15. How smaller cities are replanning.
16. Parks in large American cities.
17. The city-planning conference.
18. Statistics showing total area of city, and percentage of park space.
19. Playgrounds of Chicago and New York.
20. The Gary plan of schools and playgrounds on the same site.
The class in ancient history, owing to a belief on the part of the instructor that no child should be allowed to leave school without a background of modern affairs, devotes one day a week to contemporary history. A weekly digest of the ten most important events is kept in the history notebook, arranged, three for foreign events, three for national events, and four for local. Reports are prepared and read upon assigned magazine articles, especially from the Literary Digest, Outlook, and Independent. Everything is thus done to get the clue of historical study from the interesting events around the pupils. History is studied as much as possible backward, instead of forward.
In 1912-13 the classes in modern history became interested in the past of the Balkan nations, in order to understand the reason for their alliance against the Turkish Empire. A digression was, therefore, made to clear this point, and to vitalize thereby the history of the related European countries. The next year a similar interest was kindled in Mexico and our relations with the Spanish-American republics. During the past year the history instructor has found the study of the last two centuries of western Europe to move along without effort, owing to the interest in the great war.
Such a study of history clearly obviates the necessity of any separate study of “civics.” History and geography taught in this way become part of one’s general information. Magazines and newspapers are freely used. The systematic reading of the best weeklies and papers surely is an important training, in an age of so much cheap and worthless reading-matter.
One history class had been making a comparison of Athenian with Gary education. This is another illustration of that constant effort to make the pupils realize the meaning of what they are doing and what is around them. The effort of the Gary education is to make the child acquainted with the purposes of his school. He is not taught as an inferior who must take without question wisdom from immensely superior teachers, but as an equal and democratic citizen of his school community, learning wherever and whenever he can. The ancient history class had for its motto: “To improve its members as American citizens by a study of the experiences of the ancient peoples.” It would be difficult to imagine a more admirable reason for historical study than this phrase, the natural expression of the Gary child who wrote the constitution for the class organization. Such “social introspection” is as rare an intellectual quality as it is valuable.