XIVCOMMUNITIES FOR CHILDREN
Mr.Wirt’s schools at Gary are genuine public schools, in the sense that they provide for every kind of child in the community and draw into themselves the main aspects of the community life. They are not artificial training-schools for vocations or for life; they are a life itself. “The public school is still merely the old private school publicly supported,” he says. The change of support has not really made it a different kind of a school. It has not really grown up to urban demands. School-boards usually act as if they were handling private property. They gravely discuss “wider use of the school plant” as if this were some gracious extension of privilege. The public does not yet feel that the schools are its own. Organization, administration, instruction, are highly authoritative, doctrinaire. The ideal has been uniformity in methods and product. The educational systemhas become as autocratic and military as the industrial. As for content, the curriculum is the old medieval one, not transformed, but patched up, in the good old Anglo-Saxon way, as interests which had been the concern of the few were gradually demanded by the many. Art study, nature study, physical education, science, organized play, manual training, have been added to the public school work. But these new interests and activities have become simply additional “subjects,” taught in much the same spirit as the old. The problem of the educator has been, not how may the new activity vitalize and transform the others, but how can it be introduced with the least disturbance to what is already there. The present discussion of professional educators about vocational training shows the same mechanical effort to introduce an alien activity into the traditional curriculum in such manner that the latter may remain intact.
Mr.Wirt’s own school is not a tinkering-up of the present school system. He is not an “educational reformer” making something over. He has plowed up the educational ground. He actually has a new kind of a school. It is not a “school of unspecialized vocationaltraining,” or “a school founded on play,” or an “efficiency school,” or any of the other terms with which it has been designated. It is hard to describe because it defies classification in the old terms. Nothing is more delightful about the Gary schools than the absence of cant. Most of the current educational problems, the books and ideas on pedagogy, educational psychology, supervision, administration, teaching-methods, classroom management, discipline, etc., which fill the attention of the current educational world are here as if they were not. It is a school built up outside the influence of the professors of education, the teachers’ colleges, and the normal school of the land. It is true that there is probably not a single idea operative that is original withMr.Wirt. Probably there is not a single idea that is not being applied in some school in the country. The novelty is the synthesis, and the democratic spirit that motivates it.
Here is provided for the first time a genuine public school, a school which does reflect all the healthy interests of the community, and where the child does become familiar with its life and with his own interests and vocational opportunities through practical doing of work. Theschool becomes “a clearing-house for community life.” To enter the Emerson or Frœbel School in Gary—the two superb new buildings constructed byMr.Wirt—is like coming into a well-ordered city where each citizen is going about his proper business. There is none of that slightly depressing atmosphere of the mild if excellent prison for half-day involuntary labor which is too often the ordinary school. Classes do not seem to be neatly immured in rooms, or to be moving about in lock-step. You are dealing with interested individuals who, singly or in spontaneous groups, are utilizing all the facilities of a lavishly equipped and stimulating community. The tone is of a glorified democratic club, where members avail themselves of privileges which they know are theirs. The schools are public in the same broad sense that the streets and parks are public. The school is the children’s institution. They unaffectedly own it and use it as a mechanic uses his workshop or an artist his studio. To go to the schools in the evening and see the children running and playing in the great broad halls—incomparable playrooms—running in now and then to speak to their parents who are studying in the evening school, is to get a new emotionalsense of what a school may be. The children do not seem to be there because education is “compulsory,” or because the parents send them there to get rid of them, but because what can be done there is so interesting that they cannot stay away.
I am unable otherwise to account for their streaming back in such numbers to the voluntary Saturday schools, voluntary for the teachers, too, who are paid extra for their work. Saturday is a glorified pay-day, where one may do anything one likes, from making swords in the wood-shop to studying back work in the classroom. I spent a fascinating hour watching the thronged wood-shop where little boys were fussing with the scraps left from the regular work of the week. It occurred to me then how little real difference there was between the well-to-do home and the very poorest in the way of interesting activities for children. How many homes of the comfortably enlightened classes were fit places to bring up a child? How many even pretend to supply the books and the wood-work and tools and plants and music with which these wonderful buildings were running over? Without interesting activities for children, city homes, both rich andpoor, can provide only schools for loafing. As between the street, to which the less well-to-do child emerges for interest, and the vaudeville, the “movie” and the current fads to which the well-to-do child escapes, I think the street is probably the less demoralizing.
This Saturday workshop was a little study in spontaneous discipline. Although the children were unwatched, they worked on their own little jobs as indefatigably as if they were under a drill-master. If any little boy became weary and was moved to interfere with another little boy, he was apt to be brushed off as though he were an irritating fly. Could it be that mischievousness, supposed to be an integral part of child-nature, was simply a product of repression or idleness? Could it be that school discipline was largely an attempt to solve problems which artificial rules were directly manufacturing? Visiting superintendents, appalled at the freedom in the Gary schools, tip-toe about looking for signs of depredation. They do not seem to report any. I decided that these schools had actually acquired the “public” sense. It seemed really true that children, unless they were challenged to inventive wickedness by teachers’ rules and precepts, were nomore likely to spoil their school than a lawyer is likely to deface the panels in the library of his club. This children’s community seemed to be enjoying its busy life in the same spirit that the wider public uses its streets and libraries and museums and railroad trains.
