The classrooms in the ideal Wirt school are much more attractive than the ordinary classrooms, far less formal and far less crowded. In some of them the old-fashioned school desk and seat have been retained, largely, according to Mr. Wirt, to meet the prejudice of the parents. Owing to the frequent change and movement of classes, however, this peculiarly flagrant instrument of educational perversity does little harm. Many of the lower grades have a desk, made in the school, which is a kind of workbench. These desks have vises attached, and loose tops, which can be readily replaced when soiled or worn out. The seat is a four-legged stool, which can be pushed out of the way when the child is using his desk for a workbench. On occasion the children can take up their stools and desktops and go off to work in the halls or garden. Such a room is an ideal classroom, with its hint of the workshop and its lack of rigidity. In the history room in the Emerson School are broad tables that can be used for map-drawing. The idea is to give to each classroom the physical setting and the furniture which will best enable a particular kind of work to be done there. The result is that the classrooms of the Wirt schools have a character of their own, quite different from the colorless and depressing effect of the ordinary classroom. They are not merely rooms where children study together and tamely recite, but essentially workshops where children do interesting things with their minds, just as in the shops they do interesting things with their hands. The history room is a real history laboratory. Maps and charts made by the pupils cover the walls, magazines lie about, pictures and books overflow the tables. The visitor realizes that he is in a room saturated with history, past and present. It is easier to learn in a room where everything appeals to the imagination. Mr. Wirt says that you never can tell when a child is learning. The time that he makes progress is not necessarily the recitation time. It is the constant impingement of impressions that really educates him, and it is this that the intellectual side of the Wirt school is skillfully designed to cultivate. Music and expression and drawing are taught, not in regular classrooms, but in special studios, which are genuine studios equipped with all the facilities to impress upon the child with what seriousness these things are taken in the Wirt school. Art tends to mean much more to a child brought up in such a school, because he works at it in an impressive environment.