English, in these classes, is so alive with interest that the children write with ardor and read eagerly the literature which, improperly handled, they learn so soon to despise.

The time-honored studies of the old curriculum may be charged with interest if they are linked to life. The most irksome task has its pleasant aspects. Even the three R’s may be translated into current thought.

VII School and Home

Even more significant for the future is the work which is being done in a few cities to train girls for their chief work in life—homemaking. The home schools at Indianapolis and Providence are, perhaps, typical. The Indianapolis School Board bought a number of wretched homes near one school in a crowded district. The boys in the school renovated the homes, converting one into a rug shop, another into a mop factory, and still a third into a shoe-shop. In these shops the children of the school did their trade work. Another house was made into a model home—(model for that quarter)—in which the domestic science department was located. Of this home the girls took entire charge, living in it by the day. There they were taught, by practical experience, the art of homemaking.

The home school of Providence, Rhode Island, under the direction of Mrs. Ada Wilson Trowbridge, has received nation-wide recognition. Six hundred dollars, appropriated by the Board of Education, renovated and furnished the flat on Willard Avenue in which the school is held.

The girls who elect to take work in the home school—the work is wholly elective—may come on Monday and Tuesday, or on Wednesday and Thursday. The hours are 4 to 6, or 7:30 to 9:30. On Friday, anyone comes who cares to. The day pupils are from the grammar schools and the evening pupils come from the factories and shops. Seventy-five names on the waiting list of day classes indicate the popularity of the school.

“We try to keep the school like the homes from which these girls come,” explained Mrs. Trowbridge, as she showed her tastefully arranged apartment. “The girls in the Technical High School worked out the color schemes, selected the patterns and bought the materials. We tried to get things which were good looking and durable.”

The three kinds of work, (1) Cooking, (2) Housekeeping, and (3) Sewing, are carried on in rotation, a girl spending one entire afternoon at cooking, the next at sewing and a third at housework. Thus each girl does an afternoon’s job in each subject. The cooking class studies successively “breakfast,” “lunch” and “dinner,” in each case preparing menus and cooking the food. A meal is served nearly every day. The service falls to the housekeeping class, which is also responsible for cleaning up, tending the furnace, washing, ironing and the like. Included in this part of the work are a number of thorough discussions of personal hygiene and home sanitation. To the sewing class, the girls bring their home sewing problems. Certain classes darn stockings while a teacher reads to them. Some girls make underclothing and dresses. The beginners hem table cloths, napkins, towels, dustcloths, etc., for the school. The classes are small (ten to fifteen) making individual work possible.

“No, no,” protested Mrs. Trowbridge, “we have no course of study, or else, if you please, there are as many courses as there are girls. Each girl has her problems and we aim to meet them.”

The backyard, utilized as a garden, furnishes vegetables which the girls cook and can. These vegetables, together with canned fruits, jellies, jams and pickles, which the girls put up, give the school such an excellent source of revenue that last year it turned over $15 to the Superintendent of Schools.

The crowning work of the school was done in a bare upstairs room which the girls papered and painted themselves. “Two of them have since done the same thing with rooms at home,” declared Mrs. Trowbridge, happily. “Isn’t that good for a start?”

The home school stays close to home problems, dealing with the facts of life as the girls who come to school see them. It would hardly be fair to expect more of any school.

VIII Breaking New Ground

Anaemic children and those who show a tubercular tendency are treated in open air schools. In Springfield a special school was constructed. In Providence an old building was employed. In all cases, however, the windows are notable by their absence. The school supplies caps and army blankets, a milk lunch in the middle of the forenoon and the afternoon, and a plain, wholesome dinner at noon. A few months of such treatment works wonders with most of the children. It seems only fair that the sick school child should be treated to fresh air and full nutrition, even though the well child is not so favored.

The open air school has borne fruit, however, in the establishment of numerous open-window classes. Against these classes, there seems to be only one complaint. The children are too lively. Fancy! They get a supply of oxygen sufficient to stimulate them into life during school hours. How tragic this must seem to the teacher who is in the habit of calming the troubled spirits of her class by a generous administration of closed windows and carbon dioxide.

