This children’s community, as worked out by Mr. Wirt in the Gary schools, is a work-study-and-play school of the most varied kind. It represents, in fact, an ideal school plant which was well outlined in Mr. Wirt’s mind when he first came to Gary. Schools like the magnificent Emerson and Froebel plants in Gary, and the new Pestalozzi School, for which plans have already been drawn and the site bought, represent the working-out in concrete form of this ideal. At the same time, it must be understood that the essential features of the Wirt plan are possible in schools which were not built from the ideal plan. Perhaps Mr. Wirt’s greatest triumph in Gary is not these new schools, but the old Jefferson School, which he found when he came to the town, and which, by ingenious remodeling, he turned from a conventional school-building into a completely functioning school. If the Wirt plan is momentous as showing what a really modern public school should embody, it is no less momentous in showing how easily the old type of schoolhouse may be adapted to the varied life of the school community that is the Wirt school.

It will first be necessary to describe the ideal school plant as represented in the Emerson and Froebel Schools in Gary. This plant carries out a belief in educating the whole child, physically, artistically, manually, scientifically, as well as intellectually. Mr. Wirt believes that by putting in the child’s way all the opportunities for varied development, the child will be able to select those activities for which he is best suited, and thus develop his capacities to their highest power. This can be done only in a school which provides, besides the ordinary classrooms, also playgrounds and gardens, gymnasiums and swimming-pools, special drawing and music studios, science laboratories, MACHINE-SHOPs, and intimate and constant contact with supplementary community activities outside the school. The Wirt school is based on a fourfold unity of interests,—play and exercise, intellectual study, special work in shop and laboratory, etc., and social and expressive activity in auditorium or outside community agency.

Between these activities there is no invidious distinction. The manual and artistic are not subordinated to the intellectual, as in the ordinary school. The “special activities” are not mere trimmings to the “regular work,” but neither is the latter neglected in favor of the former. The ideal of the Wirt plan is that the child should have every day, in some form or other, contact with all the different activities which influence a well-rounded human being, instead of meeting them perfunctorily once or twice a week, as in the ordinary school. This does not mean, of course, that every child is expected to develop into a versatile genius, equally able in science and music and shopwork and history. Most children are sternly limited in their capacities, and will be unable to assimilate more than a small part of what the school offers them. But the Wirt school definitely offers the opportunity. If there are capacities, they have the chance to develop, while no child need lack that speaking acquaintance with the varied interests of work and study which now the old traditional type of school so tragically denies.

It is an essential feature of the Wirt scheme that this varied work be provided for all the children from the earliest possible years. The lavish equipment of the ideal Wirt school plant may be paralleled in other communities than Gary, but it is paralleled only in the case of the secondary schools. It is a notorious fact that, of the children who begin the American public school, only one fifth ever reach even the first year of the high school. So far it is the high school or the highest grammar grades that have received practically all of the advantages of broadening educational endeavor,—vocational training, science laboratory work, the study of civics, domestic science, etc. This means that the vast majority of school-children leave school with nothing but the barest intellectual training, without ever having come in contact with points of view and ways of doing things that are absolutely essential to any understanding or effectiveness in the world above the very lowest. Against this fundamentally undemocratic system, which denies help to those who need it most, the Wirt plan resolutely sets its face.

The ideal Wirt school contains in one school plant the complete school, with all the classes from the kindergarten through the common school and high school.

By this plan both economic and educational advantages are realized. From an economic point of view, it is cheaper to have large, completely equipped centers than to duplicate the equipment in a number of smaller centers. From an educational point of view, it enables pupils to bridge the chasm between the elementary grades and the high school. By ceasing to make the high school a separate institution to be “entered” or “graduated from,” pupils find no place to stop when they have completed the eight grades.

The complete school, Mr. Wirt believes, offers important moral gains. “The development of character, habits of industry, reliability, good health, and the growth of intelligence require time,” he says, “and must be a continuous process throughout the entire life of the child.” The complete school gives an opportunity for that coöperation or “apprenticeship” between the younger and older children, which is so important a feature of the Wirt school, and this association breaks down the snobbery of age which causes so much unhappiness in childhood.

