THIS children’s community, as worked out by Mr. Wirt in the Gary schools, is a work-study-and-play school of the most varied kind. It represents, in fact, an ideal school plant which was well outlined in Mr. Wirt’s mind when he first came to Gary. Schools like the magnificent Emerson and Froebel plants in Gary, and the new Pestalozzi School, for which plans have already been drawn and the site bought, represent the working-out in concrete form of this ideal. At the same time, it must be understood that the essential features of the Wirt plan are possible in schools which were not built from the ideal plan. Perhaps Mr. Wirt’s greatest triumph in Gary is not these new schools, but the old Jefferson School, which he found when he came to the town, and which, by ingenious remodeling, he turned from a conventional school-building into a completely functioning school. If the Wirt plan is momentous as showing what a really modern public school should embody, it is no less momentous in showing how easily the old type of schoolhouse may be adapted to the varied life of the school community that is the Wirt school. [Illustration: THE EMERSON SCHOOL ] It will first be necessary to describe the ideal school plant as represented in the Emerson and Froebel Schools in Gary. This plant carries out a belief in educating the whole child, physically, artistically, manually, scientifically, as well as intellectually. Mr. Wirt believes that by putting in the child’s way all the opportunities for varied development, the child will be able to select those activities for which he is best suited, and thus develop his capacities to their highest power. This can be done only in a school which provides, besides the ordinary classrooms, also playgrounds and gardens, gymnasiums and swimming-pools, special drawing and music studios, science laboratories, MACHINE-SHOPs, and intimate and constant contact with supplementary community activities outside the school. The Wirt school is based on a fourfold unity of interests,—play and exercise, intellectual study, special work in shop and laboratory, etc., and social and expressive activity in auditorium or outside community agency.