The complete school, Mr. Wirt believes, offers important moral gains.
“The development of character, habits of industry, reliability, good
health, and the growth of intelligence require time,” he says, “and must
be a continuous process throughout the entire life of the child.” The
complete school gives an opportunity for that coöperation or
“apprenticeship” between the younger and older children, which is so
important a feature of the Wirt school, and this association breaks down
the snobbery of age which causes so much unhappiness in childhood.
It must be admitted that in Gary, owing to the progressive mortality in
attendance which is common everywhere, it is possible to realize the
complete school only in the Emerson and Froebel plants. At the same time
it must be remembered that these schools care for three quarters of the
school-children of the town. In the elementary schools which Mr. Wirt is
reorganizing in New York, he is asking that there shall be included at
least two of the high-school years, in order that the complete school
may be approximated as closely as possible. In Gary, they are working
for a school which is even more than “complete,” for they aim to include
even the first year and perhaps even the second of the ordinary college
course. Stretching down boldly past the kindergarten to a nursery for
babies, and up into the college itself, the Wirt school thus gives a
fundamentally new orientation to education, shows it graphically and
practically as a continuous process, and breaks down those artificial
barriers by which we measure off “education,” and make it easy for
people to “finish” it. The Wirt school seems definitely to forecast the
day when the public school will have swallowed the college, and the
“higher education” will have become as local and available as the three
R’s.
* * * * *
If the school is to educate the whole child, the first need is evidently
a place for him to grow. “The best of education,” says Professor Terman,
“is but wisely directed growth.” “The activities of a child,” says
Professor Dewey, “are the means by which he becomes acquainted with his
world, and by which he learns the use and limits of his own powers.” The
lack of free activity in the conventional school has been the major
cause of those symptoms of morbidity which school hygienists have
brought to the attention of educators within the last few years.
Over-pressure and confinement have made the school a manufactory for
evils which the next generation will look back to with amazement at the
blindness of the educational world which permitted it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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