A few cities are attempting to relieve underfeeding by the provision of wholesome school lunches at cost. Buffalo leads in the work, with Chicago, Philadelphia and a number of other cities trailing behind. When you remember that the Chicago School Board reported that in the Chicago schools there were “five thousand children who were habitually hungry,” while “ten thousand others do not have sufficient nourishing food,” you will perhaps agree that the time has come for some action.

Among the liveliest educational movements of the day is that of providing school children with a legitimate occupation and a convenient place to be occupied outside of school hours. Chicago, with an unequaled system of playgrounds, and Philadelphia, with a department devoted to school gardens, are leaders in two fields which promise great things for the future welfare of American city school children.

IX The School and the Community

Not content with doing those needful things involved in the education of children of school age, the school is reaching far out into the community. Night schools came first, as a means of education for those who could not attend school during the daytime. Every progressive city and town has a night school now, and the scholars who come after working hours use the same expensive equipment that is furnished to the regular classes. Machines, cooking apparatus, maps and blackboard all do double duty. In the foreign quarters, particularly, the night schools attract a large following of adults, eager to learn the language and ways of the new land. Though many a one falls asleep over the tasks, who shall say that the spirit is not willing?

Public lectures are being used more and more as a means of public education. There is scarcely an up-to-date city that has not some public lectures connected with its school or library system, while in a center like New York, the Board of Education has established an elaborate organization for the delivery of lectures in public school buildings throughout the city. The lecture topics—widely advertised through the schools and elsewhere—cover every field of thought.

Perhaps the whole movement of the schools to influence the community may be summed up in the phrase, “A wider use of the school plant.” Why should not the schools be open, as they are in Gary, day and evening, too? Why should the mothers and fathers not be organized into “Home and School Leagues,” meeting in the schools as they do on a large scale in Philadelphia? Why should not the social sentiment of a community be crystallized around its schoolhouse, as it has been in Rochester? Is it better to have the children playing in the street in the summer time, or in the school yards and playgrounds, as they do in Minneapolis and St. Paul?

The billion dollars invested in the school plant must be made to yield a return in broader social service with each succeeding year.

X New Keys for Old Locks

Scattered attempts are being made to teach children the relation between individual and community life. All of the seventh and eighth grade children in Indianapolis visit the city bureaus—water, light, health, fire and police. Trips to factories teach them the relation between industry and the individual life, while social concepts are developed by newspaper and magazine reading, book reading and class discussions of the articles and books which are read. At election time they discuss politics; they take up strikes and labor troubles; woman suffrage is occasionally touched upon; and they are even asked to suggest methods of making a given wage cover family needs.

The widespread introduction of domestic science and elementary manual training renders any special discussion of them unnecessary. In some instances, however, they are developed to a high degree. In Gary, Indianapolis and Cincinnati, seventh and eighth grade girls make their own garments, cook and serve meals to teachers or to other classes; while in the advanced grades the boys make furniture, sleds, derricks, bridges and telegraph instruments. Chair caning, weaving and clay modeling are also widely used in the hand work of both boys and girls.

Fitchburg, Mass., has developed a Practical Arts School, paralleling the seventh and eighth grades in the grammar school. The school includes a Commercial Course, a Practical Arts Course, a Household Arts Course and a Literary Course. The regular literature, composition, spelling, mathematics, geography, history and science of the seventh and eighth grades is supplemented by social dancing, physical training and music in all of these courses; and in addition for the Commercial Course by typewriting, shorthand, bookkeeping, business arithmetic and designing; for the Practical Arts Course, by drawing, designing, printing, making and repairing; for the Household Arts Course, by cooking, sewing, homekeeping and household arts; and for the Literary Course, by half-time in modern language and the other half in manual training and household arts.

At the end of the sixth year (at about twelve years of age) children in Fitchburg may elect to take this school of Practical Arts instead of the regular grammar school course. The results of this election are extraordinary. The practical course was planned for the children who expected to leave school at fourteen, or at the end of the eighth grade. Curiously enough, all types of children have flocked into it. Sons of doctors, lawyers and well-to-do business men; boys and girls preparing for college, and children who must stop school in a year or two are all clamoring for admission. In spite of the fact that pupils are kept in these schools six hours a day instead of five, as in the other schools, the attendance at the end of two years has outrun the accommodations. The children who leave this applied work and enter the high school are apparently not a whit less able to do the high school work than those children who have come up through the regular grades.

