The Gary Schools

The distinctive features of organization in the Gary school are the separation of administrative from pedagogical supervision; the extension of departmental teaching throughout the entire school; the increased initiative and coöperation of the teaching force; the flexibility and simplicity obtained by the “helper” or “observer” system.

The school administration is vested in a single head, the superintendent of schools, who is appointed by the board of education of three members. In charge of each school-building is an executive principal, whose duties are concerned with program-making, with supervision of the pupil’s schedules, with the general maintenance of order and discipline, and ordinary administrative work. He has no supervision of the instruction.

For all the schools there are two general supervisors of instruction, who oversee the teaching, work out the curricula in coöperation with the teachers, conduct examinations for promotion, make promotions or demotions after consultation with the teacher.

The industrial and manual-training shops are under the direction of a director of industrial work, who is also practical head of the school-building and repair department. The teacher-workmen in the shops are employed by him in the dual capacity of manual-training and industrial teachers and of regular workmen engaged in repair and construction. Each building has a head manual-training teacher, who supervises the work of the industrial classes, of the part-time classes, and acts as vocational adviser for the school’s pupils. Gymnasium and swimming-pool attendants are employed by the head teachers of the physical education departments.

The departmental teachers in the head building (Emerson School) act as assistant supervisors of instruction in their subjects and have general oversight of the courses in their subjects as taught in the other buildings.

Departmental teaching is carried out in the Gary schools to an extent generally unrealized in other public schools. It is considered that, with the exception of the lowest grades, no arguments which apply to the institution of departmental teaching in the high school are inapplicable to the grades of the common school. The special activities undoubtedly call for specialists to conduct them. History, language, literature, mathematics can also be much better taught if the teacher can devote his or her attention to the particular methods and orientation of the respective subjects, and not be required to be equally at home in the technique of all of them. Teachers can rarely be found who are many-sided enough to teach well even all the common branches, without the special activities. The Gary schools, therefore, adopt for all, except the first two or three grades, what are practically advanced high-school or college methods of specialized teaching.

In these lowest grades all the regular subjects are taught by the one grade teacher; in the other grades practically all the subjects are departmentalized. A unit school plant which should have fifty-six classes, divided proportionately among the grades, in addition to the nurseries and kindergartens and special classes, would employ for grades 1 to 3, sixteen teachers, as follows: For English, mathematics, 8; for manual training, 2; for nature-study, 2; for music, 1; for expression, 1; for physical training, 2.

For grades 4 to 12, forty-six teachers would be employed: For English, 4; for mathematics, 2; for Latin, 1; for German, 1; for French, 1; for Spanish, 1; for history, 1; for fourth-and fifth-grade English, mathematics, history, and geography (either departmentalized or undepartmentalized), 8; for chemistry, 2; for botany, 2; for physics, 2; for zoölogy, 2; for freehand drawing, 2; for architectural drawing, 2; for mechanical drawing, 1; for music, 2; for expression, 2; for cooking, 1; for sewing, 1; for manual training (not including the industrial shops), 2; for physical training, 6. Four teachers would be employed in the kindergarten department. A unit plant of this size would require one executive building principal, and one supervisor of instruction. Two school nurses and a school physician would also be employed.

Such a distribution of the teaching force would be considered the ideal for a unit school plant of all grades, accommodating between fourteen hundred and twenty-two hundred and fifty children in two duplicate schools. It will be observed that this most careful specialization of teaching does not increase the number of teachers required. At least fifty-six teachers, with a number of special teachers, would be required in any school of fifty-six classes, run on an undepartmentalized plan. The Gary plan, therefore, without increasing the number of teachers, provides for a much higher expertness of service. Indeed, Superintendent Wirt has worked out a form by which a school of thirty-two classes would only require thirty-two teachers, including the special teachers, and with most of the work departmentalized.

Programs may be arranged for schools with any number of classes. The number of classrooms and teachers required will be approximately as follows, including supervisors, special teachers, librarians and playground instructors:—

In the 72-class school, 43 classrooms and 54 teachers are required, in addition to the provision for auditorium, playrooms, and library. For this work 10 teachers are required, making a total of only 64 teachers for 72 classes. The traditional elementary school requires 72 teachers and 72 classrooms for 72 classes; the manual-training shops and the manual-training teachers are extra. In addition there would be librarians in branch public libraries, playground directors in public playgrounds, and special teachers as supervisors of music, drawing, physical training, manual training, and nature-study. Often in the traditional school 80 or more persons are employed for the instruction of 72 classes, not including the building principal and assistants.

