The Gary Schools

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

The Gary school represents not merely the old public school with certain added modern features, but a definite reorganization. Its aim is to form, with its well-balanced facilities of work, study, and play, a genuine children’s community, where the children’s normal healthy interests are centered, and where they learn, in Professor Dewey’s phrase, “by doing the things that have meaning to them as children.” The Gary school aims to meet the comparative failure of the public school to-day to care for the city child. It tries to take the place of the old household and rural community life which provided for our forefathers the practical education of which the city child in his daily life is deprived to-day.

The full significance of the Gary plan can scarcely be understood unless it is seen against this background. “It is impossible,” says Professor Dewey, “to exaggerate the amount of mental and moral training secured by our forefathers in the course of the ordinary pursuits of life. They were engaged in subduing a new country. Industry was at a premium, and instead of being of a routine nature pioneer conditions required initiative, ingenuity, and pluck.... Production had not yet been concentrated in factories in congested centers, but was distributed through villages.... The occupations of daily life engaged the imagination and enforced knowledge of natural materials and processes.... Children had the discipline that came from sharing in useful activities.... Under such conditions the schools could hardly have done better than devote themselves to books.... But conditions changed, and school materials and methods did not change to keep pace. Population shifted to urban centers. Production became a mass affair carried on in big factories, instead of a household affair.... Industry was no longer a local or neighborhood concern. Manufacturing was split up into a very great variety of separate processes through the economies incident upon extreme division of labor.... The machine worker, unlike the older hand worker, is following blindly the intelligence of others instead of his own knowledge of materials, tools and processes.... Children have lost the moral and practical discipline that once came from sharing in the round of home duties. For a large number there is little alternative, especially in large cities, between irksome child labor and demoralizing child idleness.”

The Gary school is an organized attempt to restore this natural education, adapt it to modern demands, and thus avoid these alternatives so disastrous for the future of the child and the quality of the coming generation. By making the public school as much as possible a self-sustaining child community, Superintendent Wirt believes that all the benefits of this older education can be attained. “We cannot,” he says, “trust the other social institutions to remedy the defects. Not more than one quarter of the urban children attend Sunday-School regularly. This makes an average of only two minutes a day for all the days and all the children. In fact, church, Sunday-School, public library, public playgrounds, Y.M.C.A., Boy Scouts, and all other child-welfare agencies do not occupy the time of all the children of a city for more than an average of ten minutes a day. The practical effect of this is that the streets and alleys and the cheap theaters and other commercialized places of amusement have the children for over five hours a day. The cities are not fit places for the rearing of children, because, as a rule, the streets and alleys have twice the time for educating the children in the wrong direction that the school, church, library, and playground have for educating them in the right direction.”

This is the justification for extending the Gary school day to eight hours and limiting vacations. This is the plan which gives ample time for the intensive use of the remarkable school plant described in the preceding chapter. For in place of using for the special work and play activities a part of the already too few regular school hours per year, the Gary school secures additional time for these activities by appropriating the now worse than wasted “street-and-alley time” of the masses of city children. Saturday school, vacation school, even an all-year school, are features of the Gary plan which carry out this principle of providing a school life for the children for as long a time as they can be induced and encouraged to continue it. The Gary school deliberately seeks to employ and satisfy the children’s time with wholesome and interesting activity.

It aims not only to organize the daily life of the child for the greater part of his time, but it seeks to provide for him in a self-sustaining community. This means that all the work and study converge upon the school life. The things that are done in the Gary school contribute to the usefulness, the beauty, or the interest of the school community. The Gary school is built on the sound psychological theory that only such work as has meaning in the life of the school, as lived by the children themselves then and there, will be really learned and assimilated. The school is not only to be a “preparation for life”: it is to be a life itself, as the old household was a life itself. “The idea that children should study exclusively for eight years, and then work exclusively for the rest of their life,” says Superintendent Wirt, “is really a new idea in civilization. The criticism of the modern public school is directed almost entirely at the helplessness of children who are attempting to enter industrial and commercial life from this exclusive study period of eight, twelve, or sixteen years in the schools, and at the fact that the school is not able to get more than half its children beyond the sixth grade of the common school. Formerly the school plus the home and small shop educated the child. The small shop has been generally eliminated and the home has lost most of its former opportunities. A much greater part of the education of the child must be assumed by the school of the present generation. In place of the school, home, and shop, we have the school and the city street educating the great masses of children. The school must do what the school, home, and small shop formerly did together.”

