A truly public school would let nothing communal remain alien to itself. In the chemistry class at the Emerson School I actually found the children helping in the necessary chemical work for the city. The class was simply an extension of the municipal laboratory. Gary, of course, has the good fortune or the good sense to have as chemistry teacher the municipal chemist. The older children act as his assistants. With him the class tests the city water, the various milk supplies of the town. Under the inspector, they visit dairies, workshops, bakeries and food-stores. Last year they published a milk bulletin containing general information and reports of their tests. I could not see that it was essentially inferior in quality to one that an agricultural school might have issued. When I came upon this class it was testing sugars and candies, from the different shops of the town, for purity and for use of coloring matter. Another class was experimenting with soft drinks, studying questions of solution, suspension and crystallization, with ramifications, I was told, towards the physiological effect of certain products. The children were practically deputy food inspectors, and made reports on the official blanks. The chemist assured me that he had not lost a case in prosecuting for violation of the pure food laws. In East Chicago, where school-children were ostensibly not trained as a vigilance committee in scientific investigations, the chemist could not get a single conviction.
The children also test the materials supplied to the school, the coal, cement, etc., to see whether they come up to specifications. I saw a group trying to make soap for the use of the school. The chemist assured me—college-trained ignoramus that I was amidst this youthful expertness—that there was scarcely a principle of the science, theoretical or practical, that he could not develop from this work, all so directly motivated by the daily life around the children. I wish I could convey the fine caliber of this young chemist as he stood in his laboratory with the children working around him, his clear poise between the theoretical and the practical making him for me the ideal symbol of science working ceaselessly at the world around to make it cleaner and healthier and more livable.
That chemistry class in Gary has a high and momentous significance to me. It was distinctly not play, as all other laboratory work in school or college that I have seen has been play. I was surprised to find how completely the doing of real work banished the amateur atmosphere and at the same time made the work infinitely more interesting. Mr. Wirt says the child is a natural scientist, indefatigably curious and resourceful, quick and accurate. The little children actually seem to achieve less breakage than the older. What kind of a community we are going to have when any large proportion of the children grow up to observe and test the physical conditions under which they live—when they get the scientific-deputy-inspector habit, so to say—and what would happen to some forms of political jugglery if a younger generation got used to thinking in terms of qualitative and quantitative tests, I leave to the imagination. But it seemed to me that that chemistry class was one of the most important activities in the United States to-day.
XV
REALLY PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Characteristic of the “public sense” of the Gary schools is the class in history and geography, which I found at work getting an imaginative background of the larger social world. To the news-board in the hall they brought clippings that seemed important. The history room was smothered in maps and charts, most of them made by the children themselves. There was a great red Indiana ballot, a chart of the State Senate, a diagram of State administration, a table showing the evolution of American political parties, war-maps and pictures. The place was a workshop, with broad tables for map drawings, and a fine spread of magazines and papers. “Laboratory” work in history, tried so timorously in some of our most daring colleges, was in full swing in a Gary high school class.
When I visited the room the class was concerning itself with reports on “The city as a healthful place to live in,” with special emphasis on parks, because the town had been waging its campaign for the new water-front park. Little outlines on Greek and Roman cities, medieval and modern cities, had been worked up in the school library—bountifully equipped as a branch of the city public library. I had walked into a true course on town-planning, at once the most fascinating and significant of current social interests and the study that packs into itself more historical, sociological and geographical stimulation than almost any I know. A class that had gone through those reports would have the materials for exactly the social background that our current imaginations need; and, moreover, all those materials would be firmly placed in the community setting.
There is a charming communal self-consciousness about Gary, and this sort of history is the thing that feeds it. One class had been working on a comparison of Athenian and Spartan education with Gary education. This struck me as peculiarly delightful. Such social introspection we rather badly lack in America, yet it is the only soil in which intellectual virtue can ever grow. The ancient history class has for its purpose: “to improve its members as American citizens by a study of the experiences of the ancient peoples.” This class, after some classroom turbulence, formed a voluntary society which is duly opened and conducted by the president, while the instructor lingers in a leisurely fashion outside. I know of no more admirable reason for historical study than this phrase, the natural expression of the Gary child who wrote the constitution for this class.
They do not seem to know whether they are studying “Civics” or not. They are too busy soaking in from real events a familiarity with history as it is lived and the community as it works. I throw in here an advertisement for the “Literary Digest” and the “Independent,” which the pupils regularly read. They study history backward, so that it explains what is happening to-day. They repeatedly dramatize remote times. They are talking of coöperating with the State historical pageant. It seemed to me that these children were actually learning their social world in the spontaneous natural way that the intelligent child learns it from newspapers and books and from the slow, unconscious widening of horizon for which he must usually look quite outside the school.
If other community institutions have anything educational to offer outside the school, or if parents and children think they have, Mr. Wirt’s school lets the children go to these out of their auditorium or play hour. The churches may have them for religious instruction—there is no Bible-reading or prayer in the Gary schools—and thus avoid the imagined necessity for a special kind of church day-school. Already a Polish parochial school in Gary has lost its reason for being and vanished. Y. M. C. A.’s, neighborhood houses, special music-teachers, etc., may also act as extensions of the school. It will be interesting to see how successfully some of these institutions which purport to form the child’s morals and care for his soul’s destiny prove their supplementary value, and how far they are not simply having joyfully extended to them a long rope by which they may hang themselves.
To Mr. Wirt the school is not more a community than the community is a school. He believes that parks and playgrounds should follow the schools, and in Gary he demands twenty acres for every school plant. He does not rely upon public playgrounds, to which, as experience shows, only a proportion of children can be enticed from the streets, but his playground is a part of the school on equal terms with the other activities. Otherwise these very expensive grounds which cities are providing are apt to be futile. Mr. Wirt’s policy is to make it as easy as possible for the community to use the schools. He does not force people to the opportunities, but he puts them where the people cannot easily evade them. He does not drive children to the public library, but he has a branch put in each school. The Gary schools are open night and day, practically every day in the year. The Indiana law—protector from tyranny—forbids more than ten months of school a year, but allows vacation schools. Sunday sees popular lectures. The Gary schools seem almost as public as the streets.