“The modern city,” says Superintendent Wirt, “is largely the result of the application of the principle of the common use of public facilities that we need for our personal use only part of the time. We are willing that other people use public services when we cannot use them. How many street-cars and what sort of service could we afford if each citizen had to have his own private street-car seat for his own exclusive use?” Yet the educational ideal in school management generally remains what is set forth in the report of the 1913 Part-Time Committee of the New York public schools,—“Every pupil is entitled to an individual seat and desk. The teacher is entitled to the exclusive possession of a classroom....” In the light of the Gary plan this ideal is absurd. It means, as has been discovered in the New York experience, that school facilities can never be made to catch up to school population. And it is absurd because it assumes that all persons in school want to do the same thing at the same time. But all “modern public conveniences are made possible only by their common use and the fact that we do not want to use the same public conveniences at the same moment. We are willing to have some one else use our public library, look at our pictures in our public museum, walk in our public park, sleep in our Pullman berth or in our hotel bedroom, or travel in our steamboat when we are otherwise engaged.” It proves to be as financially prohibitive to attempt to provide an individual desk and seat for every school-child as it is to provide an individual seat for every citizen who may sit in the park. “The great masses of children in our city schools can never have ample play spaces, suitable auditoriums, gymnasiums and swimming-pools, workshops, libraries, museums, or even ordinary schoolrooms for study and recitation, if all children at the same time must be using each of these facilities separately.” The more people use these public services, the cheaper they become for each one of us. And the more evenly the public use is distributed, the more valuable becomes the service to each one of us. “Increasing the number of persons using any public facility either under public or private ownership betters the service for all, provided the load can be uniformly distributed during operating hours. The problem with a public lighting or transportation service is to eliminate ‘peak-loads’ as far as possible.”