The new education is broader than the old, because it accepts and adopts any study which seems likely to meet the needs or wants of any class of children or of any individual child. The storehouse of the mind is to-day unlocked with educational keys of which educators in past generations scarcely dreamed.

XI School and Shop

Ohio has provided, for the solution of the problem, a continuation school law, modeled on the more extensive plans of the German Continuation School system. The law reads: “In case the board of education of any school district establishes part-time day schools for the instruction of youths over fourteen years of age who are engaged in regular employment, such board of education is authorized to require all youths who have not satisfactorily completed the eighth grade of the elementary schools to continue their schooling until they are sixteen years of age; provided, however, that such youths, if they have been granted Age and Schooling Certificates and are regularly employed, shall be required to attend school not to exceed eight hours a week between the hours of 8:00 A. M. to 5:00 P. M. during the school term.”

Cleveland and Cincinnati, acting under this authority, have established continuation schools. In Cleveland they are voluntary; in Cincinnati they are compulsory. In both cities, children between fourteen and sixteen may attend school, during factory time, for four hours each week.

Little enough, you protest. Yes, but it is a beginning.

The child in such a continuation school may choose between academic work, art, drawing and designing, shop-work, millinery, dressmaking and domestic science. In some cases a continuation course is possible. Thus far the system has worked admirably.

Equally significant are the Massachusetts Vocational Schools, which are intended to provide a technical training for the boys who wish to pass directly from the grammar school into industry.

Under the Massachusetts law, the state pays half of the running expenses of any vocational school which is organized with the approval of the State Director of Vocational Training. The Springfield school, under the supervision of E. E. MacNary, is housed on one floor of a factory building. The boys may not come at an earlier age than fourteen and Mr. MacNary insists, where possible, that they complete the regular seventh grade work before coming to him. His school, which includes pattern making, cabinet work, carpentry and machine shop work, is run on the “job” plan. That is, a boy is assigned to a job such as making a head-stock for a lathe. The boy makes his drawings, writes his specifications, orders his material and tools, estimates the cost of the job, makes the head-stock and then figures up his actual costs and compares them with the estimated cost. Not until he has gone through all of the operations, may he turn to a new piece of work.

“We tried the half-day and half-day in shop plan,” Mr. MacNary explains, “but it was not a success. It disturbed the boys too much. So we hit on the plan of letting each boy divide his time as he needed to. When he has drawing and estimating to do, he does that and when the time for lathe work comes, he turns to that. It breaks up any system in your school, but it gives the best chance to the individual boy.”

One day a week all of the boys meet the teachers in conference to discuss their work and to make and receive general suggestions.

The boys who come to Mr. MacNary’s school are boys who would probably leave the regular school at fourteen. Many boys come because they are discouraged with the grade work, and of these “grade failures,” many succeed admirably in the new school. During the two years of this shop-work, the boys get a training which enables them to take and hold good positions in the trades. As one foreman said, “A boy gets more training in the two years of that school than he gets in three years of any shop.”

These are but an index of the myriad of attempts which cities are making to bring school and shop together, to train for usefulness, to start boys in life.

XII Half a Chance to Study

Into these evening study classes, in charge of advisory teachers, any child might come at all. The city librarian, generous in co-operation, lent library books in batches of forty, for two months at a time. Evening after evening, the boys and girls assemble and with text-books or library books, do those things in the school which are impossible in the home. For what other purpose should the school exist?

XIII Thwarting Satan in the Summer Time

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

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.

How is this done? Take the case of John Frena, who occupies a place of no particular distinction in the fifth year of the Gary schools. John’s school day (from 8:30 A. M. to 4:00 P. M.) is divided equally between regular work (reading, writing, geography, etc.) and special work (play, nature study, manual training and the like). A day of John’s school life reads like this:

During his school day, John has played, used his head and his hands, and alternated the work in such a way that no one part of it ever became irksome.

Next week, music and literature will be substituted on John’s program for drawing; the following week manual training will replace one period of play. The four special subjects (drawing and manual training, music and literature, nature study and science, and plays and games) rotate regularly. Each day, however, includes four periods of this special work and four periods of regular work.

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

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.

