary School Teacher_, February, 1912.
Charles S. Coons: “The Teaching of Science in the Gary Schools.”
_School and Society_, April 17, 1915. Able discussion of the
philosophy which motivates Gary education, by the teacher of
chemistry in Froebel School, Gary.
Raymond Dean Chadwick: “Vitalizing the History Work.” _History
Teachers’ Magazine_, April, 1915. By the history teacher in the
Emerson School, Gary.
Randolph S. Bourne: “Schools in Gary”; “Communities for Children”;
“Really Public Schools”; “Apprentices to the Schools”; “The Natural
School.” Five articles in the _New Republic_, March 27, April 3,
April 10, April 24, May 1, 1915. A mere impressionistic survey of
the schools based on a personal visit in March, 1915.
_Reports_:—
William Wirt: _A Report on a Plan of Organization for Coöperative and
Continuation Courses_. Department of Education, City of New York.
_The Reorganization of Public School 89, Brooklyn, New York._ Report
made January 19, 1915, to President Thomas W. Churchill, Board of
Education, New York City.
_Report upon a Proposed Reorganization for Public Schools 28, 2, 42,
6, 59, 44, 5, 53, 40, 32, 4, and 45, The Bronx, New York City._
These three reports are invaluable as a discussion of the philosophy
and technique of many of the features of the Gary plan, discussed
by the Gary Superintendent of Schools.
Alice Barrows-Fernandez: _A Reply to Associate Superintendent
Shallow’s_ [of New York City] _Report on the Gary Schools_.
Published by the author, 35 West 39th St., New York City.
A valuable document, with a wealth of figures and authoritative
discussion of current misconceptions regarding the work of the Gary
schools.
R. S. B.
_September 1915._
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION BY WILLIAM WIRT xvii
I. THE COMMUNITY SETTING 1
II. THE SCHOOL PLANT: EDUCATING THE WHOLE CHILD 13
The Gary plant the concrete embodiment of an
ideal—Educating the whole child by a fourfold
unity of activities—The complete school:
economic and educational advantages—The school
site: playgrounds for growth—Playgrounds and
parks as adjuncts to the school—Gymnasiums—The
school halls as streets and galleries and
“application” rooms—Museums, galleries, and
libraries as adjuncts to the school—Auditorium
as school theater for expression—Classrooms as
intellectual workshops—Art and music
studios—Science laboratories—Industrial
shops—Juxtaposition and equal value of
activities—Ingenious designing of school plant
to arouse the imagination of the child—The
fourfold division of activities as worked out in
schools not built on ideal lines—The Gary plan
in the small school.
III. WORK, STUDY, AND PLAY: THE SCHOOL AS A 35
COMMUNITY
Changed urban conditions demanding
reorganization of public school—Background as
described by Professor Dewey—Gary school
appropriates wasted “street-and-alley time” of
children—School activities motivated by
enhancement of school life—Manual-training shops
as industrial shops for school
community—Children as helpers to artisan
teachers—Contribution of nature-study
departments to school life—Of domestic
science—Of commercial department—Auditorium as
focus of school community life—School a
“clearing-house for children’s
activities”—School as the children’s
institution.
IV. PROGRAMS: THE SCHOOL AS A PUBLIC UTILITY 57
Problems of economy to be met—Solution by
application of public-service principles to Gary
schools—Impossibility of providing adequate
facilities without multiple use of school
plant—Abolition of “peak-loads”—The duplicate
schools—Old program for eight-grade school—New
program—“Application” work—Division of time
between activities—The all-year school—Economies
effected by Gary plan—Evening schools—Social and
community center—A genuinely “public” school.
V. ORGANIZATION 86
Superintendent—Executive principals—Supervisors
of instruction—Director of industrial
work—Assistant supervisors—Departmental
teaching—Distribution of teachers in unit school
plant—Junior and senior teachers—Training-school
for visiting teachers and principals—The
“Register Teacher”—Teachers’ hours—Promotion of
pupils—Classification of pupils according to
ability—Opportunities for extra work—Lockers and
classrooms—Special students—Post-graduate
work—The “helper and observer” system.
VI. CURRICULUM: LEARNING BY DOING 113
State-prescribed courses—“Expression”
work—Correlation of subjects—Special features of
history and geography work—Special features of
science work—Curriculum as subjecting both
“utilitarian” and “cultural” to “social”
purposes.
VII. DISCIPLINE: THE NATURAL SCHOOL 131
Children’s pride in Gary school—Minimum of
formal discipline—Example of voluntary
school—Superior effectiveness of discipline in
Gary type of school—The school farm—The
students’ council—No activities
“extra-curricular”—Examples of spontaneous
self-government—Dr. Harlan Updegraff on moral
effect of Gary training—Not obedience, but
self-reliance as keynote of Gary discipline.
VIII. CRITICISMS AND EVALUATIONS 144
Economies of Gary plan: no extra burdens on
public—Comparisons of costs with large city
system like New York City—Teachers’
criticisms—Features of Gary plan which benefit
teachers—Absence of truancy—Longer school day no
burden upon pupils—Criticisms of vocational
work—Evaluations of Dean Burris—Gary school
solves part-time problems—Gary school does not
subordinate intellectual and cultural
activities—Gary plan provides a school adapted
to every kind of a child—Gary vocational
training of peculiar benefit to young
worker—Gary plan keeps pupils in school—Reasons
why Gary school has national significance.
APPENDIX 179
INDEX 203
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ILLUSTRATIONS
THE FROEBEL SCHOOL _Frontispiece_
THE EMERSON SCHOOL 14
THE SWIMMING-POOL AT THE FROEBEL SCHOOL 22
THE PRINTING-SHOP AT THE EMERSON SCHOOL 46
THE MACHINE-SHOP AT THE EMERSON SCHOOL 88
THE HISTORY ROOM AT THE EMERSON SCHOOL 116
DRAWING FROM A MODEL AT THE EMERSON SCHOOL 140
THE FOUNDRY AT THE EMERSON SCHOOL 170
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INTRODUCTION
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.
[Illustration:
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.
[Illustration:
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.