XII. The Gary Plan

IT was in the nature of a happy accident that this sane and democratic proposal came before the public as a practical alternative to the scheme of turning the grammar schools into adjuncts of capitalist shops and factories.

It happened that a man named Wirt solved in the schools of Gary, Indiana, the problem of accommodating two pupils with a desk built for one. He did this by the simple means of abolishing the private and exclusive character of the desks. By having one-half the pupils come a little later and leave a little later than the other half, and use the desks which the others had just vacated for the gymnasium or workshop or assembly room, it was found that there were desks enough for all. And because this plan made it unnecessary to spend some millions of dollars on new school-buildings, he was invited to come to New York and put his plan in practice there.

If that had been all there was to the Gary system,[Pg 81] it might have been adopted peacefully enough. But the Gary system was a real and hence a revolutionary kind of education, and so it met with immediate and bitter hostility.

It made the child and his needs the center of the whole process of education. It undertook to give him a chance to learn how to live. It made the school to a large extent a replica of the world outside. It gave him machinery and gardens and printing presses to play with and learn from. And right there it aroused the suspicions of working class parents, who were afraid their children were not going to get enough Book-learning. It demanded something of teachers besides routine and discipline and stoic patience; and though they came with experience to be its most enthusiastic advocates, they were in prospect roused to angry opposition. It abolished the semi-sacerdotal dignities of the school-building, and thus offended a deep-lying superstitious reverence in a public which regarded education as something set apart from life. It clashed with the bureaucratic fads of the higher educational authorities, and provoked them to financial sabotage. And finally it was dragged into politics, where as the pet project[Pg 82] of an administration of bureaucratic reform officials it was held up to popular scorn.

But the ideal of education which was implicit in the Gary plan is still up for judgment.