An even greater individuation of children exists in Fitchburg and Newton, Mass., and in Providence, R. I. Children from the country and foreign children who have difficulty with their English, together with any other children who do not fit into any grade, are placed in an ungraded class. A typical ungraded class of fifty pupils contained Germans, Russians, Greeks, French, Italians and Polish children, who were unable to speak English on entering the school. The ages of these children varied from eight to fifteen. As soon as the ungraded children appear to be fitted for any special grade, they are transferred.

This ungraded work is supplemented by “floating teachers,” who are located in each school for the purpose of dealing with special cases. The case of any child who, for this reason or that, cannot keep up with the work in a particular subject, is handed over to these teachers. Thus individual attention is secured in individual cases.

XVI All Hands Around for An Elementary School

The children in grades one to three, inclusive, in addition to studying the three R’s, spend thirty minutes each day learning to measure, fold, cut and weave paper. In grades four and five, an hour and a half per week is devoted to simple weaving, knife-work, raffia work, sewing and basketry. Grade six has four and a half hours of similar work each week, while in grades seven and eight, the pupils are occupied for one-third of their entire school time in art work, book-binding, pottery work, weaving (blankets and rugs), chair caning, cooking, sewing and printing.

“But how is it possible?” queries the defender of the old system. “How can the necessary subjects be taught in two-thirds of the time now devoted to them? Are we not already crowded to death?”

Yes, crowded with dead work, the proof of which lies in the fact that the children who devote a third of the time to apply their knowledge get as good or better marks in the academic work than the three-thirds children. That, however, is not the really important point. This course of study is valuable because it gives a rounded, unified training.

This is how the course is organized. The school life is a unit, into which each department fits and in which it works. The spelling lesson is covered in the classroom and set in type in the print shop. The grammar lesson consists in revising compositions with regulation proofreaders’ corrections. The art department designs clothes which are made in the sewing classes. The drawing room furnishes plans for the wood and iron work and designs for basketry and pottery. In the English classes, the problems of caning and weaving are written and discussed. The mathematical problems are problems of the school. Children in the sixth year keep careful accounts of personal receipts and expenditures—accounts which are balanced semi-weekly. The boy in one woodworking class makes out an order for materials. A boy in another class makes the necessary computations and fills the order. All costs of dressmaking and cooking materials are carefully kept and dealt with as arithmetic problems. For the older boys, shop-cards are kept, showing the amount and price of materials used and the time devoted to a given operation. These again form a basis for mathematical work. The whole is knit together in a civics class, which deals with the industrial, political and social questions, in their relations to the child and to the community.

Best of all, the things which the children talk and figure about, plan and make, have value. The seventh and eighth year girls make clothes which they are proud to show and wear; they cook lunch for which some of the teachers pay a cost price. The baskets are taken home. Eighty chairs are caned by the children each year. The bindery binds magazines, songs and special literature. The boys make sleds and carts, hall stands, umbrella racks, center tables and stools. They make cupboards and shelves for the school, quilting-frames on which the girls do patchwork. Rags are woven into rag carpets and sold. The print shop prints all of the stationery for the school. Each can of preserves, in the ample stock put up by the girls, is labeled thus:

"Preserved Peaches"

with labels printed by the boys.

June, 1912, witnessed a triumph for the entire school. The children in the upper class had taken up the study of book-making. They even went to a bindery and saw a book bound and lettered. Then, to show what they had learned, they composed, set up and printed—

A Book
About Books
by
June 8 A Class

This book of twenty-eight pages, tastefully covered and decorated, contained three half-tone cuts which the children paid for by means of entertainments; an essay by Hazel Almas on “The History of Books,” one by Adele Wise on “The Printing of a Book,” and one by Ruth Kingelman on “The Art of Bookbinding"; the program of the commencement exercises, and a collection of poems and wise sayings.

The children went further and invited Mr. Charles Bookwalter, the owner of the bookbindery where they had learned their lesson, to come and talk to them on Commencement Day. He came, made a splendid address and went away filled with wonder before these achievements of fourteen-year-old grammar school children.

Each grade has a special subject of study. This year the boys in the Eighth A are studying saws; the boys in Eighth B, lumbering; the girls in Eighth A are investigating wool and silk; while in Eighth B the girls are studying cotton and flax. This “study” means much. Not only do the children discuss the topics, write about them, read books on them, and do problems concerning them, but they visit the factories and study the processes from beginning to end.

