If the school is to be the children’s community, there must be some
place of general assembly, some forum or theater where the school may
take stock of itself. This is provided in the “auditorium,” one of the
original and essential features of the Gary plan. “Auditorium,” to which
a daily hour is given, is devoted to purposes different from the
religious exercises, declamations, and moral homilies common to the
“opening exercises” of the ordinary school. It does not even open the
day, for the Gary program makes it necessary for the “auditorium” hour
to come at periods throughout the day, differing for different classes.
The aim is to make it an occasion where anything that is happening of
peculiar interest in any part of the school may be dramatically brought
to the attention of the rest of the school. In the Gary school, each
child goes to “auditorium” for a full hour each day, and listens to a
program contributed by pupils or teachers or outside visitors. There is
always choral singing; there may be instrumental or phonograph music
besides. Lantern-slides and motion-pictures are often shown. There may
be talks by the special teachers about their work. The child may see
there gymnastic exhibitions,—as has been said, the stage at the Froebel
School is so large that a full-sized basketball game may be played upon
it before the audience,—folk-dancing, or dramatic dialogues and little
plays written by the pupils themselves about interesting things in their
study or reading. There may be debates on school issues. What is to be
presented in “auditorium” is limited only by the imagination and
expressiveness of teachers and children. The teachers in turn have the
responsibility of arranging the program, in coöperation with their
pupils. Children of widely different ages are sent together to the
“auditorium” hour, so that the younger may have their curiosity
stimulated about the work of classes that they perhaps have not yet
reached, and so that the older may lose that snobbery of age which often
causes so much unhappiness in childhood, and tends to fill the adult
mind with delusions about the young. This plan, therefore, makes for
sympathy between the pupils, makes each child familiar with the
activities of the whole school, and prevents that unfortunate
segregation and confinement of the ordinary school. Besides being able
to look into the various rooms through the glass doors, the child in the
Gary school has an opportunity of seeing in “auditorium” in dramatic
form the life of his school. The influence of this “auditorium” hour
upon the school work, particularly the academic work, can hardly fail to
be marked, for it directly motivates all the studies. It is a sort of
communal “application” activity. History and literature take on a new
meaning, because the material may be studied now always in the light of
its possible presentation to the rest of the school in dramatic and
intelligent form. Many schools use the dramatic sense to vitalize these
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