Part 4
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.
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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.)