XVIITHE NATURAL SCHOOL
A surprisingly small amount of administrative machinery for so varied a system is required by the schools of Gary.Mr.Wirt is the City Superintendent of Schools. Under him each of the five school buildings has an executive principal. Two supervisors of instruction look after the pedagogical work of the system. The director of industrial work has charge of building repair, and supervises the shops where the children work under the mechanic-teachers. There is no attempt to segregate the vocational work. Manual, physical, artistic and academic activities are administered on an equal footing.
For the teacher the Gary school should be almost as liberating as it is to the pupil. In the details of courses much initiative is left to the teacher. It is really an inductive school where courses are worked out by supervisors consulting together on the basis of classroom experience.Teachers are encouraged to experiment and develop their own ideas. Here is the first public school I have ever seen that resolutely sets itself against uniformity of method or product, that recognizes differences of individuality.
The working-day of the teacher may be longer, but she is relieved of the burdensome home-work. The nervous strain is lessened also by the freer method of discipline. There cannot be unruly children unless children are ruled, and in the Gary school there is apparently no artificial repression. One found in the classroom as much talking as there would be in a concert audience, with the same natural motives, freed of “rules of order,” for quiet. The frequent change of room and activity in the Gary school prevents, too, that nervous restiveness which must inevitably come to the child kept long at his desk. The point is that only in a free and varied school like this can one talk of effective discipline. When school activities are as attractive as they are here, deprivation becomes punishment. There is at hand an instrument for inculcating reason into refractoriness which is as powerful as the stoutest disciplinarian could wish. The ordinary school tries tokeep up a military system of control, without any means, now that corporal punishment is generally abolished, of punishing infractions. In a Gary school “being sent home” for misbehavior usually means being sent to a place infinitely less interesting. But there is little talk about “mischievous and unruly boys.” Those children who, in spite of everything, “are not adapted to our kind of school,” may go to the school farm in the country to work. But this farm is not in any sense a “reform” school. Delicate children may also be sent there, and other classes go for a holiday. As to the personal manners prevailing in such a free school as this, with its absence of moral homily, and effort to “train character” through obedience and discipline, I can only repeat the words of an Italian boy who had recently come from orthodox schools elsewhere: “But they’re so polite!”
I was glad to see that there was no nonsense at Gary about schemes of “self-government,” which can be little more than a humiliating pretension in any school. A kindly judge did once institute “Boyville” in a Gary school, with a parody of municipal functions, but its unreality soon relegated it to limbo. Spontaneous organizationthere is, but it grows out of real work. The boys’ ninth grade English class, for instance, has organized itself as the Emerson Improvement Association, and its work revolves around the speaking and writing necessary in conducting the affairs of the organization. There seem to be no “extra-curricular” activities, which create so many problems elsewhere. Athletic teams and sports are connected with the gymnasium work. Other societies spring up naturally out of the school interests. Problems of “fraternities” and the control of athletics which confront so many high schools are thus naturally avoided.
The Gary school not only lightens this strain of discipline for the teacher and cultivates her initiative, but serves as a kind of training-school for the teachers themselves. The new-coming teacher learns by acting as helper or “apprentice” to the older teacher, just as the children in shop or laboratory learn from one another. The result is an uncommon and appealing equality between teachers and children, without imposed authority on one side or subservience on the other. BesideMr.WirtMme.Montessori seems almost a beginner, so daringly has he carried the principles of self-instructionup through the higher grades. Even visiting teachers and superintendents who wish to learn the theory and practice of the Gary school must learn in the same way.Mr.Wirt does not lecture to them. He allows them also to come into the school for a few months as helpers to teacher or principal. Everybody who has anything to do with a Gary school must evidently learn by doing the real work itself. Nothing shows more clearly the whole-knit fiber ofMr.Wirt’s philosophy than this new kind of “normal” school for visiting teachers.
