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Title: The Gary Schools
Author: Bourne, Randolph Silliman
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Gary Schools" ***
[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.
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_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._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
The manual and industrial work is, of course, an essential feature of
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.
* * * * *
If the school is to be the children’s community, there must be some
place of general assembly, some forum or theater where the school may
take stock of itself. This is provided in the “auditorium,” one of the
original and essential features of the Gary plan. “Auditorium,” to which
a daily hour is given, is devoted to purposes different from the
religious exercises, declamations, and moral homilies common to the
“opening exercises” of the ordinary school. It does not even open the
day, for the Gary program makes it necessary for the “auditorium” hour
to come at periods throughout the day, differing for different classes.
The aim is to make it an occasion where anything that is happening of
peculiar interest in any part of the school may be dramatically brought
to the attention of the rest of the school. In the Gary school, each
child goes to “auditorium” for a full hour each day, and listens to a
program contributed by pupils or teachers or outside visitors. There is
always choral singing; there may be instrumental or phonograph music
besides. Lantern-slides and motion-pictures are often shown. There may
be talks by the special teachers about their work. The child may see
there gymnastic exhibitions,—as has been said, the stage at the Froebel
School is so large that a full-sized basketball game may be played upon
it before the audience,—folk-dancing, or dramatic dialogues and little
plays written by the pupils themselves about interesting things in their
study or reading. There may be debates on school issues. What is to be
presented in “auditorium” is limited only by the imagination and
expressiveness of teachers and children. The teachers in turn have the
responsibility of arranging the program, in coöperation with their
pupils. Children of widely different ages are sent together to the
“auditorium” hour, so that the younger may have their curiosity
stimulated about the work of classes that they perhaps have not yet
reached, and so that the older may lose that snobbery of age which often
causes so much unhappiness in childhood, and tends to fill the adult
mind with delusions about the young. This plan, therefore, makes for
sympathy between the pupils, makes each child familiar with the
activities of the whole school, and prevents that unfortunate
segregation and confinement of the ordinary school. Besides being able
to look into the various rooms through the glass doors, the child in the
Gary school has an opportunity of seeing in “auditorium” in dramatic
form the life of his school. The influence of this “auditorium” hour
upon the school work, particularly the academic work, can hardly fail to
be marked, for it directly motivates all the studies. It is a sort of
communal “application” activity. History and literature take on a new
meaning, because the material may be studied now always in the light of
its possible presentation to the rest of the school in dramatic and
intelligent form. Many schools use the dramatic sense to vitalize these
studies, but no other school provides so definite and regular a focus,
and so constant and interested an audience for the products of such a
vitalization. The “auditorium” in the Gary school seems to be a genuine
school-community theater, an inevitable and integral part of the school
life.
In the words of Superintendent Wirt, the Gary school aims to be a
“clearing-house for children’s activities.” The ideal is to render the
school community as self-sustaining and self-stimulating as possible.
Whatever the school cannot itself contribute to the education of the
child, it may find in the institutions of the surrounding community. Any
outside agency which provides wholesome activities for children becomes
then a sort of extension of the school. Children in the Gary school are
permitted to go out from their play or “auditorium” hour to do special
work at home, take private music or art lessons, visit the Y.M.C.A.,
settlement or neighborhood house, attend the Boy Scouts or Camp-Fire
Girls, or receive religious instruction in the churches. This outside
work is then ranked as an integral part of the school work.
It is this community coöperation which has particularly roused the
interest of religious educators. It suggests to many of them a solution
of the problems of religious education, and of separate denominational
schools. Religion does not enter the Gary school in any form, not even
in Bible reading and prayer. But children may go out, for one hour a
day, two, three, or even four times a week, to classes in religious
instruction, privately organized and supported by the various churches
of the city. To meet the situation in Gary, the churches have in some
instances engaged special instructors for these classes in religion. The
Presbyterian, Methodist, and Christian churches are said to have united
in engaging a teacher at a relatively high salary. Such coöperation not
only insures the services of well-trained and liberal teachers, but must
necessarily banish sectarian dogmatism from the teaching. In Gary, the
Baptist, Roman Catholic, and Hebrew churches, besides the Y.M.C.A., are
said to be giving this special instruction. In the Jefferson School more
than half the children attend these classes at the churches. This
feature of the Gary plan is one of the most interesting, and perhaps has
the most far-reaching possibilities, in the way of transforming
religious instruction in this country. This plan is characteristic of a
school which seeks to meet the demands of the individual child, and to
make everything in the community which is truly educational, or which,
for any reason, parents and children believe to be genuinely
educational, contribute to the life of the school community.
Since the other institutions have the same privileges as the churches,
they are all given the opportunity in this plan of enlarging their
effective resources. City schools which wish to adopt the Gary plan, but
lack the ideal school plant or the varied facilities, may often avail
themselves of the gymnasium, pools, playgrounds, etc., of near-by
Y.M.C.A. or settlement houses, and use the public library and public
playground, and thus acquire, by systematic coöperation with these other
agencies, an effectively working Gary school. This plan has been adopted
with great success in the case of the New York schools, a number of
which are in the course of adopting the Gary plan, or many features of
it. Their experience has shown that, by making the school a
“clearing-house for children’s activities,” the social resources of all
these communal institutions are vastly increased.
* * * * *
To sum up, the Gary school forms a children’s community, which aims to
provide the practical natural education of the old school, shop, and
home which educated our forefathers. It is a necessary evolution and
reorganization of the public school to meet the changed social and
industrial conditions of the modern city. The school community, by
providing a fourfold activity of work, study, and play, uses the
children’s time and keeps them from the demoralizing influence of the
streets. In the “auditorium” it provides a public theater which may
motivate all the work and study. By coöperating with all the community
agencies which provide wholesome activities for children, it makes them
all more valuable and effective. And by making the school as far as
possible a self-sustaining community, it gives meaning and purpose to
all the work, trains the children for the outside world, and cultivates
the social virtues.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV
PROGRAMS: THE SCHOOL AS A PUBLIC UTILITY
SCHOOLS such as those in Gary, with their elaborate equipment and
special school enterprises, obviously require methods of financing
radically different from those of the ordinary public school. It is,
perhaps, this problem of how a small and relatively poor city like Gary
could afford to maintain such schools that has aroused the interest of
practical school men in the Gary plan. When the public schools were
first started in the new town, the authorities found themselves in a
peculiarly difficult situation, owing to the limited funds at hand and
the demands of a rapidly increasing population. The conventional method
of meeting the situation would have been to erect inferior buildings, to
omit playgrounds, laboratories, workshops, to employ cheap teachers, to
increase the size of classes, to limit the yearly term, or else to try
to accommodate all the children in a few buildings on half-time work.
These have been the methods which our large cities have almost
universally felt themselves obliged to adopt when confronted with these
problems of economy and congestion.
The other possible method—and this seems to be the unique contribution
of the Gary plan to the economics of education—was to treat the public
school as a public service, and apply to it all those principles of
scientific direction which have been perfected for the public use of
railroads, telephones, parks, and other “public utilities.” The new city
of Gary could create thoroughly modern, completely equipped school
plants, and operate them so as to get the maximum of service from them.
Superintendent Wirt and the school board believed that this plan would
be the true economy.
Mr. Wirt says, “You can afford any kind of school desired if ordinary
economic public-service principles are applied to public-school
management. The first principle in turning waste into profit in school
management is to use every facility all the time for all the people.”
Instead, therefore, of counting their financial resources and then
deciding what limited educational facilities could be provided with
them, the Gary authorities seem to have decided upon the ideal school
plant desired to meet the needs of the modern city child, and then to
have proceeded, by the ingenious application of principles well
recognized in business and industry, to utilize their resources so as to
support the desired facilities. The Gary plan has made evident the great
wastes involved in the conventional methods of managing the
public-school plant. All school men will agree with Superintendent Wirt
when he says that “most certainly playgrounds, gymnasiums, and
swimming-pools are good things for all children to have. I believe that
gardens, workshops, drawing and music studios are good things for
children to have. I believe that museums, art galleries, and libraries
are good things for children to use systematically and regularly. In my
judgment opportunities for religious instruction, for private
instruction in music, and for assisting in desirable home work are good
things for children. So also are coöperative classes between the
academic school and the industrial activities of the school business
departments, and between the school and industrial activities outside
the school. In what way will the use of these facilities handicap a
child in his efforts to secure an education?”
The answer is, of course, “in no way.” These are the things the most
advanced higher schools and wealthy private schools are providing for
their pupils. School men may have desired to provide all these things
for all the children of the elementary schools too, but rarely has
economic skill combined with educational philosophy to bring such an
ideal within the bounds of possibility. The Gary school seems to have
found a way. It has actually realized the ideal, and made practicable
that school-community life which other schools have only envisaged. It
has found that any kind of school desired may be had if classrooms,
auditoriums, playgrounds, etc., are in constant use all day long by all
the children in alternating groups and out of school hours by adults.
“The modern city,” says Superintendent Wirt, “is largely the result of
the application of the principle of the common use of public facilities
that we need for our personal use only part of the time. We are willing
that other people use public services when we cannot use them. How many
street-cars and what sort of service could we afford if each citizen had
to have his own private street-car seat for his own exclusive use?” Yet
the educational ideal in school management generally remains what is set
forth in the report of the 1913 Part-Time Committee of the New York
public schools,—“Every pupil is entitled to an individual seat and desk.
The teacher is entitled to the exclusive possession of a classroom....”
In the light of the Gary plan this ideal is absurd. It means, as has
been discovered in the New York experience, that school facilities can
never be made to catch up to school population. And it is absurd because
it assumes that all persons in school want to do the same thing at the
same time. But all “modern public conveniences are made possible only by
their common use and the fact that we do not want to use the same public
conveniences at the same moment. We are willing to have some one else
use our public library, look at our pictures in our public museum, walk
in our public park, sleep in our Pullman berth or in our hotel bedroom,
or travel in our steamboat when we are otherwise engaged.” It proves to
be as financially prohibitive to attempt to provide an individual desk
and seat for every school-child as it is to provide an individual seat
for every citizen who may sit in the park. “The great masses of children
in our city schools can never have ample play spaces, suitable
auditoriums, gymnasiums and swimming-pools, workshops, libraries,
museums, or even ordinary schoolrooms for study and recitation, if all
children at the same time must be using each of these facilities
separately.” The more people use these public services, the cheaper they
become for each one of us. And the more evenly the public use is
distributed, the more valuable becomes the service to each one of us.
“Increasing the number of persons using any public facility either under
public or private ownership betters the service for all, provided the
load can be uniformly distributed during operating hours. The problem
with a public lighting or transportation service is to eliminate
‘peak-loads’ as far as possible.”
We have had constantly before us the gradual extension of the principle
of multiple service of public facilities. The Gary plan makes the public
school the last of these public services to come under the operation of
these principles. As generally managed the public school has not
recognized these principles. The effect of its administrative methods,
its rigid school hours, its uniform curriculum, its emphasis on academic
work, has been rather to increase the “peak-loads” and thus
inadvertently to increase the costs of operation. In many schools, the
use of the “auditorium” does not average more than ten minutes a day for
each day of the year, and the playgrounds barely an hour each day of the
year. And for every hour that shops, etc., are empty, there is a waste
and leakage, which would be permitted in no other public-service
institution.
The Gary plan, therefore, has worked out a multiple use of the school
plant in the most comprehensive form. By distributing classes in
alternating groups, so that every department and room is in use as
nearly as possible every hour of the eight-hour day, the “peak-loads”
are prevented and the costs of operation reduced to the minimum. This
system, variously called a “rotation-of-crops” or a “platoon” system,
permits almost the actual doubling of the capacity of the school plant.
Two duplicate schools may function together in the same building all day
long. This “duplicate-school” plan is not, it must be observed, that
used in some cities, where one school occupies the rooms for a few hours
while the other remains at home, to take its turn in the rooms while the
other goes out. That is merely a “part-time” scheme, and only
accentuates the usual evils of fragmentary schooling and demoralizing
street life. The Gary plan involves two distinct schools, known as the
“X” and the “Y” schools, each of which has the entire program and the
full day. The Gary plan, in other words, can accommodate twice the
ordinary number in a school-building, not by shortening the time for
each child, but actually by lengthening it.
How this plan works out in detail for a school unit of eight classes may
be shown by the following program, which was used in the Jefferson
School when Superintendent Wirt first came to Gary. The Jefferson School
has been described as a conventional school-building, which was adapted
to the Gary plan by the institution of shops, gymnasium, etc., and the
conversion of classrooms into laboratories and studios. The program
shows how a small eight-room school, ordinarily accommodating three
hundred and twenty children (forty to a class), may, with a small
auditorium, playground, attic gymnasium, and basement shops accommodate
two duplicate schools of eight teachers each, with a total of six
hundred and forty children. The first column gives the teachers,—grade
teachers for the regular studies of the eight grades, and special
teachers for the special activities. The second column gives the rooms
where the work is conducted; the other columns give the distribution of
time. “1X” means the first grade of the “X” school; “1Y” means the first
grade of the “Y” school, etc. The program shows the ingenious
distribution of classes throughout the school and throughout the course
of the day,—six hours in this case, to which one hour and a quarter must
be added for lunch-time.
─────────────────────────┬─────────────────┬─────────────────
Studies │ Forenoon │ Afternoon
────────────┬────────────┼────────┬────────┼────────┬────────
Teachers │ Room │90 min. │90 min. │90 min. │90 min.
────────────┼────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┼────────
1st Grade │Classroom │ 1X │ 1Y │ 1X │ 1Y
2d Grade │Classroom │ 2X │ 2Y │ 2X │ 2Y
3d Grade │Classroom │ 3X │ 3Y │ 3X │ 3Y
4th Grade │Classroom │ 4X │ 4Y │ 4X │ 4Y
5th Grade │Classroom │ 5X │ 5Y │ 5X │ 5Y
6th Grade │Classroom │ 6X │ 6Y │ 6X │ 6Y
7th Grade │Classroom │ 7X │ 7Y │ 7X │ 7Y
8th Grade │Classroom │ 8X │ 8Y │ 8X │ 8Y
Music │Auditorium │ 1Y 2Y │ 1X 2X │ 3Y 4Y │ 3X 4X
Drawing │Basement │ 3Y 4Y │ 3X 4X │ 1Y 2Y │ 1X 2X
Literature │Library │ 5Y 6Y │ 5X 6X │ 7Y 8Y │ 7X 8X
Science or │Basement │ 7Y 8Y │ 7X 8X │ 5Y 6Y │ 5X 6X
manual arts │ │ │ │ │
│{Attic │ 2Y 1Y │ 2X 1X │ 6Y 5Y │ 6X 5X
Physical │{Playground │ 4Y 3Y │ 4X 3X │ 8Y 7Y │ 8X 7X
education │ │ │ │ │
(2 │{Attic │ 6Y 5Y │ 6X 5X │ 2Y 1Y │ 4X 3X
teachers and│ │ │ │ │
principal)│{Playground │ 8Y 7Y │ 8X 7X │ 4Y 3Y │ 2X 1X
────────────┴────────────┴────────┴────────┴────────┴────────
According to this program, only eight regular schoolrooms are required
for the sixteen classes. While these eight classrooms are occupied by
the classes engaged in the regular studies, the eight other classes are
engaged in special activities in other parts of the school plant, in
basement shops, attic gymnasium, or playground. Half the day is given to
the regular studies, and half to the special activities. The regular
studies occupy two periods of ninety minutes each, one in the forenoon
and one in the afternoon. The same amount of time is given to the
special activities, but the ninety-minute periods are divided into two
forty-five-minute periods. The time devoted to the regular studies is
divided as the teachers see fit. Each teacher has but one class at a
time, and the way in which the time is distributed between the
arithmetic, reading, spelling, geography, history, etc., depends upon
the needs of those in the class. It will be seen from the program that
each class of the two duplicate schools has time not only for three
hours a day of the traditional school studies, but for three hours of
play and special activities besides. And since this is the daily
program, each class gets this varied work, study, and play every day,
and not, as is the case of the special work in most public schools, only
once or twice a week. Thus, according to this program, the day’s work
for the third grade in the “X” school would be mapped out in this
way,—regular studies, drawing or manual training, playground or
gymnasium, lunch, regular studies, music, and playground again. The
sixth grade in the “Y” school has a program of physical education, music
or literature, regular studies, lunch, play, science or manual arts, and
regular studies again. The program shows not only how double the number
of classes are accommodated, but how all are given a longer and more
varied day than is possible in the ordinary school.
This program represents the simplest framework of the application of
public-service principles to the daily school program, with its multiple
use of facilities. It is known as the “Old Gary School Program,” and
has, of course, been much modified and refined and complicated as the
need for flexibility and for the further departmentalizing of studies
has arisen, and as it has had to be adapted to schools of different
sizes. As here presented it does not include the high-school classes.
The program of the complete school plant is much more elaborate. The
“Old Gary School Program,” however, contains the essential principles of
the distribution of classes and of school time.
