THE SCHOOL CENTER
HENRY S. CURTIS
Daniel said to Nebuchadnezzar: “Thou, O king, sawest and beheld a great image. His head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms were of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, his legs of iron, and his feet part of iron and part of clay; and a stone smote the image upon the feet that were of iron and clay and brake them in pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold broken in pieces together.”
This image might represent America nearly as well as the empire of “the great king.” In the original democracies of Greece, the freemen met together in the market place to elect from their friends and acquaintances the officers who determined the policy of the state. The weakness of American democracy is that we have not organized this primitive element or demos on which it is supposed to stand.
Politics in our cities have been corrupt, because there have been no meetings of the community to discuss community affairs. The individual has often been reckless in conduct, because he was not acquainted in the section in which he lived and consequently had no social accountability to public opinion. Foreigners have come among us and drifted in and out of the city slum, bearing with them their racial antipathies to each other, and casting no anchor in the locality because at no time have they become a real part of a community. We have had no real city communities or neighborhoods but mere districts of people in no way organized or related to each other. The feet of the image are of miry clay.
In the country sections the situation is little better. In the days of the pioneer the early settlers were drawn together by common dangers and necessities into a brotherhood of the wilderness. They assisted in erecting the cabin of the newcomer. The women had their quiltings and their sewing circles. The whole community met together to marry the lovers and bury the dead. The school house was the common center, where Sabbath service, debate, music school, and “spell down” were held.
These conditions have undergone an almost complete change. The specializing of industry and new machinery have made farmers independent of their neighbors. The community uses of the public school have fallen away.
The last few years have seen a rapid advance in the principles of Democracy through the initiative, referendum and recall, the presidential primaries and other measures; but the fundamental unit is still unorganized. The feet are still of miry clay. To secure the democratic control of the community or district is the greatest problem of our democracy. This result demands that some agora, forum, or neighborhood center shall be restored to the people.
If a neighborhood center is to be created, the facilities which the neighborhood wishes to use must be brought together in a single place. Thus each facility offered will bring patrons, not to itself alone, but to all the others as well, as each department in a department store brings customers to all the others.
A comparatively few years have seen the cities take up as municipal undertakings the public playground, the municipal gymnasium and bath, the branch library, and a few scattered beginnings in the way of municipal camps. While the undertakings have been carried on by the city and maintained by public funds, they have not been really furnished to all the people of the city, as a rule, because they have not been accessible. They have not been placed in communities, they have no definite clientele. They cut across the lines of the existing organizations of the people. The individual has no direct touch with the community that brings him into relationship with them. All of these facilities are at least as much for the children as adults, but they lie off the beaten paths of child travel, and hence secure a minimum rather than a maximum use.
The only public institution that is central to each community is the school. If this can be made the nucleus around which the other institutions can be gathered, it may be possible to create again a modern forum or market place, that will serve the same purpose as did the old. The large undertakings already under way for the improvement of the school itself can not be carried to full success without certain radical improvements in the school equipment. The playground activity demands larger playgrounds. New York is now paying more than a thousand teachers every summer to direct the play in its school playgrounds; but there are very few schools that have an out-door playground fifty feet square. It is not the same thing to play in a school basement that it is to play in the open air. The school basement is always sunless, and the air is not the same as it is in the open. The French requirement for the lighting of school buildings is that there shall be no other building within a distance equal to the height of the school. The gymnastic work, to secure the best results, must be done in the open air, and not in a dusty gymnasium. In London, all the longer exercises are always taken out of doors in pleasant weather. Some foreign cities now require a certain minimum playground space for every child. In Munich this is twenty-five square feet. In London it is thirty square feet. This would mean an acre of playground to 1,452 children, not a large amount surely, and much less than should be taken in the smaller cities. Throughout the middle states and the West, now generally a block for all new schools is given. In some cases the usefulness of the ground is being nearly destroyed by placing the school building in the center, but where the building is placed at the side or end, as it should be, this ground becomes available for many school and community uses.
This block should be shaded by trees. It should have grass plots, if they have to be renewed every year, as Jacob Riis says; and running around the outside should be a narrow space for children’s gardens where all the nature work material of the school could be grown. In one corner should be a school menagerie and benches should be placed under the trees.
