Coming to the school-building itself, we find in the Emerson and Froebel
Schools architectural creations of unusual beauty and impressiveness.
The school-building is built around a great court, with broad halls as
wide as streets, and well lighted from the court. These broad halls
serve not only as the school streets for the constant passage of the
children between their work, but also as centers for the “application”
work, or for informal study. They are so wide that all confusion is
avoided, and they suggest to the visitor that they serve the school
community in the same way that the agora or forum did the ancient city.
In the Emerson School the beginning of an art gallery has been made. It
suggests the idea that just as the schools ought to absorb the
playgrounds, so they ought to absorb the museums and galleries. Pictures
and objects of art and interest become unreal and artificial when
immured in isolated museums, which can be visited only at special times
and with effort. They should be at hand in the school, fertilizing and
beautifying every moment of its daily life. The artistic sense can be
cultivated only by bringing children into contact daily and almost
unconsciously with beautiful things. The schools themselves must be art
galleries, and these fine corridors of the Wirt school indicate the way
by which a wholly new orientation is to be given to our public galleries
by using them as adjuncts to the education of children.
Similarly with museums. The teaching of the Gary schools, based
fundamentally on concrete things and processes, needs to be constantly
in touch with the objects which it is our custom to store in dead
museums. The school museum is an essential feature of the Wirt school.
The Wirt plan does not contemplate the taking of children docilely about
to visit museums, as some progressive teachers are doing. It
contemplates bringing the museums into the schools, so that the children
can know the treasures and live with them and learn about them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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