Since September, 1913, a new and more satisfactory program has been
followed in the four larger Gary schools. The new school day is eight
and one quarter hours in length, and the work is divided into four
groups, as follows:—
──────┬────────────────────────────────────────┬──────
Group│ Program │Hours
──────┼────────────────────────────────────────┼──────
1.│History and geography, English and │ 2
│mathematics │
2.│Manual work, science, drawing, music │ 2
3.│Auditorium │ 1
4.│Play, physical training, application │ 2
│ │
│Lunch │ 1¼
──────┴────────────────────────────────────────┴──────
The first group of studies is conducted in the ordinary classrooms; the
second group in the shops, laboratories, and studios; the third group in
the auditorium; the fourth group in the gymnasiums, swimming-pools,
playrooms and playgrounds. Four groups of children are simultaneously
engaged in these four different departments throughout the day. If A
represents one half of the classes of grades 1 to 4; B, one half of
grades 5 to 8; C, the other half of grades 1 to 4; and D, the other half
of grades 5 to 8—then A and B together will represent the “X” school of
our old program, and C and D together will represent the “Y” school,
each school with its own corps of teachers and classes of all grades
from 1 to 8. The new program for the duplicate school then works out in
operation as follows. (The new day is an hour longer.)
────────────┬───────────────────────────────────
│
Time │ Studies for
│
────────────┼────────┬───────┬──────────┬───────
│ Group │Group 2│ Group 3 │Group 4
│ 1[2] │ │ │
────────────┼────────┼───────┼──────────┼───────
8.15- 9.15│ A │ B │ │ C D
9.15-10.15│ B │ A │ C │ D
10.15-11.15│ C │ D │ A │ B
11.15-12.15│ D │ C │Lunch-hour│
│ │ │ for A B │
12.15- 1.15│ A │ B │Lunch-hour│
│ │ │ for C D │
1.15- 2.15│ B │ A │ D │ C
2.15- 3.15│ C │ D │ B │ A
3.15- 4.15│ D │ C │ — │ A B
────────────┴────────┴───────┴──────────┴───────
4.15- 5.00 Playgrounds, gymnasiums, and shops open for volunteers.
------------------------------------------------------
Footnote 2:
See preceding table.
Since C D, or the “Y” school, has physical education the first hour in
the morning, and A B, or the “X” school, has it the last hour of the
afternoon, pupils in the “Y” school are permitted to come an hour later
in the morning, and the pupils in the “X” school are permitted to leave
an hour earlier in the afternoon. It will be observed from this program
that only one fourth of the pupils are engaged in group 1 during any
hour of the day. Four separate classes are, therefore, accommodated in
each regular classroom. Consequently, the capacity of the school plant
is four times that of the regular classrooms. But since a number of
rooms which would otherwise be used for classrooms are used for
laboratories and studios, the net capacity of the school plant operating
under the new program is, as under the old program, twice the capacity
of the total number of classrooms.
In the lower grades it is found desirable to use for formal physical
training, half an hour out of the two hours assigned to group 2. An
exchange is, therefore, made with the grammar and high-school grades,
which are assigned to the regular classrooms for an additional hour of
English and mathematics. In all grades the time assigned to group 4 is
divided between the teachers of physical education and play, and the
teachers of the subjects in groups 1 and 2. In the lower grades,
teachers of the regular studies use their share of the time—one hour—in
games and constructive plays that apply the subject-matter taught in the
classes. This is the “application” work which is so distinctive a
feature of the Gary school. It is planned systematically to give the
formal work of the school opportunity for expression through activity.
The music and literature teachers use the “application” period for
folk-dances, musical games, dramatics, modeling in clay and sand, and
for free imaginative play and construction. This “application” work is
carried on informally in the broad halls or in corners of the
playgrounds and playrooms. Whatever work has permanent value or interest
may then be practiced for presentation in the “auditorium” period. The
nature-study and science teachers use the application period for the
care of the lawns, trees, shrubbery, the conservatories, the gardens,
the animal pets. In the upper grades, mathematics teachers use this
period for the practical measuring and planning of the various
mechanical construction projects of the shops or grounds, or in
practical accounting in connection with the clerical work of the school.
In other words, it is in the “application” periods that that work is
done which contributes to the school community life which has been
described in the chapter on “The School as a Community.”
In the lower grades, “application” takes largely the form of games. In
the upper grades, the industrial and science work is used as the basis.
Practical instruction is given by the shop and laboratory teachers, in
addition to that given by the regular teachers. The special teacher has
his pupils for one hour in the classroom, followed by two hours in the
shop or laboratory where direct application is made of the theoretical
instruction. This extra time is taken out of that assigned to group 4.
The division of time between the various activities in the new program
therefore works out as follows:—
_For grades 1 to 3_:—
Language and mathematics 2 hours
Music, literature and expression, 1 hour
gymnastics
Application 1 hour
Auditorium 1 hour
Lunch 1 hour
Manual work and nature-study 1 hour
Free play 1 hour
_For the other grades, 4 to 8_:—
Language, mathematics, history, geography 2 hours
Science and manual work 2 hours
Mathematics and English taught by shop and 1 hour
laboratory instructors
Physical training and play 1 hour
Auditorium 1 hour
Lunch 1 hour
This is the new program for a school of eight grades. In the case of the
complete school plant, such as those of the Emerson and Froebel Schools
in Gary, with their twelve grades and their forty or more classes
apiece, the program becomes much more complicated. But the division of
time follows essentially the outlines given above, the high-school
classes resembling the upper grammar grades’ distribution of time and
subjects.
The noteworthy thing about this program, apart from the ingenious and
successful multiple use of the school plant it represents, is the
equable distribution of time between the “regular studies” and the
“special activities.” In the Gary school, the “special work,” more or
less an appendage in the ordinary public school, is as regular as the
“regular work.” Yet the amount of academic work is no less than that in
the ordinary schools. The various fundamental groups are participated in
on equal terms. No subject is slighted, no age is slighted. The extended
school day, which absorbs the “street and alley time” of the city child,
affords ample opportunity for all activities. No activity is continued
long enough to cause fatigue, while the constant daily cultivation of
each activity provides the constant drill and the thoroughness of
training which the ordinary school, with its short day and crowded
curriculum, is compelled to slight. Such a program seems to be a highly
rational distribution of school activities, as ingenious from the point
of view of educational engineering as it is pedagogically sound. By
treating the daily use of the schools as a public service, the Gary
program obtains, for twice the number of children ordinarily
accommodated, twice the number of facilities ordinarily provided. Each
individual is immensely benefited because all are served. “The only
reason why the public—that is, ourselves collectively—can afford to
provide things for each of us individually that we cannot provide for
ourselves privately, is that collectively we secure a multiple use of
the facilities.”
The same principles of administrative economy—an economy which creates
rather than impoverishes—are applied to the yearly schedule as to the
daily program. The Gary authorities find that they cannot afford to let
their plant stand idle two or three months of the year, and are
therefore working toward an all-year school. This effort coincides with
a growing general belief that the long summer vacations not only
demoralize the city child, but are a great waste of educational
influence. At the present time state laws hinder the completion of the
all-year plan. The Gary schools now have ten months of regular
compulsory school, and ten weeks of voluntary vacation school, but they
are working toward an organization of four quarters of twelve weeks
each. This plan was approximated by Superintendent Wirt in the Bluffton
schools before he came to Gary. Under this scheme pupils are required to
attend any three of the four quarters, attendance in the remaining
quarter being wholly voluntary. In Bluffton it was found that the
attendance of the younger children for the summer quarter was greater
than for any other quarter in the year. With the traditional term
organization, many children are unavoidably absent in the winter on
account of sickness and weather. Under the four-quarter arrangement,
however, the allotted vacation of these children could be so organized
as to include this absence and thus insure thirty-six weeks of
schooling. “When people are given a chance,” says Superintendent Wirt,
“it is found that they do not want to go to school at the same time any
more than they all want to travel at the same time.”
The all-year school would not increase the cost of maintenance. For with
the same number of pupils per teacher, the cost is the same whether the
pupils are all taught together for thirty-six weeks, on the traditional
plan, or whether only three quarters of them are taught at a time
throughout a school year of forty-eight weeks.
The economies which this multiple use of school facilities effects are
so large as to provide ample funds for all the special features of the
Gary plan of education. These savings are in construction, in operation
and maintenance, and in instruction. Savings in construction alone are
very large. Since, under the duplicate-school plan, two complete schools
may be accommodated in one building, the number of school plants may be
greatly reduced. In the light of the Gary plan, therefore, those cities
which are confronted with problems of school congestion are in the
paradoxical situation of having, not too few buildings, but actually too
many. Fewer and better plants would accommodate their children under the
Gary plan. It must be remembered that the Gary schools at present have
accommodations for many more children than there are children to use
them, and this in spite of a phenomenal growth of population. The
erection of a number of Gary unit plants is less expensive than the
erection of a much larger number of ordinary school-buildings of the
common school type. For the cost of building construction does not
increase in proportion to the size of the building, and large sums may
be saved on the fewer sites required. The diminution in the number of
classrooms in the Gary school plant is a distinct source of economy,
owing to the fact that the classroom is uniformly the most expensive
portion of the school plant. The Gary experience seems to show that the
best and completest unit school plant is also the cheapest. The plan of
having the twelve grades under one roof avoids the reduplication of
expensive equipment in several centers. And the self-sustaining
industrial shops cut off an item of “vocational training” expense which
most cities find almost financially prohibitive.
As for the costs of operation and maintenance, it is obvious that
increasing the size of the school plant makes for economy. The cost of
janitor service, administrative charges, heating, lighting, etc., are
much reduced by consolidation. Nor, in order to effect these economies,
need the size of the school plant be made so large as to make
administration unwieldy. The largest Gary school plant, operating with
all these economies, accommodates only twenty-seven hundred children,
forty children to a teacher, while it is the intention to reduce the
average number of children per teacher to thirty, and the building
capacity to two thousand children.
Finally, the cost per pupil for instruction is decreased by the plan of
specializing and departmentalizing the work, and thus eliminating
overhead charges for supervisors. It should be pointed out again that
_all these economies actually increase the educational efficiencies of
the school_.
The figures show that the Gary school plan does not increase public
expenditures for educational purposes. The Jefferson School, built
before Superintendent Wirt came to Gary, and representing the common
type of modern school-building, was erected at a cost of $90,000 to
accommodate 360 pupils, with 40 pupils per teacher. This is a
_per-capita_ construction cost of $250, a cost exactly equal to that of
a typical New Jersey High School recently erected at a cost of $125,000,
with a maximum capacity of 500 pupils. The capacity of the Emerson
School, constructed as an ideal Gary school plant, is 1800, with 30
pupils to a teacher. Its cost, with a large playground and the wealth of
facilities already described, was about $300,000. The _per-capita_ cost
of construction was therefore $166. At its maximum capacity, with 40
pupils to the teacher, the _per-capita_ cost of construction would be
only $111, as against $250 for the Jefferson School, with no facilities.
Further tables of comparative costs will be found in the Appendix.
The funds liberated by the application of these simple economical
principles to public-school finance are so large as to give Gary the
means to provide, as Superintendent Wirt says, “any kind of a school
desired.” Extraordinarily complete educational and recreational
facilities may be furnished for all the people all the year round. Money
is thus provided for an evening school for adults on an almost
unprecedented scale. The Gary evening schools, held in the four largest
school plants, four evenings a week throughout the regular school year
from 7 to 9.30 P.M., have an attendance over two thirds that of the
regular day schools. The cost of the evening school is only thirteen per
cent of the day-school cost.
The evening schools of Gary resemble a people’s university. Practically
every study authorized by state law is given, and the bulletin of
courses is like a university catalogue. All the shops, laboratories,
studios, and classrooms are thrown open, either to repeat the day
studies or to present more advanced work. All the work, industrial and
academic, is open on equal terms to men and women. During 1914-15, 4300
students, representing all classes in the community, are said to have
been enrolled in the Gary evening schools, with an average monthly
enrollment of 3103. Over two thousand of the nine thousand voters at the
last city election were said to be enrolled in the Gary evening schools.
There are said to be more men over twenty-one attending evening schools
in Gary than there are boys of all ages attending the day schools.
The Gary evening schools in the last year have achieved an even closer
articulation of the work of the day and evening schools. A large number
of short-unit courses were offered for busy men and women who wished
particular branches of certain studies, and who could not remain in
school to pursue their studies in the usual way. It has also been
arranged to connect into group units the studies that bear upon a given
industrial occupation, so that the school may correlate directly with
all the occupations of the community, and the adult worker may come and
secure the additional experimentation or theory which will help him in
his work.
In addition to this instruction offered in academic and industrial work,
to the evening pupils is given free use of the gymnasiums, pools,
playgrounds, etc. The playgrounds are artificially lighted so that games
may be played successfully at night. Playgrounds and swimming-pools are
open on Sundays also, and the auditoriums for lectures, moving pictures,
community forums, and the like. All wholesome social gatherings and
entertainments are welcomed any evening of the week. The auditoriums are
freely lent for political meetings, conferences, meetings of
neighborhood or other private associations. The Gary school plant thus
becomes in the fullest sense a social or community center. The “wider
use of the school plant” here involves almost the widest possible use in
the interests of all classes of the population; for the lavish Gary
school plants contain equipments which serve the needs not only of
children, but of all classes of adults as well, from the well-to-do
woman who wishes to learn French to the sheet-metal worker in the mills.
By using the schools as a public service, the Gary educational
authorities are thus able to provide for all the people facilities at no
more expense than other communities are paying now for meager
opportunities which do not even meet the needs of the children, while
they leave the majority of adults entirely uninfluenced by the schools.
“The private exclusive use of public-school facilities has meant and
will continue to mean,” says Superintendent Wirt, “that all of the
people collectively can provide for only a part of their number.”
The Gary school is evidently a genuine “public school” in a sense more
“public” than is generally known. In many communities the public school
is “still the old private school publicly supported.” School boards
often act as if they were trustees of private property. They gravely
discuss “wider use of the school plant” as if this were some gracious
extension of privilege instead of a public right. The public in many
communities scarcely feel yet that the schools are their own. The Gary
schools seem to have produced a different spirit. They are public in the
same broad sense that streets and parks are public. They are used with
the same freedom and lack of reserve. In such a community and such a
school education would never be finished. Just as there is no break
between common school and high school in the Gary plan, so there need be
none between child and adult. The child would not “graduate,” “complete
his or her education,” but would tend to drift back constantly to the
school to get the help he or she needed in profession or occupation, or
to keep on enjoying the facilities which even the wealthy private home
would not be able or willing to afford. It is toward such a public
educational ideal that the Gary plan seems to work. Toward this all the
economies and ingenious schemes of organization are directed—toward
making the public schools veritable “schools of the public.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
V
ORGANIZATION
THE distinctive features of organization in the Gary school are the
separation of administrative from pedagogical supervision; the extension
of departmental teaching throughout the entire school; the increased
initiative and coöperation of the teaching force; the flexibility and
simplicity obtained by the “helper” or “observer” system.
The school administration is vested in a single head, the superintendent
of schools, who is appointed by the board of education of three members.
In charge of each school-building is an executive principal, whose
duties are concerned with program-making, with supervision of the
pupil’s schedules, with the general maintenance of order and discipline,
and ordinary administrative work. He has no supervision of the
instruction.
For all the schools there are two general supervisors of instruction,
who oversee the teaching, work out the curricula in coöperation with the
teachers, conduct examinations for promotion, make promotions or
demotions after consultation with the teacher.
The industrial and manual-training shops are under the direction of a
director of industrial work, who is also practical head of the
school-building and repair department. The teacher-workmen in the shops
are employed by him in the dual capacity of manual-training and
industrial teachers and of regular workmen engaged in repair and
construction. Each building has a head manual-training teacher, who
supervises the work of the industrial classes, of the part-time classes,
and acts as vocational adviser for the school’s pupils. Gymnasium and
swimming-pool attendants are employed by the head teachers of the
physical education departments.
The departmental teachers in the head building (Emerson School) act as
assistant supervisors of instruction in their subjects and have general
oversight of the courses in their subjects as taught in the other
buildings.
Departmental teaching is carried out in the Gary schools to an extent
generally unrealized in other public schools. It is considered that,
with the exception of the lowest grades, no arguments which apply to the
institution of departmental teaching in the high school are inapplicable
to the grades of the common school. The special activities undoubtedly
call for specialists to conduct them. History, language, literature,
mathematics can also be much better taught if the teacher can devote his
or her attention to the particular methods and orientation of the
respective subjects, and not be required to be equally at home in the
technique of all of them. Teachers can rarely be found who are
many-sided enough to teach well even all the common branches, without
the special activities. The Gary schools, therefore, adopt for all,
except the first two or three grades, what are practically advanced
high-school or college methods of specialized teaching.
[Illustration:
THE MACHINE-SHOP AT THE EMERSON SCHOOL
]
In these lowest grades all the regular subjects are taught by the one
grade teacher; in the other grades practically all the subjects are
departmentalized. A unit school plant which should have fifty-six
classes, divided proportionately among the grades, in addition to the
nurseries and kindergartens and special classes, would employ for grades
1 to 3, _sixteen_ teachers, as follows: For English, mathematics, 8; for
manual training, 2; for nature-study, 2; for music, 1; for expression,
1; for physical training, 2.
For grades 4 to 12, _forty-six_ teachers would be employed: For English,
4; for mathematics, 2; for Latin, 1; for German, 1; for French, 1; for
Spanish, 1; for history, 1; for fourth-and fifth-grade English,
mathematics, history, and geography (either departmentalized or
undepartmentalized), 8; for chemistry, 2; for botany, 2; for physics, 2;
for zoölogy, 2; for freehand drawing, 2; for architectural drawing, 2;
for mechanical drawing, 1; for music, 2; for expression, 2; for cooking,
1; for sewing, 1; for manual training (not including the industrial
shops), 2; for physical training, 6. Four teachers would be employed in
the kindergarten department. A unit plant of this size would require one
executive building principal, and one supervisor of instruction. Two
school nurses and a school physician would also be employed.
