the Wirt school. The shops are much more extensive than is customary in
even the most progressive public school, or even in the special trade
school. The Emerson School in Gary has, for instance, a carpentry-shop,
cabinet-shop, paint-shop, foundry, forge, machine-shop, printery,
sheet-metal shop, electrical shop, sewing-room, and cooking- and
dining-rooms, all admirably equipped as regular shops, and not merely as
manual-training rooms. The Froebel School has, besides these shops, a
plumbing-shop, a laundry, a shoemaking-shop and a pottery-shop. In the
smaller schools several shops are combined into one, as at the
Jefferson, though the work done is just as genuine as at the ideal
plant. The number of shops, or the variety of work, is, as we shall see
in the next chapter, limited only by the services which the school
demands in the way of repairing or enhancing its physical facilities.
When we have mentioned the room for commercial studies, the
supply-store, the kindergartens and nurseries, the draughting-rooms,
indoor playrooms, teachers’ room, conservatory, doctor’s room and dental
clinic, offices, etc., our survey of the school plant is complete. The
arrangement of rooms itself, however, is very significant. As we pass
around the second floor of the Froebel School, for instance, we meet, in
this order, pottery-shop, laundry, freehand drawing-room, two
classrooms, physics laboratory, music and expression studios,
conservatory, two classrooms, botany laboratory, and four more
classrooms. The shops are not segregated in the basement, but the
children in their various activities work side by side. Classrooms are
placed next to laboratories, and shops next to studios, in order to
impress the pupil with the unity of the program, and in order that the
younger pupils may have constantly before their eyes an inviting future
and opportunity. All the rooms, moreover, have glass doors, and the
shops have windows, so that the children, passing through the halls, may
look in and see others at work at unfamiliar tasks. In this way their
curiosity is likely to be aroused and the ambition to work at these
interesting activities in which they see the older children engaged.
In this juxtaposition of the various activities, therefore, the child
has impressed upon him that school life is a unity in breadth, just as
the combining of the elementary and secondary school impresses him with
the fact that his school life is a unity in length. No opportunity is
lost to touch his imagination and excite his curiosity. The school plant
itself, in its mere arrangement and construction, it will thus be seen,
serves a very important educational purpose. The careful detail with
which this has been worked out in these ideal school plants of Gary
makes the Wirt school in its physical aspect something very much more
significant than a mere collection of facilities. Those facilities fit
into one another according to a very comprehensive plan. They form
organs of a genuine school life, which educates the whole child.
This fourfold division of study and recitation facilities, studio,
workshop, and laboratory facilities, auditorium facilities, and
application and play facilities, is essential to the working of the Wirt
plan. Where the ideal school plant is impossible, this fourfold plan may
yet be possible. As has been said, the greatest triumph of the Wirt plan
in Gary is, perhaps, the Jefferson School, a building of conventional
style, which had been erected before Mr. Wirt came to Gary. It was an
ordinary school-building with ten classrooms and auditorium, but no
other facilities. By turning the spacious attic into a gymnasium, by
transforming five of the classrooms into music and art studios and
nature-study laboratories, by building a general jack-of-all-trades
workshop around the engine- and boiler-room in the cellar, by building a
domestic-science kitchen in an unused corner, putting lockers into
wasted space, and by equipping the playground with apparatus, Mr. Wirt
succeeded in transforming an ordinary school-building, whose prototype
may be found in almost any town in the land, into a full-fledged,
varied, and smoothly running Wirt school. The reorganization of schools
in New York City and other places has been done by Mr. Wirt along
similar lines.[1]
Footnote 1:
See appendix for detailed description of reorganization of twelve New
York schools.
Where, in most cases, a mere rearrangement of classrooms and the
institution of shops and laboratories will transform a school, in others
special annexes are necessary. These can be built usually, however, at
comparatively small cost. The use of portable houses by the smaller
schools of Gary has enabled the small wayside “district school,”
hitherto confined entirely to study and recitation, to transform itself
into a genuine Wirt school, with its fourfold work and study. Shop,
auditorium, and laboratory and studio can be provided in the form of
small portable houses, and the capacity of the school as well as its
facilities can thus be greatly increased.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
III
WORK, STUDY, AND PLAY: THE SCHOOL AS A COMMUNITY
THE Gary school represents not merely the old public school with certain
added modern features, but a definite reorganization. Its aim is to
form, with its well-balanced facilities of work, study, and play, a
genuine children’s community, where the children’s normal healthy
interests are centered, and where they learn, in Professor Dewey’s
phrase, “by doing the things that have meaning to them as children.” The
Gary school aims to meet the comparative failure of the public school
to-day to care for the city child. It tries to take the place of the old
household and rural community life which provided for our forefathers
the practical education of which the city child in his daily life is
deprived to-day.