An important feature of the teacher organization in the Gary school is the division into senior and junior teachers, or head teacher and assistant teacher. Since each classroom accommodates two teachers according to the duplicate-school plan, the teacher who has been longer in service is designated as head teacher. The less experienced teacher acts under her direction. The head teachers, for instance, in the “X” school may visit and criticize the work of the assistant teachers in the “Y” school during the last hour of the day when the “X” school is not in session. Similarly the junior teacher in the “Y” school may visit the work of the “X” school during the first hour. Inexperienced or weak teachers may thus be developed under the direction of the more experienced. New teachers are thus being constantly trained in the new régime and spirit of the Gary school. The school is thus made an extension of the normal or training-school for teachers. The teachers continue to learn as well as the pupils. The question how teachers are to be procured for the new demands which the Gary plan puts upon them is thus answered. The school itself trains the teachers.

The responsibilities of the teachers for the auditorium period have been discussed. Under the old Gary plan each auditorium period was in charge of one teacher who acted as assistant principal. The teachers alternated in organizing the dramatic and other features of the auditorium work. Recently Superintendent Wirt has decided that this auditorium work functions better if it is specialized. In the new 72-school program, four teachers give their time exclusively to the auditorium exercises. One teacher has charge of the music; one has charge of the art, literature, history, civics, and current events; one has charge of the presentation of material relating to the science work; and one has charge of the presentation of the material relating to the shops and industries. In a properly equipped auditorium, with stereopticon lantern, motion-picture machine, stage, player-piano, organ, and phonograph, the auditorium teachers can do many things better with large numbers of children than the regular teachers can do with small numbers. The regular classroom teachers are expected to coöperate in this frequent presentation of work by their classes in the auditorium in order to use it as a place for “application” work and for motivating the academic work of the school.

In the new program, the “application” work is also specialized. Experience has shown that some teachers have a special talent for this imaginative and constructive side of teaching, and prefer to devote their entire time to it. In this scheme, the “application” teachers have six classes daily out of a total of twelve classes in each of their respective groups. They are thus able to meet each of the twelve classes of their respective groups every other day, week, month, or term. Or these teachers may select from each of the groups of three classes the pupils who need special work in language and mathematics, and meet these pupils every day. For the average pupil all of the opportunity necessary to make an application of his language and mathematics is provided in the regular manual-training, drawing, music, and expression classes. The “application” teachers meet their respective classes in the manual-training, drawing, music, and expression rooms. The facilities of these special rooms are used for “application” purposes. The “application” teachers are expected to make suggestions to the special teachers of these subjects concerning the opportunities to teach language and mathematics through the “application” opportunities of the regular work of their respective subjects. Each “application” teacher may be constituted the head of a group of eight teachers. The “application” teacher is the correlating agent for all the work of the twelve classes; also she works with all of the twelve classes as a constructive examiner, and is constantly placing before the children real problems of the type that the world of industry, business, and citizenship will place before them when they leave school. She may not be able to present these problems as well as the world will present them later, but the immediate and daily reaction while the child is in school should be invaluable in preparing him for meeting the more difficult problems which arise when he has completed his school course.

Class periods may be 40 or 50 or 55 minutes instead of 60. Teachers have six hours in school with 60-minute periods, five and one-half with 55-minute periods, and five hours with 50-minute periods. Pupils have a school day of seven, six and one-half, and six hours respectively, in addition to an hour for luncheon. The playground teachers are on duty an additional hour. Each teacher has an hour a day free for her own work. When her day is finished, she is supposed to leave the building. It is expected that all paper work, as well as all the work of the children, will be done in school. The purpose is to make the teacher’s day only six hours, without the burden of extra time at home.