Such a distribution of the teaching force would be considered the ideal
for a unit school plant of all grades, accommodating between fourteen
hundred and twenty-two hundred and fifty children in two duplicate
schools. It will be observed that this most careful specialization of
teaching does not increase the number of teachers required. At least
fifty-six teachers, with a number of special teachers, would be required
in any school of fifty-six classes, run on an undepartmentalized plan.
The Gary plan, therefore, without increasing the number of teachers,
provides for a much higher expertness of service. Indeed, Superintendent
Wirt has worked out a form by which a school of thirty-two classes would
only require thirty-two teachers, including the special teachers, and
with most of the work departmentalized.
Programs may be arranged for schools with any number of classes. The
number of classrooms and teachers required will be approximately as
follows, including supervisors, special teachers, librarians and
playground instructors:—
A 12-class school requires 8 classrooms and 12 teachers.
A 24-class school requires 15 classrooms and 23 teachers.
A 36-class school requires 22 classrooms and 33 teachers.
A 48-class school requires 29 classrooms and 43 teachers.
A 60-class school requires 36 classrooms and 54 teachers.
A 72-class school requires 43 classrooms and 64 teachers.
In the 72-class school, 43 classrooms and 54 teachers are required, in
addition to the provision for auditorium, playrooms, and library. For
this work 10 teachers are required, making a total of only 64 teachers
for 72 classes. The traditional elementary school requires 72 teachers
and 72 classrooms for 72 classes; the manual-training shops and the
manual-training teachers are extra. In addition there would be
librarians in branch public libraries, playground directors in public
playgrounds, and special teachers as supervisors of music, drawing,
physical training, manual training, and nature-study. Often in the
traditional school 80 or more persons are employed for the instruction
of 72 classes, not including the building principal and assistants.
An important feature of the teacher organization in the Gary school is
the division into senior and junior teachers, or head teacher and
assistant teacher. Since each classroom accommodates two teachers
according to the duplicate-school plan, the teacher who has been longer
in service is designated as head teacher. The less experienced teacher
acts under her direction. The head teachers, for instance, in the “X”
school may visit and criticize the work of the assistant teachers in the
“Y” school during the last hour of the day when the “X” school is not in
session. Similarly the junior teacher in the “Y” school may visit the
work of the “X” school during the first hour. Inexperienced or weak
teachers may thus be developed under the direction of the more
experienced. New teachers are thus being constantly trained in the new
régime and spirit of the Gary school. The school is thus made an
extension of the normal or training-school for teachers. The teachers
continue to learn as well as the pupils. The question how teachers are
to be procured for the new demands which the Gary plan puts upon them is
thus answered. The school itself trains the teachers.
The responsibilities of the teachers for the auditorium period have been
discussed. Under the old Gary plan each auditorium period was in charge
of one teacher who acted as assistant principal. The teachers alternated
in organizing the dramatic and other features of the auditorium work.
Recently Superintendent Wirt has decided that this auditorium work
functions better if it is specialized. In the new 72-school program,
four teachers give their time exclusively to the auditorium exercises.
One teacher has charge of the music; one has charge of the art,
literature, history, civics, and current events; one has charge of the
presentation of material relating to the science work; and one has
charge of the presentation of the material relating to the shops and
industries. In a properly equipped auditorium, with stereopticon
lantern, motion-picture machine, stage, player-piano, organ, and
phonograph, the auditorium teachers can do many things better with large
numbers of children than the regular teachers can do with small numbers.
The regular classroom teachers are expected to coöperate in this
frequent presentation of work by their classes in the auditorium in
order to use it as a place for “application” work and for motivating the
academic work of the school.
In the new program, the “application” work is also specialized.
Experience has shown that some teachers have a special talent for this
imaginative and constructive side of teaching, and prefer to devote
their entire time to it. In this scheme, the “application” teachers have
six classes daily out of a total of twelve classes in each of their
respective groups. They are thus able to meet each of the twelve classes
of their respective groups every other day, week, month, or term. Or
these teachers may select from each of the groups of three classes the
pupils who need special work in language and mathematics, and meet these
pupils every day. For the average pupil all of the opportunity necessary
to make an application of his language and mathematics is provided in
the regular manual-training, drawing, music, and expression classes. The
“application” teachers meet their respective classes in the
manual-training, drawing, music, and expression rooms. The facilities of
these special rooms are used for “application” purposes. The
“application” teachers are expected to make suggestions to the special
teachers of these subjects concerning the opportunities to teach
language and mathematics through the “application” opportunities of the
regular work of their respective subjects. Each “application” teacher
may be constituted the head of a group of eight teachers. The
“application” teacher is the correlating agent for all the work of the
twelve classes; also she works with all of the twelve classes as a
constructive examiner, and is constantly placing before the children
real problems of the type that the world of industry, business, and
citizenship will place before them when they leave school. She may not
be able to present these problems as well as the world will present them
later, but the immediate and daily reaction while the child is in school
should be invaluable in preparing him for meeting the more difficult
problems which arise when he has completed his school course.
* * * * *
Class periods may be 40 or 50 or 55 minutes instead of 60. Teachers have
six hours in school with 60-minute periods, five and one-half with
55-minute periods, and five hours with 50-minute periods. Pupils have a
school day of seven, six and one-half, and six hours respectively, in
addition to an hour for luncheon. The playground teachers are on duty an
additional hour. Each teacher has an hour a day free for her own work.
When her day is finished, she is supposed to leave the building. It is
expected that all paper work, as well as all the work of the children,
will be done in school. The purpose is to make the teacher’s day only
six hours, without the burden of extra time at home.
An interesting extension of this teacher-organization plan is the new
training course for outside teachers or principals who are desirous of
studying the Gary school plan and teaching methods. Visiting teachers
and principals are allowed, at a fee, to attach themselves as assistants
to teachers or principals, and follow the work through a course of weeks
or months, in exactly the same way that the small child acts as “helper”
or “observer” to the older child in the laboratory or shop or the junior
to the senior teacher. The fee goes to the teacher or principal who
instructs the visitor. This novel way of teaching the principles of the
Gary school, not by lectures, but by direct practical assistance on the
part of the visitor, is typical of that insistence upon “learning by
doing” which is the keynote of the Gary instruction.
The Gary plan acts on the theory that the good teachers should be given
initiative and responsibility, while the inexperienced and weak teachers
should be trained into initiative and responsibility. The usual plan in
school systems is to make the experienced and inexperienced, strong and
weak, coördinate with one another, and all subordinate to the supervisor
or superintendent. The Gary plan thus secures the utmost from the good
teachers, and trains the poor ones.
Instead of employing special “visiting teachers,” as is done in many
school systems, the teacher in the Gary school is given the
responsibilities of the “visiting teacher” by being made a “register
teacher” for a subdivision of the school district. In this way cases of
maladjustment to school, home, or neighborhood conditions may be met.
The school population of the city is geographically districted in such a
way that each district holds about fifty families. The children in a
district are assigned, irrespective of age or grade, to one of the grade
teachers. Each “register teacher” meets her group once a week for
general conference. She gives out the monthly reports. Failure in
self-control, irregular attendance, tardiness, and other matters are
reported to her. No child is excused from class without her permission,
and she is expected to call at the homes of the children when necessary
or to meet their parents at the school. Each “register teacher” holds
the same children from class to class as long as they live in the
district. She corresponds almost exactly to what is known as the
“faculty adviser” of the college student, a guide and friend for the
general conduct of school life and for difficulties that arise. The
“register teacher” is a sort of disciplinary and sociological overseer
for a group of children living in the same neighborhood. She has a set
of blanks which in fact provide a basis for a complete sociological
survey of her district. These she is supposed to fill in, as facts about
living conditions, etc., come to her attention. It seems evident that
this work, while exacting, involves no more than a teacher should know.
No more valuable sociological training could be imagined for the
intelligent and progressive teacher. Such work relates her at once to
the general community life, and makes her profession of a far more
serious importance than is usually given to the grade teachers in the
public schools. This work is typical of the demands for a new initiative
and intelligence that the Gary plan makes upon the teachers, and also of
the immense educative value of these demands.
The effort is constantly made in the Gary schools to bridge the gap
between teacher and pupil. An important recent innovation is the
institution of “teachers’ assistants.” Students in the sixth, seventh,
and eighth grades have ten weeks for drawing, ten weeks for science, ten
weeks for shopwork, and ten weeks for service as “teachers’ assistants.”
The students act as laboratory and studio assistants only in the
departments in which they have a special interest. Three or four
students assist the science teachers, three or four the drawing
teachers, and three or four the shop teachers. Playground teachers,
auditorium teachers, music teachers, etc., have as assistants the
students especially interested. Each student can, therefore, receive
twenty weeks of work in the department in which he has a special
interest. Many teachers confess that the first year of teaching gave
them a much clearer grasp of the subjects they taught than they were
able to secure as students. From the point of view of scholarship, the
teachers’ assistants learn more by acting in this rôle for a limited
time than they could learn by using the time for additional study. They
not only learn how to take initiative and assume responsibility, but
they enable the teacher to do much more effective work with the regular
classes.
* * * * *
This same fundamental principle of organization is applied to the pupils
themselves in their relations with one another. Fourth- and fifth-grade
pupils are considered too old for the primary manual training and
nature-study, and not quite old enough to use profitably the
laboratories and workshops as independent students. They are, therefore,
assigned as assistants to students in the higher classes. These children
in this way learn more by working with the older students than they can
be taught in separate classes by themselves. Not only does the younger
child learn by helping the older and watching him and asking questions
of him, but the older learns by being required to answer the questions
and make the younger child understand what he is doing in shop or
laboratory. The object is to make the Gary school, in the words of
Superintendent Wirt, “as much as possible like a large family wherein
the younger children are learning consciously and unconsciously from the
older, and the latter from contact with the younger children are
learning to assume responsibility and take the initiative. Some one has
said that we send our boy to school, but his playmates, not the school
faculty, educate him. This is true because in the conventional school
the faculty does not utilize the playmates as assistant instructors.”
This “helper” system has proved to be one of the most valuable features
of the Gary schools.
For the pupil, organization means a degree of flexibility and individual
instruction extraordinary for a public school. Except in the lowest
grades, the pupils are classified by subjects as well as by grades, so
that practically college methods obtain. Each pupil has his own schedule
or program, just as the college student has. The executive principal
corresponds to the college registrar in supervising these individual
records. The pupil is promoted by subjects and not by grades, and may be
promoted or demoted at any time by the supervisor of instruction, acting
with the teacher. Grades, therefore, represent merely years of schooling
and not classes which are promoted as units. Each regular class has a
maximum register of forty, but the class does not work as a unit, any
more than a college class of sophomores works as a unit. Some are taking
one group of subjects, some another. The work is thus done largely in
small groups, or even as individuals. The great wealth of equipment and
the economical use of time permit a large amount of practically
individual instruction.
The students of each grade are classified into three groups—rapid,
normal, and slow workers. The rapid workers can easily complete the
twelve years’ course in ten years. They may then enter college at
sixteen years of age. The great majority of the Gary pupils who go to
college actually come from this rapid-working group. The normal workers
complete the course in twelve years, and the slow workers in fourteen.
Many of the slow workers do not attempt to complete the course, but
specialize in the industrial departments. This grouping contemplates the
recognition of differences in the mental endowments and ambitions of
children of the same age, so that means are provided for the shortening
of school life for some children and the lengthening of it for others.
Every child is, as far as possible, working along with his equals, so
that the bright child is not held back and rendered listless by the
presence of slower members in the class, nor is the slow child
discouraged by the competition of the brighter ones. Every pupil may go
as fast as he can, and may specialize on the work which he can best do.
The presence of a great variety of activities makes it possible for the
children who falter on their intellectual work to give more attention to
the manual or artistic or physical work in which they may excel.
A special investigation was made in 1914 into the regrading of the
pupils of two ninth-grade algebra classes in the Emerson School. The
results of regrading the classes into rapid and slow workers showed
marked improvement in the interest displayed in the algebra work,
especially on the part of the slow workers. No failures were reported
among the rapid workers, and only three among the slow workers, and
these were due to absence from class. The total class average for the
slow division was in three months raised five per cent. In the Jefferson
School, which has been operated on the Gary plan longer than any other
school, fifty-two per cent of the children are one or more years _ahead_
of their normal grades.
Many features of the Gary plan afford extraordinary opportunities for
extra assistance in study and work. The pupil may take extra work in a
subject during a proportion of his play, auditorium, or shop hours. If
he is a member of the “X” school, he may get the same lesson repeated
for him the same day by attending the parallel class in the “Y” school
held at a different hour. He may come to the voluntary Saturday school
and get extra coaching from the teacher, and the vacation school
provides additional opportunity to make up back work. No home work is
allowed, except to a small extent in the high-school grades. The long
school day, and the freedom which the teacher has to distribute her time
and to conduct supervised study, obviate the necessity for carrying
books away from the school. Since the state law does not authorize the
schools to provide free textbooks, these must be provided by the pupil,
or, as in the case of most of the Gary classes, bought by the school and
loaned cooperatively to a number of classes. Since home work is not
permitted, the books may be kept in the school and distributed to the
classes as they require them.
The headquarters of the pupil in the school are not in the classroom, as
in other public schools. It is the teacher and not the class which is
assigned to the room. The teacher remains in the room and the pupils go
to him or her, moving about individually from classroom, shop,
laboratory, etc., according to the printed schedule card which each
pupil holds. The child’s headquarters is the spacious lockers which line
the corridors in the basements. Each child has a private locker for
books, papers, and wraps. Strictly speaking, the pupil in the Gary
school, except in the lowest grades, has no “teacher,” except the
“register teacher.” The departmental system gives him many teachers, but
no teacher. This system and the self-governing responsibility for his
own schedule is intended to cultivate initiative and responsibility on
the part of the pupil. It brings him from an early age into contact with
different personalities, gives him the benefit of expert teaching and a
variety of movement and exercise. The introduction of these free college
methods into the common school is, in the light of public-school
practice, a daring experiment, but the Gary school experience seems to
show that it is quite possible to give the younger children a large
measure of freedom and individuality of treatment.
Most of the schedules of the pupils are arranged with reference to the
requirements of the state course of instruction, specialization not
being permitted, of course, except in the higher grades, or where some
special weakness causes repeated failure. Yet the Gary schools have
about twenty per cent of special students who do not intend to finish
the course and are specializing in some departments. But since, owing to
the individualization of schedules, every pupil is in a sense a “special
student,” the presence of this large number of students causes no
administrative confusion, nor are the special students—as would be the
case in many schools operated on a uniform plan—marked off invidiously
from those who are following the more regular course.
The segregation of sexes which the visitor finds in some of the Gary
schools and courses is not the result of any prejudice against
coeducation. (All the activities are open equally to boys and girls
alike, so that girls are found in the printing-shop and in the
wood-working classes, etc.) It is due to the effort to give each boy and
girl what he or she needs. The organization of many classes, such as
play, gymnasium, personal hygiene, and the manual activities which do
not appeal to the girls, or the domestic science which does not appeal
to the boys, required this unisexual classification, and sometimes it
has been retained to avoid the break-up of classes in related subjects.
An example of this effort to provide for all kinds of students in the
Gary school is the first-year college work which is offered to students
who wish to remain in the school for post-graduate work. The Gary school
endeavors thus to overlap the college, just as it has made the common
school dovetail into the high school, and the day school into the
evening school. When the Gary high-school students have come up through
the Gary schools, it is hoped to be able to send students from the local
schools at the age of eighteen so prepared that they may complete the
ordinary college course in two years.
A word should be said about the interrelation of this flexibility of
schedule with the “helper” system. The choice of what subjects the pupil
shall study is not as willful and anarchical as it may seem. In the
lower grades the regular studies are, of course, prescribed. English,
arithmetic, history, and geography must be studied by all, with the
attendant “application” and “auditorium” work. All must have physical
education, music and expression, and some form of manual and scientific
work. The courses in science, industrial work, and music and expression,
below the high school, are taken in alternation. Each occupies one third
of the school year. The individual choice of the pupil comes in what
science or what shop work he or she will take. The beginning is not by
chance, but really the result of a natural process of selection by the
child. All the early years are made a sort of unconscious prevocational
school in which the child tries out his interests and powers. Things are
neither forced on him nor aimlessly selected. The child in kindergarten
or first three grades moves about the halls and corridors. Since the
shops and studios and laboratories are not segregated, but distributed
over the building, so that all seem equally significant, the child has
every opportunity to become familiar with them. His curiosity is
aroused, and, unaided, he is tempted to peer in through the glass doors
and windows, and wonder what the older children are doing. When the
child has reached the fourth grade, he already has an idea of what
activity interests him, and what he would like to try. Fourth- and
fifth-grade children then go in as helpers to the seventh-, eighth-, and
ninth-grade students in shops, studios, and laboratories. If the child
finds the work does not interest him, he still has a chance to try some
other work, and thus gradually sifts out what is likely to be valuable
to him for a vocation or avocation. If he has special skill, he may
specialize in the higher grades. Such a plan seems to be admirably
devised to bring out whatever capacities there are in the pupils, and to
insure almost automatically their interest in work which in many schools
is mere unintelligent drudgery.
