When we have mentioned the room for commercial studies, the
supply-store, the kindergartens and nurseries, the draughting-rooms,
indoor playrooms, teachers’ room, conservatory, doctor’s room and dental
clinic, offices, etc., our survey of the school plant is complete. The
arrangement of rooms itself, however, is very significant. As we pass
around the second floor of the Froebel School, for instance, we meet, in
this order, pottery-shop, laundry, freehand drawing-room, two
classrooms, physics laboratory, music and expression studios,
conservatory, two classrooms, botany laboratory, and four more
classrooms. The shops are not segregated in the basement, but the
children in their various activities work side by side. Classrooms are
placed next to laboratories, and shops next to studios, in order to
impress the pupil with the unity of the program, and in order that the
younger pupils may have constantly before their eyes an inviting future
and opportunity. All the rooms, moreover, have glass doors, and the
shops have windows, so that the children, passing through the halls, may
look in and see others at work at unfamiliar tasks. In this way their
curiosity is likely to be aroused and the ambition to work at these
interesting activities in which they see the older children engaged.
In this juxtaposition of the various activities, therefore, the child
has impressed upon him that school life is a unity in breadth, just as
the combining of the elementary and secondary school impresses him with
the fact that his school life is a unity in length. No opportunity is
lost to touch his imagination and excite his curiosity. The school plant
itself, in its mere arrangement and construction, it will thus be seen,
serves a very important educational purpose. The careful detail with
which this has been worked out in these ideal school plants of Gary
makes the Wirt school in its physical aspect something very much more
significant than a mere collection of facilities. Those facilities fit
into one another according to a very comprehensive plan. They form
organs of a genuine school life, which educates the whole child.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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