An interesting extension of this teacher-organization plan is the new training course for outside teachers or principals who are desirous of studying the Gary school plan and teaching methods. Visiting teachers and principals are allowed, at a fee, to attach themselves as assistants to teachers or principals, and follow the work through a course of weeks or months, in exactly the same way that the small child acts as “helper” or “observer” to the older child in the laboratory or shop or the junior to the senior teacher. The fee goes to the teacher or principal who instructs the visitor. This novel way of teaching the principles of the Gary school, not by lectures, but by direct practical assistance on the part of the visitor, is typical of that insistence upon “learning by doing” which is the keynote of the Gary instruction.

The Gary plan acts on the theory that the good teachers should be given initiative and responsibility, while the inexperienced and weak teachers should be trained into initiative and responsibility. The usual plan in school systems is to make the experienced and inexperienced, strong and weak, coördinate with one another, and all subordinate to the supervisor or superintendent. The Gary plan thus secures the utmost from the good teachers, and trains the poor ones.

Instead of employing special “visiting teachers,” as is done in many school systems, the teacher in the Gary school is given the responsibilities of the “visiting teacher” by being made a “register teacher” for a subdivision of the school district. In this way cases of maladjustment to school, home, or neighborhood conditions may be met. The school population of the city is geographically districted in such a way that each district holds about fifty families. The children in a district are assigned, irrespective of age or grade, to one of the grade teachers. Each “register teacher” meets her group once a week for general conference. She gives out the monthly reports. Failure in self-control, irregular attendance, tardiness, and other matters are reported to her. No child is excused from class without her permission, and she is expected to call at the homes of the children when necessary or to meet their parents at the school. Each “register teacher” holds the same children from class to class as long as they live in the district. She corresponds almost exactly to what is known as the “faculty adviser” of the college student, a guide and friend for the general conduct of school life and for difficulties that arise. The “register teacher” is a sort of disciplinary and sociological overseer for a group of children living in the same neighborhood. She has a set of blanks which in fact provide a basis for a complete sociological survey of her district. These she is supposed to fill in, as facts about living conditions, etc., come to her attention. It seems evident that this work, while exacting, involves no more than a teacher should know. No more valuable sociological training could be imagined for the intelligent and progressive teacher. Such work relates her at once to the general community life, and makes her profession of a far more serious importance than is usually given to the grade teachers in the public schools. This work is typical of the demands for a new initiative and intelligence that the Gary plan makes upon the teachers, and also of the immense educative value of these demands.

The effort is constantly made in the Gary schools to bridge the gap between teacher and pupil. An important recent innovation is the institution of “teachers’ assistants.” Students in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades have ten weeks for drawing, ten weeks for science, ten weeks for shopwork, and ten weeks for service as “teachers’ assistants.” The students act as laboratory and studio assistants only in the departments in which they have a special interest. Three or four students assist the science teachers, three or four the drawing teachers, and three or four the shop teachers. Playground teachers, auditorium teachers, music teachers, etc., have as assistants the students especially interested. Each student can, therefore, receive twenty weeks of work in the department in which he has a special interest. Many teachers confess that the first year of teaching gave them a much clearer grasp of the subjects they taught than they were able to secure as students. From the point of view of scholarship, the teachers’ assistants learn more by acting in this rôle for a limited time than they could learn by using the time for additional study. They not only learn how to take initiative and assume responsibility, but they enable the teacher to do much more effective work with the regular classes.

This same fundamental principle of organization is applied to the pupils themselves in their relations with one another. Fourth- and fifth-grade pupils are considered too old for the primary manual training and nature-study, and not quite old enough to use profitably the laboratories and workshops as independent students. They are, therefore, assigned as assistants to students in the higher classes. These children in this way learn more by working with the older students than they can be taught in separate classes by themselves. Not only does the younger child learn by helping the older and watching him and asking questions of him, but the older learns by being required to answer the questions and make the younger child understand what he is doing in shop or laboratory. The object is to make the Gary school, in the words of Superintendent Wirt, “as much as possible like a large family wherein the younger children are learning consciously and unconsciously from the older, and the latter from contact with the younger children are learning to assume responsibility and take the initiative. Some one has said that we send our boy to school, but his playmates, not the school faculty, educate him. This is true because in the conventional school the faculty does not utilize the playmates as assistant instructors.” This “helper” system has proved to be one of the most valuable features of the Gary schools.