Vocational guidance in such a system is simple and effective. The
“auditorium” teacher, in charge of the presentation of material relating
to the shops and industries, is able to give information as to the
desirability of the several trades and industries as occupations. For
example, the school plumber may prepare with his students a plumbing
outfit for an ordinary dwelling or apartment, and give a lesson on the
way in which plumbing should be cared for in the home. The plumbing
instructor may know much about plumbing, but very little about
presenting his information to a large body of students. The “auditorium”
teacher would assume the responsibility of supervising such auditorium
presentations in order that they might be dramatically effective. The
day that the plumber and his students present the advantages and
disadvantages of plumbing as a trade, the teacher of industries may
announce to the boys in “auditorium” period that for the remainder of
the week any boy may be excused for a personal consultation with him
concerning the desirability of joining a class in plumbing. Students are
thus directed in their shop assignments by this “auditorium” teacher of
industries. Vocational guidance is thus made possible as far as it is
probably wise to undertake such guidance in the school at present. Such
a plan directs the mechanically inclined among the children by enlisting
their interest and then their will. The “auditorium” teachers for the
other activities may also act as advisers in the same way. Teacher and
pupil thus coöperate, not in any haphazard fashion, but systematically,
in studying the various activities with a view to their future use as a
vocation. Such an attitude not only organizes and motivates the work,
but gives it seriousness and purpose. Every detail of organization in
the Gary school is devised to make the pupil as well as the teacher an
integral part of the school life, not only in its own meaning, but in
its relation to the outside world.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VI
CURRICULUM: LEARNING BY DOING
THE Gary curriculum, in spite of its many special features, is neither
eccentric nor overcrowded. It follows the regular course of study laid
down for Indiana schools by the State Department of Public Instruction.
Students who follow the full course may be ready to enter college at the
age of sixteen. The additional facilities of the Gary schools are not
gained at the expense, therefore, of the ordinary course of education.
They are made possible through a more ingenious distribution of time
throughout a longer school day, and by an integration and interrelation
of subjects which tend to vitalize them all.
The regular studies in the lower grades are conducted along the
conventional lines, with the addition of the “application” work which
has been described. The English work is further vitalized through the
employment of special teachers for “expression,” who alternate with the
special teachers of music. “Expression” is a mixture of elocution and
dramatics. The aim of the instruction is evidently to bring the pupils
to read and speak with more intelligence and appreciation than is
usually done. It is to give the training which will bear fruit in
increased expressiveness in all the studies of the school, in all
writing and reciting, in “auditorium” and “application” work. So far,
owing to the peculiar requirements of talent in the teachers and on
account of the lack of good American elocutionary and dramatic
tradition, the enterprise can scarcely be called more than a frank and
important experiment. For the Gary curriculum with its emphasis on
self-activity, such training in expressiveness is essential, and it can
be depended upon to improve rapidly in quality as the children and
teachers catch the spirit of the schools and get the practice of
“auditorium” and “application” work.
The importance of the equable division of time between regular studies
and special activities has already been discussed. An important feature
of the Gary teaching is the avoidance of that excessive subdivision of
subjects which has affected curriculum-making in many schools. History
and geography are here uniformly taught together; language, grammar,
spelling, reading, and writing are taught as much as possible together
as English; physiology is taught in connection with zoölogy. Since the
teacher is left much initiative in the distribution of her time, she may
emphasize and correlate the different studies as she finds necessary.
All the English branches are taught constantly in connection with the
other studies. The history or physics class may begin with a
spelling-lesson. Compositions in science or history, or the brochures
issued by the science departments, are supervised by the English
teacher. We have seen how the shop and commercial instructors give
special work in practical English and mathematics. The effort is
constant in the Gary curriculum to teach a subject, not as an isolated
body of subject-matter, but as knowledge which may bear on any or all
the other departments of the school community.
Studies are taught also with as much bearing as possible on the social
activities of the larger city community. The subject-matter in the
history and geography classes is really “The Sociological World we Live
in,” and textbooks, histories, atlases, globes, newspapers, and
magazines become the reference sources and the materials for
understanding that world. The working-out of such principles must, of
course, be a matter of experimentation by able teachers, and the work
cannot be described in any formal manner. Illustrations of some of the
successful methods can, however, be given. The history room in the
Emerson School, for instance, is found by the visitor to be almost
smothered in maps and charts, most of them made by the children
themselves, in their effort to “learn by doing,” and to contribute their
part to the school community. A large Indiana ballot, a chart of the
State Senate, a diagram of the state administration, a table showing the
evolution of American political parties, with many war maps and
pictures, covered the walls. The place is a workshop rather than a
classroom, with broad tables for map-drawing, and a fine spread of
papers and magazines. The ninth-grade Gary children are, in fact,
conducting what some progressive colleges have introduced as “laboratory
work in history.”
[Illustration:
THE HISTORY ROOM AT THE EMERSON SCHOOL
]
When the writer visited the school, the town of Gary was waging a
campaign for a new water-front park. The history class had for some
weeks been using this public issue as a text for their work. They had
been studying “The City: A Healthful Place in Which to Live (with
special reference to parks).” Outlines had been worked up from reference
books in the school branch of the public library. These were read to the
class and discussed by them. Such a course became almost one in
town-planning, one of the most fascinating and significant of current
social interests, and one which packs into itself a maximum of
historical, sociological, and geographical information. Such a course
provided an admirable motive for a review of history from a practical
local point of view which all the intelligent pupils could appreciate.
The outline follows:—
_The City: A Healthful Place in Which to Live: Emphasis on Parks_
1. Athenian recreation centers.
2. Roman opportunities for recreation.
3. Mediæval cities: England.
4. Mediæval cities: Continental Europe.
5. The modern British city.
6. Modern cities in Argentina, Chile, Brazil.
7. The large German city.
8. The small German city.
9. Paris, and the smaller French cities.
10. Colonial cities of America.
11. American cities during the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
12. American cities before the Civil War.
13. American cities from the Civil War to the twentieth century.
14. American cities in the twentieth century.
15. How smaller cities are replanning.
16. Parks in large American cities.
17. The city-planning conference.
18. Statistics showing total area of city, and percentage of park
space.
19. Playgrounds of Chicago and New York.
20. The Gary plan of schools and playgrounds on the same site.
The class in ancient history, owing to a belief on the part of the
instructor that no child should be allowed to leave school without a
background of modern affairs, devotes one day a week to contemporary
history. A weekly digest of the ten most important events is kept in the
history notebook, arranged, three for foreign events, three for national
events, and four for local. Reports are prepared and read upon assigned
magazine articles, especially from the _Literary Digest_, _Outlook_, and
_Independent_. Everything is thus done to get the clue of historical
study from the interesting events around the pupils. History is studied
as much as possible backward, instead of forward.
In 1912-13 the classes in modern history became interested in the past
of the Balkan nations, in order to understand the reason for their
alliance against the Turkish Empire. A digression was, therefore, made
to clear this point, and to vitalize thereby the history of the related
European countries. The next year a similar interest was kindled in
Mexico and our relations with the Spanish-American republics. During the
past year the history instructor has found the study of the last two
centuries of western Europe to move along without effort, owing to the
interest in the great war.
Such a study of history clearly obviates the necessity of any separate
study of “civics.” History and geography taught in this way become part
of one’s general information. Magazines and newspapers are freely used.
The systematic reading of the best weeklies and papers surely is an
important training, in an age of so much cheap and worthless
reading-matter.
One history class had been making a comparison of Athenian with Gary
education. This is another illustration of that constant effort to make
the pupils realize the meaning of what they are doing and what is around
them. The effort of the Gary education is to make the child acquainted
with the purposes of his school. He is not taught as an inferior who
must take without question wisdom from immensely superior teachers, but
as an equal and democratic citizen of his school community, learning
wherever and whenever he can. The ancient history class had for its
motto: “To improve its members as American citizens by a study of the
experiences of the ancient peoples.” It would be difficult to imagine a
more admirable reason for historical study than this phrase, the natural
expression of the Gary child who wrote the constitution for the class
organization. Such “social introspection” is as rare an intellectual
quality as it is valuable.
The history classes in the lower grades use sand-tables to reproduce the
topography of the localities which are being studied, or to describe the
progress of some battle or invasion. One of the pupils in 1912
constructed with his own hands in the wood-working shops a miniature
Roman temple about five feet in length, the plans of which he had worked
out from the descriptions in the histories. These classes often engage
in debates, and the written reports which are sufficiently interesting
are read in “auditorium,” and often printed in the local newspapers.
Bulletin boards are placed in the hall for displaying important
clippings. The pupils bring these, and classify them under the
headings,—foreign news, American news, state, city, and county news,
pictures and cartoons, and items on the special topics that are being
studied. The history classes have charge of a small historical museum in
the corridors, which contains a loan collection of Indian relics and of
pottery from Central America.
The teaching of science occupies a unique place in the Gary schools.
Just as the history and geography are taught as clues to the social and
political world around the pupil, so the science is used to acclimatize
him to the natural world. The theory is that children should commence
the study of the sciences while their minds are still plastic and their
interest in natural phenomena keen. The persistent questions which the
child asks are attempts to get an understanding of the world he lives
in. Unless these questions are answered, his interest is apt to wane as
he grows older. And unless he acquires a familiarity with nature that is
accompanied by true scientific information, he is apt to get only a
satisfied feeling of knowledge without any true appreciation.
Science in the Gary schools, consequently, goes beyond the simple
nature-study taught now in most elementary schools. The child has
experience with the laboratory at an early age. The smaller children
from the third, fourth, fifth, or sixth grades go into the chemistry,
physics, botany, and zoölogy laboratories as “helpers” or “observers” to
the work of the high-school classes. On the theory that “children are
natural scientists” they are allowed contact with apparatus and
materials. It is said, in fact, that experience shows the smaller
children to be as careful as the older, and actually to cause less
breakage and damage.
The science classes in the lower grades are taught neither in formal
recitation nor in formal laboratory work, but in a combination which the
instructors describe as “experience meetings.” Pupils and teacher meet
on common ground to exchange ideas about their experiences in dealing
with natural phenomena. The outside world is treated as a great
laboratory, and these “experience meetings” are used to interpret the
children’s experiences in terms of scientific principles. There are
demonstrations by the children, assisted by the teacher; a little
individual laboratory work; and considerable vocal reading from
textbooks and scientific story-books.
The Gary science instructors believe that much time and money have been
wasted in the teaching of science in high schools, owing to the
elaborate methods which have treated the students as if the purpose was
to make professional scientists of them all. Children, it is believed in
Gary, cannot resort to the detailed research methods of scientists, but
must have quick answers and quick results. There is a waste of energy in
trying to duplicate in the laboratory the fundamental experiences of
life which the children are constantly seeing outside in the great
laboratory of nature.
The care of the flowers and plants and gardens, the care of the animals
in the zoo, and the study of their habits offer endless concrete
material for building up the theoretical side of botany and zoölogy. The
pupils are trained to observe and to write down what they see. One class
in zoölogy last year made an illustrated booklet descriptive of the
school zoo. The text was written by the pupils, the photographs prepared
by them, and then the booklet was tastefully printed in the school
printing-shop by the pupils themselves. The result was a charming
brochure, in which not only the pupils themselves, but the whole school
could take pride and pleasure. Such scientific study becomes an intimate
and vital part of the entire school life.
For the physics classes, the lighting, heating, and ventilating systems
of the school afford a practical textbook. In the Jefferson School,
where the industrial shop is built around the boiler-room, the heating
plant becomes an integral part of the shop. The physics classes study
the climate and the weather. They study particularly the principles of
the machines used in the different shops. Each shop may thus act as an
extension of the physics laboratory. Classes of even the smaller
children are sent to take apart machines like the bicycle,
cream-separator, lawn-mower, and explain the construction. The
automobile and motor-cycle provide many practical lessons. An old
automobile which needs tinkering up is considered in the Gary school to
be almost a physics laboratory in itself. The writer witnessed a physics
class of twelve-year-old girls who, with their nine-year-old “helpers,”
were studying the motor-cycle. With that disregard for boundaries which
characterizes all Gary education, the hour began with a spelling-lesson.
The names of the parts and processes of the machine were rehearsed
orally and then written. After the words were learned, the parts of the
machine were explained by the instructor while the class spelled the
words over again. Their memory of certain physical principles, such as
vaporization, evaporation, were called again into play. Then the
instructor set the motor-cycle going, the girls again describing its
action. When this had been thoroughly gone over, the class copied from
the blackboard sentences describing the processes and parts, but
omitting certain crucial words which the pupil had to supply. The
intense vivacity and interest of the little group, the intelligence with
which these small children grasped the principles involved, made the
lesson seem a model of expert teaching. It was an excellent illustration
of the way concrete processes may be used to build up scientific
knowledge. It is interesting to notice that no distinction is made
between boys and girls in their science work.
This lively interest in scientific processes may have unexpected
results. The story is told of a high-school boy who, while the board of
education was discussing means of fire-prevention, made an investigation
of methods and processes which was so excellent that it was forthwith
adopted by the board.
This incident is typical of the way in which the scientific work in the
schools may correlate with the wider social community. Just as the
history classes may bring the pupil into touch with the political life
outside the school, so the physics and chemistry class may connect him
with the industry of the community and with those public services into
which scientific processes enter. A boy, for example, brings to the
chemistry class a bag of low-grade iron ore which he has found in the
vicinity. The class, under the direction of the teacher, constructs a
simple electric furnace and reduces the ore. This experiment is then
used as the basis for a study of the great steel industry upon which the
city of Gary is founded.
A part of the chemistry work makes a direct contribution to the city.
Gary has the good fortune, or the good sense, to have as chemistry
teacher in the Emerson School the man who acts as municipal chemist for
the city. As a result, the school laboratory becomes an extension of the
municipal laboratory. The high-school chemistry pupils assist the
chemist just as the smaller children assist them. With the
chemist-instructor the pupils test the city water and the various milk
supplies. Under the sanitary inspector they visit, as part of their
“application” work, dairies, factories, bakeries, food-stores. Last year
the class issued a “Milk Bulletin,” containing general information, with
reports of their tests. The various articles were recorded as part of
the English composition work, and the bulletin was printed by the pupils
in the school printing-shop. In quality these bulletins seemed scarcely
inferior to what an agricultural school might issue. On their inspection
rounds, the class takes samples of sugars and candies from the various
shops of the town, and tests them in the laboratory for purity and for
the use of harmless coloring matter. Another class experiments with the
soft drinks sold in the town, testing their composition, and studying
physiological effects. The children are practically deputy
food-inspectors, and make their reports on the official blanks. It is
said that the result of this sort of inspection is that in a prosecution
for violation of the pure-food laws in Gary a case has never been lost.
The children test also the materials supplied to the schools, the coal,
cement, etc., to see if they come up to the specifications. They are not
only using the things around them for practical textbooks, but they are
able to turn their knowledge immediately into work which is immensely
beneficial, not only to themselves, but to the whole community. The
value of enlisting pupils in this inspection work, of training them to
observe and criticize and test the physical conditions under which they
live, is incalculable. For even a small proportion of children to get
this scientific-deputy-inspector habit, and to get used to thinking in
terms of qualitative and quantitative tests, would evidently have some
effect upon political and social conditions. Such scientific training
makes science an integral part of life, not only a knowledge of how
natural forces and materials behave, but also a command of technical
resources in making them behave in desirable ways. The pupils in such a
school, from their earliest years, get a correct appreciation of the
value of science in ameliorating conditions and in improving the
healthfulness and security of the community in which they live.
The Gary curriculum seems to represent a determined effort to break down
the distinction between the “utilitarian” and the “cultural.” All the
subjects are taught, as far as possible, in concrete ways which shall
draw upon familiar experience and teach the child by making him do
something. That something is made, as far as possible, an activity which
will enhance the life of the school community, or contribute to the
social community. These activities are “utilitarian,” but they are at
the same time profoundly educative. Principles are never lost sight of
in practice. The artistic and academic work take equal rank with the
manual. Both “cultural” and “utilitarian” are, in fact, subjected to the
“_social_.” This is the key note of the Gary education.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VII
DISCIPLINE: THE NATURAL SCHOOL
THE problems of discipline in a Gary school are essentially different
from those of public schools run on the usual semi-military plan. The
large degree of coöperation between teachers and pupils and between
pupils, the emphasis on laboratory, shop, and “application” work, where
freedom of movement and conversation is essential, produces a more
natural atmosphere, and a certain amount of genuine if unconscious
self-government. The children in the Gary schools are generally
conscious of the unique features of their school; they understand what
the school is trying to do. This sense, and their pride in its fame,
cultivate an admirable school spirit denied to those schools which are
operated on conventional lines.
The organization of the Gary school permits the reduction of formal
discipline to a minimum. It allows the teachers to dispense with
disciplinary rules against whispering, with formal punishments, with
formal marks or demerits for conduct. The frequent change of activity,
with opportunities for exercise throughout the day, prevents the
children from becoming nervously overwrought. They thus escape
irritability and aimless boisterousness when left to themselves. The
“application” and shop work compel attention, so that the child is kept
busy and interested, and the mischievousness that arises from idleness
or distracted attention is avoided. As Professor Dewey says, “Trained in
doing things, the child will be able to keep at work and to think of the
other people around him when he is not under restraining supervision.”
When the teacher’s rôle changes from preceptor to that of helper, it is
obvious that what is needed in the classroom is not so much perfect
quiet and military order as freedom of expression and spontaneity.
Visitors to the Gary schools bear witness to the peculiarly beneficial
effects of this absence of formal discipline. The free and individual
way in which the children move about to their tasks and the spontaneous
way in which they talk to visitors make a marked impression. In
classroom or laboratory or shop, it is usual to find about as much
whispering as in a concert audience, with the same motives, freed of
“rules of order,” for quiet. A natural atmosphere of orderly and
tolerant conduct seems to be formed in such a school.