It must be admitted that in Gary, owing to the progressive mortality in attendance which is common everywhere, it is possible to realize the complete school only in the Emerson and Froebel plants. At the same time it must be remembered that these schools care for three quarters of the school-children of the town. In the elementary schools which Mr. Wirt is reorganizing in New York, he is asking that there shall be included at least two of the high-school years, in order that the complete school may be approximated as closely as possible. In Gary, they are working for a school which is even more than “complete,” for they aim to include even the first year and perhaps even the second of the ordinary college course. Stretching down boldly past the kindergarten to a nursery for babies, and up into the college itself, the Wirt school thus gives a fundamentally new orientation to education, shows it graphically and practically as a continuous process, and breaks down those artificial barriers by which we measure off “education,” and make it easy for people to “finish” it. The Wirt school seems definitely to forecast the day when the public school will have swallowed the college, and the “higher education” will have become as local and available as the three R’s.

If the school is to educate the whole child, the first need is evidently a place for him to grow. “The best of education,” says Professor Terman, “is but wisely directed growth.” “The activities of a child,” says Professor Dewey, “are the means by which he becomes acquainted with his world, and by which he learns the use and limits of his own powers.” The lack of free activity in the conventional school has been the major cause of those symptoms of morbidity which school hygienists have brought to the attention of educators within the last few years. Over-pressure and confinement have made the school a manufactory for evils which the next generation will look back to with amazement at the blindness of the educational world which permitted it.

The ideal school will make the playground the very center of its life. The school in the Wirt plan covers a site of from ten to twenty acres. Actually the Emerson School in Gary has ten acres; Froebel has twelve; the new Tolleston site covers twenty acres. Of this ideal site of twenty acres, ten acres in front of the school-building are purchased by the city and maintained by it as an open public square or small park. The remaining ten acres are bought by the school for the building site and playgrounds. It is the intention in Gary to have these park-school playgrounds distributed over the city so that few families will live more than half a mile away from one of them.

It is a cardinal principle of the Wirt plan that the parks and playgrounds of a city should be placed as adjuncts of the schools. It is the schools that they primarily serve and it is with the schools that they should be grouped. Millions of dollars have been wasted in the public-playground movement in this country through disregard of this fact. There is a good story of a Chicago playground instructor who, when asked if the playgrounds coöperated with the schools, replied, “Sure we do! If we see any kid on here between nine and three, we chase him off!” This is symbolic of the lack of intelligent coöperation between child-welfare agencies. It is this wasteful and ineffective situation which the Wirt plan remedies by boldly annexing park and playground to the school itself. A comparison of the Chicago playgrounds with the Gary school playgrounds shows the immensely greater public service rendered under the Wirt scheme. Chicago has one of the most elaborate systems of recreation parks and field-houses in the country. Yet in a district only one fortieth the size of the Chicago district, one Gary school, providing for both children and adults, gave indoor gymnasium work to three times as many people; shower-baths to one third as many; outdoor gymnasium to an equal number; the use of swimming-pools to half as many; use of the assembly halls to four times as many; and to as many, the use of clubrooms and reading-rooms. Thus, in educating the child’s body, and giving him space to grow and play, the Wirt school enormously increased the opportunities of every one in the district, old and young, to secure the same advantages.

The ideal Wirt school plant, such as the Emerson School in Gary, in its open space of ten acres, besides its playground filled with apparatus, has gardens, tennis courts, ball fields, running tracks, and handball courts. For the younger children there are wading-pools and sandpits. One field is arranged so that it may be flooded in winter for skating. There are two acres of school-gardens, and a cluster of cages and houses for the animals of the school zoo. The outdoor equipment is, in other words, on the scale of a college or a wealthy private school which can afford spacious grounds and provision for every athletic sport. The Gary schools are, however, public schools, and these facilities are open to all the children of all ages and all the time.

It is customary for our newer high schools to have gymnasiums, but the common school is rarely provided for. In the Wirt school, the common school shares, of course, in the extensive gymnasium equipment. The Emerson School has two gymnasiums, one for boys and one for girls. It has also a large swimming-pool.

The Froebel School has two gymnasiums and two swimming-pools. The Jefferson School has a large gymnasium, though only the common school is provided for in the Jefferson. The other Gary schools all have gymnasiums proportionate to their size. In the new school plants it is intended to build pergolas about the inner court which will contain open-air classrooms and additional outdoor gymnasium space. Nothing is omitted which will provide the right physical conditions for the child’s growth and development from his earliest years.

