The Gary school represents not merely the old public school with certain added modern features, but a definite reorganization. Its aim is to form, with its well-balanced facilities of work, study, and play, a genuine children’s community, where the children’s normal healthy interests are centered, and where they learn, in Professor Dewey’s phrase, “by doing the things that have meaning to them as children.” The Gary school aims to meet the comparative failure of the public school to-day to care for the city child. It tries to take the place of the old household and rural community life which provided for our forefathers the practical education of which the city child in his daily life is deprived to-day.

The full significance of the Gary plan can scarcely be understood unless it is seen against this background. “It is impossible,” says Professor Dewey, “to exaggerate the amount of mental and moral training secured by our forefathers in the course of the ordinary pursuits of life. They were engaged in subduing a new country. Industry was at a premium, and instead of being of a routine nature pioneer conditions required initiative, ingenuity, and pluck.... Production had not yet been concentrated in factories in congested centers, but was distributed through villages.... The occupations of daily life engaged the imagination and enforced knowledge of natural materials and processes.... Children had the discipline that came from sharing in useful activities.... Under such conditions the schools could hardly have done better than devote themselves to books.... But conditions changed, and school materials and methods did not change to keep pace. Population shifted to urban centers. Production became a mass affair carried on in big factories, instead of a household affair.... Industry was no longer a local or neighborhood concern. Manufacturing was split up into a very great variety of separate processes through the economies incident upon extreme division of labor.... The machine worker, unlike the older hand worker, is following blindly the intelligence of others instead of his own knowledge of materials, tools and processes.... Children have lost the moral and practical discipline that once came from sharing in the round of home duties. For a large number there is little alternative, especially in large cities, between irksome child labor and demoralizing child idleness.”

The Gary school is an organized attempt to restore this natural education, adapt it to modern demands, and thus avoid these alternatives so disastrous for the future of the child and the quality of the coming generation. By making the public school as much as possible a self-sustaining child community, Superintendent Wirt believes that all the benefits of this older education can be attained. “We cannot,” he says, “trust the other social institutions to remedy the defects. Not more than one quarter of the urban children attend Sunday-School regularly. This makes an average of only two minutes a day for all the days and all the children. In fact, church, Sunday-School, public library, public playgrounds, Y.M.C.A., Boy Scouts, and all other child-welfare agencies do not occupy the time of all the children of a city for more than an average of ten minutes a day. The practical effect of this is that the streets and alleys and the cheap theaters and other commercialized places of amusement have the children for over five hours a day. The cities are not fit places for the rearing of children, because, as a rule, the streets and alleys have twice the time for educating the children in the wrong direction that the school, church, library, and playground have for educating them in the right direction.”

This is the justification for extending the Gary school day to eight hours and limiting vacations. This is the plan which gives ample time for the intensive use of the remarkable school plant described in the preceding chapter. For in place of using for the special work and play activities a part of the already too few regular school hours per year, the Gary school secures additional time for these activities by appropriating the now worse than wasted “street-and-alley time” of the masses of city children. Saturday school, vacation school, even an all-year school, are features of the Gary plan which carry out this principle of providing a school life for the children for as long a time as they can be induced and encouraged to continue it. The Gary school deliberately seeks to employ and satisfy the children’s time with wholesome and interesting activity.

It aims not only to organize the daily life of the child for the greater part of his time, but it seeks to provide for him in a self-sustaining community. This means that all the work and study converge upon the school life. The things that are done in the Gary school contribute to the usefulness, the beauty, or the interest of the school community. The Gary school is built on the sound psychological theory that only such work as has meaning in the life of the school, as lived by the children themselves then and there, will be really learned and assimilated. The school is not only to be a “preparation for life”: it is to be a life itself, as the old household was a life itself. “The idea that children should study exclusively for eight years, and then work exclusively for the rest of their life,” says Superintendent Wirt, “is really a new idea in civilization. The criticism of the modern public school is directed almost entirely at the helplessness of children who are attempting to enter industrial and commercial life from this exclusive study period of eight, twelve, or sixteen years in the schools, and at the fact that the school is not able to get more than half its children beyond the sixth grade of the common school. Formerly the school plus the home and small shop educated the child. The small shop has been generally eliminated and the home has lost most of its former opportunities. A much greater part of the education of the child must be assumed by the school of the present generation. In place of the school, home, and shop, we have the school and the city street educating the great masses of children. The school must do what the school, home, and small shop formerly did together.”