During the school hours, the school park should belong to the nurses and mothers with baby carriages. From three to ten p. m. every school day, and all through the summer, it should be the playground of the children and the social center of the adults. In the winter it should be flooded for skating.
Each of the new public schools of New York contains a gymnasium, but most of these are on the top floor, and they have to equip another in the basement for the play center. Each of the new public schools of Cincinnati contains a gymnasium and a swimming pool, and they are generally on the ground floor or near it. Most of the new high schools all over the country contain a gymnasium at least and many of them swimming pools as well. Wherever these facilities are furnished, they are generally used by the school during the day and by the public at night. A number of cities are now building municipal gymnasiums and baths also, but the children want to use the gymnasium and swimming pool during the day, the adults want to use them at night, it is not evident that two sets of gymnasiums and two sets of swimming pools are necessary.
Berlin has an interesting solution of this problem. They house the gymnasium in a separate building in the yard. In this way the noise and dust which is incident to exercise is removed from the school, and it is possible to give more freedom to the work. In most cases there is a swimming pool in the basement where the pupils are taught to swim. But the chief advantage of the gymnasium’s being in a separate building is that it is thus more accessible to the general public as a free gymnasium and bath at night.
Our public schools and especially our summer schools are greatly hampered by the lack of library facilities. The school in order to be successful must create a love of reading. It cannot do this without books. At present only a small proportion of the children have access to a library, and this is often so distant that little use is made of it. The reason is simple, the library is a strange place and its methods are unknown. If the child, despite this, manifests his desire to draw out books, he must often first get some one to be his security for their return, and this is not always easy for a child of laboring or foreign parentage. But the school may safely trust the child because he is a member of the school and known and responsible, when it would not be at all safe for the public library to give out a book to him.
Parents often have little time or inclination to go to libraries for books, but depend on their children to provide them with reading. If the library were a separate building in the school yard or a part of the school, it would be no task for the children to take out and return as many books as might be desired in the home. The growing use of the school as a social center makes it increasingly important that the branch libraries should be connected with it.
The theaters of Greece and Rome were public institutions. Many of the best theaters of Europe are subsidized. The dramatic form of representation is the one that is nearest to having the experience itself. The socialized theater might undoubtedly be one of the greatest agencies for good that could come into any community.
In the past the expense of the public theater has been almost prohibitive; but to the credit of Thomas A. Edison be it said, that he has brought the theater to every man’s door. Most of our new schools contain auditoriums, and the state and city departments of public instruction will soon be required by public sentiment to furnish educational moving-picture films to every school in the state. With the addition of the theater the success of the school social center and the organization of community life is assured.
Besides these activities which should be connected directly with the school itself, the school is the best dispenser of much of the social betterment work for children. If each school had a camp in the country, it could make a much wiser selection of children to be sent there than any fresh air agency can do. No one child would be sent out successively by half a dozen different societies to the exclusion of the needy but timid child. Judging from a very limited experience it has seemed to me that the children are not at their best in the fresh air camps. Often away from all their friends and acquaintances they are homesick and feel that this trip and this camp have no connection with anything else in their lives.
Besides these great disadvantages under which the present system works, there are corresponding advantages that are lost to the school. With such a camp, there would be an opportunity for nature study and gardening of a most approved kind. Athletics might be so carried on as to supply many of the deficiencies of the school year, and boy scout patrols might be organized for all the older boys. But, best of all, the children would then learn to meet their teachers on a common footing and the tone of the school would be improved.
This extension of the school would not mean for the most part a large increase in expense. Already we are getting the larger playgrounds, the auditoriums, the gymnasiums, and the swimming pools in our new school buildings, but the cities are also building municipal baths and gymnasiums, small playgrounds and public libraries in places that have no relationship to any definite community. It is mostly a question of locating without duplication the facilities that all need in places where they will be accessible to all.
We may well ask ourselves if the school is competent to take these new responsibilities. The answer must be that at present the average school principal is certainly not competent to take charge of these new phases, but that men usually rise soon to new responsibilities or new men appear to take their places. These new relations would bring the school and the home together, would make the school a part of life, would give the pupil a new set of associations with his teachers and with study, and in every way would redound to the good of the school and the community.