The full significance of the Gary plan can scarcely be understood unless
it is seen against this background. “It is impossible,” says Professor
Dewey, “to exaggerate the amount of mental and moral training secured by
our forefathers in the course of the ordinary pursuits of life. They
were engaged in subduing a new country. Industry was at a premium, and
instead of being of a routine nature pioneer conditions required
initiative, ingenuity, and pluck.... Production had not yet been
concentrated in factories in congested centers, but was distributed
through villages.... The occupations of daily life engaged the
imagination and enforced knowledge of natural materials and
processes.... Children had the discipline that came from sharing in
useful activities.... Under such conditions the schools could hardly
have done better than devote themselves to books.... But conditions
changed, and school materials and methods did not change to keep pace.
Population shifted to urban centers. Production became a mass affair
carried on in big factories, instead of a household affair.... Industry
was no longer a local or neighborhood concern. Manufacturing was split
up into a very great variety of separate processes through the economies
incident upon extreme division of labor.... The machine worker, unlike
the older hand worker, is following blindly the intelligence of others
instead of his own knowledge of materials, tools and processes....
Children have lost the moral and practical discipline that once came
from sharing in the round of home duties. For a large number there is
little alternative, especially in large cities, between irksome child
labor and demoralizing child idleness.”
The Gary school is an organized attempt to restore this natural
education, adapt it to modern demands, and thus avoid these alternatives
so disastrous for the future of the child and the quality of the coming
generation. By making the public school as much as possible a
self-sustaining child community, Superintendent Wirt believes that all
the benefits of this older education can be attained. “We cannot,” he
says, “trust the other social institutions to remedy the defects. Not
more than one quarter of the urban children attend Sunday-School
regularly. This makes an average of only two minutes a day for all the
days and all the children. In fact, church, Sunday-School, public
library, public playgrounds, Y.M.C.A., Boy Scouts, and all other
child-welfare agencies do not occupy the time of all the children of a
city for more than an average of ten minutes a day. The practical effect
of this is that the streets and alleys and the cheap theaters and other
commercialized places of amusement have the children for over five hours
a day. The cities are not fit places for the rearing of children,
because, as a rule, the streets and alleys have twice the time for
educating the children in the wrong direction that the school, church,
library, and playground have for educating them in the right direction.”
This is the justification for extending the Gary school day to eight
hours and limiting vacations. This is the plan which gives ample time
for the intensive use of the remarkable school plant described in the
preceding chapter. For in place of using for the special work and play
activities a part of the already too few regular school hours per year,
the Gary school secures additional time for these activities by
appropriating the now worse than wasted “street-and-alley time” of the
masses of city children. Saturday school, vacation school, even an
all-year school, are features of the Gary plan which carry out this
principle of providing a school life for the children for as long a time
as they can be induced and encouraged to continue it. The Gary school
deliberately seeks to employ and satisfy the children’s time with
wholesome and interesting activity.
It aims not only to organize the daily life of the child for the greater
part of his time, but it seeks to provide for him in a self-sustaining
community. This means that all the work and study converge upon the
school life. The things that are done in the Gary school contribute to
the usefulness, the beauty, or the interest of the school community. The
Gary school is built on the sound psychological theory that only such
work as has meaning in the life of the school, as lived by the children
themselves then and there, will be really learned and assimilated. The
school is not only to be a “preparation for life”: it is to be a life
itself, as the old household was a life itself. “The idea that children
should study exclusively for eight years, and then work exclusively for
the rest of their life,” says Superintendent Wirt, “is really a new idea
in civilization. The criticism of the modern public school is directed
almost entirely at the helplessness of children who are attempting to
enter industrial and commercial life from this exclusive study period of
eight, twelve, or sixteen years in the schools, and at the fact that the
school is not able to get more than half its children beyond the sixth
grade of the common school. Formerly the school plus the home and small
shop educated the child. The small shop has been generally eliminated
and the home has lost most of its former opportunities. A much greater
part of the education of the child must be assumed by the school of the
present generation. In place of the school, home, and shop, we have the
school and the city street educating the great masses of children. The
school must do what the school, home, and small shop formerly did
together.”