The writer witnessed an interesting study in spontaneous discipline in
one of the Saturday voluntary classes at the Froebel School. The
wood-working shop was filled with little boys who were fussing over the
scraps left by the week’s work and trying to make toys and knick-knacks
out of them. The teacher was in the room, but was exercising no control
over the children. Yet each little boy worked on his own little job as
indefatigably as if he were under a drill-master. If any of them became
weary and was moved to interfere with another small worker, he was apt
to be brushed off as if he were an irritating fly. The theory at the
back of such freedom is that rules in the school tempt to infraction,
and school discipline is, as a result, largely an attempt to solve
problems which the rules directly manufacture. Some visitors, appalled
by the freedom of the Gary schools, look about for signs of depredation.
But they do not seem to find any. The visitor gets the impression that
these schools have acquired a “public sense.” The schools are the
children’s own institution, and are public in the same broad sense that
streets and parks are public. The tone is of a glorified democratic
club, where members are availing themselves of privileges which they
know are theirs. One expects children, unless they are challenged to
inventive wickedness, no more to spoil their school than a lawyer is
likely to deface the panels of his club. The children seem in such a
school unaffectedly to own it, and to use it as a mechanic uses his
workshop or an artist his studio. The halls in the Gary school become
really school streets. Benches are built by the pupils along the walls,
where children are seen informally studying together. Or one comes upon
a table where a boy is drawing a map, having been excused from
recitation, on the theory that it is not necessary for every child to be
exposed to every exercise of the class when he might do something more
important outside. The children come with their parents to night school
and play and run about the broad halls quite unwatched. The visitor gets
the idea that children come to such a school, not because education is
compulsory or because their parents send them there to get rid of them,
but because what is done there is so interesting that they will not stay
away. The equipment, used so freely, makes the school a substitute for
the defects, not only of the poorer homes, but of the well-to-do also,
in supplying activities for children.
One might say that only in a free and varied school like this was such a
thing as effective discipline possible. When school activities are as
attractive as they are in the Gary school, deprivation means a distinct
punishment. There is ready at hand an instrument for inculcating reason
into the refractory which is as powerful as the stoutest disciplinarian
could wish. The ordinary school has its difficulties with discipline
largely because it tries to keep up a military system of conduct without
any means, now that corporal punishment is generally abolished, of
punishing infractions. Marks prove ineffective, “keeping in” punishes
the keeper as well as the kept, and being sent home is too often a
pleasure. But in the Gary school, “being sent home” would mean being
sent to a place infinitely less interesting, and being deprived of
school play or any special activity would mean a real hardship. The free
and spontaneous discipline of the Gary school does not mean that there
is no discipline at all. Unruly cases are sometimes punished severely by
the executive principal. But there is little talk about “mischievous and
unruly boys.” Children who, in spite of everything, are “not adapted to
our kind of a school,” may go to the school farm. This, however, is not
a reform school for juvenile delinquents. Delicate children may be sent
there for a vacation or classes go for a holiday. The farm contains a
hundred acres, with a model dairy, good orchards, and substantial farm
buildings. A graduate from one of the state universities is in charge,
and is working to bring the farm up to a high pitch of cultivation and
production. One group of boys who were there for a while, some of whom
had come from homes surrounded by unwholesome conditions, others of whom
wished to try farming for a livelihood, built themselves living quarters
and a clubroom. They were provided with a teacher, and school work went
on with the farm work. The boys received fifteen cents an hour for their
work, and earned enough to pay their board and make something besides.
These boys finally drifted back to the Emerson School or to work in the
factories. But the farm remains as a valuable adjunct to the schools.
Efforts are being made to make it a source of income and an object
lesson to farmers in the vicinity.
Freedom of discipline is obtained in the Gary schools without the
methods of “self-government” and “honor systems” which prevail
elsewhere. Where the teachers retain all authority, such schemes can be
little more than a humiliating pretense. For a time an elaborate
self-government plan was tried in the Emerson School under the name of
“Boyville,” with a sort of parody of municipal functions. But it seems
to have been too unreal to last. It has been superseded by a “students’
council,” elected by the pupils of the upper grades, and exercising
control over athletics, social, and other student affairs. This
students’ council has executive charge of the “auditorium” periods, for
which it elects a presiding officer and secretary, alternately a boy and
a girl, every month. The elections for councilors are conducted in
regular form, with ballots printed by the pupils in the school
printing-shop. Booths are erected, judges appointed, and the election
carried through, after a campaign, in which the parties meet, nominate a
boy and girl for each office, and appoint a campaign manager who
arranges a program for the campaign. The candidates make speeches,
giving their views and the arguments for their policies.
Like everything in the Gary schools, this political practice is put into
effect on a broader scale. During a recent campaign the students’
council in the Emerson School arranged a public meeting at which
prominent men of the city appeared and argued for their respective
parties. The meeting was entirely organized and managed by the pupils.
Such practical application seems far more real and instructive than the
usual play at self-government.
Student organization in the Gary schools grows out of real work.
Athletic teams and sports of various kinds are connected directly with
the gymnasium work and organized play. Glee clubs and orchestras grow
out of the music work. A monthly paper is conducted by the high-school
pupils as part of their English work, and printed by them in the school
printing-shop. There are, strictly speaking, no “extra-curricular
activities” in the Gary schools. The curriculum deliberately provides
for all wholesome activities, and the student interests grow out of it.
Problems of “fraternities” and of the control of school athletics, which
confront so many schools, are thus avoided. The students do not get into
the habit of thinking of their clubs and teams as something outside of
the school community life.
An example of how spontaneous organization may spring up is that of the
boys’ ninth-grade English class last year in the Emerson School, which
formed itself into the Emerson Improvement Association. It tries to
suggest civic improvements for the school community, and the speaking
and writing necessary to the conducting of the affairs of the
organization provide the basis for the English work.
[Illustration:
DRAWING FROM A MODEL AT THE EMERSON SCHOOL
Notice frieze on wall designed and painted by the children themselves
]
This illustrates the way that effort is made to take advantage of all
the spontaneity and initiative which pupils display in organization. The
moral effects of this active form of education are clearly great.
Professor Dewey thinks it is a mistake to consider that an interesting
and free school “makes things too easy for the child.” In the ideal
school the interests and needs of the child are identical. It is a
mistake, he says, to think that interesting things are necessarily easy.
They may be hard, but the interest overcomes the difficulty, and it is
in the overcoming that the moral value lies. Irksome tasks may be
valuable, but it is not in their irksomeness that their value lies. Work
that appeals to pupils as worth while, that holds out the promise of
resulting in something to their own or the school’s interests, involves
just as much persistence and concentration as work given by the sternest
advocate of disciplinary drill.
Most of the visitors to the Gary schools bear witness to the excellent
tone of the pupils, “the free and natural way,” to quote one
authoritative teacher, “in which pupils govern themselves without the
rigorous discipline found in other systems.” Dr. Harlan Updegraff, of
the Federal Bureau of Education, says, “The pupils of the Gary schools
seem to display greater self-control, more self-respect, and more
thoughtful consideration for others than the pupils of the same age in
most of the better school systems of to-day. I am inclined to think that
it comes largely from their games and play, but a part of it is due to
the organization of the school, and to the practices that have evolved
in its administration. No child in Gary has a single teacher who is the
object of his hero-worship, upon whom he tends to become more or less
dependent, or his arch-enemy whom he detests with a growing hatred. The
Gary pupil has several teachers, each of whom affects him in a different
way. He becomes more conscious of his individuality in this way, and
learns to determine for himself what he should do and become. Under such
a system the influence of fellow pupils becomes relatively stronger than
in the ordinary school. It is, therefore, highly important that care be
taken to further the development of right ideals in the student body.
Organized play has its great value here. Self-control, coöperation,
courage, self-respect, consideration for others, and a sense of justice
have been developed in the Gary youth to a noticeable degree, largely,
it seems to me, through the spirit that prevails in consequence of the
administration of the physical training department. Pupils who love
their school better than the streets, who have a good physical tone
through their play and physical exercises, and who have good
self-control and independence of thought, must naturally have a more
favorable attitude toward school work.”
Such a school will evidently train character as a by-product.
Self-activity, self or coöperative instruction, freedom of movement,
_camaraderie_ with teachers, interesting and varied work, study, and
play, a sense of what the school is doing, social introspection,—all
combine to give an admirable moral training and to produce those
desirable intellectual and moral qualities that the world most needs
to-day. Not obedience but self-reliance does such a school cultivate.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VIII
CRITICISMS AND EVALUATIONS
THE criticisms directed against the Gary schools by superintendents and
teachers are criticisms rather of the whole educational philosophy
behind the institution than objections to the detailed working-out of
the philosophy. Those who follow Professor Dewey’s philosophy find in
the Gary schools—as Professor Dewey does himself—the most complete and
admirable application yet attempted, a synthesis of the best aspects of
the progressive “schools of to-morrow.”
Concrete criticisms almost all concern the alleged additional burdens
laid upon the public, the teacher, and the pupil. As far as the public
goes, the fact has been brought out that the Gary school is actually a
cheaper kind of a school than is the ordinary public school, even when
run in the most economical and scientific manner. The charge that the
Gary schools are aided by private corporation enterprise has already
been discussed. The facts are, of course, that the schools are all
supported in the usual way, by local and state appropriations. The city
of Gary is not overtaxed to support its schools, neither does the United
States Steel Corporation pay more than its proportionate share of the
local taxes. Nor is there any truth in the impression that the operation
of the Gary plan is confined to the two larger school plants of the
city. Although these two plants accommodate three quarters of the
children of the city, the Gary plan is in operation in all the schools.
In the two larger schools, Emerson and Froebel, the academic work
extends from the kindergarten through all twelve grades. In the other
schools there are no high-school students. Four of the other schools
have eight grades, one has six, one is only for children in the
kindergarten and first two grades. These schools have no high-school
department because they are too small and the schools with high-school
departments are easily accessible. All the schools have real shopwork,
though in not all of them is the apprentice-repair feature possible. All
the schools have play and recreation facilities. The smaller schools
lack swimming-pools, but the children use the well-equipped Y.M.C.A. All
the schools have “auditorium,” science, music, and expression work. All
the schools either contain a branch of the public library or else use
the main building near by. All the schools have an eight-hour day.
The charge that the Gary schools are too costly for imitation cannot be
sustained. We have seen the ingenious efforts of the various features of
the Gary plans to reduce costs, and there is a wealth of figures to show
in detail the greater economy of the Gary plan. Superintendent Wirt has
made an estimate that for an outlay of $6,000,000, “part-time” could be
wholly abolished in the New York City public schools by an adoption of
the Gary plan. The requisition of the board of superintendents in 1914
was for an appropriation of $40,000,000, simply for new buildings, which
would require large sums for operation and maintenance and lack the
equipments of the Gary plan. By the multiple use of facilities,
Superintendent Wirt has shown that the number of school plants in New
York could actually be reduced and yet the part-time of 132,000 children
abolished. At the same time that this was done, the school day would
actually be increased and the facilities more than doubled. A comparison
between the _per-capita_ costs of instruction in the Gary and New York
City schools, figured in average daily attendance for 1913-14, has been
made by Mrs. Alice Barrows-Fernandez. (The Jefferson School in Gary is
used for the comparison because it is more like the elementary schools
in New York than any other school in Gary.)
_Pupil per-capita cost for Jefferson School, $31.72
Gary_, including instruction and supplies
_Pupil per-capita cost for elementary schools 40.24
in New York City_, including instruction
and supplies
_Pupil per-capita cost for the two Gary
schools which have kindergarten, elementary
school, and full vocational shops_—
Emerson, with one third of the school 56.12
high-school pupils
Froebel, with twelve per cent high-school 32.85
pupils
_Pupil per-capita cost in New York City_—
Elementary schools 40.24
High schools 104.74
Vocational schools for boys 86.48
Vocational schools for girls 142.32
“In other words,” says Mrs. Barrows-Fernandez in her report, “in the
Froebel School, which is typical of the average school because only
twelve per cent of its pupils are in high school, twelve years in
elementary school and high school costs the city for one pupil twelve
times $32.85, or $394.20. In New York, eight years in elementary school
costs the city for one student eight times $40.24, or $329.92, and four
years in high school costs four times $104.74, or $418.96; or for the
twelve years, $748.88. In Gary for the $394.20, a student could also get
more vocational training than is given in a separate trade school. The
New York boy would get none of this in the elementary school. Even if we
make allowances for the fact that the average salary of teachers in
elementary schools and high schools in New York City is one third higher
than in Gary, it is obvious that the balance of economy is immensely in
favor of Gary as against a large typical city school system operated on
the conventional lines.”
It seems established that the Gary plan imposes no burdens upon the
public, either in Gary or in the communities who imitate the plan, but
rather provides increased facilities at reduced cost, besides immense
facilities for adults. As for the burden upon the teacher, much has been
said to the effect that the Gary plan is unpopular among teachers
because of the extra work it entails. In connection with this criticism,
it must be remembered that the Gary plan postulates an educational
philosophy different from that of the ordinary public schools. Teachers
trained in schools managed with rigid administrative and disciplinary
methods naturally find adjustment difficult in a system which repeatedly
calls upon them for initiative, alters their relations to their pupils,
and requires a more practical attitude of “application” toward the
subject-matter of instruction. Experience seems to show that many
teachers who at first found this adjustment burdensome have later come
to prefer the Gary plan. One teacher with a fine scholastic training,
who had taught for many years under the traditional form of
organization, is quoted by Dean Burris as saying, “I did not like it
when I came here a year ago, but I begin to like it and see what it is
all about, so I am going to stay.”
This attitude would seem to be typical of the intelligent teacher who
comes to appreciate what it is all about and the valuable educational
advantages which the system provides for the teacher herself. And
although the problem of securing teachers has been somewhat difficult in
Gary, owing to the newness of the town, the large factory population,
and the relative absence of organized social life, most visitors are
impressed by the unusual personal caliber of the head teachers.
It is difficult to see where the Gary plan involves extra burdens for
teachers. The teaching period is only four hours a day, with an hour for
“auditorium” and an hour for “application.” This is certainly no more
exacting than the five-hour teaching day of the ordinary teacher. All
“home work” and “paper work,” moreover, is supposed to be done by the
Gary teacher during school hours, so that her school day is over when
the bell rings. This makes her real school day actually shorter than
that of the teacher in the ordinary school, whose afternoons and
evenings must often be spent in correcting papers, etc. The Gary teacher
is supposed to have leisure and to behave in school and out of school as
a good citizen actively interested in the community welfare. The
Saturday school work, for which the teachers are called upon in turn, is
paid for at a rate of one dollar an hour. The care and work involved in
the “register-teacher” plan is certainly offset by its valuable
educational value for the teacher herself.
It should be clear that the various features of the Gary plan tend to
relieve the teacher of burdens and particularly of nervous strain. The
teaching of special subjects by special teachers relieves the grade
teacher of the obligation of teaching, under the exacting direction of
supervisors, subjects like music and drawing with which she may be
little acquainted. The departmentalizing of subjects down through the
lower grades gives a breadth to the teachers’ work, and enables them to
concentrate on the subjects which interest them, rather than diffuse
their attention among many. The absence of uniform standards, the
absence of formal term examinations for which a whole class must be
prepared, the promotion of children by subjects rather than whole
classes, as well as the division of grades according to rate of
progress,—all this makes for a great saving in the teacher’s nervous
energy. She does not have the strain of passing her whole class in every
subject, of finishing her course on schedule time, of cramming for
examinations. She has some freedom in the division of her time and a
voice in the making of the course and curriculum. The less experienced
teacher has in her classroom the assistance and advice of the senior
teacher, as well as of the head teacher of her subjects in the head
school. Teachers are not rivals, but colleagues as in a college faculty.
The freer methods of discipline are much to the teacher’s advantage.
When the ideal is no longer to keep the classroom in a rigid military
silence, a large part of the teacher’s energy may go into teaching which
formerly went into the maintenance of discipline. Where “interest” and
“application” and “learning by doing” are the keynotes, and where every
one—teacher and pupil alike—is at some time in the course both teaching
some one and learning from some one, the teacher is no longer interested
in “making the child obey,” or “commanding his respect.” No official
gulf is set between teachers and pupils. It is discipline that wears out
most teachers,—and children too,—and a greater flexibility makes for the
lessening of nervous strain on both.
The custom of “helpers and observers,” the emphasis on discussion rather
than formal recitation, even take a certain amount of actual teaching
out of the hands of the teachers. The teacher, as in the Montessori
method, becomes the guide and mentor rather than direct preceptor. She
is no longer so much concerned with predigesting subject-matter and
presenting it in logical form to the pupil, only to draw it from him
again in recitation and written examination. She is rather concerned
with directing the large amount of practical work which the Gary child
does in every course, and in devising methods of “application,” or in
turning the work into practical value for the school community. Those
classes where the “helper and observer” system obtains are, to a large
degree, self-instructing. The older child tells the younger what he is
doing in shop or laboratory, etc., and when the younger child comes to
take up the work, he is already familiar with materials and apparatus
and the significance of the course. Raw new classes thus do not have to
be constantly broken in by the teacher. This means a very large saving
of labor for the teacher, while it makes for the more thorough
understanding on the part of the pupil. In the physical education work
and in the organized play, the older pupils are enlisted as assistants
to the teachers. Superintendent Wirt’s new plans involve the employment
throughout the different departments as teachers’ assistants of a class
of older pupils, selected for their interest and ability. Such work not
only gives the student the best possible training for developing
leadership, initiative, and the ability to assume responsibility, but it
also relieves the teachers and makes possible many small classes without
extra teachers and without extra rooms.
