A few cities, like Indianapolis, Worcester and Gary, on the other hand, have established vacation schools in which children may make up back work, or pursue studies in which they are especially interested.
As a means of bringing below-grade children up to the standard of affording an opportunity for the able children to advance more rapidly in school, and, in general, as a means of keeping city children usefully occupied during the summer months, the vacation school has won its place.
Newark, making an even more radical departure from tradition, runs some schools twelve months in the year. Edgar G. Pitkin, principal of a school in an immigrant district, first put the idea into practice. At the end of the regular session in June, he announced to his children that school would start again on the following Monday. Fearfully he approached the building. The streets about the school seemed unusually deserted that Monday morning. Suppose no one should be there! When the gong sounded, however, more than seven-tenths of the two thousand children belonging in the school were in their places. The attendance that summer was ninety-two per cent, and the promotion ninety-five per cent. During the three summer months there were exactly two cases of discipline.
“You see what happened,” Mr. Pitkin explained. “All of the bright ambitious children came back and the loafers stayed away. From that picked crowd nothing but good work could be expected. There was no attendance officer on duty, but the children were regular. Order was so good that on hot days we put up the sashes between rooms, and on the second floor, where four class-rooms were thrown into one, four classes worked industriously under four teachers without the least friction.”
This school has been organized on a year schedule. If the children come four terms each year instead of three, they will reduce the time between the first and eighth grades by one-third, which means a saving to them and to the school. Since it is the able children who come, the twelve months’ school affords them an opportunity to go quickly through work on which the slower classmates must hold a more moderate pace.
XIV Sending the Whole Child to School
It is a long step from the school of—
Reading, and writing and ‘rithmetic,
Taught to the tune of the hickory stick,
to the school which aims at the education of the whole child; yet that step has been attempted in Gary, Indiana. There, perhaps more consistently than anywhere else in the United States, the school authorities are providing for the whole child in their schools. Many schools have manual training and domestic science; many schools have school gardens and playgrounds; many schools have nature work in the parks and squares; but in no school that I have visited did I find a more conscious effort to unite mental and physical, hand and head, and vocation and recreation, in one complete system.
This result, which to some may sound unbelievably like the impossible, is accomplished first, by engaging experts to teach such special subjects as botany and physical training; second, by abolishing grade promotions and permitting each child to advance in his subject when he is ready to do so; third, by keeping the school open morning, afternoon and evening during practically the entire year; fourth, by making the work of interest to each individual child. Perhaps this matter of interest sums up better than any other the spirit of the Gary schools. The system aims to make the school so attractive that children will prefer to be there rather than to be anywhere else.