Such a plan sounds complicated. In reality, it is very easy. The gymnasium teacher stays in the gymnasium, the drawing teacher in the drawing room. In the regular work, there are forty children in each class. For science and manual training these classes split in two. At the end of each period, or of each two periods, depending on the subject, the children pass from one room to another. While this system brings them under several teachers each day, it enables them to take a subject like art with one teacher for twelve years.
Meanwhile our little friend John has shown himself bright in language, but slow in arithmetic. Immediately he is advanced in language, and perhaps placed in a lower arithmetic class. He may even be transferred to another teacher for special arithmetic work. The system permits this flexibility because it allows each teacher, an expert in her own field, to shape her work to suit her pupils.
Better still, if John cannot master his arithmetic in the regular classes, he may attend voluntary classes on Saturday, at night, or during the summer months. The schools afford him every chance to keep up in every subject, and if he cannot make his way in this subject or in that, he works in the fields which are open to him, doing what he can to make his course a success.
John, in the schools of Gary, is John Frena, with all of John Frena’s limitations and possibilities. The Gary school seeks to bridge the limitations, expand the possibilities, and give John Frena a thousand and one reasons for believing that if there is any place in the world where he can grow into a complete man, that place is the Gary school.
XV Smashing the School Machine
One of the oft-repeated complaints against the old education arose from the iron-clad system of promotion which once in each year, with automatic precision, separated the sheep from the goats, saying to the sheep, “go higher,” and to the goats, “repeat the grade.”
For the sheep, the system worked fairly well, at least that once; but for the goats, it was a tragedy. The child who had failed in one out of six branches, side by side with the child failing in six out of six, repeated the year.
The new education affords several remedies for this situation. Of these the most generally known is promotion twice yearly. While this affords considerable relief, it is greatly improved upon in Springfield, Mass., by the division of each grade into three divisions—advanced, normal and backward. These divisions the teacher handles separately so that when promotion time comes the children who have shown special aptitude are prepared to go into the next grade. Meantime the children have been constantly changing from one division in the class to another.
Perhaps the most generally practicable plan for relieving the mechanical features of promotion is found in Indianapolis, and even more intensely in Gary, where children are promoted by subjects rather than by grades. In Indianapolis, the child entering the sixth grade, takes all English with one teacher from that time until the end of the eighth grade. If the child is strong in English, he advances rapidly. If he is weak in English, the teacher gives him special attention. Learning each pupil’s capabilities in her particular branch, the teacher is able to give the individual child, over a series of years, the help which his special case requires.
In Gary the departmental idea is carried through the entire school system. In the Emerson School, for instance, children may take eighth grade work in English and high school work in nature study or history. The departmental work is strengthened in Gary, in Indianapolis, and in a number of other cities, by afternoon work, Saturday classes and vacation schools. Here, a child interested in any phase of the school work or desiring to make up work in which he is deficient, may spend his spare time to his heart’s content.