The Gary Schools

To set the Gary schools in their proper perspective, one must discount at the start any prevailing impression that the distinctive traits are due to peculiar local conditions, or to the enlightened philanthropy of the United States Steel Corporation, which founded the town in 1906 as the site for its new plant, the most complete system of steel mills west of Pittsburg. For to the steel officials the building of the town was incidental to the creation of the plant. Gary in consequence is far less of a “satellite city” than other made-to-order towns. The opportunity to plan the city, provide fundamental necessities for community life, determine the character of the housing, and predestine the lines of growth, all in the best and most enlightened way, was taken advantage of by the Steel Corporation only in part. Very little of the marvelous science and engineering skill that went into the making of the steel plant went into the even more important task of creating a model city. Several hundred houses were built, it is true, for the skilled labor and officialdom of the plants, but practically no attempt was made to house the low-paid unskilled labor. The result has been the development of large tracts by land speculators, and all the problems of congestion and bad housing and sanitation that curse the larger industrial cities. The connection of the Steel Corporation with the town has been throughout that of any land and development company. Communal problems have all been thrown upon the people themselves to solve. The new community was incorporated as soon as possible as a municipality under the laws of the State of Indiana, and has organized all its municipal functions, including the public schools, in entire independence of the Steel Corporation, with which it has had no more political or institutional connection than any ordinary American town has with its local industrial interests. The Corporation has by no means paid more than its share of the local taxes, and the schools, in particular, have not only been quite free from the Corporation influence or support, but have even at times run so far counter to the approval of the Corporation officials that the school administration has had difficulty in acquiring its needed sites for new schools. It can be emphatically said that the schools of Gary are no more the product of peculiar conditions than are the schools of numberless rapidly growing Western towns.

The mushroom growth of Gary has not meant a peculiar kind of a town, but simply the telescoping into a few years of the typical municipal evils of graft, franchise fights, saloon dominance, insufficient housing and health regulation, election frauds, and lack of social cohesion. Its dramatic growth has not prevented its becoming a very typical American city. In April, 1906, Gary was a waste of sand-dunes and scrub-oak swamps at the southern end of Lake Michigan. Three years later it had a steel plant covering an area of a square mile and capable of employing 140,000 men; it had a population of 12,000; 15 miles of paved streets, 25 miles of cement sidewalks, $2,000,000 worth of residences, sewer, water, gas, and electric facilities; it had 2 banks, 6 hotels, 3 dailies, 2 schools, 10 church denominations, 46 lawyers, 24 physicians—in short, all the paraphernalia of the modern city. The visitor who goes to-day to Gary finds a typically varied American city, rather better built than the average, and rather unusually favored in its open spaces. Situated within thirty miles of Chicago, the city presents a rather pleasing contrast to the long chain of industrial towns that stretches for miles in every direction across the treeless prairie. With a well-built business section, lines of residence streets, handsome public buildings and churches, electric cars and taxi-cabs, Gary has a settled air of community life unusual even for an older town. It has almost the aspect of a commercial rather than an industrial center. It is the focus of the county trade, and the extent of its business and middle-class residential districts is somewhat larger than in neighboring towns. The steel mills and subsidiary plants are massed along the lake and the artificially constructed harbor. The great immigrant population, largely of cheap and illiterate proletarian labor from southeastern Europe, inhabits the congested district of the South Side. The mills are separated from the town by a small river which forms almost a moat for the great industrial fortress. The town is laid out in checkerboard fashion, with a wide main avenue a hundred feet wide and cross-streets sixty feet wide. Alleys run the long way of the blocks, and contain the sewer and water mains. Ethnologically the population is very mixed. Thirty nationalities are said to be represented in the schools, but this large foreign population is a familiar phenomenon in the American industrial town. A rough census taken in 1908 gave the foreign population of Gary as fifty-six per cent of the whole. In 1912 it was only forty per cent, or a decrease of sixteen per cent. The alien influx has not destroyed the essentially characteristic American features of the city. The native American element has always predominated politically and socially. For an American city of its size to-day, Gary represents, not a specialized community, but a fairly harmonious distribution of social classes, races, occupations, and interests. It is essentially a normal, variedly functioning, independent community, and the schools have been developed to meet the needs of a modern varied urban community.

It must be emphasized that neither the demands of a peculiar type of industrial community nor the work of benevolent philanthropy created the schools of Gary. They have been developed in response to the typically current needs of a normal American municipality. They have had to meet the same situations which all American cities are confronting in their effort to educate “all the children of all the people.”

