on the "unique and ingenious synthesis of educational influences" which these remarkable schools represent. Little by little the American public is coming to understand that this public school which Superintendent William Wirt has founded in Gary offers, in its practicality, in the wealth of educational opportunities it offers, and in the financial economies which it embodies, a model for widespread imitation by the cities and towns of this country, confronted as they are with the most perplexing problems of rapid growth and changing social and industrial conditions.

The connection of the United States Steel Corporation with the town of Gary has led to a wide but entirely erroneous impression that the schools of Gary are dependent upon the enlightened business philanthropy of the corporation. As a matter of fact, though the Steel Corporation did found the town upon the sand-dunes by Lake Michigan as an industrial centre for its great plants, its connection with the government and public affairs of the town ceased with the selling of the land. Gary, to-day a well-built city of nearly forty thousand people, with attractive business and residential districts, a public library, churches, electric cars and taxi-cabs, and all the conveniences of a modern city, owes all these things, as well as its schools, to its own energy and is in no way dependent upon the Steel Corporation or the other large industrial companies that have built their mills along the lake. Even though there is a large immigrant population, the town does not differ except in its newness from the other industrial suburbs of Chicago. Gary has had no peculiar advantages in the organization of its public schools. There is nothing peculiar about the organization and support of the public schools except the educational genius of Superintendent Wirt. As far as their financial foundation goes, they have been built up from the ordinary school appropriations of the city budget and the State funds. The city has not made any unusual sacrifices for its schools. There is nothing that is possible in Gary that is not possible anywhere else. The superiority of the Gary school lies entirely in the

skill with which the relatively poor resources have been utilized.

When Mr. Wirt came to Gary from Bluffton, Ind., where he had been able to work out some of his ideas on a small scale, he found a small village with one plain school-building, erected to accommodate about three hundred and fifty children. To-day there are nearly five thousand school-children in Gary, housed in five buildings, two of which, the recently completed Emerson and Froebel Schools, are perhaps the most beautiful and magnificently equipped common schools to be found anywhere in the United States. That Mr. Wirt has been able to work out, in so short a time and in a small city with relatively low tax values, a school system which in its wealth of material equipment as well as in its educational results surpasses the achievements of old and wealthy communities, seems almost a miracle. It would be extraordinary even as an experiment. But all who have seen the Gary schools agree that they are not an experiment, but a most successful working out of educational ideas which the most advanced and democratic educators have been long trying to get realized in the American public-school system. They see in the striking success of the Gary schools the proof that we have scarcely begun to scratch the surface of the opportunities for public education in this country.

The school that William Wirt has built up in Gary is not a mere attempt to tinker with the old public-school system. It is not a mere collection of fads, as some of the popular accounts of the Gary school would lead the reader to believe. It is really a new kind of a school, a school reorganized from the bottom up, to meet the demands of the changing social and industrial conditions of the day. It is based on a very definite philosophy, for which Mr. Wirt does not hesitate to give full credit to the great educator and philosopher, Professor John Dewey, under whom he studied at Chicago. The fundamental ideas of this philosophy are two

first, that the public school should be a sort of embryonic community life in which the child would gradually become familiar not only with the knowledge

that he will need in adult life but also with the occupations and the organization of the society into which he will enter; second, that learning comes only from doing, that it is idle to learn things that are not used, and that therefore whatever is learned in school must be used in school. School work must be real work, productive in some form that the child can appreciate and not a mere storing up of information and skill against some possible future time.

It is clear that the attempt to apply these ideas will result in a public school very different from the present one. The criticism of the school from business men and college instructors has been constantly increasing. The complaint is that children come from the public schools wretchedly prepared either for higher study or for business and industrial life. They are inaccurate, ill-informed, lacking even in the rudiments of education, without either intellectual orientation or the skill and knowledge to earn a living. Educators have struggled to meet these complaints, but beyond adding various kinds of manual training and commercial studies, both taught in an academic way, the ordinary public school has done little to remedy the situation. Educators have generally failed to recognize these fundamental truths, that knowledge must be used or it will not be learned. The public schools have left the children without the opportunity to apply what they have learned. The Gary school is the first to recognize this truth and provide on a comprehensive scale for the learning through practical work.

