118.The
Gary Plan: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto
from archive.org
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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