From the teachers’ point of view, then, the numerous ways in which the
Gary plan relieves the nervous strain and actual responsibility of
teaching, and removes the pressure of outside work, more than compensate
for the slightly longer actual time during which the teacher must be in
the school plant. And since this longer time means increased salary, it
is clear that the teacher under the Gary plan is the gainer in every
direction.
The criticisms of the Gary plan on the ground that the long school day
and varied curriculum overload the pupil can scarcely be sustained in
view of the fact that the “school day” is not merely a lengthening of
the ordinary public school day, but an absorbing, in healthful
activities of play, exercise and manual work, of time which would
otherwise be spent in demoralizing street and alley or in idleness at
home. We have seen that this additional activity is not gained at the
expense of the academic studies, but comes from giving the children
interesting things to do in the surplus hours in which they are usually
left to take care of themselves. The freedom of the Gary schools, and
the constant passing back and forth between school and home, church,
etc., does not seem to make for truancy. The percentage of attendance in
November, 1914, was for boys 92.9, for girls, 91.6,—a remarkable record
when it is considered that boy truancy in most city schools is much the
greater. For the year 1913-14 the percentage of attendance was for boys
89.5, for girls, 89.2.
The criticism of the Gary school on the ground that the shopwork either
involves the risk of exploiting the pupil, or else introduces him to
manual activity at too early an age, ignores the fact that the manual
work is really unspecialized and is introduced so gradually into the
child’s life that it is scarcely felt as work. “Play” and “work” are
merged in “interesting activity,” and almost unconsciously the child
finds himself absorbed in work which may be his vocation later on.
Whether it is to be his vocation or not, the Gary school believes that
such work is a good thing in the education of all children. Many
educators believe that the novel form of shopwork in the Gary school
offers a solution for the problems of industrial training. There is
great risk, in schools where shopwork is introduced apart from the
academic work, as in special technical high schools, of an undemocratic
and invidious distinction between the manual worker and the brain
worker. In plans of organization, such as the Ettinger plan in New York
City, with a preliminary course of “prevocational training,” in which
the prospective industrial pupil in the seventh and eighth grades
discovers by hasty experimentation which trade his aptitudes fit him to
pursue, there is great danger that the vocational work will be left
unassimilated to the rest of the school work and the child trained into
a narrow specialist. Such “vocational training” deserves all the
criticism that has been directed against it by the opponents of a too
“utilitarian” education. The Gary type of vocational training keeps the
industrial work constantly in touch with the other activities, and makes
it a really “cultural” branch of the school community work. And because
the children lay their foundations of skill and interest so early and
work at real work under real workmen, their training from a practical
point of view is as good as, if not better than, the special trade
school is likely to give them. More shops are actually supported in the
Gary school than even the most elaborate special trade school can afford
to provide. The correlation of day courses with evening continuation
courses, the great attention to science, the emphasis on the social and
communal bearing of all activities,—all this means a higher type of
vocational training than has been worked out generally in the public
school. If he is intelligent, he will be better qualified for skilled
work than the more narrowly trained worker. “This is the age,” says
Superintendent Wirt, “of the engineer, of machinery, and of big
business. The school business enterprises offer a type of industrial and
commercial education facilities ... adapted to modern industry and
business. There are big business problems and machinery problems in the
school.” These problems evolved in the life of a school community give
an education, he holds, superior to what can be given even in schools
narrowly devoted to shop-training. And it can give the training in small
groups or even to individuals, where the special school has to give
instruction in large classes to make it pay at all. As Mrs.
Barrows-Fernandez puts it, “If you believe that vocational education is
confined to specific training for a trade, and that this must be carried
on in a separate trade school, and that general education has no
relation to it except as it may add a fringe of culture, then you will
think that there is no vocational education in Gary. But, on the other
hand, if you belong to the group that believes that what children under
sixteen need in the way of vocational work is not specialized trade
training on top of an inadequate elementary-school education, but
fundamental industrial training closely related to the science and
academic work, and made real and natural because it is one of the many
activities of the whole school,—then you will come away from Gary
feeling that the vocational work there represents the soundest point of
view and the best practical accomplishment in vocational work for
children under sixteen that can be found anywhere in the country.”
In New York City, where an extended experimentation is being carried on
with the Gary plan, considerable controversy is said to have arisen over
the provision of the Gary scheme which permits outside institutions,
including churches, to coöperate with the school and take children for a
few hours a week for any special work, amusement, or instruction which
the schools cannot give. The fear was expressed there that this
provision would mean the entering wedge of religion into the public
school.
As outlined by Mr. Wirt, however, the Gary plan holds no brief for
religious instruction. It has no concern with any church activity as
such. What it tries to do is to coördinate the community child-welfare
agencies with the school. The lengthening of the school day absorbs an
hour which would otherwise be spent by the city child in the street, or
at home, church, or settlement. All the Gary school does is to organize
and systematize this hour. It may be spent by the child either in play
or auditorium at the school, or in any outside activity which provides
wholesome activities for children. The object is to coördinate the
community opportunities so that they may function regularly and vitally
instead of spasmodically as at present. The school gives to all the
agencies which pretend to be interested in the child’s welfare a chance
to spend themselves effectively. It brings up to the level of public
discussion, for the first time, the question what sort of home, church,
and neighborhood activities are good for children.
Into this scheme the church enters merely as a community institution. As
long as any considerable number of the parents of the children in a
school believe that religious instruction is valuable, no public school
which attempts to be really public can refuse to release children for
this purpose, just as it releases them for playgrounds, settlements,
libraries, home music, or other instruction. This outside time is not
taken from study. Nor are the children turned out into the streets to be
taken care of by the churches and other institutions. No child is
excused unless the parents make formal application. If the parents do
not do this, the child stays at the school for the full seven or eight
hours of work, study, and play. The burden of responsibility rests
entirely upon the parents and the churches. The teachers have nothing to
do with the matter, either in segregating the children or seeing where
they go. There seems to be little fear that the practice will not
conform to the theory. Mr. Wirt tells us that his work-study-and-play
school had been functioning for twelve years in Bluffton and Gary before
any religious organization took advantage of this provision. The idea
that the opportunity would unduly increase religious influence in the
schools seems to be groundless. In the Jefferson School in Gary, which
has been longest in operation under the Wirt plan, and where the fullest
efforts have been made by all the sects and religions of the town to
provide this supplementary instruction, scarcely half the children in
the spring of 1915 were going out to any sort of religious training
whatever. And in one of the Wirt schools in New York, where unusual
efforts have been made by some of the churches to meet the new plan, not
even half of the children are released for this purpose. In another Wirt
school in New York, none of the children are released, because there is
no demand for it on the part of the parents.
What the Gary plan seems to do is not to bring religion into the
schools, but for the first time to take it out of the schools. The
relations now between church and school are hidden. The Gary plan brings
them out into the open. The establishment of a fair, free, and open
relation between the school and all other community institutions is of
utmost importance. No institution which has anything valuable to offer
the child will lose by such a relation. No outside power can dominate or
even partially control a public school which has established it.
_We may sum up the Gary school, then, as primarily a school
community for children of all ages between nursery and college,
providing wholesome activities under a fourfold division of
work, study, play, and expression. It aims to provide the best
possible environment for the growing child throughout the course
of a full eight-hour day. The school community, replacing the
old-time education of household and_ _school, aims to be as
self-sustaining as possible, all activities contributing to the
welfare of the school community life. By the multiple use of
school facilities, on the plan of public-service principles,
such a school may be provided at no more expense than that of
the ordinary public school. The economics effected by this
multiple use enable the Gary school to provide recreational and
educational facilities for adults as well as children all the
year round, as well as to pay better salaries to teachers, and
completely solve “part-time problems.” It makes the school the
cultural center of a community with parks, libraries, and
museums functioning as contributory to the school, as well as
all other activities which provide wholesome interests for
children. It makes the school, for the first time, a genuine
“social center,” and a genuinely “public school” in a
comprehensive sense scarcely realized hitherto._
No better evaluation of the Gary plan has been made than that by William
Paxton Burris, Dean of the College for Teachers, University of
Cincinnati, in the _Bulletin_ of the United States Bureau of Education,
1914, no. 18. In his opinion the school system at Gary provides:—
“1. For the better use of school-buildings day and evening, including
Saturdays, the year round, making it possible to save large sums of
money expended for this purpose.”
This multiple use of school plants, which secures greatly increased
facilities at greatly reduced cost, while it permits the giving of
full-time instruction to all the children of even the congested school
districts, is the aspect which has appealed most generally to educators
outside of Gary. For administrators confronted with problems of
part-time, it makes an examination of the Wirt plan almost essential. No
educationist can afford to ignore a plan which, in mere details of
mechanical administration, provides not only a full-time program, but
actually a longer school day, for all the children in the city
school—something hitherto considered impossible in the larger school
systems. The Gary plan seems to provide an easy solution for these
difficulties which grow progressively worse in the large city with every
year.
“2. The possibility of a better division of time between the old and the
new studies, the ‘regular studies’ and ‘special activities.’”
The Gary plan provides not only an enriched curriculum, but an unusually
favorable and harmonious balance between the various activities. The
larger emphasis on science and manual work has not made the school
ultra-utilitarian in its purpose. The Gary schools have not been “turned
into mills and factories,” as certain educators have feared. For many
visitors, the Gary school is a living refutation of the idea that the
useful and the beautiful are opposed. The new school plants, such as the
Emerson and Froebel, are spacious and dignified buildings, with many
touches of thoughtful taste that one usually associates only with the
high schools of exceptionally wealthy and cultivated suburban
communities. The presence of pictures, the cultivation of music, the
emphasis on expression, the teaching of literature, the systematic use
of the public library, indicate a determined effort to bring the
cultural aspects of education to the front, and make them as real a part
of the school life as the more striking special activities. The
“application” work involves constant care and interest in the
enhancement of the beauty of the school plant. The actual charm of the
school life in Gary—the conservatories and gardens, the play, the
freedom of the children, the dramatic expression, the absence of strain
and confusion, the happiness of the children—is testified to by most
visitors. A very beautiful school life seems to be lived, paradoxical as
it may seem, where every activity is motivated by application and
expression, where the learning is by doing and not by mere studying.
“3. Greater flexibility in adapting studies to exceptional children of
all kinds, thereby diminishing the necessity of special schools.”
The Gary plan provides a school which is adapted to almost every kind of
a child. It does not try to adapt the child to the school, casting off
automatically those who do not fit. But it adapts the school to the very
unequal needs and capacities of the children. Such a school seems to be
one where capacities will be developed wherever there are capacities, a
school where something like equal educational opportunity can be given,
as it cannot be in the ordinary public school. It can almost be said
that the only reason for keeping a child home from the Gary school would
be a case of contagious disease. If the child is physically weak, so
that he cannot undertake all the work, he may take what he can and use
the other facilities of the school as one would use a sanitarium for
regaining health. The daily program permits a child to spend all his
time in the special activities if this is best for him. He may spend his
time resting in the open air, or in supervised play until he gains
strength to do the regular work. The defective child may work at what he
can in the way of manual activity. And the retarded child may take such
activities as will awaken his interest, and gradually bring him up to
the level of his grade. An elementary school system like this has no
need for the expensive special open-air schools, classes for defectives,
etc., special trade schools or commercial schools. In the organized life
of the complete school community, the child may find approximately what
he needs.
“4. The possibility of more expert teaching through the extension of the
departmental plan of organization.”
“5. The better use of playtime, thereby preventing influences which undo
the work of the schools.”
“6. More realism in vocational and industrial work, by placing it under
the direction of expert workmen from the ranks of laboring men, selected
for their personal qualities and teaching ability as well as their skill
in the trade industries.”
The organization of the industrial and other vocational work offers many
practical advantages to the young worker. Not only does he have the
evening continuation courses and the privilege of coming back to the
school shops in the daytime when unemployed, but the most practical
foundation is laid for the development of coöperative courses between
school and factory on the lines of the well-known Fitchburg plan. The
flexibility of administration and curriculum in the Gary school allows
him to attend the academic class during slack hours, or to divide the
job and the school with another student. The Gary school even offers to
provide special instruction for part-time students for any desired
number of hours a week, or allows them to work on their own initiative.
In 1914 in Gary there were said to be about one hundred part-time
students. The plan of the all-year school also offers peculiar
opportunities to the young worker. The opportunity of finding employment
is increased fourfold. For instead of throwing all the pupils on the
market to find jobs at the same time, one quarter of those who needed
work would be available throughout the year. Instead of one continuous
apprentice in an industry or trade, therefore, four pupils could take
his place in alternation. Instead of one young workman spending all his
time at work and none at school, four would be getting a full schooling
of thirty-six weeks in the year, and twelve weeks of practical
apprentice training in the factory. Thus the Gary plan makes it easy for
the young worker to get the maximum benefit of the modern school and his
apprenticeship at the same time.
[Illustration:
THE FOUNDRY AT THE EMERSON SCHOOL
Notice group of curious children at window
]
A word should be said about the value of the vocational industrial
training that the Gary school gives, from the point of view of
preparation for efficiency in the industrial world. The organization of
the manual work as a part of the regular curriculum prevents the narrow
specialization of the trade school. It tends to turn the young worker
out, not as a part of the industrial machine fitted to do only one
thing, but equipped to meet a dynamic, rapidly changing industrial world
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 a chance to-day to rise above the mass. The tendency of
the old public school, in spite of its fancied “liberal” curriculum, was
to turn out only very low-grade specialists in book-learning. The
student who comes from the well-rounded curriculum of the Gary school
into the industrial world is bound to be more alert, more interested in,
and more cognizant of, what he is doing. The Gary school seems to be
making an effort to produce the type of mind perhaps the most needed
to-day, that of the versatile engineer, the mind that adapts and masters
mechanism. This exactness, resourcefulness, inventiveness, pragmatic
judgment of a machine by its product, the sense of machinery as a means
not an end in itself,—these qualities of mind which come from an
emphasis on applied science are the qualities which society demands in
almost every industry, profession, and trade. The Gary school tends to
cultivate this type of intelligence. For this type of mind, “culture”
would not be a fringe, but a more or less integral part of life, because
it had been woven in from the earliest years in the school community. On
the other hand, skilled labor would not seem degrading or of lower
value, for it too would have had its equal part in the school life.
“7. Better facilities for the promotion of the health of children.”
The large amount of play, the spacious and sanitary school plants, the
care of the special school physicians and school nurses who devote their
whole time to the purpose, insure the needed attention to the physical
well-being of the children.
“8. The possibility of having pupils do work in more than one grade and
of promoting them by subjects instead of by grades.”
“9. The possibility of having pupils help each other.”
The “helper and observer” system, applied not only in the relations
between children, but between teachers, and between teachers inside the
school and visitors, is one of the most valuable features of the Gary
plan. It entirely alters the usual relations, making for a coöperative
instead of a competitive spirit in work, and facilitating enormously the
work of both pupils and teachers. Children learn by watching and asking
questions—“picking up”—in the most natural way in the world, in contrast
to the formal and stilted ways of the traditional classroom work.
“10. An organization which prevents a chasm between the elementary and
high school, and prevents dropping out of school at critical periods in
the lives of pupils by the introduction, at such times, of subjects
which appeal to awakening interests not satisfied by a continuous and
exclusive devotion to the ‘common branches.’”
The Gary plan, which includes all the grades in one school plant
wherever possible, prevents these chasms more successfully than even
such schemes as the junior high school which are being extensively
experimented with elsewhere. The Gary school has an extraordinary hold
on its pupils. There is no incentive for leaving school, since the
school provides for the needs of the most diversely equipped children,
gives them the practical vocational training they may want, and even
allows their working part-time while continuing with the school. All
those problems of “pupil-mortality,” whereby half the children in our
public schools are said never to pass beyond the sixth grade, are almost
automatically avoided in a school which deliberately sets itself to
meeting the individual child’s needs. The success of the Gary school in
holding its pupils is indicated in the fact that, in spite of the short
time the Gary schools have been in existence, the proportion of
high-school pupils in Gary is said to be almost twice as large as that
in the schools of New York City.
“11. A saving in the cost of instruction by reducing overhead charges
for supervisors, making it possible to pay better salaries or reduce the
number of pupils per teacher, or both.”
“12. A plan which brings together, in a unitary way, with economy and
efficiency in management, the other recreational and educational
agencies of the city.”
These evaluations of Dean Burris’s sum up the various aspects of the
Gary plan as it appeals to practical educators. It must be remembered
that the Gary school represents not a rigid system, or a static and
completed mechanism. Its chief value is that it provides a flexible
program and facility for change and development. Any examples of details
in the curricula or details of administration can only be tentative, for
it is an experimental school, where every one is constantly studying and
learning. It is a growing organism. The only limit to its growth seems
to lie in the imagination of teachers and pupils. Even when it starts
with an admirable equipment, its life is only begun. It is the use of
the equipment, the constant appeal to the imagination and to expression
that is the real education. In such a school, the cultivation of
resource may go on indefinitely. Such a school provides that “embryonic
community life” which Professor Dewey expresses as his ideal of a
school, where in actual work the child senses the occupations and
interests of the larger world into which he is some time actively to
enter.
