Not merely has the plan of the building been improved, but the equipment has also been thoroughly worked over. Drinking fountains or individual drinking cups have taken the place of the pail and the common dipper. Toilets have been furnished in a way which makes it possible to keep them clean and wholesome.
The matter of seats may be discussed from both points of view suggested in earlier paragraphs, that is, from the point of view of attention to the health and comfort of pupils and from the point of view of the work which pupils have to do in school. The old uncomfortable benches have given place to comfortable individual seats which, in the best-equipped schools, have been made adjustable so that they fit the individual pupil. Where this complete adjustment to individual size is not provided, at least an approximation is secured by seats of two or three heights in each room. Desks with broad, smooth, sloping tops have been added to make writing and other kinds of school work easy. The most recent improvements have to do with the storage of books and materials. Formerly the pupil’s knees were wedged below the storage drawer, or the working top of the desk was inconveniently or unhygienically high. The storage drawer is now being relegated to a position under the chair or to a locker on the side of the room.
Relation of Equipment to the Course of Study
The adaptation of the desk to the pupil’s work has been carried to the full limit in the shops and drawing rooms and domestic-science laboratories where work benches and laboratory equipment have been substituted for the conventional seats. That much remains to be accomplished is vividly set forth in the following extract from the writing of one of the most suggestive critics of the present-day school. In the second chapter of “The School and Society” Professor Dewey writes:
Some few years ago I was looking about the school supply stores in the city, trying to find desks and chairs which seemed thoroughly suitable from all points of view—artistic, hygienic, and educational—to the needs of the children. We had a good deal of difficulty in finding what we needed, and finally one dealer, more intelligent than the rest, made this remark: “I am afraid we have not what you want. You want something at which the children may work; these are all for listening.” That tells the story of the traditional education. Just as the biologist can take a bone or two and reconstruct the whole animal, so, if we put before the mind’s eye the ordinary schoolroom, with its rows of ugly desks placed in geometrical order, crowded together so that there shall be as little moving room as possible, desks almost all of the same size, with just space enough to hold books, pencils and paper, and add a table, some chairs, the bare walls, and possibly a few pictures, we can reconstruct the only educational activity that can possibly go on in such a place. It is all made “for listening”—for simply studying lessons out of a book is only another kind of listening; it marks the dependency of one mind upon another. The attitude of listening means, comparatively speaking, passivity, absorption; that there are certain ready-made materials which are there, which have been prepared by the school superintendent, the board, the teacher, and of which the child is to take in as much as possible in the least possible time.
There is very little place in the traditional schoolroom for the child to work. The workshop, the laboratory, the materials, the tools with which the child may construct, create, and actively inquire, and even the requisite space, have been for the most part lacking. The things that have to do with these processes have not even a definitely recognized place in education. They are what the educational authorities who write editorials in the daily papers generally term “fads” and “frills.” A lady told me yesterday that she had been visiting different schools trying to find one where activity on the part of the children preceded the giving of information on the part of the teacher, or where the children had some motive for demanding the information. She visited, she said, twenty-four different schools before she found her first instance.[32]
These paragraphs serve to indicate the close relation between school equipment and the course of study. Since the above criticism was written, general conditions have undergone a radical change. Shops have become common, and there is an increasing emphasis on activities. Correspondingly, there is a change in the conception of the course of study, as we shall see in later chapters.
Modern School Construction and Costs
In the meantime the erection of buildings with shops, auditoriums, laboratories, kitchens, and gymnasiums has given rise to new and urgent problems. First, the cost of these new buildings is great, and many school boards are driven to ask whether the community can afford to erect them. The superintendent of schools of New York City recently reported to the Board of Education of that city that a building program would have to be adopted which would cost the city $40,000,000 in a period of five years. In order to provide buildings many cities have been obliged to issue bonds which will fall, in the years to come, as a financial burden on the generation which is being educated in the buildings.
The urgency of these financial problems is aggravated by the fact that in many school systems the elaborate buildings are not used to the full extent of their capacity. Indeed, it comes to be a most interesting economic and educational problem to inquire what is the capacity of one of these buildings. For example, what does an auditorium represent in the way of actual enlargement of the school plant? Is it merely a place in which the school may come together for a general exercise once a week, or should it be used every day? If it is used for twenty minutes or half an hour every morning, should it be closed during the remainder of the day? As a matter of public economy should it be made available to adults at hours when it is not needed for school purposes, as, for example, in the evening or in the late afternoon?
Such questions as the foregoing multiply with every new addition to the buildings. The old buildings equipped only for study and recitations were economical in the extreme; the new buildings are often lavish.