The idea of making the school a self-sustaining community is worked out
in the Gary school in the most comprehensive form. The manual-training
and industrial shops, for instance, are actually the shops for the
school community, and their work goes largely toward the upkeep of the
school plant. Vocational training in the Gary school means that whatever
work is necessary in the way of repairing, conserving, beautifying, or
enhancing the school facilities is done by the pupils themselves. The
school, like the old-time industrial home and community, has a large
amount of real work that is now being done and must always be done in
connection with the equipment of its buildings, grounds, laboratories,
shops, etc. The large, lavishly equipped Gary school plants require a
force of mechanics to keep them in repair. The usual way of doing this
would be to hire outside labor at considerable expense to do the
necessary work during school vacations. The Gary schools, on the other
hand, which have no long vacations, employ a permanent force of
mechanics, and keep them continuously employed throughout the year.
Regular union artisans, chosen because of their character, intelligence,
and teaching ability, are engaged by the building departments of the
school plant. There are carpenters, cabinet-makers, painters, plumbers,
sheet-metal workers, engineers, printers, electricians, machinists,
foundrymen, etc., sufficient to meet the needs of the schools. This
great variety of equipment and maintenance work provides manual activity
of a truly educative sort suitable to every stage of the child’s
development. The shops of these workmen become the regular manual and
industrial training shops of the school. The children work with the
artisans in much the same way as old-time apprentices, though, of
course, for only a fraction of their time. Just as the child formerly
participated in the industrial activities of the household, so now he
participates in the real industrial activities of his school. The school
artisans, and the nurses, school dentist, and physician, landscape
gardener, architect, and draftsman, accountant, storekeeper, office
force, lunch-room manager, designer, dress-maker, milliner, all take the
place of the father and mother and older brothers and sisters in the
old-time, self-sustaining, practically educative household. The children
receive all the benefits of doing real work that must be done and of
participating in their own school business. And they have the benefit of
a completely modern equipment resembling in detail the machinery and
processes which they will find when they go out into the larger social
community.
In this novel scheme the Gary schools seem to have experienced little
difficulty. Superintendent Wirt says that when you have provided a plant
where the children may live a complete life eight hours a day in work,
study, and play, it is the simplest thing imaginable to permit the
children in the workshops, under the direction and with the help of
well-trained men and women, to assume the responsibility for the
maintenance of the school plant. There can be no exploitation of the
children, for masters and pupils are permitted to do only enough work to
balance the wages of the masters and the cost of materials. The
teacher-workmen would be doing the work whether the children assisted or
not. They earn their salaries by their repair and construction work, and
the children who desire it get an admirably practical vocational
training almost without additional cost to the city. The great expense
is avoided of special shop equipment, such as the usual industrial high
school or special trade school has for its industrial courses, which
are, moreover, wholly unproductive. And the school is able to offer a
much greater variety of trades than even the special trade school: for a
school plant like the Gary institution will demand for its equipment and
maintenance almost every staple trade, industrial and domestic, with the
attendant educational opportunities for both boy and girl.
Manual work takes on quite a new meaning when it becomes, as in the Gary
schools, productive work for the school community. It is no longer a
question of each child doing his “practice” work, his stereotyped
“stunt,” in which he soon loses interest. The boys in the Gary
carpenter-shop are making desks and tables for the classrooms, cabinets
and stools for the laboratories, or bookracks for the library. In the
paint-shop they are staining and finishing them; or they are at work on
the woodwork of the building, painting or varnishing. The electricians
must care for motors, bells, etc., and there is always opportunity for
teaching winding, motor construction, and wiring. Plumbing must be
installed and kept in repair. Many parts of the plant call for the
sheet-metal worker. Foundry and machine workers require in turn a
pattern-making shop and draftsmen to furnish plans and specifications.