We may say, then, that the Gary school has national significance because
it is the first public school system in successful established operation
which has been able to solve the pressing and apparently insoluble
problems of the city school; which has kept pace with changing
industrial and social conditions, and adapts the school to every kind of
a child; which synthesizes the best educational endeavors of the day,
and provides the facilities which educators have vainly sought to
provide for all the children, but have only succeeded in providing at
great expense for the more advanced and older pupils of the community;
which marks a distinct advance in democratic education; which realizes
the ideal of a truly public school, in providing for all the people all
of the time; and, which, in its simple organization and ingenious
financial economies, furnishes a practical working-model for imitation
and adaptation in other communities, large and small.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPENDIX
I
DISTRIBUTION OF EXPENDITURES
_August 1, 1914-July 31, 1915_
_Schools of Gary, Indiana_
REGULAR SCHOOL (TEN MONTHS, FIVE DAYS PER WEEK, EIGHT-HOUR DAY)
───────────────┬──────────┬──────────┬────────────┬──────────
LARGEST THREE │ Emerson │ Froebel │ Jefferson │ All
SCHOOLS WITH │ School │ 1847_ │ 764 │ schools
NO. OF PUPILS │ (895) │ │ │ 4789
───────────────┼──────────┼──────────┼────────────┼──────────
Instruction │ │ │ │
—Salaries of │ │ │ │
supervisors │ │ │ │
and │ │ │ │
principals, │ │ │ │
and │ $2,750.19│ $4,189.95│ $2,016.60│$13,745.75
miscellaneous│ │ │ │
Salaries of │ 27,954.77│ 46,373.36│ 16,713.70│113,533.24
teachers │ │ │ │
Supplies │ 854.66│ 758.58│ 367.00│ 2,660.09
───────────────┼──────────┼──────────┼────────────┼──────────
Total cost of │$31,559.62│$51,321.89│ $19,097.30│$129,939.08
instruction │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │
Operation and │ │ │ │
maintenance— │ │ │ │
Janitors’ wages│ $3,908.80│ $4,936.02│ $1,131.11│$12,203.15
Fuel, water, │ 4,815.03│ 5,234.70│ 1,205.11│ 13,799.49
light, │ │ │ │
supplies │ │ │ │
───────────────┼──────────┼──────────┼────────────┼──────────
Total cost of │ $8,723.83│$10,170.72│ $2,336.22│$26,002.62
operation │ │ │ │
Maintenance │ 7,420.40│ 6,050.67│ 7,418.36[3]│ 26,574.62
───────────────┴──────────┴──────────┴────────────┴──────────
Footnote 3:
Includes new heating plant.
SATURDAY SCHOOL (TEN MONTHS, EIGHT-HOUR DAY)
────────────┬──────────┬──────────┬──────────┬──────────
SCHOOLS │ Emerson │ Froebel │Jefferson │ All
│ │ │ │ schools
────────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────
Instruction │ $1,782.20│ $2,721.57│ $860.28│ $6,909.52
Operation │ 1,713.63│ 1,690.83│ 344.65│ 4,332.31
────────────┴──────────┴──────────┴──────────┴──────────
SUMMER SCHOOL (TWO MONTHS)
───────────────┬──────────┬──────────┬──────────┬──────────
SCHOOLS │ Emerson │ Froebel │Jefferson │ All
│ │ │ │ schools
───────────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────
Instruction— │ $831.56│ $1,349.65│ $543.75│ $3,375.20
Salaries of │ │ │ │
supervisors │ │ │ │
and │ │ │ │
principals │ │ │ │
Salaries of │ 4,213.63│ 3,678.08│ 779.58│ 10,602.91
teachers │ │ │ │
Supplies │ 38.61│ 33.30│ 30.50│ 114.31
───────────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────
Total cost of │ $5,083.80│ $5,061.03│ $1,353.83│$14,092.42
instruction │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │
Operation— │ $1,317.98│ $1,542.37│ $251.03│ $3,424.34
Janitors’ │ │ │ │
wages │ │ │ │
Fuel, etc. │ 794.37│ 1,308.42│ 131.25│ 2,421.95
───────────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────
Total cost of │ $2,112.35│ $2,850.79│ $382.28│ $5,846.29
operation │ │ │ │
Maintenance │ 1,149.41│ 689.79│ 1,682.55│ 4,165.90
───────────────┴──────────┴──────────┴──────────┴──────────
SUNDAY-SCHOOL (TWO PLANTS, FOUR HOURS WEEKLY)
───────────────┬──────────┬──────────┬──────────
SCHOOLS │ Emerson │ Froebel │ All
│ │ │ schools
───────────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────
Salaries of │ $103.00│ $128.00│ $231.00
teachers │ │ │
Operation │ 954.56│ 847.60│ 1,802.16
───────────────┴──────────┴──────────┴──────────
EVENING SCHOOL (FIVE EVENINGS WEEKLY OF TWO HOURS EACH, NINE MONTHS OF
SCHOOL)
───────────────┬──────────┬──────────┬──────────
SCHOOLS │ Emerson │ Froebel │ All
│ │ │ schools
───────────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────
Salaries of │ $1,091.07│ $1,731.45│ $3,813.24
supervisors │ │ │
and │ │ │
principals │ │ │
Salaries of │ 5,112.89│ 5,828.00│ 13,675.73
teachers │ │ │
Supplies │ 340.54│ 471.68│ 1,042.84
───────────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────
Total cost of │ $6,544.50│ $8,031.13│$18,531.81
instruction │ │ │
Operation │ 2,283.91│ 2,392.68│ 5,872.55
───────────────┴──────────┴──────────┴──────────
PUPIL _PER-CAPITA_ YEAR (TWELVE MONTHS; ALL ACTIVITIES)
───────────────┬──────────┬──────────┬──────────┬──────────
SCHOOLS │ Emerson │ Froebel │Jefferson │ All
│ │ │ │ schools
───────────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────
Per-capita cost│ │ │ │
for │ │ │ │
Instruction │ $35.26│ $27.79│ $25.00│ $27.13
Operation │ 9.75│ 5.50│ 3.06│ 5.43
Maintenance │ 8.29│ 3.27│ 9.71│ 5.55
───────────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────
Current cost, │ $53.30│ $36.56│ $37.77│ $38.11
total │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │
Permanent │ 11.43│ 7.81│ 14.43│ 10.88
improvements │ │ │ │
───────────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────┼──────────
Grand total │ $64.73│ $44.37│ $52.20│ $48.99
│ │ │ │
General control│ │ │ │ 3.54
Other payments │ │ │ │ 7.75
Auxiliary │ │ │ │ 1.02
agency │ │ │ │
───────────────┴──────────┴──────────┴──────────┴──────────
ENROLLMENT
────────────┬──────────┬──────────┬────────┬────────┬────────
Day School │Enrollment│ Average │ No. of │ All │Enrollment
│ │ daily │teachers│Average │ per
│ │attendance│ │ salary │teacher
────────────┼──────────┼──────────┼────────┼────────┼────────
Emerson │ 895│ 769.80│ 31│ $915.78│ 27.56
Froebel │ 1,847│ 1,591.06│ 57│ 813.56│ 31.50
Jefferson │ 764│ 661.70│ 22│ 759.71│ 33.50
All schools │ 4,789│ 4,043.98│ 142│ 802.59│ 33.70
Summer │ 1,700│ │ │ │
schools │ │ │ │ │
Evening │182,348[4]│ │ │ │
schools │ │ │ │ │
────────────┴──────────┴──────────┴────────┴────────┴────────
Footnote 4:
Number of student hours.
TOTAL EXPENDITURES—TWELVE MONTHS—ALL ACTIVITIES (REGULAR, SATURDAY,
SUNDAY, SUMMER, EVENING SCHOOLS)
Instruction $169,703.83
Operation 43,855.93
Maintenance 30,740.52
Total current cost 244,300.28
──────────
Total expenditures $362,325.73
------------------------------------------------------------------------
II
SUPERINTENDENT WIRT’S REPORT
ON THE
REORGANIZATION OF THE BRONX SCHOOLS, NEW YORK CITY
_Showing how the Gary Plan may be adapted to the Usual School Plant_
THESE twelve schools, I am informed, are the most congested of any group
of twelve schools in New York City. There are only 25,331 sittings in
these schools and 35,580 children were registered December 31,
1914,—10,249 more than sittings. The registration is 140 per cent of the
sittings. But 2500 of the present sittings, representing 50 classrooms,
are unsatisfactory. There are 779 classes in the schools and only 480
satisfactory classrooms. The classes are 162 per cent of the
satisfactory classrooms.
Two new schools are under construction, and a leased school-building of
fifteen classrooms is nearing completion. These three buildings will
provide accommodations for 4500 children and 103 additional classes.
When these three buildings are completed, there will be 583 satisfactory
classrooms for 779 classes. The registration of the twelve schools
increased 4000 pupils from December 31, 1913, to December 31, 1914. At
the present rate of increase the new buildings will not take care of the
increase in school attendance during the construction of the said
buildings. Four new buildings in addition to those under construction
are needed now to give each child attending the schools a satisfactory
school seat. Because of financial limitations the Board of Education is
asking for only six new elementary-school buildings for the entire city,
and _two_ of the six, _to cost approximately $1,000,000_, are proposed
for the relief of the twelve schools named. If the two additional
schools requested, together with the three under construction, could be
made ready for use to-morrow, there would still be 4000 children without
satisfactory seats and no provision for normal growth in the immediate
future.
I herewith submit a plan for the reorganization of the twelve schools
named, so that 1022 classes may be satisfactorily accommodated in place
of the 583 now provided for.
Under the New Organization unsatisfactory annexes are vacated, and
unsatisfactory classrooms are used for auditorium, playrooms,
laboratories, and workshops. In place of the 779 classes and 35,580
children now in the schools, room will be secured for 242 additional
classes and a total registration of 46,000 children. A future increase
in school registration of approximately 10,000 children will thus be
provided for.
To accomplish this reorganization, rather extensive annexes are
necessary at four schools, costing approximately $475,000. The remaining
eight schools need only slight structural changes and additional
equipment, costing approximately $44,500. Additional land should be
purchased for four of the schools, costing approximately $225,000 [a
total of $744,500 for twelve schools, as against $1,000,000 for two new
plants on the old plan].
The cost of the four annexes, the remodeling, the equipment, and the
additional land will be much less than the cost for buildings,
equipment, and sites for the proposed two new schools. If the proposed
two-new-schools plan is followed, a total satisfactory capacity on a
five-hour single-school system for 671 classes will be secured, which is
108 classes short of the present enrollment. If the reorganization at
less cost than the two-new-schools plan is followed, satisfactory
accommodations in a longer school day will be secured for 1022 classes,
which is 243 classes more than are now enrolled,—a difference of 351
classes and 16,000 children.
The true economy of the New Organization is to be found in the greater
educational facilities provided for all of the children, rather than in
the great capacity of the plants secured under the new plan.
The upper grades, 511 classes, will have a daily school program of the
following type: 80 minutes in classroom for academic work; 40 minutes in
gymnasium or play-yard or grounds for physical training and play; 40
minutes for general exercises in the auditorium; 60 minutes for
luncheon; 140 minutes in classroom for academic work; and 80 minutes for
drawing-rooms, science laboratories, or manual-training and workshops.
The lower grades, 511 classes, will have a program of the following
type: same as for upper grades, except that the last period of 80
minutes will be given to play, excursions, library, church instruction,
or at home. As a rule the children will have 380 minutes in school in
addition to the luncheon hour, in place of the 300 minutes provided in
the regular full-time school. Such a study-work-and-play school removes
the children very largely from the demoralizing life of the street, and
gives ample time for academic, physical, and prevocational training.
────────────────────┬───────────────┬───────────────
│ Average time │ Average time
SUBJECTS │per week under │per week under
│ regular │ New
│ full-time │Organization in
│organization in│ Bronx schools
│ New York City │ (minutes)
│ (minutes) │
────────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
Opening exercises │ 75 │ 100
Music │ 60 │ 100
Physical training, │ 120 │ 200
recesses, │ │
physiology, hygiene │ │
English, geography, │ 1010 │ 1100
history, and │ │
arithmetic │ │
Nature-study and │ 80 │ 133
science │ │
Drawing │ 85 │ 133
Construction work │ 70 │ 134
────────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
Total time per week │ 1500 │ 1900
────────────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────
Under the old regular full-time organization, only manual-training and
cooking-rooms are provided, and for seventh and eighth grades alone.
Science laboratories for individual work, and drawing studios with
special equipment, are not provided at all.
Under the New Organization, manual-training, cooking and sewing-shops,
drawing-studios with special equipment, and science laboratories for
individual work by students are provided for all the above grades.
Besides, there will be sixty-three additional prevocational workshops
with special equipment and teachers distributed advantageously in the
twelve schools. Also there will be provided gardens, better auditoriums
and music-rooms, better classrooms, gymnasiums and playgrounds.
DESCRIPTION OF SCHOOLS
_Indicating in Detail Necessary Changes to introduce Wirt Plan_
_Public School 28_ has fifty-eight regular classes in forty-five regular
classrooms, with one wood-working shop and one cooking-room. The ground
floor play-yard and fine basement playroom provide ample play space for
nine classes at one time. There is a large gymnasium on the top floor
that is not desirable for play, and should be used for drawing-rooms.
The auditorium on the fourth floor should be made into six regular
classrooms by installing permanent partitions for the sliding
partitions. The wall partitions should be removed from the four
combination auditorium and classrooms on the second floor, and the
auditorium thus secured should be seated for a permanent auditorium.
Since four classrooms are thus used for the auditorium, there will be
left only forty-one regular classrooms. Thirty-six of these should be
used for regular class work. Two of the five remaining classrooms should
be used for science laboratories, one for a music studio, and two for
workshops. These five special rooms, with the manual-training shop and
cooking-room and drawing-studios, will provide facilities for nine
classes in science, drawing, music, manual-training or shopwork, at one
time. Seventy-two regular classes may be accommodated in this school
with thirty-six classes in thirty-six classrooms, nine in the
auditorium, nine at play, nine in special work, and nine primary classes
with an extra period for play, religious instruction in churches,
excursions, library work, etc.
With a full register of classes, seventy-six teachers should be
employed. Fifty-six teachers should teach the history, geography,
arithmetic, language, and reading, and manage the auditorium. Two
teachers should have charge of the music, four of the play and physical
training, one of the library, two of the drawing, two of the science
laboratories, and nine of the manual training, domestic science and art,
and the shopwork.
There are thirteen regular classes in the eight-room frame annex, which
must be used for class purposes in order to enable the city to hold the
property. A special program can be arranged for this annex, to
accommodate twelve classes.
Public School 28 and the annex can therefore accommodate eighty-four
classes, a gain of thirteen classes over the present enrollment, and
thirty-one classes more than the normal capacity of fifty-three classes
in a single-school system.
The only expense will be the placing of permanent partitions in the
auditorium classrooms, and the equipment of the auditorium,
laboratories, studios and shops,—approximately $10,000.
* * * * *
_Public School 5_ has twenty-seven classes in nineteen regular
classrooms, a good auditorium and two portable schools. Four classes are
now using the auditorium as classrooms, with only curtains for
partitions. There is play space in the basement play-yard for six
classes to play at once.
By removing the portable schools a satisfactory outdoor playground can
be secured. The basement has a fine shoproom, large enough to
accommodate two small shops. In these shops and the nineteen classrooms,
with the auditorium and play facilities, thirty-two classes may be
accommodated by using sixteen of the most desirable rooms for
classrooms. This is five classes more than are now in the school, and
thirteen more than the capacity of the main building on a five-hour
single-school system.
The cost of moving the portables should be charged to the school to
which they are moved. The cost for equipment and remodeling should be
approximately $5,000.
* * * * *
_Public School 32_ has sixty classes in thirty-eight classrooms, with
one workshop and one cooking-room. Five classrooms and one cooking-room
are now in a gymnasium with only curtains for partitions. Three
classrooms are unsatisfactory basement rooms, one is an unsatisfactory
attic room, and twelve classrooms are combination auditorium and
classrooms.
By placing permanent partitions in the combination auditoriums,
twenty-nine satisfactory classrooms and five shoprooms may be secured.
The gymnasium and play-yard are ample for a large school. The building
is close to Bronx Park for large outdoor play-yard and for gardens. The
present site can be enlarged without great cost. I believe that it is
desirable to make Public School 32 a seventy-two-room school, which will
enable it to accommodate twelve more classes than are now in the school.
An annex should be built containing swimming-pool, auditorium, five
shops, and seven classrooms, costing approximately $100,000.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
III
SUPERINTENDENT WIRT’S REPORT
ON THE
REORGANIZATION OF PUBLIC SCHOOL 89, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK.
_Showing the Adaptation of the Gary Plan to the Usual School Plant_
THIS school was the first to be reorganized in New York City under the
Gary plan. The following quotations from Superintendent Wirt’s report
indicate the changes that were made in transforming a congested
elementary school into a smoothly running Gary school on the duplicate
plan:—
Prior to November 6, 1914, there were forty classes attending School 89.
Twelve of the forty classes, representing the upper grades, were on full
time, having the exclusive use of twelve of the twenty-six classrooms.
The remaining twenty-eight classes were organized in groups of fourteen
classes each and were accommodated in the remaining fourteen classrooms,
small auditorium, and five cellar rooms, with a modification of the
accompanying program. (See p. 191).
Since in this program twelve classrooms were used exclusively for twelve
classes, the burden of the overcrowding was placed entirely upon the
remaining fourteen classrooms. These fourteen rooms had a multiple use
for eight hours a day, but the auditorium and playground were used only
two hours a day. This means that the auditorium and playground were
congested during the short time that they were in use. When it rained
and all the children were required to be in the building from 9.30 to
11.30, nine classes were forced to use the five cellar rooms at one time
as study-rooms. No provision was made for the systematic use of other
child-welfare agencies.
