Yet with its leaping movement of population the city of Gary has been able to provide not only full-time instruction for every child, but actually a longer school day. It has not only done this, but it has provided evening school instruction for an even greater number of adults. There is something pardonable in the Gary boast that every third person in the city goes to school. And Gary has succeeded not only in giving this universal schooling, but in making it what is probably the most varied and stimulating elementary public-school instruction in the United States, with an equipment in buildings and facilities for work, study, and play which is surpassed, if anywhere, only in specially favored communities. All this has been done with a normal tax-rate, and at a _per-capita_ cost of both construction and maintenance no greater than that in the city of Chicago and the city of New York, with their many overcrowded and poorly equipped school-buildings. The Gary schools, at the same time, have paid the highest teachers’ salaries in the State. The entire achievement has been as brilliant as the difficulties confronted were formidable. It is these remarkable results that have focused the attention of so many educators on Gary, and it will be the purpose of this book to expound the “unique and ingenious synthesis of educational influences” which has made them possible. If, then, in the course of eight years, the schools of Gary have acquired a wide reputation as a momentous educational experiment which has passed into successful demonstration, the fact must be laid entirely to the abilities of the school authorities, and not to any adventitious factors of the community situation or of private assistance. The dominating factor was the personal genius of the superintendent, William Wirt, who was called to Gary in 1908 from Bluffton, Indiana, where he had been in charge of the public schools, and where he had partly worked out some of the ideas which he was later to develop so comprehensively in the Gary schools. When it is objected that the Gary plan is an experiment, and that eight years are scarcely sufficient time to pronounce upon its merits, it must be remembered that the real experimental stage of the Gary plan consisted in the eight years in Bluffton. Mr. Wirt came to Gary with his educational ideas matured after this long testing. He was brought to Gary by the unusually progressive mayor and school board of the new town, for the express purpose of working out on a large scale the principles which they had seen in concrete application at Bluffton. Against the financial meagerness of the town’s resources and the obstructiveness of the founders must, therefore, be set the advantage of having a virgin field in which to work. The superintendent and school board were able in a remarkably short time to build up a public interest and support which has been a very large asset. The people of Gary seem