Mr. Wirt sees the public school as an extension of the home. On the farm or in the country community the children learned their life-vocation by participating, from an early age, in the work of the household, or the shop, or the farm. They learned how to do things by watching their elders. They got their "vocational" education almost before they knew it. What was possible in more primitive days is no longer possible in these days of urban life. The city child cannot learn in the home; the school must step in and supplement the activities of the household. And it must do much more than merely give the child a little

intellectual knowledge. It must really become a little household by itself, a sort of children's community, where the child gets the comprehensive training that will fit it for the hard work of professional or industrial life. The present public school, with its four or five hour session and its Saturday holiday, leaves the city child for many hours a day to the demoralizing and disintegrating influences of the street and alley and crowded home, where the work of the school is practically undone. The result is idleness, juvenile crime, truancy, and the tendency of children to leave school at the earliest possible age. The city, spending so much money on its schools, cannot afford to give the child so much of this "street-and-alley time," as Mr. Wirt puts it. It is not doing its duty to the child or to itself, and it pays a heavy price in inefficiency, ignorance, and crime.

The Gary school is a genuine child's community, the centre of all his work and play. It has an eight-hour day, with plenty of play and varied activities, and a voluntary Saturday school, to which, as experience shows, most of the children come. Instead of a two months' summer vacation, the Gary school runs all the year round, though attendance in the vacation school is voluntary, according to the demands of the State law. The idea is to make the school as inevitable and natural to the child as is his home, to give him the training and the opportunities for interesting work and play that even the well-to-do city home is not in a position to give him. At the same time. the Gary school does not monopolize the child. On the contrary, if there are other institutions in the community which have something to give the child that the school cannot, then the school co-operates cheerfully with them. So the child in the Gary school may go home in school hours for music lessons or special training of any sort, or to the church for religious instruction, or to neighborhood houses or Y. M. C. A.'s. Superintendent Wirt's idea is to make the school what he calls "the clearing-house for community activities." It is not only the centre of the child's work and play, but the means through which he comes in contact with the community life.

It is obvious that the school which

plays such a rôle must be much richer in facilities and much more interesting than the ordinary public school, from which the child is glad to escape at the end of the school day. The Gary school is a large and complex institution. The Gary idea of a school-plant is "a playground, garden, workhouse, social centre, library, and traditional school, combined under the same management." Such a schoof as the new Froebel School in Gary is almost unbelievably rich in resources for work, study, and play. It occupies twenty acres of land, with playgrounds, athletic fields, school-gardens, lawns. The building itself, besides the ordinary classrooms and kindergarten-rooms, contains a big auditorium, with a stage so large that basket-ball games may be played upon it; two gymnasiums, one for boys and one for girls; two swimmingpools; botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry laboratories; music and drawing studios; kitchen and lunch-room; laundry; two branches of the public library; carpenter-shop, cabinet-shop, plumbingshop, forge and foundry, machine-shop, paint-and-varnish shop, pottery-shop, and printery. And this small city of Gary has not only one school like this, but two, the Emerson School being only slightly less magnificent in its equipment. And it must be remembered that these schools are not high schools, where these lavish opportunities are reserved for only a small minority of the fortunate children of the community, but are primary schools as well, sharing all this wealth with the younger children. Mr. Wirt's philosophy involves a radical rearrangement of studies. He finds it absurd that four children out of five in America should leave school without having studied science or had any opportunities for vocational training. The Gary school represents a great broadening of the scope of the primary and "grammar" school. Years that are practically wasted in the ordinary public school are now utilized in introducing the younger children to physics and chemistry, letting them take up the trades or languages or sociological studies, while their minds are still fresh and keen and their curiosity aroused. Mr. Wirt says that children are natural scientists, and the experience of the Gary

schools has shown that the younger children are capable of taking up many studies which the public school has unaccountably reserved, important as the work was for the child going out into the world, for the favored few of the high school.

