There is a genial, joyous quality about all the work that gives every room a charm—the foundry with its deep shadows, the smooth gray pottery shop with its turning wheels and bright glazed jugs, the botany room with its mass of greenery. Even the history room at Emerson School had the atmosphere which comes from concentrated interest and the slow accretion of significant material. Emerson itself is a spacious and dignified building with innumerable little touches of taste that one usually associates only with the high schools of exceptionally wealthy and cultivated suburban communities. It is a delightful paradox that so beautiful a life should appear to be lived where every activity seems to be motivated by direct utilitarian application. I said that you have to plow your mind up to understand this kind of a school. Certainly I have never seen a place which more nearly permitted to seem real that old ideal of the joy of work which we imagine must have existed back in guild days. It may be left to the imagination what children trained in such a school are likely to have to say to the industrial society in which we live.
The practical work of the school is only limited by local school needs, but the shoeless condition of some of the Frœbel children inspired the starting of a shoe shop where old shoes were made over. Both Emerson and Frœbel have a printery from which come all the blanks, reports, programs, etc., used in the school, as well as the bulletins and papers by which the various classes are tempted to preserve the good things they write. The commercial pupils have charge of all the accounting and bookkeeping as well as the supplies. The children who work in the shops are paid in checks, which are calculated on the basis of prevailing union wages for the working-time. This provides opportunities for a banking system, which is also in charge of the commercial class. In the Jefferson School the boiler-room is an integral part of the machine-shop.
The botany class was responsible for the beautiful and elaborate conservatory at the entrance of the Emerson School, and for the window hothouse in the botany room, where practical experiments are made. The botanists also have charge of the shrubs and trees on the grounds, and the vegetable gardens which they work communistically all through the summer. Their study of food and textile products ramified into the domestic science work, just as the zoology study was fused with physiology. This latter class had a playground zoo, with foxes and coyotes, raccoons and prairie-dogs, about whose habits and adventures they were preparing a brochure, which was already in press at the printery. When I stepped into the zoology laboratory itself, I found that I was in an even more animated zoo. Crows, chickens and pigeons in cages at the back of the room were lusty with vociferous greeting. The imperturbability of the children amidst this racket showed me how well aware they were that this was the way a zoology room ought to behave.
Such a school, where the child works almost unconsciously into a vocation which appeals to him as neither play nor drudgery, is far more “vocational” than even the specialized school. The child, beginning so young in shop or laboratory, and assimilating the work very gradually, is able to lay deep foundations of interest and skill. The Gary school is distinctly unspecialized. In a sense it gives a completely “liberal education.” The child emerges a skilful amateur. The industrial and scientific work no more “train” him to take a definite place in the industrial world than the cultural work trains him to be a college professor. But he should leave school well equipped to cope with a dynamic, rapidly changing industrial society which demands above all things versatility, and which scraps methods and machines as ruthlessly as it does men. Only the man of rounded training and resourcefulness who can turn his hand quickly to a variety of occupations has much chance of success. Our public school, in spite of its fancied “liberal” curriculum, has really been turning out only very low-grade specialists. It has made no effort to produce the type of mind most needed to-day—the versatile machinist, the practical engineer, the mind that adapts and masters mechanism. This is probably the best intellectual type our society produces. This exactness, resourcefulness, inventiveness, pragmatic judgment of a mechanism by its product, the sense of machinery as a means, not an end, are exactly the qualities that society demands in every profession or trade.
The Gary school is the first I have seen that promises to cultivate this kind of intelligence. It frankly accepts the machine not in the usual sense of the vocational schools, as an exacting master that the child is to learn docilely to obey, but as the basis of our modern life, by whose means we must make whatever progress we may will. The machine seems to be a thing to which society is irrevocably pledged. It is time the school recognized it. In Gary it is with the child from his earliest years. It is the motive of his scientific study. The physics teacher at the Emerson School told me that he thought the fascinating and irresponsible automobile had done more to educate the younger generation than most of the public schools. Tinkering with an automobile was a whole scientific training.
I dropped into his physics class, and found a dozen twelve-year-old girls and their nine-year-old “helpers” studying the motor-cycle. With that fine disregard for boundaries which characterizes Gary education, the hour began with a spelling lesson of the names of the parts and processes of the machine. After the words were learned, the mechanism was explained to them as they pored over it, and their memory of vaporization, evaporation, etc., called into play. The motor-cycle was set going, the girls described its action, and the lesson was over, as perfect a piece of teaching as I have ever heard. The intense animation of that little group was all the more piquant for having as a background the astounded disapprobation of three grave school superintendents from the East.
To these physics classes the ventilating, heating and electric systems in the schools are all text-books. The climate is studied. The shops provide many physics problems. There was a class of boys having explained to them the physical principles of various types of machines. The impetuous rush of those little boys as they were sent into the machine-shop to take apart a lawn-mower, a bicycle, and a cream-separator, and the look of elation on their faces, would alone make Gary unforgettable to me. It was evident that this was indeed a different kind of school.
XVII
THE NATURAL SCHOOL
A surprisingly small amount of administrative machinery for so varied a system is required by the schools of Gary. Mr. Wirt is the City Superintendent of Schools. Under him each of the five school buildings has an executive principal. Two supervisors of instruction look after the pedagogical work of the system. The director of industrial work has charge of building repair, and supervises the shops where the children work under the mechanic-teachers. There is no attempt to segregate the vocational work. Manual, physical, artistic and academic activities are administered on an equal footing.
For the teacher the Gary school should be almost as liberating as it is to the pupil. In the details of courses much initiative is left to the teacher. It is really an inductive school where courses are worked out by supervisors consulting together on the basis of classroom experience. Teachers are encouraged to experiment and develop their own ideas. Here is the first public school I have ever seen that resolutely sets itself against uniformity of method or product, that recognizes differences of individuality.