The Cincinnati schools provide for special children as well as for special classes of people. First there are the unusually bright children, who “mark-time” in the ordinary classes. These children were placed in “rapidly moving classes.” While omitting none of the work, they were allowed to go as fast as their mental development would allow them, instead of as slowly as the other members of the class made it necessary to move. At the beginning the teacher found these exceptionally able children lacking in effort and attention, qualities which they had not needed to keep their place in the grades. “The extra work and responsibility stimulated their mental activity, increased their power of attention, fostered thoroughness and accuracy, developed resourcefulness and initiative, and those other qualities necessary for leadership.” Why should it not be so? Why should not the specially able child be taught as thoroughly as the defective one? Yet Mr. Dyer, speaking from experience, remarks: “Strange to say, it is harder to establish such classes than defective and retarded ones.” Strange indeed!
For the sub-normal or retarded children Cincinnati has made ample provision. Spending from a quarter to a half of their time in manual work, the children are no longer tortured with the doing of things beyond their powers. The overgrown boys have instruction in shop work. The overgrown girls have a furnished flat in which they learn the arts of home-making at first hand. There are in all over four hundred children in these schools.
Similar accommodations are provided for other special groups. The anaemic and tubercular children are taught in two open-air schools; six teachers are detailed to instruct the deaf children; one teacher devotes her time to the blind children, and ten teachers are employed to take charge of those children who are mentally defective. Thus, by adjusting the schools to the needs of special groups of people, and of special individuals, Cincinnati is providing an education which reaches the individual members of the community.
IX Playground and Summer Schools
The vacation school is planned to meet the needs of the children in the crowded districts during the hot summer months. “For that reason,” says Mr. Dyer, “it provides industrial work of all kinds unassociated with book instruction, but mingled with a great amount of recreational activity—excursions, stories, folk-dancing, and a wide variety of games.”
The field of industrial activity is a broad one, including cooking, nursing, housekeeping, sewing, knitting, crocheting, weaving and basketry; drawing and color work, brush and plastic work; bench work with tools, making useful articles; sports and games, including folk-dancing for girls and ball for boys. The primary and kindergarten classes offer a delightful round of song, story, games, excursions, paper work and other forms of construction. For the girls who have to take care of babies there are special classes. The boys make useful articles in the shops, and the girls, in sewing-room and cooking laboratory, learn to do the things around which the interests of the home always center. By co-operation with the park commissioners, the playgrounds were made an integral part of the summer school work.
Besides the recreational summer school Cincinnati has maintained for the past five years an academic summer school, in which children might make up back work in school, or do special work in any line which was of particular interest to them. In these schools “the very best instructors that can be secured” are employed, and their recommendations are accepted by the school principals when the fall term opens. “This school is one of the means taken to deal with the problem of repeaters in our schools,” says Mr. Dyer. “Instead of requiring children who are behind to fall back a year, they may, if they are not hopeless failures, but only deficient in a few studies, remove their deficiencies in the summer school and go on with their class. We have followed up these pupils,” Mr. Dyer adds, “and found that a normal percentage keep up with the class in succeeding years.”
X Mr. Dyer and the Men Who Stood With Him
A spirit of comradeship and hearty co-operation breathes from every nook and cranny of the Cincinnati schools. Principals and teachers alike sense the fact. Alike they aim toward the upbuilding of the schools.
“Never in my life have I found such a spirit of mutual helpfulness,” says Assistant Superintendent Roberts. “Every teacher has felt that she had a part to play, that she counted, that her suggestions were worth while, and she has worked earnestly toward this end.”