The Gary Schools

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

THE SWIMMING-POOL AT THE FROEBEL SCHOOL

It is customary for our newer high schools to have gymnasiums, but the common school is rarely provided for. In the Wirt school, the common school shares, of course, in the extensive gymnasium equipment. The Emerson School has two gymnasiums, one for boys and one for girls. It has also a large swimming-pool.

The Froebel School has two gymnasiums and two swimming-pools. The Jefferson School has a large gymnasium, though only the common school is provided for in the Jefferson. The other Gary schools all have gymnasiums proportionate to their size. In the new school plants it is intended to build pergolas about the inner court which will contain open-air classrooms and additional outdoor gymnasium space. Nothing is omitted which will provide the right physical conditions for the child’s growth and development from his earliest years.

Coming to the school-building itself, we find in the Emerson and Froebel Schools architectural creations of unusual beauty and impressiveness. The school-building is built around a great court, with broad halls as wide as streets, and well lighted from the court. These broad halls serve not only as the school streets for the constant passage of the children between their work, but also as centers for the “application” work, or for informal study. They are so wide that all confusion is avoided, and they suggest to the visitor that they serve the school community in the same way that the agora or forum did the ancient city. In the Emerson School the beginning of an art gallery has been made. It suggests the idea that just as the schools ought to absorb the playgrounds, so they ought to absorb the museums and galleries. Pictures and objects of art and interest become unreal and artificial when immured in isolated museums, which can be visited only at special times and with effort. They should be at hand in the school, fertilizing and beautifying every moment of its daily life. The artistic sense can be cultivated only by bringing children into contact daily and almost unconsciously with beautiful things. The schools themselves must be art galleries, and these fine corridors of the Wirt school indicate the way by which a wholly new orientation is to be given to our public galleries by using them as adjuncts to the education of children.

Similarly with museums. The teaching of the Gary schools, based fundamentally on concrete things and processes, needs to be constantly in touch with the objects which it is our custom to store in dead museums. The school museum is an essential feature of the Wirt school. The Wirt plan does not contemplate the taking of children docilely about to visit museums, as some progressive teachers are doing. It contemplates bringing the museums into the schools, so that the children can know the treasures and live with them and learn about them.

And similarly with libraries. Mr. Wirt believes that the school may do the work of the public library much more efficiently and much more economically than the library can itself do it. He has shown in Gary that in a school branch of the public library, library maintenance and circulation cost per book circulation is only about five per cent of the cost in the main library, while the life of the book circulated in sets under the control of the teachers is ten times that of the usual circulation book in the library. In both the Emerson and Froebel Schools there is a branch of the public library, under a library assistant. Children use the library as a part of their regular work under the supervision of the assistant and teachers. All sorts of stereoscopic pictures, photographs, collections of pictures, atlases, etc., can thus be provided, which would be impossible for the classroom. The library becomes the storehouse of the knowledge of the school, and the children learn to recognize it as such. Again, the library is already an important feature of many of the newer high schools throughout the country. In the Wirt school, however, all the elementary classes use it also.

The Wirt school contemplates bringing all the cultural resources of the community to bear on the school. It makes the school the proper and natural depository for whatever the community has to offer in artistic interest or intellectual resource. Like most of the features of the Wirt plan, this consolidation of gallery, museum, and library in the school is as economically efficient as it is educationally valuable.

A word must be said about the auditorium. Few schools have assembly rooms like that in the Froebel School in Gary, with its stage large enough for a full-sized basketball game or athletic contest. The unique rôle of the auditorium in the Wirt school will be described in the next chapter. It assists materially in educating the whole child by giving him opportunities for public expression before the school community.

The classrooms in the ideal Wirt school are much more attractive than the ordinary classrooms, far less formal and far less crowded. In some of them the old-fashioned school desk and seat have been retained, largely, according to Mr. Wirt, to meet the prejudice of the parents. Owing to the frequent change and movement of classes, however, this peculiarly flagrant instrument of educational perversity does little harm. Many of the lower grades have a desk, made in the school, which is a kind of workbench. These desks have vises attached, and loose tops, which can be readily replaced when soiled or worn out. The seat is a four-legged stool, which can be pushed out of the way when the child is using his desk for a workbench. On occasion the children can take up their stools and desktops and go off to work in the halls or garden. Such a room is an ideal classroom, with its hint of the workshop and its lack of rigidity. In the history room in the Emerson School are broad tables that can be used for map-drawing. The idea is to give to each classroom the physical setting and the furniture which will best enable a particular kind of work to be done there. The result is that the classrooms of the Wirt schools have a character of their own, quite different from the colorless and depressing effect of the ordinary classroom. They are not merely rooms where children study together and tamely recite, but essentially workshops where children do interesting things with their minds, just as in the shops they do interesting things with their hands. The history room is a real history laboratory. Maps and charts made by the pupils cover the walls, magazines lie about, pictures and books overflow the tables. The visitor realizes that he is in a room saturated with history, past and present. It is easier to learn in a room where everything appeals to the imagination.