THE PRINTING-SHOP AT THE EMERSON SCHOOL
There is not a department which does not contribute in some way to the school community life. The caretakers of the grounds are under the supervision of the botany and zoölogy (nature-study) departments. The children work with them in taking charge of and caring for the gardens, lawns, trees, and shrubs. The botany classes care also for the school conservatory and for the smaller experimental conservatory in the botany laboratory. The zoölogy classes have charge of the school zoo as well as the collection of pets in the zoölogy room. Even the drawing classes contribute, the mechanical-drawing pupils in preparing plans for the industrial work and construction, the art classes in decorating the friezes of their room or in designing details for the building.
Domestic science in the Gary school is not taught as a separate “subject.” It means the practical operation of the school lunch-room under the direction of an instructor and a cook assistant. The domestic-science room is a real kitchen, dining-room, and pantry in which the daily lunch is prepared and served to such teachers and pupils as desire it. The domestic-science work for the girls then consists of nothing but this daily service, older and younger girls coöperating with cook and teacher. The salary of the assistant is paid out of the profits of the lunch-room. Since the food is sold, all expenses for supplies are charged to the lunch department. The sewing-room is operated on a similar plan. The instructor has as assistants a practical dress-maker, laundress, and milliner. Their salaries and all materials used are paid for from the savings made by doing the necessary laundry and needlework for the school. Both cooking and sewing departments are therefore self-sustaining school-community shops. The school board makes no appropriations for the support of the lunch-room, dressmaking, laundry, and millinery departments other than the salaries of the two head teachers. All bills are paid directly by the department managers, and no accounts are kept by the school board. The other shops are self-supporting in the sense that the ordinary appropriations for painting, cabinet-work, electrical work, plumbing, printing, etc. (which would have to be paid anyway), generally pay the salaries of the teacher-workmen and the costs of the material. The ideal attainment would be to make the shops all self-sustaining school-community shops.
The work of all these shops requires elaborate systems of accounting. All this work is taken charge of by the instructors and pupils of the commercial departments of the school. The work the children do in the shops is computed on the basis of regular union wages for the particular trade, and they are “paid” in imitation checks, upon which their standing in the course is based. For these payments the commercial pupils manage a regular school banking system, with savings accounts, etc. They also have charge, under the instructors’ supervision, of all the regular accounting and secretarial work for the school administration. Thus their bookkeeping, stenography, and typewriting contribute directly to the needs of the school. The commercial pupils also take care of the ordering and distribution of supplies. Some of these, such as the coal and cement used in the schools, are in turn tested by the chemistry classes in their laboratory to see whether they come up to specifications. The school “store” is as important a feature of the school community as the school “bank,” and the commercial pupils take turns in “keeping” it. The criticism that the pupils are incompetent to handle all these matters is met by the obvious consideration that the school cannot afford to graduate pupils in accounting and secretarial work who cannot perform these functions efficiently for themselves and their school. At present, it should be mentioned, these departments are said not to be self-supporting, in the way that the domestic-science shops are.