When the problem of pins came up, the teacher desired several copies of a description of pin-making, so she asked the class to write out a letter to the manufacturers. The class, left to select, decided to send this letter:

Need I say that the American Pin Company sent immediately twenty duplicates of the desired pamphlet?

The work in this school where thought and activity go hand in hand, is done by the regular grade teachers—done, and done well. They are as enthusiastic as the pupils. Four years’ trial has convinced them. On the day that I visited the school, I walked into a classroom where twenty girls were busy sewing. The order was perfect. Every one was busy. The teacher was nowhere in evidence.

“That teacher,” explained the principal to me later, “is off at a teachers’ meeting. She left these girls on their honor to work. You see the result.”

I saw and marveled. Yet why marvel? Was not this a typical product of the system which knits thought and activity into such a harmonious, fascinating whole as the most fortunate adults find in later life? Out of such a school may we not well develop harmony and keen life? Never yet have men gathered grapes from thistles, but often and often have they plucked from fig trees the figs which they craved and sought.

XVII From a Blazed Trail to a Paved Highway

Pages might be filled with descriptions of similar successes, yet I think that my point is already sufficiently established. How can we disagree regarding so plain a matter? The path of educational progress has led away from the three R’s along a trail, blazed at first by a few men and women who dreamed and stepped forward hesitatingly. Often they retraced their steps, discouraged, and gave over the little they had gained. By degrees, however, the trail was blazed. The way became clearer. After all it was possible to connect education with life.

Slowly the light of this truth dawned upon men’s minds. Gradually the way opened before them. One by one they trod the path, bridging the worst defiles, straightening the road, cutting out the thickets and filling in the morasses, until at last, behold the way, explored by hesitating, derided pioneers, no longer a trail, but a broad highway. Others have gone—their name is legion—and have succeeded. The three R’s are but the beginning of an adequate elementary curriculum. You, in your own city, with your own teachers, can vitalize your elementary schools. You can teach the children to use their heads and hands together, and thus show them the way to a deeper interest in your schools, and a larger outlook on their work in life.

CHAPTER V

II An Experiment in Futures

Children who get stranded in the seventh or eighth grades may have failed in one subject or in several. Over age and out of place, they lose interest, become discouraged and at fourteen drop out of school to work or to idle. In Newton, as in every other town, there were a number of just such children whom Mr. Spaulding decided to get into the high school.

“There they will be among children of their own age,” he explained. “They may take a new line of work and acquire a real interest.”

“But they will fail in their high school work as they have failed in their grade work,” protested the doubters.

Mr. Spaulding, smiling his quiet, genial smile, tried his experiment all the same. From the seventh and eighth grades of the Newton schools he picked the boys and girls who were fifteen or more at their next birthdays. These pupils, seventy in all—forty girls and thirty boys—were transferred, without examination, into the high school.

“These youngsters were going to drop out of school for good in one year, or two at the outside,” explained Mr. Spaulding, “so I made up my mind that during that year at least they should have some high school training. They went to the regular high school teachers for their hand-work; but for their studies, I put them in charge of three capable grade teachers, who were responsible for seeing that each child was making good. I put it to the grade teachers this way: ‘Here are a lot of children who have got the failure habit by failing all through their school course. Unless we want to send them out of our school to make similar failures in life, we must teach them to succeed. Take each child on his own merits, give him work that he can do and let him learn success.’

“We gave these boys and girls twenty hours a week of technical work (drawing, designing, shop-work, cooking and sewing) and ten hours a week of academic work (English, mathematics, civics and hygiene). Shop costs, buying of materials and simple accounting covered their mathematics. Those were the things which would probably be most needful in life. The boys got deeply interested in civics, and we let them go as far and as fast as they pleased. With the girls we discussed hygiene, dressing and a lot of other things in which they were interested.

“When those children entered the school they were boisterous and rough. The girls dressed gaudily, reveling in cheap finery. By Christmas, to all appearances, their classes differed in no way from the other high school classes. They all brushed their hair. The boys were neater and the girls were becomingly dressed.["]

Most of the seventy children stayed through the year. Twenty-seven of the forty girls and seventeen of the thirty boys entered the regular high school course the next fall. They were thus put into competition with their former seventh and eighth grade comrades, although they had had only two-fifths as much academic work as the regular eighth grade pupils. There was the test.