The engineer of the heating, lighting, and ventilating plant gives
lessons in firing and in the care of boilers. The printing-shop does all
the printing work for the schools,—blanks, forms, reports, charts, etc.,
besides the illustrated brochures which the pupils of the various
departments issue. In the Froebel School there is even a demand for a
pottery shop, where the children often discover artistic talent in
making the necessary clay utensils for the school. The number and
character of the school shops is limited only by the needs of the school
community. One year the shoeless condition of some of the children set a
demand for a shoe shop, in which old shoes were made over into wearable
new ones.
The visitor to the Gary school finds everywhere little groups of busy
children, absorbedly interested, working on the different needs of the
school, under kindly and intelligent teacher-workmen. He finds that
there is enough real work in the school plant to keep occupied for his
hour or more a day every child who is interested in manual work—and most
children are—or who desires to become familiar with a trade. Such work
is highly educational, and it is not drudgery. It is not specialized,
nor is it segregated from the academic studies. The industrial work for
both boys and girls is an integral part of the school life in which
every one who cares for a rounded education must participate in some
form or other.
[Illustration:
THE PRINTING-SHOP AT THE EMERSON SCHOOL
]
There is not a department which does not contribute in some way to the
school community life. The caretakers of the grounds are under the
supervision of the botany and zoölogy (nature-study) departments. The
children work with them in taking charge of and caring for the gardens,
lawns, trees, and shrubs. The botany classes care also for the school
conservatory and for the smaller experimental conservatory in the botany
laboratory. The zoölogy classes have charge of the school zoo as well as
the collection of pets in the zoölogy room. Even the drawing classes
contribute, the mechanical-drawing pupils in preparing plans for the
industrial work and construction, the art classes in decorating the
friezes of their room or in designing details for the building.
Domestic science in the Gary school is not taught as a separate
“subject.” It means the practical operation of the school lunch-room
under the direction of an instructor and a cook assistant. The
domestic-science room is a real kitchen, dining-room, and pantry in
which the daily lunch is prepared and served to such teachers and pupils
as desire it. The domestic-science work for the girls then consists of
nothing but this daily service, older and younger girls coöperating with
cook and teacher. The salary of the assistant is paid out of the profits
of the lunch-room. Since the food is sold, all expenses for supplies are
charged to the lunch department. The sewing-room is operated on a
similar plan. The instructor has as assistants a practical dress-maker,
laundress, and milliner. Their salaries and all materials used are paid
for from the savings made by doing the necessary laundry and needlework
for the school. Both cooking and sewing departments are therefore
_self-sustaining school-community shops_. The school board makes no
appropriations for the support of the lunch-room, dressmaking, laundry,
and millinery departments other than the salaries of the two head
teachers. All bills are paid directly by the department managers, and no
accounts are kept by the school board. The other shops are
self-supporting in the sense that the ordinary appropriations for
painting, cabinet-work, electrical work, plumbing, printing, etc. (which
would have to be paid anyway), generally pay the salaries of the
teacher-workmen and the costs of the material. The ideal attainment
would be to make the shops all self-sustaining school-community shops.
The work of all these shops requires elaborate systems of accounting.
All this work is taken charge of by the instructors and pupils of the
commercial departments of the school. The work the children do in the
shops is computed on the basis of regular union wages for the particular
trade, and they are “paid” in imitation checks, upon which their
standing in the course is based. For these payments the commercial
pupils manage a regular school banking system, with savings accounts,
etc. They also have charge, under the instructors’ supervision, of all
the regular accounting and secretarial work for the school
administration. Thus their bookkeeping, stenography, and typewriting
contribute directly to the needs of the school. The commercial pupils
also take care of the ordering and distribution of supplies. Some of
these, such as the coal and cement used in the schools, are in turn
tested by the chemistry classes in their laboratory to see whether they
come up to specifications. The school “store” is as important a feature
of the school community as the school “bank,” and the commercial pupils
take turns in “keeping” it. The criticism that the pupils are
incompetent to handle all these matters is met by the obvious
consideration that the school cannot afford to graduate pupils in
accounting and secretarial work who cannot perform these functions
efficiently for themselves and their school. At present, it should be
mentioned, these departments are said not to be self-supporting, in the
way that the domestic-science shops are.
* * * * *