The idea of making the school a self-sustaining community is worked out in the Gary school in the most comprehensive form. The manual-training and industrial shops, for instance, are actually the shops for the school community, and their work goes largely toward the upkeep of the school plant. Vocational training in the Gary school means that whatever work is necessary in the way of repairing, conserving, beautifying, or enhancing the school facilities is done by the pupils themselves. The school, like the old-time industrial home and community, has a large amount of real work that is now being done and must always be done in connection with the equipment of its buildings, grounds, laboratories, shops, etc. The large, lavishly equipped Gary school plants require a force of mechanics to keep them in repair. The usual way of doing this would be to hire outside labor at considerable expense to do the necessary work during school vacations. The Gary schools, on the other hand, which have no long vacations, employ a permanent force of mechanics, and keep them continuously employed throughout the year. Regular union artisans, chosen because of their character, intelligence, and teaching ability, are engaged by the building departments of the school plant. There are carpenters, cabinet-makers, painters, plumbers, sheet-metal workers, engineers, printers, electricians, machinists, foundrymen, etc., sufficient to meet the needs of the schools. This great variety of equipment and maintenance work provides manual activity of a truly educative sort suitable to every stage of the child’s development. The shops of these workmen become the regular manual and industrial training shops of the school. The children work with the artisans in much the same way as old-time apprentices, though, of course, for only a fraction of their time. Just as the child formerly participated in the industrial activities of the household, so now he participates in the real industrial activities of his school. The school artisans, and the nurses, school dentist, and physician, landscape gardener, architect, and draftsman, accountant, storekeeper, office force, lunch-room manager, designer, dress-maker, milliner, all take the place of the father and mother and older brothers and sisters in the old-time, self-sustaining, practically educative household. The children receive all the benefits of doing real work that must be done and of participating in their own school business. And they have the benefit of a completely modern equipment resembling in detail the machinery and processes which they will find when they go out into the larger social community.

In this novel scheme the Gary schools seem to have experienced little difficulty. Superintendent Wirt says that when you have provided a plant where the children may live a complete life eight hours a day in work, study, and play, it is the simplest thing imaginable to permit the children in the workshops, under the direction and with the help of well-trained men and women, to assume the responsibility for the maintenance of the school plant. There can be no exploitation of the children, for masters and pupils are permitted to do only enough work to balance the wages of the masters and the cost of materials. The teacher-workmen would be doing the work whether the children assisted or not. They earn their salaries by their repair and construction work, and the children who desire it get an admirably practical vocational training almost without additional cost to the city. The great expense is avoided of special shop equipment, such as the usual industrial high school or special trade school has for its industrial courses, which are, moreover, wholly unproductive. And the school is able to offer a much greater variety of trades than even the special trade school: for a school plant like the Gary institution will demand for its equipment and maintenance almost every staple trade, industrial and domestic, with the attendant educational opportunities for both boy and girl.

Manual work takes on quite a new meaning when it becomes, as in the Gary schools, productive work for the school community. It is no longer a question of each child doing his “practice” work, his stereotyped “stunt,” in which he soon loses interest. The boys in the Gary carpenter-shop are making desks and tables for the classrooms, cabinets and stools for the laboratories, or bookracks for the library. In the paint-shop they are staining and finishing them; or they are at work on the woodwork of the building, painting or varnishing. The electricians must care for motors, bells, etc., and there is always opportunity for teaching winding, motor construction, and wiring. Plumbing must be installed and kept in repair. Many parts of the plant call for the sheet-metal worker. Foundry and machine workers require in turn a pattern-making shop and draftsmen to furnish plans and specifications. The engineer of the heating, lighting, and ventilating plant gives lessons in firing and in the care of boilers. The printing-shop does all the printing work for the schools,—blanks, forms, reports, charts, etc., besides the illustrated brochures which the pupils of the various departments issue. In the Froebel School there is even a demand for a pottery shop, where the children often discover artistic talent in making the necessary clay utensils for the school. The number and character of the school shops is limited only by the needs of the school community. One year the shoeless condition of some of the children set a demand for a shoe shop, in which old shoes were made over into wearable new ones.

The visitor to the Gary school finds everywhere little groups of busy children, absorbedly interested, working on the different needs of the school, under kindly and intelligent teacher-workmen. He finds that there is enough real work in the school plant to keep occupied for his hour or more a day every child who is interested in manual work—and most children are—or who desires to become familiar with a trade. Such work is highly educational, and it is not drudgery. It is not specialized, nor is it segregated from the academic studies. The industrial work for both boys and girls is an integral part of the school life in which every one who cares for a rounded education must participate in some form or other.