The Greatest Works of John Dewey. Джон Дьюи
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and they are taught as well trades and processes which will at least give them a start towards prosperity, and then, too, they are aroused to a feeling of responsibility for the welfare of the whole community.
All these things are done as part of the regular work of the school, and to a large extent during regular school hours. But there are many other activities which, while not contributing so directly to the education of the children, are important for the general welfare of the whole community. There is a night school for the adults of the neighborhood who want to go on learning, the shops being used as well as the schoolrooms. A group of people especially interested in the school have formed a club to promote the interest of the night school, and to see that the men of the community understand the opportunities it offers for them to perfect themselves in a trade or in their knowledge and use of English. This club is made up of men who live near the school and who are sufficiently alive to the needs of the school and the community to work very hard to let all the district know what the school is already doing for its welfare and what it can do as the people come to demand more and more from it. Besides keeping up the attendance at the night school, the club has done much for the general welfare of the school, like helping raise money for remodeling the buildings and giving an expensive phonograph to the school. The success of the school as a social center and the need for such a center are realized when we remember that this club is made up of men who live in the district, whose children are using the school, and who are perhaps themselves going to the night school.
There is also a vacation school during the summer time for the children of the neighborhood, with some classroom work and a great deal of time spent on the playground and in the workshops. The school has an active alumni association which uses the school building for social purposes and keeps track of the pupils that leave. A parents’ club has been started as an aid in gaining the coöperation of the pupils’ parents in the work of the school and as a means of finding out the real needs of the neighborhood. The parents are brought in even closer contact with the school through the series of teas given by the grades for their parents during the year. Each grade serves tea once a year in the domestic science house for the mothers of its pupils. The children do the work for the teas as part of their domestic science work, and write the invitations in their English class. The teachers use these teas as an opportunity for visiting the children’s homes and getting acquainted with their mothers. The teacher who knows the home conditions of each child is much better able to adjust the work to the child, being aware of his weak and strong points. To poverty-stricken, overworked mothers these social gatherings come as a real event.
The pupils of the school are given social as well as educational opportunities through their school life. The boys’ club house is opened nearly every night to local boys’ clubs, some of them being school organizations and some independent ones. There are rooms for the boys to hold meetings and to play games, and a well-equipped gymnasium. The teachers of the school take turns supervising these evening gatherings. The attendance is large for the size of the building. Giving the boys a place for wholesome activities has done much to break up the habits of street loafing and the gangs which were so common in the district. The girls of the school use the domestic science house for social purposes. Two chapters of the Camp Fire girls hold regular meetings in the building and get help and advice from the teachers. Each domestic science class aims to teach the girls how to live a comfortable and self-respecting life, as well as how to do housework, and so becomes a social center of its own. The girls learn to cook and serve good cheap meals, and then they sit down together and eat what they have cooked. They talk over their individual problems with the teacher and with each other, and give each other much practical help. The domestic science teacher helps the girls who have some skill find work to do after school hours so that they can help their families by helping themselves; she helps the pupils find steady work as they leave school and then keeps track of them, encouraging them to go on fitting themselves for better work.
The success of the settlement work the school has done points strongly to the fact that the schoolhouse is the natural and logical social center in a neighborhood, the teachers coming into closer and more natural contact with both children and parents than is possible in the case of other district workers.
There are large economies combining the school and the settlement in districts where the social and economic standards of living are so low that the people are not especially successful citizens. Both the school and settlement facilities are enlarged by using the same group of buildings for both purposes. The settlement has the use of better and larger shops and classrooms than most settlements can command, and the school uses the social rooms and activities to become itself a community. The school comes in contact with almost all the families in a district so that community action is much easier to establish. But even more important than these economies are the far-reaching results which come from the fact that the school settlement is a democratic community, really reflecting the conditions of the community.
In using the school plant for any activities, whether simply for the usual eight classes or to supply the community with all sorts of opportunities, as the Gary schools are doing and as Mr. Valentine’s school is doing, the people of the community feel that they are using for their own ends public facilities which have been paid for by their taxes. They want to see real, tangible results in the way of more prosperous and efficient families and better civic conditions, coming from the increased plant in the district school. Because the schools are public institutions in fact as well as in name, people know whether the schools are really meeting their needs and they are willing to work to see that they do. The school settlement reaps all the advantages of working for definite ends and of having the businesslike cooperation of the community as a body. In spite of the fact that the work of Mr. Valentine’s school has been hampered by lack of funds, and that some of the special things done are suited to one particular local population, the changes which have taken place in the neighborhood in the relation between the school and the parents, and in the spirit of the pupils in their school attitude, show what a public school may mean to its neighborhood when it ceases to be an isolated academic institution.
The Gary schools and Mr. Valentine’s school have effected an entire reorganization in order to meet the particular needs of the children of the community, physically, intellectually, and socially. Both schools are looking towards a larger social ideal; towards a community where the citizens will be prosperous and independent, where there will be no poverty-ridden population unable to produce good citizens. While changes in social conditions must take place before this can happen, these schools believe that such an education as they provide is one of the natural ways and perhaps the surest way of helping along the changes. Teaching people from the time they are children to think clearly and to take care of themselves is one of the best safeguards against exploitation.
A great many schools are doing some of the same sort of work, using the activities of the community as a means of enriching the curriculum, and using the school plant for a neighborhood center. The civic clubs of the Chicago public schools, which have already been described, are aiming at the same thing: the better equipment of pupils for their life in the community with the hope of improving the community itself. The Cottage School at Riverside, Illinois, where pupils all come from well-to-do American families, has found a similar club valuable for the pupils and of real use to the town. The school organized by the pupils into a civic league has made itself responsible for the conditions of the streets in certain portions of the town, and is not only cleaning up but trying to get the rest of the town interested in the problem. Mock elections and “self-governments” based upon political organization are examples of attempts of education to meet the need for training in good citizenship. Using the school plant as a social center is recognition of the need for social change and of the community’s responsibility to help effect it.
The attempt to make this enlarged use of the school plant is not so much in order to train young people so that they can assume the burden of improvement for themselves as to give the neighborhood some immediate opportunities which it lacks for recreation, intercourse and improvement. The school plant is the natural and convenient place for such undertakings. Every community has the right to expect and demand that schools supported at public expense for public ends shall serve community uses as widely as possible. As attempts in socializing education have met with such success and such enthusiasm among the children that their value as educational tools is established,