Part 7

I mention this because it is typical of Mr. Wirt’s genius to obliterate artificial lines and avoid mechanical groupings. His ideal school is one like the Emerson in Gary, a complete school, from kindergarten to college, in the same building, with all the varied facilities used by all classes. The grading is of the utmost flexibility. The traditional twelve grades are followed, but classes work in “rapid,” “average,” or “slow” groups, according as the various children give promise of completing the State-prescribed curriculum in ten, twelve or fourteen years. The child may pass from group to group or from grade to grade at any time on the examination of the supervisor of instruction. The child himself has no sense of being “graded” or even “marked.” Report-cards are rather a concession to parents’ weaknesses. If the child needs additional help, there is the parallel school, so that he may have a double lesson the same day. And the Saturday school offers another opportunity.

All studying is supposed to be done in school hours. The fearful bogey of “home-work” is laid. In this free interchange of groups the child acquires a sense of individuality. Each has practically an individual schedule of work, for the organization of which the executive principal, who devotes all his time to such matters, is responsible. Except in the youngest classes, the children seem to move about individually to their different rooms and shops. By this drastic carrying down of college methods through the grades Mr. Wirt has exploded another hoary superstition that great masses of children in city schools can only be handled by uniform and machine methods, in a lump. Frœbel School in Gary has twenty-five hundred children, most of them very small alien immigrants. Yet the same flexible and free methods are used there, apparently with success. These children, because of the immensely varied equipment, and the possibility of small classes in the shops, are getting something resembling individual instruction. I picked up at random the card of an older girl at Emerson. It read: “Printing, History, Gymnasium, French, Music, Botany, Auditorium, English.” The very shock of that bold “Printing” gives you a realization of the modern school you are in. And this is a girl besides.

Now a program like this, and all this free election and flexibility, would seem wilful and anarchical were it not for the fact that in the Gary school these schedules are the result of a natural and very careful process of selection, made by the child. What the child shall study, outside of the regular classroom work, is neither forced upon it nor aimlessly selected. Take the Emerson School, a beautiful building with laboratories and studios, gymnasia and shops, and put your child into its kindergarten or first grade. He runs about the halls. The shops and studies and laboratories are not segregated, but distributed over the building so as to convey the impression that they are equally significant, and to give every child an opportunity of becoming familiar with them. All the rooms have big glass doors or windows. The child’s own unaided curiosity makes him look in and wonder about what the older children are doing there. One could see children of all ages peering into the foundry or machine-shop or printery.

When the child has reached the third or fourth grade he has a certain idea of what activity interests him, and he is allowed to go into shop or laboratory as observer or helper to the older child. He watches and asks questions, and the older boy learns by teaching him. If the child finds that the work does not actually interest him he still has the chance to change. When he takes up the work in the higher grades he has served his apprenticeship and is already familiar with the apparatus and the technique. The teacher does not have to break in a new class each year. It is almost a self-perpetuating and self-instructing class. The child has been assimilated to the work as new members in any profession or trade in society are assimilated. When the child is exposed from his earliest years to the various vocational activities, is allowed to come into them just as his curiosity ripens, you have as perfect a “choice of a vocation” as could be imagined. Only this sort of opportunity can really be called “vocational training.” The usual vocation school work takes the child too late, when his curiosity is likely to be dulled; it puts him into the work without any previous familiarity. It can scarcely be anything but drudgery. If “capacities are to be developed,” Mr. Wirt’s scheme gives the surest means of developing them. It solves the grave problems of “vocational” and “pre-vocational” training, which are so sorely vexing the professional educational world, a large part of whose business in life seems to be to create and have problems.

XVI

APPRENTICES TO THE SCHOOL

Vocational training in the schools of Gary means that whatever work is necessary in the way of repairing, conserving, beautifying or enhancing the facilities, is done by the school itself. These large, lavishly equipped modern school-buildings require a force of mechanics to keep them in repair. Their shops are the industrial and manual shops for the school. The children work in them with skilled union workmen, who are employed not primarily as “manual training” teachers, but as assistants to the building superintendent. The mechanics teach by allowing the children to help them as apprentices. They earn their salaries by repair and construction work, while the children who desire it get an incomparable vocational training at practically no cost to the town. Where the ordinary trade-school must have large classes to make the enterprise pay, the Gary vocational work may be done with the smallest groups, for the shops are paying for themselves anyway.

Manual training takes on quite a new meaning as you move about, watching the boys in the carpenter-shop making desks or tables, or cabinets for the botany collections, or book-racks for the library, sending them on to the paint-shop when they have finished; boys in the sheet-metal shop hammering zinc for the roof; young electricians repairing bells; a couple of plumbers tinkering with pipes; little groups of serious and absorbedly interested boys in foundry and forge and pattern-making shop, all coöperating like the parts of a well-ordered factory. There was obviously enough real work to keep busy for his hour a day every child who desired training in a trade. Where school and workshop are thus fused, the need for “continuation” and “coöperative” courses--where the boy alternates between shop or factory and school--disappears. The child has the advantages of both.

The ordinary school, and even the specialized vocational school, is rarely doing more in its industrial, manual, or domestic science work than playing a rather dreary game with toys. There could scarcely be a greater contrast between the real shops of the Gary schools and those ordinary “shops” and kitchens with their dozens of little machines at which at a given time the entire class does its little stereotyped “stunt.” In Gary the domestic science room is a real kitchen in which the daily luncheon is prepared and served at cost to the teachers and pupils who desire it. The cook is a real cook, and the girls come in as observers, helpers or workers, just as the boys go into the shops. The nearest approach to a luxury is the pottery shop, but this is itself perhaps the best symbol of that fusion of the artistic and the practical that is the Wirt genius. What are you to say when you walk into the art studio and find a dozen girls and boys high on a scaffolding painting a frieze which they have themselves designed, while others are at work on stained-glass designs to go in varnished paper on the panels of the door?