For the pupil, organization means a degree of flexibility and individual instruction extraordinary for a public school. Except in the lowest grades, the pupils are classified by subjects as well as by grades, so that practically college methods obtain. Each pupil has his own schedule or program, just as the college student has. The executive principal corresponds to the college registrar in supervising these individual records. The pupil is promoted by subjects and not by grades, and may be promoted or demoted at any time by the supervisor of instruction, acting with the teacher. Grades, therefore, represent merely years of schooling and not classes which are promoted as units. Each regular class has a maximum register of forty, but the class does not work as a unit, any more than a college class of sophomores works as a unit. Some are taking one group of subjects, some another. The work is thus done largely in small groups, or even as individuals. The great wealth of equipment and the economical use of time permit a large amount of practically individual instruction.

The students of each grade are classified into three groups—rapid, normal, and slow workers. The rapid workers can easily complete the twelve years’ course in ten years. They may then enter college at sixteen years of age. The great majority of the Gary pupils who go to college actually come from this rapid-working group. The normal workers complete the course in twelve years, and the slow workers in fourteen. Many of the slow workers do not attempt to complete the course, but specialize in the industrial departments. This grouping contemplates the recognition of differences in the mental endowments and ambitions of children of the same age, so that means are provided for the shortening of school life for some children and the lengthening of it for others. Every child is, as far as possible, working along with his equals, so that the bright child is not held back and rendered listless by the presence of slower members in the class, nor is the slow child discouraged by the competition of the brighter ones. Every pupil may go as fast as he can, and may specialize on the work which he can best do. The presence of a great variety of activities makes it possible for the children who falter on their intellectual work to give more attention to the manual or artistic or physical work in which they may excel.

A special investigation was made in 1914 into the regrading of the pupils of two ninth-grade algebra classes in the Emerson School. The results of regrading the classes into rapid and slow workers showed marked improvement in the interest displayed in the algebra work, especially on the part of the slow workers. No failures were reported among the rapid workers, and only three among the slow workers, and these were due to absence from class. The total class average for the slow division was in three months raised five per cent. In the Jefferson School, which has been operated on the Gary plan longer than any other school, fifty-two per cent of the children are one or more years ahead of their normal grades.

Many features of the Gary plan afford extraordinary opportunities for extra assistance in study and work. The pupil may take extra work in a subject during a proportion of his play, auditorium, or shop hours. If he is a member of the “X” school, he may get the same lesson repeated for him the same day by attending the parallel class in the “Y” school held at a different hour. He may come to the voluntary Saturday school and get extra coaching from the teacher, and the vacation school provides additional opportunity to make up back work. No home work is allowed, except to a small extent in the high-school grades. The long school day, and the freedom which the teacher has to distribute her time and to conduct supervised study, obviate the necessity for carrying books away from the school. Since the state law does not authorize the schools to provide free textbooks, these must be provided by the pupil, or, as in the case of most of the Gary classes, bought by the school and loaned cooperatively to a number of classes. Since home work is not permitted, the books may be kept in the school and distributed to the classes as they require them.

The headquarters of the pupil in the school are not in the classroom, as in other public schools. It is the teacher and not the class which is assigned to the room. The teacher remains in the room and the pupils go to him or her, moving about individually from classroom, shop, laboratory, etc., according to the printed schedule card which each pupil holds. The child’s headquarters is the spacious lockers which line the corridors in the basements. Each child has a private locker for books, papers, and wraps. Strictly speaking, the pupil in the Gary school, except in the lowest grades, has no “teacher,” except the “register teacher.” The departmental system gives him many teachers, but no teacher. This system and the self-governing responsibility for his own schedule is intended to cultivate initiative and responsibility on the part of the pupil. It brings him from an early age into contact with different personalities, gives him the benefit of expert teaching and a variety of movement and exercise. The introduction of these free college methods into the common school is, in the light of public-school practice, a daring experiment, but the Gary school experience seems to show that it is quite possible to give the younger children a large measure of freedom and individuality of treatment.

