“11. A saving in the cost of instruction by reducing overhead charges for supervisors, making it possible to pay better salaries or reduce the number of pupils per teacher, or both.”
“12. A plan which brings together, in a unitary way, with economy and efficiency in management, the other recreational and educational agencies of the city.”
These evaluations of Dean Burris’s sum up the various aspects of the Gary plan as it appeals to practical educators. It must be remembered that the Gary school represents not a rigid system, or a static and completed mechanism. Its chief value is that it provides a flexible program and facility for change and development. Any examples of details in the curricula or details of administration can only be tentative, for it is an experimental school, where every one is constantly studying and learning. It is a growing organism. The only limit to its growth seems to lie in the imagination of teachers and pupils. Even when it starts with an admirable equipment, its life is only begun. It is the use of the equipment, the constant appeal to the imagination and to expression that is the real education. In such a school, the cultivation of resource may go on indefinitely. Such a school provides that “embryonic community life” which Professor Dewey expresses as his ideal of a school, where in actual work the child senses the occupations and interests of the larger world into which he is some time actively to enter.
We may say, then, that the Gary school has national significance because it is the first public school system in successful established operation which has been able to solve the pressing and apparently insoluble problems of the city school; which has kept pace with changing industrial and social conditions, and adapts the school to every kind of a child; which synthesizes the best educational endeavors of the day, and provides the facilities which educators have vainly sought to provide for all the children, but have only succeeded in providing at great expense for the more advanced and older pupils of the community; which marks a distinct advance in democratic education; which realizes the ideal of a truly public school, in providing for all the people all of the time; and, which, in its simple organization and ingenious financial economies, furnishes a practical working-model for imitation and adaptation in other communities, large and small.
APPENDIX
I
DISTRIBUTION OF EXPENDITURES
August 1, 1914-July 31, 1915
Schools of Gary, Indiana
REGULAR SCHOOL (TEN MONTHS, FIVE DAYS PER WEEK, EIGHT-HOUR DAY)