All this richness of opportunity in the Gary school is possible only because the schools are managed like a public utility. Mr. Wirt points out that if the schools or any department in them are to stand idle for a large part of the time, as is our general practise, the public simply cannot afford the expensive equipment that he would provide. The Gary schools are run, therefore, on the principle of "equalizing the load." The ideal of the ordinary public school, “to provide a desk and seat for every child," he says is as absurd as it would be to provide a seat in the park for every inhabitant. No public service is used by more than a fraction of the people at any one time. The Gary school provides the traditional classroom for about one-quarter of the children. While they are studying, the rest of the school is distributed in playground and shop, gymnasium and laboratory and studio, or at home. Then, by an ingenious redistribution of the groups throughout the course of the eight-hour day, the school is able to give every child participation in all these various activities every day, while all the facilities of the school are being used practically all the time. In this way the Gary school is able to accommodate in one school-building twice the ordinary number of children. The Gary school has two complete schools, each with its set of teachers, functioning together in the same building all day long. In the lower grades the child spends two hours daily in the classroom, an hour in laboratory or shop, half an hour in studio and half an hour in gymnasium, an hour in auditorium, and the rest in study, play, and outside activity. The older child has three hours for formal instruction, and two hours for more intensive shop or studio work. But merely by this intensive use of the plant, by this "rotation of crops" or "platoon" system, as it has been called, the capacity of the schools is doubled. While other cities are struggling with "part-time" problems, forced

vented the realization of these freer ideals. The Gary school cultivates co-operation and initiative. The teachers also help each other, the younger acting as "apprentice" teacher, in much the same way that the younger child learns from the older and the older learns from the workmen-teachers in the industrial shops of the school. The teachers are allowed great leeway in their courses. They develop their own ideas, shape their own work, share each other's plans. The children are encouraged to develop their own ideas. Each person in the Gary school is thus at the same time, or at some time in the course, both a pupil and a teacher. The auditorium hour, which Mr. Wirt considers one of the most important of the day, is used for the development of expression. If anything interesting happens in any class, this hour gives an opportunity to present it in dramatic form to the rest of the school. The teachers take turns in providing an interesting programme. The children dramatize their history or literature stories, athletic exhibitions are given, musical performances, moving pictures. "Auditorium" is a sort of school theatre, where work of interest, that would be otherwise lost in the classroom, is vitalized and brought to the attention of the rest of the school community.

Great emphasis is laid on expression in the Gary school. There are special teachers for this work, and the lower classes all have what is called an "application" hour, in which they discuss what they have been studying or apply it in whatever practical form the teacher or the children can suggest. The Gary school makes every effort to train individual, expressive personalities instead of the uniformly drilled and trained product of the ordinary public school. Discipline is very free, for Mr. Wirt finds that when children are busy and interested they do not have time to be mischievous and that in the absence of strict rules they will learn naturally how to rule themselves. They move freely about the building with the unconscious air of owning the school themselves. Visiting teachers, though they are often shocked at the freedom, are never able to find evidences of depredation. The Gary school

seems actually to have solved a great problem by providing interesting activity which does away with the need of enforcing strict discipline.

Mr. Wirt has shown that these things are possible even in public schools that handle great masses of children. The Froebel School in Gary has twenty-five hundred children in one building, most of them very small immigrant children, yet every child will be able to get an education suited to his individual needs. Each child has his own schedule of work and goes through the school as an individual and not as a member of a "class." This plan does not complicate the administration, for each school has an executive principal, whose sole duty is to look after these schedules, while the instruction is supervised by special officers and the shop work is under the direction of a director of industrial work. The smaller children are, of course, busy in the earlier years with the three R's. But as early as the fourth grade the little boy or girl is allowed to go into one of the industrial shops or science laboratories as "observer" or "helper" to the older children who are at work there. One of the characteristic features of the Gary school is the arrangement of the rooms. Shops, laboratories, and classrooms are not segregated, but mixed together, so as to give an impression of the fundamental unity of this well-rounded education, which should embrace manual as well as intellectual work, the artistic as well as the scientific. All the rooms have glass windows and doors, so that the little child, running about the building, is led by his own curiosity to look in, and discovers what he is interested in before he enters the shop or laboratory. His interest is caught while it is fresh, and the roots of his skill are laid early, in marked contrast to the usual "vocational" training which takes the child only in the last year or two before he goes to work. In the Gary school the child picks up the new knowledge almost without effort. The older child learns, too, by teaching the younger. When the latter takes up the work in a higher grade he already knows the apparatus and technique. He has almost taught himself. The work of the teacher has been immensely lightened. Individual instruc