If the school is to be the children’s community, there must be some place of general assembly, some forum or theater where the school may take stock of itself. This is provided in the “auditorium,” one of the original and essential features of the Gary plan. “Auditorium,” to which a daily hour is given, is devoted to purposes different from the religious exercises, declamations, and moral homilies common to the “opening exercises” of the ordinary school. It does not even open the day, for the Gary program makes it necessary for the “auditorium” hour to come at periods throughout the day, differing for different classes. The aim is to make it an occasion where anything that is happening of peculiar interest in any part of the school may be dramatically brought to the attention of the rest of the school. In the Gary school, each child goes to “auditorium” for a full hour each day, and listens to a program contributed by pupils or teachers or outside visitors. There is always choral singing; there may be instrumental or phonograph music besides. Lantern-slides and motion-pictures are often shown. There may be talks by the special teachers about their work. The child may see there gymnastic exhibitions,—as has been said, the stage at the Froebel School is so large that a full-sized basketball game may be played upon it before the audience,—folk-dancing, or dramatic dialogues and little plays written by the pupils themselves about interesting things in their study or reading. There may be debates on school issues. What is to be presented in “auditorium” is limited only by the imagination and expressiveness of teachers and children. The teachers in turn have the responsibility of arranging the program, in coöperation with their pupils. Children of widely different ages are sent together to the “auditorium” hour, so that the younger may have their curiosity stimulated about the work of classes that they perhaps have not yet reached, and so that the older may lose that snobbery of age which often causes so much unhappiness in childhood, and tends to fill the adult mind with delusions about the young. This plan, therefore, makes for sympathy between the pupils, makes each child familiar with the activities of the whole school, and prevents that unfortunate segregation and confinement of the ordinary school. Besides being able to look into the various rooms through the glass doors, the child in the Gary school has an opportunity of seeing in “auditorium” in dramatic form the life of his school. The influence of this “auditorium” hour upon the school work, particularly the academic work, can hardly fail to be marked, for it directly motivates all the studies. It is a sort of communal “application” activity. History and literature take on a new meaning, because the material may be studied now always in the light of its possible presentation to the rest of the school in dramatic and intelligent form. Many schools use the dramatic sense to vitalize these studies, but no other school provides so definite and regular a focus, and so constant and interested an audience for the products of such a vitalization. The “auditorium” in the Gary school seems to be a genuine school-community theater, an inevitable and integral part of the school life.
In the words of Superintendent Wirt, the Gary school aims to be a “clearing-house for children’s activities.” The ideal is to render the school community as self-sustaining and self-stimulating as possible. Whatever the school cannot itself contribute to the education of the child, it may find in the institutions of the surrounding community. Any outside agency which provides wholesome activities for children becomes then a sort of extension of the school. Children in the Gary school are permitted to go out from their play or “auditorium” hour to do special work at home, take private music or art lessons, visit the Y.M.C.A., settlement or neighborhood house, attend the Boy Scouts or Camp-Fire Girls, or receive religious instruction in the churches. This outside work is then ranked as an integral part of the school work.
It is this community coöperation which has particularly roused the interest of religious educators. It suggests to many of them a solution of the problems of religious education, and of separate denominational schools. Religion does not enter the Gary school in any form, not even in Bible reading and prayer. But children may go out, for one hour a day, two, three, or even four times a week, to classes in religious instruction, privately organized and supported by the various churches of the city. To meet the situation in Gary, the churches have in some instances engaged special instructors for these classes in religion. The Presbyterian, Methodist, and Christian churches are said to have united in engaging a teacher at a relatively high salary. Such coöperation not only insures the services of well-trained and liberal teachers, but must necessarily banish sectarian dogmatism from the teaching. In Gary, the Baptist, Roman Catholic, and Hebrew churches, besides the Y.M.C.A., are said to be giving this special instruction. In the Jefferson School more than half the children attend these classes at the churches. This feature of the Gary plan is one of the most interesting, and perhaps has the most far-reaching possibilities, in the way of transforming religious instruction in this country. This plan is characteristic of a school which seeks to meet the demands of the individual child, and to make everything in the community which is truly educational, or which, for any reason, parents and children believe to be genuinely educational, contribute to the life of the school community.
Since the other institutions have the same privileges as the churches, they are all given the opportunity in this plan of enlarging their effective resources. City schools which wish to adopt the Gary plan, but lack the ideal school plant or the varied facilities, may often avail themselves of the gymnasium, pools, playgrounds, etc., of near-by Y.M.C.A. or settlement houses, and use the public library and public playground, and thus acquire, by systematic coöperation with these other agencies, an effectively working Gary school. This plan has been adopted with great success in the case of the New York schools, a number of which are in the course of adopting the Gary plan, or many features of it. Their experience has shown that, by making the school a “clearing-house for children’s activities,” the social resources of all these communal institutions are vastly increased.