The idea of making the school a self-sustaining community is worked out in the Gary school in the most comprehensive form. The manual-training and industrial shops, for instance, are actually the shops for the school community, and their work goes largely toward the upkeep of the school plant. Vocational training in the Gary school means that whatever work is necessary in the way of repairing, conserving, beautifying, or enhancing the school facilities is done by the pupils themselves. The school, like the old-time industrial home and community, has a large amount of real work that is now being done and must always be done in connection with the equipment of its buildings, grounds, laboratories, shops, etc. The large, lavishly equipped Gary school plants require a force of mechanics to keep them in repair. The usual way of doing this would be to hire outside labor at considerable expense to do the necessary work during school vacations. The Gary schools, on the other hand, which have no long vacations, employ a permanent force of mechanics, and keep them continuously employed throughout the year. Regular union artisans, chosen because of their character, intelligence, and teaching ability, are engaged by the building departments of the school plant. There are carpenters, cabinet-makers, painters, plumbers, sheet-metal workers, engineers, printers, electricians, machinists, foundrymen, etc., sufficient to meet the needs of the schools. This great variety of equipment and maintenance work provides manual activity of a truly educative sort suitable to every stage of the child’s development. The shops of these workmen become the regular manual and industrial training shops of the school. The children work with the artisans in much the same way as old-time apprentices, though, of course, for only a fraction of their time. Just as the child formerly participated in the industrial activities of the household, so now he participates in the real industrial activities of his school. The school artisans, and the nurses, school dentist, and physician, landscape gardener, architect, and draftsman, accountant, storekeeper, office force, lunch-room manager, designer, dress-maker, milliner, all take the place of the father and mother and older brothers and sisters in the old-time, self-sustaining, practically educative household. The children receive all the benefits of doing real work that must be done and of participating in their own school business. And they have the benefit of a completely modern equipment resembling in detail the machinery and processes which they will find when they go out into the larger social community.

In this novel scheme the Gary schools seem to have experienced little difficulty. Superintendent Wirt says that when you have provided a plant where the children may live a complete life eight hours a day in work, study, and play, it is the simplest thing imaginable to permit the children in the workshops, under the direction and with the help of well-trained men and women, to assume the responsibility for the maintenance of the school plant. There can be no exploitation of the children, for masters and pupils are permitted to do only enough work to balance the wages of the masters and the cost of materials. The teacher-workmen would be doing the work whether the children assisted or not. They earn their salaries by their repair and construction work, and the children who desire it get an admirably practical vocational training almost without additional cost to the city. The great expense is avoided of special shop equipment, such as the usual industrial high school or special trade school has for its industrial courses, which are, moreover, wholly unproductive. And the school is able to offer a much greater variety of trades than even the special trade school: for a school plant like the Gary institution will demand for its equipment and maintenance almost every staple trade, industrial and domestic, with the attendant educational opportunities for both boy and girl.

Manual work takes on quite a new meaning when it becomes, as in the Gary schools, productive work for the school community. It is no longer a question of each child doing his “practice” work, his stereotyped “stunt,” in which he soon loses interest. The boys in the Gary carpenter-shop are making desks and tables for the classrooms, cabinets and stools for the laboratories, or bookracks for the library. In the paint-shop they are staining and finishing them; or they are at work on the woodwork of the building, painting or varnishing. The electricians must care for motors, bells, etc., and there is always opportunity for teaching winding, motor construction, and wiring. Plumbing must be installed and kept in repair. Many parts of the plant call for the sheet-metal worker. Foundry and machine workers require in turn a pattern-making shop and draftsmen to furnish plans and specifications. The engineer of the heating, lighting, and ventilating plant gives lessons in firing and in the care of boilers. The printing-shop does all the printing work for the schools,—blanks, forms, reports, charts, etc., besides the illustrated brochures which the pupils of the various departments issue. In the Froebel School there is even a demand for a pottery shop, where the children often discover artistic talent in making the necessary clay utensils for the school. The number and character of the school shops is limited only by the needs of the school community. One year the shoeless condition of some of the children set a demand for a shoe shop, in which old shoes were made over into wearable new ones.