This supremely democratic public sense is the motive ofMr.Wirt’s genius. All this richness of opportunity—the playgrounds, gymnasia, swimming-pools, gardens, science laboratories, work-shops, libraries, conservatories—which this school provides so lavishly, is possible to the public of a small and relatively poor city like Gary, exactly because the schools are managed like any other public service. The modern educational ideal, “to provide a desk and seat for every child,” is as absurd as would be one to provide a seat in the park for every inhabitant. No public service is used by more than a fraction of the people at any one time.Mr.Wirt provides the coveted “desk and seat” for about one-quarter of the children. While they are studying the traditional three R’s, etc., the rest of the school is distributed in shop and playgrounds, gymnasium and studio, or at home. By an ingenious redistribution of the groups throughout the course of an eight-hour day,Mr.Wirt is able not only to give every child the opportunity of the varied facilities every day, but he is able to accommodate in one school building twice the ordinary number of children. The insoluble “part-time” problems of city schools disappear. The Gary school has two complete schools, each with its set of teachers, functioning together in the same building all day long. In the lower grades the child spends two hours daily in the classroom, an hour in laboratory or shop, half-an-hour in studio, and half-an-hour in gymnasium, an hour in auditorium, and the rest of the day in study, play or outside activity. The older child has three hours for formal instruction, and two hours for more intensive shop or studio work. Children are passing back and forth constantly between home and school, each with his or her own scheme of work, and all the school is being used all the time.
The amount of money thus saved in school buildings alone is so large that even a town like Gary, with relatively meager school revenues, can afford not only the varied equipment, but also luxuries like special school physicians and nurses, and special teachers for special subjects.Mr.Wirt has been accused of “businessefficiency,” but this is scarcely the term for so artistically elegant a scheme of economy. When you reflect that it is just because the traditional classrooms are provided for only a proportion of the children that all of them have the varied daily opportunities of many-sided work and play, you are likely to call this “economy,” in the old golden Greek sense of the wise management of household resources, so that every member may share alike in the activity and the wealth. Such economy is creative; it enriches, not impoverishes. I have said thatMr.Wirt thought in terms of the rural community, but it is of the rural community and its creative economy, expanded to fill and reorganize the life of the modern city. The school trains the child by letting him do the things the city does. His education is an acclimatization to the wider social life.
A truly public school would let nothing communal remain alien to itself. In the chemistry class at the Emerson School I actually found the children helping in the necessary chemical work for the city. The class was simply an extension of the municipal laboratory. Gary, of course, has the good fortune or the good sense to have as chemistry teacher the municipal chemist.The older children act as his assistants. With him the class tests the city water, the various milk supplies of the town. Under the inspector, they visit dairies, workshops, bakeries and food-stores. Last year they published a milk bulletin containing general information and reports of their tests. I could not see that it was essentially inferior in quality to one that an agricultural school might have issued. When I came upon this class it was testing sugars and candies, from the different shops of the town, for purity and for use of coloring matter. Another class was experimenting with soft drinks, studying questions of solution, suspension and crystallization, with ramifications, I was told, towards the physiological effect of certain products. The children were practically deputy food inspectors, and made reports on the official blanks. The chemist assured me that he had not lost a case in prosecuting for violation of the pure food laws. In East Chicago, where school-children were ostensibly not trained as a vigilance committee in scientific investigations, the chemist could not get a single conviction.
The children also test the materials supplied to the school, the coal, cement, etc., to seewhether they come up to specifications. I saw a group trying to make soap for the use of the school. The chemist assured me—college-trained ignoramus that I was amidst this youthful expertness—that there was scarcely a principle of the science, theoretical or practical, that he could not develop from this work, all so directly motivated by the daily life around the children. I wish I could convey the fine caliber of this young chemist as he stood in his laboratory with the children working around him, his clear poise between the theoretical and the practical making him for me the ideal symbol of science working ceaselessly at the world around to make it cleaner and healthier and more livable.
That chemistry class in Gary has a high and momentous significance to me. It was distinctly not play, as all other laboratory work in school or college that I have seen has been play. I was surprised to find how completely the doing of real work banished the amateur atmosphere and at the same time made the work infinitely more interesting.Mr.Wirt says the child is a natural scientist, indefatigably curious and resourceful, quick and accurate. The little children actually seem to achieve less breakagethan the older. What kind of a community we are going to have when any large proportion of the children grow up to observe and test the physical conditions under which they live—when they get the scientific-deputy-inspector habit, so to say—and what would happen to some forms of political jugglery if a younger generation got used to thinking in terms of qualitative and quantitative tests, I leave to the imagination. But it seemed to me that that chemistry class was one of the most important activities in the United States to-day.