XIIITHE ORGANIC SCHOOL
The Fairhope Summer School, which has just closed its season (Sept., 1915), at Greenwich, Connecticut, has given to Northern people an opportunity to see at work Mrs. Marietta Johnson’s widely known ideal of “organic education.” Just as the Gary plan has shown how the city school may give a varied training to great masses of children with a freedom and flexibility never believed possible, so Mrs. Johnson has demonstrated how the small community, or even household, by using the natural environment and the natural needs as laboratory and workshop, may adjust the child to life far more accurately than any formal school. No school carries out more carefully Professor Dewey’s dictum that the child can only be educated by concerning himself with what has meaning to him as a child, and not what is to have meaning to him later as an adult.
In the organic school, children grow up naturallyand healthfully, playing out-of-doors, following their curiosities, learning as their life makes demands upon them. The teacher is there to answer their questions, to sharpen their wits, to name for them and analyze the flowers and soil and trees, to show how to plant vegetables and build little coops or houses. In their winter school at the single-tax colony of Fairhope, Alabama, on the shores of Mobile Bay, the children can be out in the open air almost every day. The land is a complete geological, botanical, and physical laboratory, and the household a natural classroom where they learn to live. The school grew, in fact, quite naturally out of the household, and the necessity for some sort of school in a community where there was none. Mrs. Johnson, with her teacher’s genius, simply sharpened and arranged her intercourse with the children around her, and presently had a school which has become one of the most interesting in the country.
Its very informality is its charm and success. The hundred or more children are not classified in grades, but in “life-classes,” which correspond roughly to those three periods in child life—the first seven years of growth, the years to adolescence, and early adolescence. Thefirst class is really an outgrowth of the nursery. In the cool rooms of the Fairhope Summer School one comes upon little farmhouses and villages and doll-houses of building-blocks, which form the basis for getting acquainted with the village the children lived in. The next group is characterized by a tough practicality, a capacity for drill and persistence, and this “life-class” was found in the wood-working shop and garden. Literary studies are taken up very late by the third class, whose recitations are rather informal discussions in an outdoor cluster around the teacher. Only when a broad background of acquaintance with real things is obtained, practical powers of observation acquired, and an actual need felt for learning what books can tell, are the conventional school studies begun. In the organic school there is thus some chance left to the children for getting real meanings and not mere words and phrases which they may glibly repeat. Reading and writing are not taught by drill, but are picked up by the child from the teacher or the other children, in the Rousseauan fashion, whenever he finds that he is missing something very important and interesting in not having this skill.
Learning in this kind of school becomes as natural as eating. One learns when one is hungry to understand what is going on in the world. Such schools, it will be said, are all very well as an ideal, but where can teachers be found to direct them? Certainly many of Mrs. Johnson’s children could teach others in the way they have learned themselves. The way to get teachers for this free organic education in the “schools of to-morrow” is clearly to teach more children in the same way.