The visitor to the Gary school finds everywhere little groups of busy children, absorbedly interested, working on the different needs of the school, under kindly and intelligent teacher-workmen. He finds that there is enough real work in the school plant to keep occupied for his hour or more a day every child who is interested in manual work—and most children are—or who desires to become familiar with a trade. Such work is highly educational, and it is not drudgery. It is not specialized, nor is it segregated from the academic studies. The industrial work for both boys and girls is an integral part of the school life in which every one who cares for a rounded education must participate in some form or other.

There is not a department which does not contribute in some way to the school community life. The caretakers of the grounds are under the supervision of the botany and zoölogy (nature-study) departments. The children work with them in taking charge of and caring for the gardens, lawns, trees, and shrubs. The botany classes care also for the school conservatory and for the smaller experimental conservatory in the botany laboratory. The zoölogy classes have charge of the school zoo as well as the collection of pets in the zoölogy room. Even the drawing classes contribute, the mechanical-drawing pupils in preparing plans for the industrial work and construction, the art classes in decorating the friezes of their room or in designing details for the building.

Domestic science in the Gary school is not taught as a separate “subject.” It means the practical operation of the school lunch-room under the direction of an instructor and a cook assistant. The domestic-science room is a real kitchen, dining-room, and pantry in which the daily lunch is prepared and served to such teachers and pupils as desire it. The domestic-science work for the girls then consists of nothing but this daily service, older and younger girls coöperating with cook and teacher. The salary of the assistant is paid out of the profits of the lunch-room. Since the food is sold, all expenses for supplies are charged to the lunch department. The sewing-room is operated on a similar plan. The instructor has as assistants a practical dress-maker, laundress, and milliner. Their salaries and all materials used are paid for from the savings made by doing the necessary laundry and needlework for the school. Both cooking and sewing departments are therefore self-sustaining school-community shops. The school board makes no appropriations for the support of the lunch-room, dressmaking, laundry, and millinery departments other than the salaries of the two head teachers. All bills are paid directly by the department managers, and no accounts are kept by the school board. The other shops are self-supporting in the sense that the ordinary appropriations for painting, cabinet-work, electrical work, plumbing, printing, etc. (which would have to be paid anyway), generally pay the salaries of the teacher-workmen and the costs of the material. The ideal attainment would be to make the shops all self-sustaining school-community shops.

The work of all these shops requires elaborate systems of accounting. All this work is taken charge of by the instructors and pupils of the commercial departments of the school. The work the children do in the shops is computed on the basis of regular union wages for the particular trade, and they are “paid” in imitation checks, upon which their standing in the course is based. For these payments the commercial pupils manage a regular school banking system, with savings accounts, etc. They also have charge, under the instructors’ supervision, of all the regular accounting and secretarial work for the school administration. Thus their bookkeeping, stenography, and typewriting contribute directly to the needs of the school. The commercial pupils also take care of the ordering and distribution of supplies. Some of these, such as the coal and cement used in the schools, are in turn tested by the chemistry classes in their laboratory to see whether they come up to specifications. The school “store” is as important a feature of the school community as the school “bank,” and the commercial pupils take turns in “keeping” it. The criticism that the pupils are incompetent to handle all these matters is met by the obvious consideration that the school cannot afford to graduate pupils in accounting and secretarial work who cannot perform these functions efficiently for themselves and their school. At present, it should be mentioned, these departments are said not to be self-supporting, in the way that the domestic-science shops are.

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.

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.