Education and living

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

If the school is to be not only a community embryonic of current society but also a school-community of itself, it must have some forum or theater where everything that is peculiarly interesting in any part of the school may be brought dramatically to the attention of the rest of the school. This Mr. Wirt provides in the auditorium hour, so drearily used in the ordinary school for religious exercises, “speaking pieces,” and moral homilies. In Gary every child goes to “auditorium” for an hour each day, but he listens there to talks by the special teachers about their work, lantern-lectures and dramatic dialogues written by the children themselves from their history or literature work. There may be moving-pictures, instrumental music, gymnastic exhibitions. The initiative and responsibility are left to the teachers. There seems to be no limit to the interest and the possibility of what may go on in this free little secular theater except what the imagination of teachers and children can suggest. There is always singing, and of a most excellent tone. “Auditorium” is one of Mr. Wirt’s novel ideas. It seems to make unreal the old categories of “entertainment” and “edification,” just as the rest of the school seems to damage the conceptions of “work” and “play.” There was a pleasant informality about things, with the girls sewing at the back of the theater, and the young audience breaking into whistling as they marched out to the music of the piano. “Auditorium” ought to be quite as important as Mr. Wirt thinks it is. What school-work might become, lived always in the possible light of its intelligent presentation to the school audience in dramatic form, we do not know, because educators have never been dramatists. The Gary schools have special teachers for expression, but the American spirit is in many ways so inexpressive that the idea can thus far be only a frank and delightful experiment.

I liked particularly in the “auditoriums” I visited the intermingling of children of all ages. This is one of the many ways by which the Gary school breaks down the snobbery of age which causes so much unhappiness in childhood, and fixes the adult mind with so many delusions. I came across a significant editorial in the Emerson School paper which showed me how useful this intermingling was in smashing caste lines that were already forming. The editor acknowledged that the expected objectionableness of the “youngsters” had not asserted itself. One got a real sense of a new sympathy breaking upon these already sophisticating minds of high-school children.

I mention this because it is typical of Mr. Wirt’s genius to obliterate artificial lines and avoid mechanical groupings. His ideal school is one like the Emerson in Gary, a complete school, from kindergarten to college, in the same building, with all the varied facilities used by all classes. The grading is of the utmost flexibility. The traditional twelve grades are followed, but classes work in “rapid,” “average,” or “slow” groups, according as the various children give promise of completing the State-prescribed curriculum in ten, twelve or fourteen years. The child may pass from group to group or from grade to grade at any time on the examination of the supervisor of instruction. The child himself has no sense of being “graded” or even “marked.” Report-cards are rather a concession to parents’ weaknesses. If the child needs additional help, there is the parallel school, so that he may have a double lesson the same day. And the Saturday school offers another opportunity.

All studying is supposed to be done in school hours. The fearful bogey of “home-work” is laid. In this free interchange of groups the child acquires a sense of individuality. Each has practically an individual schedule of work, for the organization of which the executive principal, who devotes all his time to such matters, is responsible. Except in the youngest classes, the children seem to move about individually to their different rooms and shops. By this drastic carrying down of college methods through the grades Mr. Wirt has exploded another hoary superstition that great masses of children in city schools can only be handled by uniform and machine methods, in a lump. Frœbel School in Gary has twenty-five hundred children, most of them very small alien immigrants. Yet the same flexible and free methods are used there, apparently with success. These children, because of the immensely varied equipment, and the possibility of small classes in the shops, are getting something resembling individual instruction. I picked up at random the card of an older girl at Emerson. It read: “Printing, History, Gymnasium, French, Music, Botany, Auditorium, English.” The very shock of that bold “Printing” gives you a realization of the modern school you are in. And this is a girl besides.

