This fourfold division of study and recitation facilities, studio, workshop, and laboratory facilities, auditorium facilities, and application and play facilities, is essential to the working of the Wirt plan. Where the ideal school plant is impossible, this fourfold plan may yet be possible. As has been said, the greatest triumph of the Wirt plan in Gary is, perhaps, the Jefferson School, a building of conventional style, which had been erected before Mr. Wirt came to Gary. It was an ordinary school-building with ten classrooms and auditorium, but no other facilities. By turning the spacious attic into a gymnasium, by transforming five of the classrooms into music and art studios and nature-study laboratories, by building a general jack-of-all-trades workshop around the engine- and boiler-room in the cellar, by building a domestic-science kitchen in an unused corner, putting lockers into wasted space, and by equipping the playground with apparatus, Mr. Wirt succeeded in transforming an ordinary school-building, whose prototype may be found in almost any town in the land, into a full-fledged, varied, and smoothly running Wirt school. The reorganization of schools in New York City and other places has been done by Mr. Wirt along similar lines.[1] Footnote 1: See appendix for detailed description of reorganization of twelve New York schools. Where, in most cases, a mere rearrangement of classrooms and the institution of shops and laboratories will transform a school, in others special annexes are necessary. These can be built usually, however, at comparatively small cost. The use of portable houses by the smaller schools of Gary has enabled the small wayside “district school,” hitherto confined entirely to study and recitation, to transform itself into a genuine Wirt school, with its fourfold work and study. Shop, auditorium, and laboratory and studio can be provided in the form of small portable houses, and the capacity of the school as well as its facilities can thus be greatly increased. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ III WORK, STUDY, AND PLAY: THE SCHOOL AS A COMMUNITY THE Gary school represents not merely the old public school with certain added modern features, but a definite reorganization. Its aim is to form, with its well-balanced facilities of work, study, and play, a genuine children’s community, where the children’s normal healthy interests are centered, and where they learn, in Professor Dewey’s phrase, “by doing the things that have meaning to them as children.” The Gary school aims to meet the comparative failure of the public school to-day to care for the city child. It tries to take the place of the old household and rural community life which provided for our forefathers the practical education of which the city child in his daily life is deprived to-day.