Could these derelicts, after one year of special care, take their places in the regular freshman high school work? After the end of the first quarter, a study made of the 800 children in the high school showed that on the average there were fifty-four hundredths of one failure for each scholar. Among the twenty-seven girls from the special classes, however, there was but seventeen-hundredths of a failure for each girl, or one-third as many failures as in the whole school. The boys made an even better showing. Of the entire seventeen, only one boy failed, and in only one subject.

III The Success Habit

Just a word about James. He began life badly. His mother died when he was young; and his father, a rather indifferent man, boarded the boy out during his early years with an aunt, who first spoiled him through indulgence, and then, inconsistently enough, hated him because he was spoiled. Growing up in this uncongenial atmosphere, James became entirely uncontrollable. He was disagreeable in the extreme, wild and unmanageable.

The people with whom James was boarding grew tired of his continued truancy and he was placed on a farm near Boston. There, too, he was discontented, dissatisfied and disobedient. Time after time he ran away to Boston. He went on from bad to worse, falling in with vagrants, learning their talk and their ways, acquiring a love for wandering and a distaste for regularity and direction. Taken into custody by the Juvenile Court, and placed on probation with a family outside of Boston, James again ran away to mingle with a crowd of his old associates in Boston. It was at this point that the court decided to send him to the Reform School. It was likewise at this time that some friendly people took him in charge, found him a home in Newton, and started his life anew in the Newton Technical High School, which James entered with a special transfer class. Promoted to the regular freshman class on trial, James has renewed his interest in education and bids fair to make his way through the high school.

James is doing well in the Newton Technical High School. Though he does not like all of the regular high school work, he has a full course, and is working at it persistently. Heretofore school has never appealed to him—in fact, he hated it cordially—but the school at Newton offered him such a variety of subjects that he was able to find some which were attractive. Since then he has been working on those subjects.

There are many cities in which every school door would have been closed to James, because he did not fit into the school system, but the superintendent of the Newton schools believes in making the school fit the needs of the boy. A fantastic theory? Well, perhaps a trifle, from one viewpoint; nevertheless, it is the soul of education.

IV The Help-Out Spirit

That is virile work, is it not? And the result? During the past eight years the number of pupils in the Newton schools who are over fourteen has increased three times as fast as the number of pupils who are under fourteen. The school authorities have searched the highways and byways of the educational world until one-quarter of the school children of Newton are in the high schools.

V Joining Hands with the Elementary Schools

Superintendent Wirt of Gary, Indiana, has established such a twelve-year course in the Emerson School. The grades, numbered from one to twelve, are so arranged that a girl may take half of her subjects in school year eight (last grammar grade) and the other half in school year nine (first high school grade). In order to make the harmony more complete, Mr. Wirt places the elementary rooms, containing the second grade pupils, next door to the rooms which shelter high school seniors. On this side of the hall is a kindergarten; directly across from it is a class in high school geometry.

The same plan, on a larger scale, has been adopted by I. B. Gilbert, principal of the Union High School, Grand Rapids, Michigan, which houses twelve hundred students.

“We have obliterated the sharp line of distinction between the grades,” declared Mr. Gilbert. “The school, which is a new one, has a very complete equipment—physical, chemical, and biological laboratories, two cooking rooms, dressmaking and millinery rooms, an art department, a woodworking shop, a forge room and a machine shop; the print shop, though not yet installed, is to be put in this year. By bringing children of all grades to the school, we place at the disposal of grade pupils apparatus ordinarily reserved for high school pupils only. At the same time, our equipment is in constant use and the cost of establishing a separate industrial department or school for the grades is eliminated.

“These are merely the surface advantages, however. The real gain to the students is in other and most significant directions. First, the abolishing of rigid grading allows each child to follow his own bent. At the beginning of the adolescent period, when the old interests begin to lag, some new ideas must be furnished if the child is to be kept in school. We provide that new stimulus by beginning departmental work with the seventh year (at twelve or thirteen). Then, if the child shows any particular preference for any line of work, he may pursue it. From the seventh grade up, promotion is by subjects entirely, and not by grades. If a student elects art, she may follow up her art work for the next six years; similarly, a boy may follow shop-work, or a girl domestic science or millinery. In order to fit the school more quickly to the pupils’ need, we make a division at the beginning of the eighth grade of those pupils desiring to take academic work and those desiring to take industrial work in the high school. The latter group does extra sewing or shop-work twice each week.