There is a genial, joyous quality about all the work that gives every room a charm--the foundry with its deep shadows, the smooth gray pottery shop with its turning wheels and bright glazed jugs, the botany room with its mass of greenery. Even the history room at Emerson School had the atmosphere which comes from concentrated interest and the slow accretion of significant material. Emerson itself is a spacious and dignified building with innumerable little touches of taste that one usually associates only with the high schools of exceptionally wealthy and cultivated suburban communities. It is a delightful paradox that so beautiful a life should appear to be lived where every activity seems to be motivated by direct utilitarian application. I said that you have to plow your mind up to understand this kind of a school. Certainly I have never seen a place which more nearly permitted to seem real that old ideal of the joy of work which we imagine must have existed back in guild days. It may be left to the imagination what children trained in such a school are likely to have to say to the industrial society in which we live.

The practical work of the school is only limited by local school needs, but the shoeless condition of some of the Frœbel children inspired the starting of a shoe shop where old shoes were made over. Both Emerson and Frœbel have a printery from which come all the blanks, reports, programs, etc., used in the school, as well as the bulletins and papers by which the various classes are tempted to preserve the good things they write. The commercial pupils have charge of all the accounting and bookkeeping as well as the supplies. The children who work in the shops are paid in checks, which are calculated on the basis of prevailing union wages for the working-time. This provides opportunities for a banking system, which is also in charge of the commercial class. In the Jefferson School the boiler-room is an integral part of the machine-shop.

The botany class was responsible for the beautiful and elaborate conservatory at the entrance of the Emerson School, and for the window hothouse in the botany room, where practical experiments are made. The botanists also have charge of the shrubs and trees on the grounds, and the vegetable gardens which they work communistically all through the summer. Their study of food and textile products ramified into the domestic science work, just as the zoology study was fused with physiology. This latter class had a playground zoo, with foxes and coyotes, raccoons and prairie-dogs, about whose habits and adventures they were preparing a brochure, which was already in press at the printery. When I stepped into the zoology laboratory itself, I found that I was in an even more animated zoo. Crows, chickens and pigeons in cages at the back of the room were lusty with vociferous greeting. The imperturbability of the children amidst this racket showed me how well aware they were that this was the way a zoology room ought to behave.

Such a school, where the child works almost unconsciously into a vocation which appeals to him as neither play nor drudgery, is far more “vocational” than even the specialized school. The child, beginning so young in shop or laboratory, and assimilating the work very gradually, is able to lay deep foundations of interest and skill. The Gary school is distinctly unspecialized. In a sense it gives a completely “liberal education.” The child emerges a skilful amateur. The industrial and scientific work no more “train” him to take a definite place in the industrial world than the cultural work trains him to be a college professor. But he should leave school well equipped to cope with a dynamic, rapidly changing industrial society 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 much chance of success. Our public school, in spite of its fancied “liberal” curriculum, has really been turning out only very low-grade specialists. It has made no effort to produce the type of mind most needed to-day--the versatile machinist, the practical engineer, the mind that adapts and masters mechanism. This is probably the best intellectual type our society produces. This exactness, resourcefulness, inventiveness, pragmatic judgment of a mechanism by its product, the sense of machinery as a means, not an end, are exactly the qualities that society demands in every profession or trade.

The Gary school is the first I have seen that promises to cultivate this kind of intelligence. It frankly accepts the machine not in the usual sense of the vocational schools, as an exacting master that the child is to learn docilely to obey, but as the basis of our modern life, by whose means we must make whatever progress we may will. The machine seems to be a thing to which society is irrevocably pledged. It is time the school recognized it. In Gary it is with the child from his earliest years. It is the motive of his scientific study. The physics teacher at the Emerson School told me that he thought the fascinating and irresponsible automobile had done more to educate the younger generation than most of the public schools. Tinkering with an automobile was a whole scientific training.

I dropped into his physics class, and found a dozen twelve-year-old girls and their nine-year-old “helpers” studying the motor-cycle. With that fine disregard for boundaries which characterizes Gary education, the hour began with a spelling lesson of the names of the parts and processes of the machine. After the words were learned, the mechanism was explained to them as they pored over it, and their memory of vaporization, evaporation, etc., called into play. The motor-cycle was set going, the girls described its action, and the lesson was over, as perfect a piece of teaching as I have ever heard. The intense animation of that little group was all the more piquant for having as a background the astounded disapprobation of three grave school superintendents from the East.

To these physics classes the ventilating, heating and electric systems in the schools are all text-books. The climate is studied. The shops provide many physics problems. There was a class of boys having explained to them the physical principles of various types of machines. The impetuous rush of those little boys as they were sent into the machine-shop to take apart a lawn-mower, a bicycle, and a cream-separator, and the look of elation on their faces, would alone make Gary unforgettable to me. It was evident that this was indeed a different kind of school.

XVII

THE 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 to keep 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 organization there 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. Beside Mr. Wirt Mme. Montessori seems almost a beginner, so daringly has he carried the principles of self-instruction up 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 of Mr. 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 the old-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. Already a number of communities have copied the essential features, and Mr. 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.