Organized under a school administration consisting of a board of education with three members working in conjunction with a superintendent of schools, the school system depends for support entirely upon local taxation and the usual sources of revenue, and enjoys no unusual municipal or financial advantages. On the contrary, the enterprise of providing public schools for the town of Gary was one of peculiar difficulty. The new and rapidly growing town required the immediate creation of a school plant, in addition to the annual cost of instruction and maintenance. The community was poor. A large proportion of the people, being recently arrived immigrants, owned no taxable property. The plants of the Steel Corporation, the most valuable property in the community, were habitually undervalued in the assessments. The state laws, moreover, provide that school revenues for any given year are to be obtained on an assessment made almost two years before. The result in a new city like Gary, where the population had been doubling each year, was, therefore, that current school revenues had to be based on assessment values obtained when the population was only one quarter as great.

In the face of all these formidable difficulties the success of the Gary school system seems little short of amazing. In the short space of eight years the population has increased from three hundred to over thirty thousand. No ordinary city would attempt to supply school facilities to a population which doubled every year. The mere physical problem of providing seats for the children would be insurmountable. A city which followed the conventional school plan would be swamped. At the present time, with their much slower yearly increase of population, half of the cities of over one hundred thousand in this country have insufficient sittings for their children.

Yet with its leaping movement of population the city of Gary has been able to provide not only full-time instruction for every child, but actually a longer school day. It has not only done this, but it has provided evening school instruction for an even greater number of adults. There is something pardonable in the Gary boast that every third person in the city goes to school. And Gary has succeeded not only in giving this universal schooling, but in making it what is probably the most varied and stimulating elementary public-school instruction in the United States, with an equipment in buildings and facilities for work, study, and play which is surpassed, if anywhere, only in specially favored communities. All this has been done with a normal tax-rate, and at a per-capita cost of both construction and maintenance no greater than that in the city of Chicago and the city of New York, with their many overcrowded and poorly equipped school-buildings. The Gary schools, at the same time, have paid the highest teachers’ salaries in the State. The entire achievement has been as brilliant as the difficulties confronted were formidable.

It is these remarkable results that have focused the attention of so many educators on Gary, and it will be the purpose of this book to expound the “unique and ingenious synthesis of educational influences” which has made them possible. If, then, in the course of eight years, the schools of Gary have acquired a wide reputation as a momentous educational experiment which has passed into successful demonstration, the fact must be laid entirely to the abilities of the school authorities, and not to any adventitious factors of the community situation or of private assistance. The dominating factor was the personal genius of the superintendent, William Wirt, who was called to Gary in 1908 from Bluffton, Indiana, where he had been in charge of the public schools, and where he had partly worked out some of the ideas which he was later to develop so comprehensively in the Gary schools. When it is objected that the Gary plan is an experiment, and that eight years are scarcely sufficient time to pronounce upon its merits, it must be remembered that the real experimental stage of the Gary plan consisted in the eight years in Bluffton. Mr. Wirt came to Gary with his educational ideas matured after this long testing. He was brought to Gary by the unusually progressive mayor and school board of the new town, for the express purpose of working out on a large scale the principles which they had seen in concrete application at Bluffton. Against the financial meagerness of the town’s resources and the obstructiveness of the founders must, therefore, be set the advantage of having a virgin field in which to work. The superintendent and school board were able in a remarkably short time to build up a public interest and support which has been a very large asset. The people of Gary seem proud of their schools, and seem to appreciate the comprehensive educational and recreational facilities which through them are provided for both children and adults. Few educational experiments have been so successful in technique and in popular support. The Gary schools represent the fruit of a very unusual combination of educational philosophy, economic engineering, and political sagacity. Circumstances seem to have conspired to produce a school system which unites a very remarkable school plant with a synthesis of novel plans of operation which are fertile in suggestion to school men, if they do not tend to revolutionize many methods of financing public schools as well as methods of administration and teaching.

This outline of the setting of the Gary schools scarcely puts the background in its correct light. When we speak of the “Gary school” we are really talking about something bigger than the educational system of a small Western city. What we have to deal with is an educational idea, a comprehensive plan for the modern public school, capable of general imitation and adaptation to the needs of other American communities. In this sense it means primarily what Superintendent Wirt thought a public school should be. Being at once a social engineer and educational philosopher, he has succeeded in working out a type-plan of public school which to many educators appears uniquely valuable in American public education. The discussion which follows attempts to describe the Gary schools from this larger point of view. The effort is to show in detail how the plan actually works in the schools of Gary, while at the same time to suggest the larger ideas and principles which have motivated it. The “Gary plan” represents, of course, not only what has been done in Gary, but its further implications and tendencies, as well as the developments and modifications now working out in those schools, such as the group in New York City, which have been put in the hands of the Gary authorities for reorganization.