Coming to the school-building itself, we find in the Emerson and Froebel Schools architectural creations of unusual beauty and impressiveness. The school-building is built around a great court, with broad halls as wide as streets, and well lighted from the court. These broad halls serve not only as the school streets for the constant passage of the children between their work, but also as centers for the “application” work, or for informal study. They are so wide that all confusion is avoided, and they suggest to the visitor that they serve the school community in the same way that the agora or forum did the ancient city. In the Emerson School the beginning of an art gallery has been made. It suggests the idea that just as the schools ought to absorb the playgrounds, so they ought to absorb the museums and galleries. Pictures and objects of art and interest become unreal and artificial when immured in isolated museums, which can be visited only at special times and with effort. They should be at hand in the school, fertilizing and beautifying every moment of its daily life. The artistic sense can be cultivated only by bringing children into contact daily and almost unconsciously with beautiful things. The schools themselves must be art galleries, and these fine corridors of the Wirt school indicate the way by which a wholly new orientation is to be given to our public galleries by using them as adjuncts to the education of children.

Similarly with museums. The teaching of the Gary schools, based fundamentally on concrete things and processes, needs to be constantly in touch with the objects which it is our custom to store in dead museums. The school museum is an essential feature of the Wirt school. The Wirt plan does not contemplate the taking of children docilely about to visit museums, as some progressive teachers are doing. It contemplates bringing the museums into the schools, so that the children can know the treasures and live with them and learn about them.

And similarly with libraries. Mr. Wirt believes that the school may do the work of the public library much more efficiently and much more economically than the library can itself do it. He has shown in Gary that in a school branch of the public library, library maintenance and circulation cost per book circulation is only about five per cent of the cost in the main library, while the life of the book circulated in sets under the control of the teachers is ten times that of the usual circulation book in the library. In both the Emerson and Froebel Schools there is a branch of the public library, under a library assistant. Children use the library as a part of their regular work under the supervision of the assistant and teachers. All sorts of stereoscopic pictures, photographs, collections of pictures, atlases, etc., can thus be provided, which would be impossible for the classroom. The library becomes the storehouse of the knowledge of the school, and the children learn to recognize it as such. Again, the library is already an important feature of many of the newer high schools throughout the country. In the Wirt school, however, all the elementary classes use it also.

The Wirt school contemplates bringing all the cultural resources of the community to bear on the school. It makes the school the proper and natural depository for whatever the community has to offer in artistic interest or intellectual resource. Like most of the features of the Wirt plan, this consolidation of gallery, museum, and library in the school is as economically efficient as it is educationally valuable.

A word must be said about the auditorium. Few schools have assembly rooms like that in the Froebel School in Gary, with its stage large enough for a full-sized basketball game or athletic contest. The unique rôle of the auditorium in the Wirt school will be described in the next chapter. It assists materially in educating the whole child by giving him opportunities for public expression before the school community.

The classrooms in the ideal Wirt school are much more attractive than the ordinary classrooms, far less formal and far less crowded. In some of them the old-fashioned school desk and seat have been retained, largely, according to Mr. Wirt, to meet the prejudice of the parents. Owing to the frequent change and movement of classes, however, this peculiarly flagrant instrument of educational perversity does little harm. Many of the lower grades have a desk, made in the school, which is a kind of workbench. These desks have vises attached, and loose tops, which can be readily replaced when soiled or worn out. The seat is a four-legged stool, which can be pushed out of the way when the child is using his desk for a workbench. On occasion the children can take up their stools and desktops and go off to work in the halls or garden. Such a room is an ideal classroom, with its hint of the workshop and its lack of rigidity. In the history room in the Emerson School are broad tables that can be used for map-drawing. The idea is to give to each classroom the physical setting and the furniture which will best enable a particular kind of work to be done there. The result is that the classrooms of the Wirt schools have a character of their own, quite different from the colorless and depressing effect of the ordinary classroom. They are not merely rooms where children study together and tamely recite, but essentially workshops where children do interesting things with their minds, just as in the shops they do interesting things with their hands. The history room is a real history laboratory. Maps and charts made by the pupils cover the walls, magazines lie about, pictures and books overflow the tables. The visitor realizes that he is in a room saturated with history, past and present. It is easier to learn in a room where everything appeals to the imagination.

Mr. Wirt says that you never can tell when a child is learning. The time that he makes progress is not necessarily the recitation time. It is the constant impingement of impressions that really educates him, and it is this that the intellectual side of the Wirt school is skillfully designed to cultivate. Music and expression and drawing are taught, not in regular classrooms, but in special studios, which are genuine studios equipped with all the facilities to impress upon the child with what seriousness these things are taken in the Wirt school. Art tends to mean much more to a child brought up in such a school, because he works at it in an impressive environment.