I was pleased with the absence of self-display. Advertising has come from the outside. The teachers seem innocent of the great number of things they are doing which a large part of the orthodox educational world believes to be impossible. You are talked with frankly and genially, but nothing is done to impress you. You are left to interpret it all for yourself. Those who miss the spirit will find weaknesses. Professional educators hold up hands of horror at the “looseness” of the teaching. They miss the dramatic effect of the “well-conducted recitation”—the drawing-out of the pupil’s memory, or the appeals to glib guesses at what the teacher wants. They judge by theold-fashioned standard of how the teacher is teaching rather than the new one of what the child is learning. My complaint would be rather that there was still too much teaching that is conventional, particularly in the lower grades. And I have an animus against the deadly desks and seats which are still in use in too many of the classrooms. But the significant thing is that this kind of a school is not static or completed, but a constantly growing organism. The only limit to which it may grow lies in the imagination and initiative of teachers and pupils. And the school cannot be judged in cross-section. Even when it starts with so admirable an equipment, its life has just begun. For the mechanical and artistic, manual work and intellectual study, are all directed towards enriching the physical body and the spiritual life and atmosphere of the school. This intensive cultivation of resources produces that “embryonic community life” which is Professor Dewey’s ideal, where in actual work the child senses the occupations and interests of the larger society into which he is to enter.
Mr.Wirt’s schools would be unworthy of discussion were they not capable of imitation generally in American towns and cities. Alreadya number of communities have copied the essential features, andMr.Wirt is at present occupied in remodeling a few of the New York City schools, successfully, too, in spite of the fact that New York, on account of its rapid growth, its great alien population, and its political cross-currents, presents perhaps the most formidable school problems in the country. The only substantial difficulty in remodeling schools according to the Gary scheme is the matter of playgrounds. Even this is surmountable, for most cities have parks or usable vacant lots within reach of the school.Mr.Wirt’s great triumph in Gary is the old Jefferson School which he found when he came to the town. This was an orthodox ten-room building built by the city fathers to accommodate Gary children for many generations. By turning the spacious attic into a gymnasium, transforming five of the classrooms into music and art studios and nature-study laboratories, by building a jack-of-all-trades workshop around the engine-room in the cellar, a domestic-science kitchen in an unused corner, and by appropriating a nearby park space, he transformed a perfectly ordinary school building, whose prototype may be found in every town in the land, into a full-fledged,varied and smoothly-functioning Wirt school. Through the “rotation of crops” system, this school, built for three hundred and sixty children, actually accommodates over eight hundred, and gives them every facility, if less elaborately, of the specially designed new schools.
Perhaps I may here recapitulate. The mere prosaic business economy of the Wirt scheme is enough to recommend it. No school board can afford to neglect a plan which not only saves money to the taxpayers, but provides better facilities, more varied equipment and better educational opportunities than even well-to-do communities can at present afford. The Wirt school solves the vexing “part-time” problem. Gary is the only city I know that has room (March, 1915) in its present buildings for at least one-third more children than there now are to go to school.
In the second place, the plan solves most of the problems of vocational and industrial training which now confront the public school. It catches the child’s curiosity and skill on the upstroke. It makes no separation of manual from intellectual work, and avoids that sinister caste-feeling which seems to be creeping into the vocational movement. And from the point ofview of economy again, the scheme of devoting industrial work to actual care of the school-plant enables the school to provide a great variety of occupations almost without additional cost to the community.
In the third place, the plan provides a large measure of individual instruction. It is a school for every kind of a child. The flexibility of schedules, the coöperation of outside agencies like the churches, the varied activities, give opportunity for the fullest development of differing interests and capacities.
In the fourth place, the plan carries out throughout the school life the educational truth that learning can only come through doing. The habits and attitudes of careful scientific observation, or purposeful interesting activity which is neither work nor play, the social, democratic, and coöperative background which such a school cultivates, are exactly the qualities we need for our younger generation in American society.
Such a school carries out the best ideals of American democracy, as I see them, in an extremely effective way. Its philosophy is American, its democratic organization is American. It is one of the institutions that our Americanculture should be proudest of. Perhaps professional educators, accustomed to other concepts and military methods and administrative illusions, will not welcome this kind of school. But teachers hampered by drill and routine will want it, and so will parents and children.