To sum up, the Gary school forms a children’s community, which aims to provide the practical natural education of the old school, shop, and home which educated our forefathers. It is a necessary evolution and reorganization of the public school to meet the changed social and industrial conditions of the modern city. The school community, by providing a fourfold activity of work, study, and play, uses the children’s time and keeps them from the demoralizing influence of the streets. In the “auditorium” it provides a public theater which may motivate all the work and study. By coöperating with all the community agencies which provide wholesome activities for children, it makes them all more valuable and effective. And by making the school as far as possible a self-sustaining community, it gives meaning and purpose to all the work, trains the children for the outside world, and cultivates the social virtues.
IV
PROGRAMS: THE SCHOOL AS A PUBLIC UTILITY
Schools such as those in Gary, with their elaborate equipment and special school enterprises, obviously require methods of financing radically different from those of the ordinary public school. It is, perhaps, this problem of how a small and relatively poor city like Gary could afford to maintain such schools that has aroused the interest of practical school men in the Gary plan. When the public schools were first started in the new town, the authorities found themselves in a peculiarly difficult situation, owing to the limited funds at hand and the demands of a rapidly increasing population. The conventional method of meeting the situation would have been to erect inferior buildings, to omit playgrounds, laboratories, workshops, to employ cheap teachers, to increase the size of classes, to limit the yearly term, or else to try to accommodate all the children in a few buildings on half-time work. These have been the methods which our large cities have almost universally felt themselves obliged to adopt when confronted with these problems of economy and congestion.
The other possible method—and this seems to be the unique contribution of the Gary plan to the economics of education—was to treat the public school as a public service, and apply to it all those principles of scientific direction which have been perfected for the public use of railroads, telephones, parks, and other “public utilities.” The new city of Gary could create thoroughly modern, completely equipped school plants, and operate them so as to get the maximum of service from them. Superintendent Wirt and the school board believed that this plan would be the true economy.
Mr. Wirt says, “You can afford any kind of school desired if ordinary economic public-service principles are applied to public-school management. The first principle in turning waste into profit in school management is to use every facility all the time for all the people.” Instead, therefore, of counting their financial resources and then deciding what limited educational facilities could be provided with them, the Gary authorities seem to have decided upon the ideal school plant desired to meet the needs of the modern city child, and then to have proceeded, by the ingenious application of principles well recognized in business and industry, to utilize their resources so as to support the desired facilities. The Gary plan has made evident the great wastes involved in the conventional methods of managing the public-school plant. All school men will agree with Superintendent Wirt when he says that “most certainly playgrounds, gymnasiums, and swimming-pools are good things for all children to have. I believe that gardens, workshops, drawing and music studios are good things for children to have. I believe that museums, art galleries, and libraries are good things for children to use systematically and regularly. In my judgment opportunities for religious instruction, for private instruction in music, and for assisting in desirable home work are good things for children. So also are coöperative classes between the academic school and the industrial activities of the school business departments, and between the school and industrial activities outside the school. In what way will the use of these facilities handicap a child in his efforts to secure an education?”
The answer is, of course, “in no way.” These are the things the most advanced higher schools and wealthy private schools are providing for their pupils. School men may have desired to provide all these things for all the children of the elementary schools too, but rarely has economic skill combined with educational philosophy to bring such an ideal within the bounds of possibility. The Gary school seems to have found a way. It has actually realized the ideal, and made practicable that school-community life which other schools have only envisaged. It has found that any kind of school desired may be had if classrooms, auditoriums, playgrounds, etc., are in constant use all day long by all the children in alternating groups and out of school hours by adults.
“The modern city,” says Superintendent Wirt, “is largely the result of the application of the principle of the common use of public facilities that we need for our personal use only part of the time. We are willing that other people use public services when we cannot use them. How many street-cars and what sort of service could we afford if each citizen had to have his own private street-car seat for his own exclusive use?” Yet the educational ideal in school management generally remains what is set forth in the report of the 1913 Part-Time Committee of the New York public schools,—“Every pupil is entitled to an individual seat and desk. The teacher is entitled to the exclusive possession of a classroom....”
In the light of the Gary plan this ideal is absurd. It means, as has been discovered in the New York experience, that school facilities can never be made to catch up to school population. And it is absurd because it assumes that all persons in school want to do the same thing at the same time. But all “modern public conveniences are made possible only by their common use and the fact that we do not want to use the same public conveniences at the same moment. We are willing to have some one else use our public library, look at our pictures in our public museum, walk in our public park, sleep in our Pullman berth or in our hotel bedroom, or travel in our steamboat when we are otherwise engaged.” It proves to be as financially prohibitive to attempt to provide an individual desk and seat for every school-child as it is to provide an individual seat for every citizen who may sit in the park. “The great masses of children in our city schools can never have ample play spaces, suitable auditoriums, gymnasiums and swimming-pools, workshops, libraries, museums, or even ordinary schoolrooms for study and recitation, if all children at the same time must be using each of these facilities separately.” The more people use these public services, the cheaper they become for each one of us. And the more evenly the public use is distributed, the more valuable becomes the service to each one of us. “Increasing the number of persons using any public facility either under public or private ownership betters the service for all, provided the load can be uniformly distributed during operating hours. The problem with a public lighting or transportation service is to eliminate ‘peak-loads’ as far as possible.”
We have had constantly before us the gradual extension of the principle of multiple service of public facilities. The Gary plan makes the public school the last of these public services to come under the operation of these principles. As generally managed the public school has not recognized these principles. The effect of its administrative methods, its rigid school hours, its uniform curriculum, its emphasis on academic work, has been rather to increase the “peak-loads” and thus inadvertently to increase the costs of operation. In many schools, the use of the “auditorium” does not average more than ten minutes a day for each day of the year, and the playgrounds barely an hour each day of the year. And for every hour that shops, etc., are empty, there is a waste and leakage, which would be permitted in no other public-service institution.