The science laboratories for botany, zoölogy, chemistry, physics, are not only well-equipped laboratories, but workshops as well. The botany room in the Gary school has a large conservatory of vines and plants at the end; the zoölogy room has a menagerie of small pets, fowls and birds, guinea-pigs and rabbits. The physics rooms are in contact with a machine room where automobiles and other machines illustrate the practical application of scientific principles. Everywhere the attempt is made to give a dramatic and practical physical setting to the work and study, so that the child may be learning all the time by suggestion and imitation. And everywhere the attempt is made to show that no one activity is any more important than any other. Each activity represents one side of that whole child to educate whom this school plant has been built.

The manual and industrial work is, of course, an essential feature of the Wirt school. The shops are much more extensive than is customary in even the most progressive public school, or even in the special trade school. The Emerson School in Gary has, for instance, a carpentry-shop, cabinet-shop, paint-shop, foundry, forge, machine-shop, printery, sheet-metal shop, electrical shop, sewing-room, and cooking- and dining-rooms, all admirably equipped as regular shops, and not merely as manual-training rooms. The Froebel School has, besides these shops, a plumbing-shop, a laundry, a shoemaking-shop and a pottery-shop. In the smaller schools several shops are combined into one, as at the Jefferson, though the work done is just as genuine as at the ideal plant. The number of shops, or the variety of work, is, as we shall see in the next chapter, limited only by the services which the school demands in the way of repairing or enhancing its physical facilities.

When we have mentioned the room for commercial studies, the supply-store, the kindergartens and nurseries, the draughting-rooms, indoor playrooms, teachers’ room, conservatory, doctor’s room and dental clinic, offices, etc., our survey of the school plant is complete. The arrangement of rooms itself, however, is very significant. As we pass around the second floor of the Froebel School, for instance, we meet, in this order, pottery-shop, laundry, freehand drawing-room, two classrooms, physics laboratory, music and expression studios, conservatory, two classrooms, botany laboratory, and four more classrooms. The shops are not segregated in the basement, but the children in their various activities work side by side. Classrooms are placed next to laboratories, and shops next to studios, in order to impress the pupil with the unity of the program, and in order that the younger pupils may have constantly before their eyes an inviting future and opportunity. All the rooms, moreover, have glass doors, and the shops have windows, so that the children, passing through the halls, may look in and see others at work at unfamiliar tasks. In this way their curiosity is likely to be aroused and the ambition to work at these interesting activities in which they see the older children engaged.

In this juxtaposition of the various activities, therefore, the child has impressed upon him that school life is a unity in breadth, just as the combining of the elementary and secondary school impresses him with the fact that his school life is a unity in length. No opportunity is lost to touch his imagination and excite his curiosity. The school plant itself, in its mere arrangement and construction, it will thus be seen, serves a very important educational purpose. The careful detail with which this has been worked out in these ideal school plants of Gary makes the Wirt school in its physical aspect something very much more significant than a mere collection of facilities. Those facilities fit into one another according to a very comprehensive plan. They form organs of a genuine school life, which educates the whole child.

This fourfold division of study and recitation facilities, studio, workshop, and laboratory facilities, auditorium facilities, and application and play facilities, is essential to the working of the Wirt plan. Where the ideal school plant is impossible, this fourfold plan may yet be possible. As has been said, the greatest triumph of the Wirt plan in Gary is, perhaps, the Jefferson School, a building of conventional style, which had been erected before Mr. Wirt came to Gary. It was an ordinary school-building with ten classrooms and auditorium, but no other facilities. By turning the spacious attic into a gymnasium, by transforming five of the classrooms into music and art studios and nature-study laboratories, by building a general jack-of-all-trades workshop around the engine- and boiler-room in the cellar, by building a domestic-science kitchen in an unused corner, putting lockers into wasted space, and by equipping the playground with apparatus, Mr. Wirt succeeded in transforming an ordinary school-building, whose prototype may be found in almost any town in the land, into a full-fledged, varied, and smoothly running Wirt school. The reorganization of schools in New York City and other places has been done by Mr. Wirt along similar lines.^[1]

Where, in most cases, a mere rearrangement of classrooms and the institution of shops and laboratories will transform a school, in others special annexes are necessary. These can be built usually, however, at comparatively small cost. The use of portable houses by the smaller schools of Gary has enabled the small wayside “district school,” hitherto confined entirely to study and recitation, to transform itself into a genuine Wirt school, with its fourfold work and study. Shop, auditorium, and laboratory and studio can be provided in the form of small portable houses, and the capacity of the school as well as its facilities can thus be greatly increased.