“Again, we take all over-age and over-size pupils from the schools in this section of the city, and by placing them in ungraded classes, permit them to take the work which they can do. Here is a boy who cannot master grammar. That is no reason why he should not design jewelry, so we give him fourth year language, and take him into the tenth year class in jewelry design. Yes, and he makes good, doing excellent craft work and gradually pulling up in his language. By this means we make our twelve grade school fit the needs of any and every pupil who may come to it.

“We have a natural educational progress for twelve years,” concluded Mr. Gilbert. “There is no break anywhere. Instead of making it hard to step from grade eight to grade nine, we interrelate them so intimately that the student scarcely feels the change from one to the other. The result? Last June there were 152 pupils in our eighth grade. Of that number 118, or more than three-quarters of them reported in the ninth grade this fall. We have cancelled the invitation to quit school at the end of the eighth grade and our children stay with us.”

VI The Abolition of “Mass Play”

“So it goes. The bright girl takes her cue from the teacher and the class takes the cue from the bright girl. They must be taught to think and do for themselves.”

Everyone interested in school children should visit the Washington Irving School (New York) and watch the truly wonderful McAndrew system of individualization. In the office, you are cordially greeted. You wish to see the school? By all means! But no teacher is detailed to serve you. Instead, a messenger goes in search of the Reception Committee. Two of the school girls, after a formal introduction, start your tour of inspection, if you are fortunate enough to be there at nine, with a visit to one of the assembly rooms, where, in groups of three or four hundred, the girls enjoy three-quarters of an hour each morning. The word “enjoy” is used advisedly, for, unlike the ordinary assembly, this one is conducted entirely by the girls.

Each morning a different chairman and secretary is selected, so that in the course of the year every girl has had her turn. The chairman, after calling the meeting to order and appointing two critics for the day, reads her own scripture selection, and then calls upon some girl to lead the salute to the flag. The minutes of the previous day’s meeting are then read, discussed and accepted. After fifteen minutes of singing—singing of everything from “Faust” to “Rags"—the chairman calls on the two critics for their criticism of the conduct of that day’s meeting. Some special event is then in order. On one Monday in December Miss Sage, head of the Biology Department, described the Biological Laboratory in the new school building. After she had finished, the chairman rose.

“Will anyone volunteer to tell in a few words the principal points which Miss Sage made?”

Three girls were promptly on their feet, giving, in clear, collected language, an analysis of the talk.

After you, as a guest, have been conducted to the platform, introduced to the chairman, and given a seat of honor, the chairman turns to the assembly, with the announcement,—

“Girls, I wish to introduce to you our guest of this morning.”

Instantly the whole assembly rises, singing blithely, “Good morning, honored guest, we the girls of the Washington Irving High School are glad to welcome you.”

The proceedings having come to an end, the chairman declares the meeting adjourned and you look about, realizing with a start that the girls—freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors—have spent three-quarters of an hour in charge of themselves, and have done it with interest, and with striking efficiency. Continuing your journey, you find the process of individualization everywhere present. Here a girl is in front of a class, directing the calisthenics which precede each class hour. There a girl is standing at the front of the room, leading singing or quizzing in geometry.

“Yes, it was a wrench,” Mr. McAndrew admits. “You see, the teachers hated to give up. They had been despots during all of their teaching lives, and the idea of handing the discipline and a lot of the responsibility of the school over to the girls hurt them dreadfully, but they have tried it and found that it works.”

VII Experimental Democracy

The high school pupil, after discovering himself, must next determine his relation to the community. It is one thing to break down what Mr. McAndrew calls the W. I. (Wooden Indian) attitude. It is quite another to relate pupils to the community in which they live. Yet this, too, can be done. The school is a society—incomplete in certain respects, yet in its broad outline similar to the city and the state. The social work of the school consists in showing the citizens of the school-community how to enjoy the privileges and act up to the responsibilities of citizenship. The Emerson School at Gary and the Union High School at Grand Rapids, organized into complete schools from the first grade to the end of the high school, are miniature working models of the composite world in which all of the children will live.