It is an essential feature of the Wirt scheme that this varied work be provided for all the children from the earliest possible years. The lavish equipment of the ideal Wirt school plant may be paralleled in other communities than Gary, but it is paralleled only in the case of the secondary schools. It is a notorious fact that, of the children who begin the American public school, only one fifth ever reach even the first year of the high school. So far it is the high school or the highest grammar grades that have received practically all of the advantages of broadening educational endeavor,—vocational training, science laboratory work, the study of civics, domestic science, etc. This means that the vast majority of school-children leave school with nothing but the barest intellectual training, without ever having come in contact with points of view and ways of doing things that are absolutely essential to any understanding or effectiveness in the world above the very lowest. Against this fundamentally undemocratic system, which denies help to those who need it most, the Wirt plan resolutely sets its face.
The ideal Wirt school contains in one school plant the complete school, with all the classes from the kindergarten through the common school and high school.
By this plan both economic and educational advantages are realized. From an economic point of view, it is cheaper to have large, completely equipped centers than to duplicate the equipment in a number of smaller centers. From an educational point of view, it enables pupils to bridge the chasm between the elementary grades and the high school. By ceasing to make the high school a separate institution to be “entered” or “graduated from,” pupils find no place to stop when they have completed the eight grades.
The complete school, Mr. Wirt believes, offers important moral gains. “The development of character, habits of industry, reliability, good health, and the growth of intelligence require time,” he says, “and must be a continuous process throughout the entire life of the child.” The complete school gives an opportunity for that coöperation or “apprenticeship” between the younger and older children, which is so important a feature of the Wirt school, and this association breaks down the snobbery of age which causes so much unhappiness in childhood.
It must be admitted that in Gary, owing to the progressive mortality in attendance which is common everywhere, it is possible to realize the complete school only in the Emerson and Froebel plants. At the same time it must be remembered that these schools care for three quarters of the school-children of the town. In the elementary schools which Mr. Wirt is reorganizing in New York, he is asking that there shall be included at least two of the high-school years, in order that the complete school may be approximated as closely as possible. In Gary, they are working for a school which is even more than “complete,” for they aim to include even the first year and perhaps even the second of the ordinary college course. Stretching down boldly past the kindergarten to a nursery for babies, and up into the college itself, the Wirt school thus gives a fundamentally new orientation to education, shows it graphically and practically as a continuous process, and breaks down those artificial barriers by which we measure off “education,” and make it easy for people to “finish” it. The Wirt school seems definitely to forecast the day when the public school will have swallowed the college, and the “higher education” will have become as local and available as the three R’s.
If the school is to educate the whole child, the first need is evidently a place for him to grow. “The best of education,” says Professor Terman, “is but wisely directed growth.” “The activities of a child,” says Professor Dewey, “are the means by which he becomes acquainted with his world, and by which he learns the use and limits of his own powers.” The lack of free activity in the conventional school has been the major cause of those symptoms of morbidity which school hygienists have brought to the attention of educators within the last few years. Over-pressure and confinement have made the school a manufactory for evils which the next generation will look back to with amazement at the blindness of the educational world which permitted it.
The ideal school will make the playground the very center of its life. The school in the Wirt plan covers a site of from ten to twenty acres. Actually the Emerson School in Gary has ten acres; Froebel has twelve; the new Tolleston site covers twenty acres. Of this ideal site of twenty acres, ten acres in front of the school-building are purchased by the city and maintained by it as an open public square or small park. The remaining ten acres are bought by the school for the building site and playgrounds. It is the intention in Gary to have these park-school playgrounds distributed over the city so that few families will live more than half a mile away from one of them.
It is a cardinal principle of the Wirt plan that the parks and playgrounds of a city should be placed as adjuncts of the schools. It is the schools that they primarily serve and it is with the schools that they should be grouped. Millions of dollars have been wasted in the public-playground movement in this country through disregard of this fact. There is a good story of a Chicago playground instructor who, when asked if the playgrounds coöperated with the schools, replied, “Sure we do! If we see any kid on here between nine and three, we chase him off!” This is symbolic of the lack of intelligent coöperation between child-welfare agencies. It is this wasteful and ineffective situation which the Wirt plan remedies by boldly annexing park and playground to the school itself. A comparison of the Chicago playgrounds with the Gary school playgrounds shows the immensely greater public service rendered under the Wirt scheme. Chicago has one of the most elaborate systems of recreation parks and field-houses in the country. Yet in a district only one fortieth the size of the Chicago district, one Gary school, providing for both children and adults, gave indoor gymnasium work to three times as many people; shower-baths to one third as many; outdoor gymnasium to an equal number; the use of swimming-pools to half as many; use of the assembly halls to four times as many; and to as many, the use of clubrooms and reading-rooms. Thus, in educating the child’s body, and giving him space to grow and play, the Wirt school enormously increased the opportunities of every one in the district, old and young, to secure the same advantages.
The ideal Wirt school plant, such as the Emerson School in Gary, in its open space of ten acres, besides its playground filled with apparatus, has gardens, tennis courts, ball fields, running tracks, and handball courts. For the younger children there are wading-pools and sandpits. One field is arranged so that it may be flooded in winter for skating. There are two acres of school-gardens, and a cluster of cages and houses for the animals of the school zoo. The outdoor equipment is, in other words, on the scale of a college or a wealthy private school which can afford spacious grounds and provision for every athletic sport. The Gary schools are, however, public schools, and these facilities are open to all the children of all ages and all the time.