are very bad, neighborhood public opinion is worked up through the other children on the block. From time to time an auditorium period is devoted to showing these maps and pointing out the good and bad features of blocks and neighborhoods. Children always carry the news home to their parents, and as rents and accommodations are freely discussed, these reports are often acted upon. The parents are encouraged to come to the school and ask for information, and on more than one occasion some newly arrived family has moved from an overcrowded rear shack to a comfortable flat with the same rent because through the children they found out that their bad quarters were unnecessary. Because the school does this work to help, and as part of its regular program, it is accepted by the children and their parents as a matter of course. Information about improvements, sanitation, the size and comfort of the houses, and the rents, is given to the parents. If a block is poor a good block near by where conditions are better and the rents the same, is shown them. Thus the schools not only teach the theory of good citizenship and social conditions, they give the children actual facts and conditions, so that they can see what is wrong and how it can be bettered.
Gary schools use the community as much as possible as a contributor to the educational facilities, and in so doing they give good return in immediate results, besides the larger return in alert and intelligent citizens. Conditions in Gary are not ideal. The schools have no larger sums to spend than any city of its size, the teachers might be found in any other town, and the pupils come for the most part from homes that offer their children no training, while the parents are trying to adjust themselves to entirely new surroundings. But these schools have done much by showing a good business management, by spending the taxpayers’ money in an economical way so as to give the younger generation the largest possible facilities for spending their time profitably. The results of the system as seen in the school buildings and playgrounds, the alert and happy students, and the statistics of their progress through school as well as their careers afterwards, are doubly inspiring just because they have been accomplished with the resources available in any public school.
Chapter VIII
The School As A Social Settlement
Schools all over the country are finding that the most direct way of vitalizing their work is through closer relations with local interests and occupations. That period of American school history which was devoted to building up uniformity of subject-matter, method, and administration, was obliged to neglect everything characteristic of the local environment, for attention to that meant deviation from uniformity. Things remote in time and space, and things of an abstract nature, are most readily reduced to uniformity and doled out in doses to children in a mass. Unfortunately the consequences were too often that in aiming to hit all children by exactly the same educational ammunition, none of them were really deeply touched. Efforts to bring the work into vital connection with pupils’ experiences necessarily began to vary school materials to meet the special needs and definite features of local life.
This closer contact with immediate neighborhood conditions not only enriches school work and strengthens motive force in the pupils, but it increases the service rendered to the community. No school can make use of the activities of the neighborhood for purposes of instruction without this use influencing, in turn, the people of the neighborhood. Pupils, for example, who learn civics by making local surveys and working for local improvements, are certain to influence the life of the locality, while lessons in civics learned from the purely general statements of a text-book are much less likely to have either applicability or application. In turn, the community perceives the local efficiency of the schools. It realizes that the service rendered to welfare is not remote, to appear when the pupils become adults, but a part of the regular, daily course of education. The statement that the schools exist for a democratic purpose, for the good of citizenship, becomes an obvious fact and not a formula. A community which perceives what a strong factor its school is in civic activities, is quick to give support and assistance in return, either by extending the use of its own facilities (as happens in Gary) or by the direct assistance of labor, money, or material when these are needed.
The supervising principal of public school No. 26 in Indianapolis is trying an experiment unlike any other known to us in an effort to make his plant a true school; that is, a place where the children of his neighborhood shall become healthy, happy, and competent both economically and socially, and where the connection of instruction with the life of the community shall be directly recognized both by children and parents. Mr. Valentine’s school is located in the poor, crowded colored district of the city and has only colored pupils. It is not an attempt to solve the “race question” nor yet an experiment suited only to colored people. There is nothing in the school not entirely practical in any district where the children come from homes with limited resources and meager surroundings. A visitor when leaving this school can not fail to wish that such ventures might be started in all our great cities,—indeed in any community where people need to be aroused to a sense of their needs, including the fact that if they are to contribute to the best interests of the community, they must be taught how to earn a living, and how to use their resources for themselves and their neighbors both in leisure time and in working hours. Mr. Valentine’s school is a school for colored children only in the sense that the work has been arranged in relation to the conditions in the neighborhood; these modify the needs of the particular children who are the pupils. Yet the success of the experiment would mean a real step forward in solving the “race question” and peculiar problems of any immigrant district as well. Mr. Valentine is not interested in illustrating any theories on these points, but in making up for gaps in the home life of the pupils; giving them opportunities to prepare for a better future; in supplying plenty of healthy occupation and recreation; and in seeing to it that their school work reacts at once to improve neighborhood conditions.
Mr. Valentine’s school is really a social settlement for the neighborhood, but it has a decided advantage over the average settlement, for it comes in contact with all the children living within its district for a number of hours each day, while most settlements reach the children for only a few scattered hours each week. The school has a larger influence than most settlements because it is a public institution for which the people who use it are paying their share; they feel that their relation to it is a business one, not a matter of philanthropy. Because of this businesslike relation the school is able really to teach the doctrines of social welfare. In any settlement the work is always handicapped by the fact that the people who make use of it feel that they are receiving something for which they do not pay, that something is being done for them by people who are better off financially than they are. But giving a community facilities that it lacks for special classes and recreation through the public school of the district put the work on a different basis. The school is really the property of the people of the district; they feel that they are more or less responsible for what is done there. Any wider activities that a school may undertake are to a certain extent the work of the people themselves; they are simply making use of the school plant for their own needs.
The neighborhood around Mr. Valentine’s school is one of the poorest in Indianapolis, and once had a bad reputation for lawlessness and disorder as well. The school had struggled along for years with little or no support from the community as a whole or from individual parents. The per cent. of truancy was high, and a large number of cases were sent to the juvenile court each year. The children took no interest in their work as a whole, and cases of extreme disorder were not infrequent; one pupil tried to revenge himself on his teacher for a merited punishment with a butcher’s knife, in another case it was necessary to arrest a boy’s father as a lesson to the neighborhood. Besides this attitude of hostility and of unwilling attendance, the school had to contend with immoral surroundings which finally made it necessary to do something to isolate the school building from neighboring houses. Finally the school board bought the tract of land and wooden tenements around the school building. It was at first proposed to tear down the old buildings, but the authorities were persuaded to turn them over to the school for its use. The school