Now a program like this, and all this free election and flexibility, would seem wilful and anarchical were it not for the fact that in the Gary school these schedules are the result of a natural and very careful process of selection, made by the child. What the child shall study, outside of the regular classroom work, is neither forced upon it nor aimlessly selected. Take the Emerson School, a beautiful building with laboratories and studios, gymnasia and shops, and put your child into its kindergarten or first grade. He runs about the halls. The shops and studies and laboratories are not segregated, but distributed over the building so as to convey the impression that they are equally significant, and to give every child an opportunity of becoming familiar with them. All the rooms have big glass doors or windows. The child’s own unaided curiosity makes him look in and wonder about what the older children are doing there. One could see children of all ages peering into the foundry or machine-shop or printery.

When the child has reached the third or fourth grade he has a certain idea of what activity interests him, and he is allowed to go into shop or laboratory as observer or helper to the older child. He watches and asks questions, and the older boy learns by teaching him. If the child finds that the work does not actually interest him he still has the chance to change. When he takes up the work in the higher grades he has served his apprenticeship and is already familiar with the apparatus and the technique. The teacher does not have to break in a new class each year. It is almost a self-perpetuating and self-instructing class. The child has been assimilated to the work as new members in any profession or trade in society are assimilated. When the child is exposed from his earliest years to the various vocational activities, is allowed to come into them just as his curiosity ripens, you have as perfect a “choice of a vocation” as could be imagined. Only this sort of opportunity can really be called “vocational training.” The usual vocation school work takes the child too late, when his curiosity is likely to be dulled; it puts him into the work without any previous familiarity. It can scarcely be anything but drudgery. If “capacities are to be developed,” Mr. Wirt’s scheme gives the surest means of developing them. It solves the grave problems of “vocational” and “pre-vocational” training, which are so sorely vexing the professional educational world, a large part of whose business in life seems to be to create and have problems.

XVI
APPRENTICES TO THE SCHOOL

Vocational training in the schools of Gary means that whatever work is necessary in the way of repairing, conserving, beautifying or enhancing the facilities, is done by the school itself. These large, lavishly equipped modern school-buildings require a force of mechanics to keep them in repair. Their shops are the industrial and manual shops for the school. The children work in them with skilled union workmen, who are employed not primarily as “manual training” teachers, but as assistants to the building superintendent. The mechanics teach by allowing the children to help them as apprentices. They earn their salaries by repair and construction work, while the children who desire it get an incomparable vocational training at practically no cost to the town. Where the ordinary trade-school must have large classes to make the enterprise pay, the Gary vocational work may be done with the smallest groups, for the shops are paying for themselves anyway.

Manual training takes on quite a new meaning as you move about, watching the boys in the carpenter-shop making desks or tables, or cabinets for the botany collections, or book-racks for the library, sending them on to the paint-shop when they have finished; boys in the sheet-metal shop hammering zinc for the roof; young electricians repairing bells; a couple of plumbers tinkering with pipes; little groups of serious and absorbedly interested boys in foundry and forge and pattern-making shop, all coöperating like the parts of a well-ordered factory. There was obviously enough real work to keep busy for his hour a day every child who desired training in a trade. Where school and workshop are thus fused, the need for “continuation” and “coöperative” courses—where the boy alternates between shop or factory and school—disappears. The child has the advantages of both.

The ordinary school, and even the specialized vocational school, is rarely doing more in its industrial, manual, or domestic science work than playing a rather dreary game with toys. There could scarcely be a greater contrast between the real shops of the Gary schools and those ordinary “shops” and kitchens with their dozens of little machines at which at a given time the entire class does its little stereotyped “stunt.” In Gary the domestic science room is a real kitchen in which the daily luncheon is prepared and served at cost to the teachers and pupils who desire it. The cook is a real cook, and the girls come in as observers, helpers or workers, just as the boys go into the shops. The nearest approach to a luxury is the pottery shop, but this is itself perhaps the best symbol of that fusion of the artistic and the practical that is the Wirt genius. What are you to say when you walk into the art studio and find a dozen girls and boys high on a scaffolding painting a frieze which they have themselves designed, while others are at work on stained-glass designs to go in varnished paper on the panels of the door?