Most of the schedules of the pupils are arranged with reference to the requirements of the state course of instruction, specialization not being permitted, of course, except in the higher grades, or where some special weakness causes repeated failure. Yet the Gary schools have about twenty per cent of special students who do not intend to finish the course and are specializing in some departments. But since, owing to the individualization of schedules, every pupil is in a sense a “special student,” the presence of this large number of students causes no administrative confusion, nor are the special students—as would be the case in many schools operated on a uniform plan—marked off invidiously from those who are following the more regular course.

The segregation of sexes which the visitor finds in some of the Gary schools and courses is not the result of any prejudice against coeducation. (All the activities are open equally to boys and girls alike, so that girls are found in the printing-shop and in the wood-working classes, etc.) It is due to the effort to give each boy and girl what he or she needs. The organization of many classes, such as play, gymnasium, personal hygiene, and the manual activities which do not appeal to the girls, or the domestic science which does not appeal to the boys, required this unisexual classification, and sometimes it has been retained to avoid the break-up of classes in related subjects.

An example of this effort to provide for all kinds of students in the Gary school is the first-year college work which is offered to students who wish to remain in the school for post-graduate work. The Gary school endeavors thus to overlap the college, just as it has made the common school dovetail into the high school, and the day school into the evening school. When the Gary high-school students have come up through the Gary schools, it is hoped to be able to send students from the local schools at the age of eighteen so prepared that they may complete the ordinary college course in two years.

A word should be said about the interrelation of this flexibility of schedule with the “helper” system. The choice of what subjects the pupil shall study is not as willful and anarchical as it may seem. In the lower grades the regular studies are, of course, prescribed. English, arithmetic, history, and geography must be studied by all, with the attendant “application” and “auditorium” work. All must have physical education, music and expression, and some form of manual and scientific work. The courses in science, industrial work, and music and expression, below the high school, are taken in alternation. Each occupies one third of the school year. The individual choice of the pupil comes in what science or what shop work he or she will take. The beginning is not by chance, but really the result of a natural process of selection by the child. All the early years are made a sort of unconscious prevocational school in which the child tries out his interests and powers. Things are neither forced on him nor aimlessly selected. The child in kindergarten or first three grades moves about the halls and corridors. Since the shops and studios and laboratories are not segregated, but distributed over the building, so that all seem equally significant, the child has every opportunity to become familiar with them. His curiosity is aroused, and, unaided, he is tempted to peer in through the glass doors and windows, and wonder what the older children are doing. When the child has reached the fourth grade, he already has an idea of what activity interests him, and what he would like to try. Fourth- and fifth-grade children then go in as helpers to the seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade students in shops, studios, and laboratories. If the child finds the work does not interest him, he still has a chance to try some other work, and thus gradually sifts out what is likely to be valuable to him for a vocation or avocation. If he has special skill, he may specialize in the higher grades. Such a plan seems to be admirably devised to bring out whatever capacities there are in the pupils, and to insure almost automatically their interest in work which in many schools is mere unintelligent drudgery.

Vocational guidance in such a system is simple and effective. The “auditorium” teacher, in charge of the presentation of material relating to the shops and industries, is able to give information as to the desirability of the several trades and industries as occupations. For example, the school plumber may prepare with his students a plumbing outfit for an ordinary dwelling or apartment, and give a lesson on the way in which plumbing should be cared for in the home. The plumbing instructor may know much about plumbing, but very little about presenting his information to a large body of students. The “auditorium” teacher would assume the responsibility of supervising such auditorium presentations in order that they might be dramatically effective. The day that the plumber and his students present the advantages and disadvantages of plumbing as a trade, the teacher of industries may announce to the boys in “auditorium” period that for the remainder of the week any boy may be excused for a personal consultation with him concerning the desirability of joining a class in plumbing. Students are thus directed in their shop assignments by this “auditorium” teacher of industries. Vocational guidance is thus made possible as far as it is probably wise to undertake such guidance in the school at present. Such a plan directs the mechanically inclined among the children by enlisting their interest and then their will. The “auditorium” teachers for the other activities may also act as advisers in the same way. Teacher and pupil thus coöperate, not in any haphazard fashion, but systematically, in studying the various activities with a view to their future use as a vocation. Such an attitude not only organizes and motivates the work, but gives it seriousness and purpose. Every detail of organization in the Gary school is devised to make the pupil as well as the teacher an integral part of the school life, not only in its own meaning, but in its relation to the outside world.