────────────┬────────────┬──────────────
│ │Exercises and
School hours│ Fourteen │ study in
│ classrooms │auditorium and
│ │ playground
────────────┼────────────┼──────────────
8.30- 9.30│First │
│group—14 │
│classes │
9.30-10.30│First group │Second group
10.30-11.30│Second │First group
│group—14 │
│classes │
11.30-12.30│Second group│First group—at
│ │lunch
12.30- 1.30│First group │Second
│ │group—at lunch
1.30- 2.30│First group │Second group
2.30- 3.30│Second group│
3.30- 4.30│Second group│
────────────┴────────────┴──────────────
The old program was not intended to secure greater facilities for
children than the ordinary single-system school offers.
The principle underlying the old program was that of securing the
traditional five-hour school day by supplementing the four hours in the
classroom with an additional hour in playground and auditorium.
Unfortunately the latter hour was used as much as possible for study in
quarters that were never intended for use as a study-room and cannot be
made satisfactory for study. No one offers the argument that such a
five-hour school is better than or even as good as five hours of regular
classroom work in the ordinary single-system school.
This program was not intended to secure greater facilities for children
than the ordinary single-system school offers. The purpose was to secure
as nearly as possible the traditional work of the regular five-hour
full-time school, and it was considered only as a temporary expedient
until a sufficient number of new schools could be built to provide the
regulation full-time school. Since the main object was the building of
additional school-buildings for permanent relief, no funds could be
expended upon this temporary double-system expedient.
In contrast to this, the new program at Public School 89 is in no sense
an effort to relieve part-time by giving the children as nearly as
possible a five-hour traditional school day until a new building can be
built.
The sole purpose determining the new program now in use at this school
is that of securing a six-hour day and much richer opportunities in a
study-work-and-play school with a coördination of the activities of all
child-welfare agencies.
By making the following improvements at Public School 89, the increase
in capacity and additional facilities can be made permanent—a gymnasium
and swimming-pool, two rooms for branch of the public library, equipment
for science laboratories and auditorium, wardrobes for sixteen classes,
permanent playground, and drawing and music studios. With the exception
of the playground, the above will cost approximately $35,000.
The cost of the site and the proposed new fifty-one unit
school-building, to relieve Public School 89 and two other buildings,
will provide the funds for similar changes in ten schools after the plan
at Public School 89. These changes would make possible a permanent
increase in capacity of not less than two hundred classrooms, since in
the more modern schools a less expenditure will secure greater capacity.
Since a fifty-one unit building adds accommodation for only forty-eight
traditional full-time classes, the satisfactory accommodation of sixteen
additional classes at Public School 89 would justify the expenditure of
one third the cost of the new building and site upon Public School 89,
or approximately $170,000. But, as has just been pointed out, it is not
necessary to spend anything like this amount.
Under the old program there were only forty classes, but one class was
very large and was divided into two sections with two teachers in
charge. The number of pupils attending this school is increasing
rapidly, and therefore a program for forty-two classes is planned.
The forty-two classes in the New Program are divided into two duplicate
schools of twenty-one classes each. In the following programs these
duplicate schools are designated as the “X” School and the “Y” School.
_The X School_: Twenty-one of the classrooms are used for the desired
academic instruction in the regular school subjects,—arithmetic,
language, reading, history, and geography. The five remaining classrooms
are used for the special school subjects,—science, drawing, and music.
In addition to the twenty-six classrooms, the school has a
manual-training shop, a domestic-science laboratory, a small auditorium,
five cellar playrooms, and a kindergarten. Because the special rooms are
not yet equipped (January 9, 1915), for the time being they are used for
additional regular class work. Since there is no library or librarian,
and since the manual-training and cooking teachers are at the building
only half-time, two extra special teachers are in charge of the
playground.
The X School has the following activities and facilities for carrying
them on:—
Type of work Facilities used by each
type of work
Academic instruction 21 classrooms.
General exercises Auditorium.
Play and physical Playground, playrooms,
training pool, gymnasium.
Special work 2 manual-training shops,
2 science laboratories, 2
drawing studios, 1 music
studio, 1 public-library
branch.
The twenty-one classes are divided into three divisions of seven classes
each, as follows:—
Division 1—seven classes, grades 6, 7, 8.
Division 2—seven classes, grades 3, 4, 5.
Division 3—seven classes, grades 1 and 2.
All these twenty-one classes, from the first grade to the eighth, take
part in these activities according to the following program:—
────────────┬───────────────┬─────────┬────────┬─────────
School │ Academic │ General │ Play, │ Special
hours │ instruction │exercises│ etc. │
────────────┼───────────────┼─────────┼────────┼─────────
8.30- 9.20│Arithmetic, all│ │ │
│divisions │ │ │
9.20-10.10│Language, all │ │ │
│divisions │ │ │
10.10-11.00│ │ Div. 1. │Div. 3. │ Div. 2.
11.00-12.00│Entire X school│ │ │
│at luncheon │ │ │
12.00- 1.00│Reading, all │ │ │
│divisions │ │ │
1.00- 1.50│History, │ │ │
│geography, all │ │ │
│divisions │ │ │
1.50- 2.40│ │ Div. 3. │Div. 2. │ Div. 1.
2.40- 3.30│ │ Div. 2. │Div. 3. │ Div. 1.
3.30- 4.30│ │ │Div. 1. │
────────────┴───────────────┴─────────┴────────┴─────────
_Summary of time schedule: Pupils’ time, minutes per week._ (_All pupils
have twenty per cent more time in school._)
──────────┬───────────────┬───────────────┬───────────────────
School │ Division │ Division │ Division
department│ 1. │ 2. │ 3.
──────────┼───────┬───────┼───────┬───────┼────────┬──────────
│ X │ N.Y. │ X │ N.Y. │ X │ N.Y.
│school │minimum│school │minimum│ school │ minimum
──────────┼───────┼───────┼───────┼───────┼────────┼──────────
Academic │ 1050 │ 840 │ 1050 │ 840 │ 1050 │ 880-1090
Auditorium│ 250 │ 75 │ 250 │ 75 │ 250 │ 75
Play │ after │ │ │ │ │
│school │ 80 │ 250 │ 150 │ 500 │ 180-300
Work │ 500 │ 280 │ 250 │ 250 │Included│
│ │ │ │ │ in │
│ │ │ │ │academic│
│ │ │ │ │ time. │
──────────┼───────┼───────┼───────┼───────┼────────┼──────────
Total │ 1800 │ 1275 │ 1800 │ 1315 │ 1800 │1255-1345
Full time │ 1800 │ 1500 │ 1800 │ 1500 │ 1800 │1200-1500
──────────┴───────┴───────┴───────┴───────┴────────┴──────────
The actual time spent by the teachers according to the New Program is no
longer than the established time. Each teacher has 210 minutes in
regular activities, and 100 in special activities, with 20 minutes for
assembling of pupils, a total of 330 minutes, which is the established
time.
The two periods in special activities should be departmentalized by
certain teachers giving both periods to play and physical training, and
other teachers giving both periods to music, drawing, and science, etc.
The manual-training teachers and the public librarian release two
teachers from the work periods, who may be assigned to play and physical
training. Six teachers should run the auditorium period, and the
remaining teacher of the Division should be assigned to play and
physical training. The only extra teachers are the manual-training
teachers. If there are a few teachers who cannot do the work of the
special activities successfully, they may give all of this time to
regular school activities. The teachers so displaced from regular
activities may give all of their time to physical training and play,
music, drawing, etc.
About half of the teachers will have an extra 50-minute period in the
school for grading papers, planning school work, looking after
individual needs of children, or professional study. In my judgment it
would be well if all teachers did their supplementary school work at the
school rather than at home. Less energy will be required to do this work
at the school than at home, and the public will have a better
understanding of the teacher’s work.
_The Y School_: Unfortunately the program described requires twenty-six
classrooms for twenty-one classes of children in addition to the
auditorium, play space, library, workshops, etc. No facility during the
school day is used more than half the time by the X School. Fortunately
the auditorium need be large enough to accommodate only one third of the
X School. The same is true of the play space and the special work
facilities. There is a great economy in using the facilities named for
three periods by alternate groups, each representing one third of the
school. But a higher first cost and a greater operation and maintenance
cost would be justifiable in all these facilities, including the regular
classrooms, if they could be used longer and accommodate more children.
Since the X School can use any of these facilities only half of the
time, what objection can there be to another school of twenty-one
classes using the facilities when the X School cannot use them? On p.
198 is shown a program for such a duplicate school, designated Y.
The Y School has the same time as the X School, for both pupils and
teachers. Neither school could use any facility any more if the other
school were not there, but both schools have better facilities every
hour of the day because the other school is there. Forty-two classes of
children are thus accommodated in twenty-six classrooms. Instead of
building a sixteen-room additional school, with its initial cost of
construction, site, janitor service, heating, maintenance, etc., an
equivalent expenditure can be made for the permanent improvement and
increased operating cost of the twenty-six-room school.
────────────┬────────────┬─────────┬─────────┬─────────
School │ Academic │ General │ Play, │ Special
hours │instruction │exercises│ etc. │
────────────┼────────────┼─────────┼─────────┼─────────
8.30- 9.20│ │ Div. 2. │ Div. 3. │ Div. 1.
9.20-10.10│ │ Div. 3. │ Div. 2. │ Div. 1.
10.10-11.00│Arithmetic, │ │ │
│all │ │ │
│divisions │ │ │
11.10-12.00│Language, │ │ │
│all │ │ │
│divisions │ │ │
12.00- 1.00│Entire │ │ │
│school at │ │ │
│luncheon │ │ │
1:00- 1:50│ │ Div. 1. │ Div. 3. │ Div. 2.
1:50- 2:40│Reading, all│ │ │
│divisions │ │ │
2:40- 3:30│History, │ │ │
│geography, │ │ │
│all │ │ │
│divisions │ │ │
3:30- 4:30│ │ │ Div. 1. │
────────────┴────────────┴─────────┴─────────┴─────────
(The blank spaces represent the periods when the X School is using the
facilities.)
While this program makes two schools in one possible, primarily it is
planned to provide a longer school day, i.e., six hours in place of
five, and greater facilities for each child during each of the six
hours. One hundred minutes’ daily play is given to the primary grades,
for play takes the place of work for small children. This play is
gradually transformed into work, fifty minutes’ work and fifty minutes’
play in the intermediate grades, and one hundred minutes’ work in the
grammar grades, as the older children use their after-school leisure
time for play. Thus the play impulse is transformed into the work
impulse. Productive activities are substituted for non-productive
activities. Work is made constructive play.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV
ECONOMY OF PLAYGROUND MANAGEMENT IN GARY SCHOOL, AS CONTRASTED WITH
PUBLIC PLAYGROUND
SUPERINTENDENT WIRT, at the meeting of the Department of Superintendence
of the National Education Association, St. Louis, February, 1912 spoke
as follows:—
We have not utilized the school plants completely unless they are used
for recreation and social centers by adults. Fortunately, a school plant
that provides for the constructive play and recreation activities of
children is also most admirably adapted for similar activities with
adults. The playground, gymnasiums, swimming-pools, auditorium, club and
social rooms, library, shops, laboratories, etc., make a complete social
and recreation center for adults. Experience has demonstrated that the
facilities for academic instruction add also to the attractiveness of
the plant as a social and recreation center.
Compared with the cost of such facilities and their use when separated
from the school plant, the economy of the combined playground, workshop,
and school plant is indeed surprising. The city of Chicago has a most
elaborate system of recreation parks and field-houses. Selecting the
eleven most successful parks of the South Park Commission, we may
compare the total cost and use of the eleven parks with the cost and use
of one Gary school plant. Note that the attendance of the parks is the
total, not the average, for the eleven parks. Also note that the cost of
the school includes the furnishing of complete school facilities for
twenty-seven hundred children, in addition to the social and recreation
features.
_Chicago parks and Gary school compared as to costs_
──────────────────┬────────────┬───────────
│ Total for │
Items │eleven parks│One school
│ in Chicago │ in Gary
──────────────────┼────────────┼───────────
Population │ 800,000│ 20,000
First cost, less │ $2,000,000│ $300,000
land │ │
Annual maintenance│ $440,000│ $100,000
Annual │ │
attendance:— │ │
Indoor gymnasium│ 310,000│ 1,000,000
Shower baths │ 1,385,000│ 500,000
Outdoor │ 2,000,000│ 2,000,000
gymnasium │ │
Swimming-pool │ 735,000│ 300,000
Assembly halls │ 270,000│ 1,000,000
Reading-rooms │ 600,000│ 1,000,000
Clubrooms │ 70,000│ 50,000
Lunchrooms │ 520,000│ 20,000
──────────────────┴────────────┴───────────
------------------------------------------------------------------------
V
TABLE SHOWING HOW CAPACITY OF SMALL SCHOOL PLANT MAY BE DOUBLED
_Increasing School Capacity_
A—Traditional school plant: 8 rooms; 320 children; grounds 160 × 160;
playgrounds, 80 × 160, 40 square feet per pupil:—
Cost of building and $55,000
equipment
Cost of land 5,000
10 per cent on 6,000
investment
Annual operation 2,000
Cost of instruction 10,000
per year
B—Gary plan for 320 more pupils:—
Additional cost of $5,000
land
Additional cost of 10,000
instruction per year
Costs of building and equipment, operation and maintenance not
increased, though capacity is doubled.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INDEX
Administration, 86.
All-year school, 76, 77.
“Application” work, 23, 52, 72, 73, 93.
Art-studios and work, 24, 28, 46.
Auditorium, 26, 50, 92, 111, 138.
Bluffton, 9, 10, 76, 162.
Board of Education, 10, 86.
Botany work, 29, 46.
“Boyville,” 137.
Burris, Dean W. P., 149, 164, 175.
Chemistry work, 29, 127.
Chicago, 8, 20, 21, 199.
“Clearing-house for children’s activities,” 52.
Commercial studies, 30, 48, 49.
Community center, 83.
“Complete school,” the, 17, 18.
Departmental teaching, 87.
Dewey, Prof. John, 19, 35, 132, 140, 144, 176.
Director of Industrial Work, 87.
Domestic science, 30, 47.
Duplicate-school plan, 64, 78.
Economy, 79, 80, 201.
Emerson School, 13, 14, 18, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 30, 74, 80, 87, 116,
128, 137, 138, 145, 166.
English work, 115, 139, 140.
Enrollment, 181.
Ettinger plan, 157.
Evening school, 81, 82.
Executive principal, 86.
Expenditures, 179.
“Expression” work, 113.
Extra-curricular activities, 139.
Farm, school, 136.
Fernandez, Mrs. Alice Barrows-, 147, 159.
Financing of schools, 6.
Foreigners in Gary, 5.
Froebel School, 13, 14, 18, 20, 23, 25, 31, 45, 51, 74, 133, 145, 166.
Gardens, school, 22.
Gary, 3-8, 57, 145.
Gymnasiums, 22.
Helper or observer system, 86, 100, 108, 122, 173.
History work, 27, 116.
Industrial shops, 30, 44, 45, 133.
Jefferson School, 13, 23, 30, 33, 54, 65, 80, 81, 147, 162.
Laboratories, science, 29.
Laundry, 30.
Libraries, school, 25.
Manual training, 40.
Montessori method, the, 153.
Museum, school, 24, 121.
New York City, 8, 12, 18, 33, 55, 61, 146, 147, 157, 160, 162, 174,
182.
Observer or helper system, 86, 100, 108, 122, 173.
“Peak-loads,” 63, 64.
Pestalozzi School, 13.
Physics work, 29, 125.
“Platoon” system (duplicate-school), 64.
Playgrounds, 20, 141, 199.
Pottery-shop, 30, 45.
Printery, 30, 45, 124.
Programs, 66, 69, 70, 73, 74, 191, 194, 195, 198.
Promotion, 102.
Public utility, 58.
Register teacher, 97.
Religious instruction, 53, 54, 160.
Saturday school, 38, 104, 133.
School bank, 48.
School community, 37, 40, 44, 48, 52, 55.
School day, 95.
School desks, 27.
School-gardens, 22.
School libraries, 25.
School store, 49.
School zoo, 22.
Science work, 29, 46, 122.
Self-government, 137.
Shops, industrial, 30, 44, 45, 133.
Shopwork, 156.
Special activities, 15, 74.
“Street-and-alley time,” 38, 75.
Students’ Council, 138.
Studios, art, 24, 28, 46.
Supervisors of instruction, 86.
Swimming-pools, 22.
Teachers, 91, 149.
Teachers’ assistants, 99.
Teacher-workmen, 41, 87.
Terman, Prof. Lewis, 19.
Trade schools, 44.
Training-school for teachers, 96.
Truancy, 156.
Unit school plant organization, 88.
U.S. Steel Corporation, 1, 2, 3, 145.
Updegraff, Dr. Harlan, 141.
Vacation school, 38.
Vocational guidance, 110.
Vocational training, 41, 156, 169.
Wirt, Superintendent William, 9, 10, 17, 28, 33, 39, 43, 52, 58, 59,
76, 77, 81, 84, 90, 101, 146, 158, 160.
Workmen-teachers, 41, 87.
“X” and “Y” schools, 64, 69.
Y.M.C.A., 37, 53, 55, 146.
Zoölogy work, 29, 46, 124.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that:
was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
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