The
Gary Plan
Frederick Taylor's gospel of efficiency demanded complete and
intensive use of industrial plant
facilities. From 1903 onwards, strenuous efforts were made to achieve full utilization of space by forcing
year-round school on society.
Callahan suggests it was "the children of America, who
would have been unwilling victims of this scheme, who played a decisive role in beating the original effort to
effect this back."
But east of Chicago,
in the synthetic U.S. Steel company town of Gary, Indiana, Superintendent William A. Wirt, a
former student of John Dewey's at the University of Chicago, was busy testing a radical school innovation called
the Gary Plan soon to be sprung on
the national scene. Wirt had supposedly invented a new organizational
scheme in which school subjects
were departmentalized; this required movement of students from room to room on a regular basis so
that all building spaces were in constant use. Bells would ring and just as with Pavlov's salivating dog,
children would shift out of their
seats and lurch toward yet another class.
In this way children
could be exposed to many nonacademic socialization experiences and much scientifically engineered
physical activity, and it would be a bonus value from the same investment, a curriculum apart from so-called basic
subjects which by this time were
being looked upon as an actual menace to long-range social goals. Wirt called
his system the
"work-study-play" school, but outside of Gary it was referred to
simply as "the Gary
Plan." Its noteworthy economical feature, rigorously scheduling a student
body twice as large as before into
the same space and time, earned it the informal name "platoon school."
While the prototype was being
established and tested on children of the new industrial proletariat in Gary, the plan itself
was merchandised from newsstand, pulpit, and lecture circuit, lauded in administrative circles, and soundly
praised by first pedagogical couple
John and Evelyn Dewey in their 1915 book, Schools of Tomorrow. The first
inkling Gary might be a deliberate
stepchild of the scientific management movement occurred in a February 1911 article by Wirt for The
American School Board Journal, "Scientific Management of School Plants." But a more thorough and
forceful exposition of its
provenance was presented in the Elementary School Teacher by John
Franklin Bobbit in a 1912 piece
titled "Elimination of Waste in Education."
Bobbit said Gary schools were the work
of businessmen who understood scientific
management. Teaching was slated to become a specialized scientific
calling conducted by pre-approved
agents of the central business office. Classroom teachers would teach the same thing over and over to groups of
traveling children; special subject teachers would deliver their special subjects to classes rotating through
the building on a precision time
schedule.
Early in 1914, the Federal Bureau of
Education, then located in the Interior Department, strongly endorsed Wirt's system. This led to one of the most
dramatic and least-known events in
twentieth-century school history. In New York City, a spontaneous
rebellion occurred on the part of
the students and parents against extension of the Gary Plan to their own city. While the revolt had
only short-lived effects, it highlights the demoralization of private life occasioned by passing methods
of industry off as education.
15. Bobbit was the influential schoolman
who reorganized the Los Angeles school curriculum, replacing formal history
with "Social Studies." Of
the Bobbitized set of educational objectives, the five most important
were 1) Social intercommunication 2) Maintenance of physical efficiency 3) Efficient citizenship 4) General
social contacts and relationships 5) Leisure occupations. My own favorite is
"efficient citizenship," which
bears rolling around on the point of one's bayonet as the bill is
presented for payment.
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