hat school would start again on the following Monday. Fearfully he
approached the building. The streets about the school seemed unusually
deserted that Monday morning. Suppose no one should be there! When the
gong sounded, however, more than seven-tenths of the two thousand
children belonging in the school were in their places. The attendance
that summer was ninety-two per cent, and the promotion ninety-five per
cent. During the three summer months there were exactly two cases of
discipline.

"You see what happened," Mr. Pitkin explained. "All of the bright
ambitious children came back and the loafers stayed away. From that
picked crowd nothing but good work could be expected. There was no
attendance officer on duty, but the children were regular. Order was so
good that on hot days we put up the sashes between rooms, and on the
second floor, where four class-rooms were thrown into one, four classes
worked industriously under four teachers without the least friction."

This school has been organized on a year schedule. If the children come
four terms each year instead of three, they will reduce the time between
the first and eighth grades by one-third, which means a saving to them
and to the school. Since it is the able children who come, the twelve
months' school affords them an opportunity to go quickly through work on
which the slower classmates must hold a more moderate pace.

XIV Sending the Whole Child to School

It is a long step from the school of--

Reading, and writing and 'rithmetic,
Taught to the tune of the hickory stick,

to the school which aims at the education of the whole child; yet that
step has been attempted in Gary, Indiana. There, perhaps more
consistently than anywhere else in the United States, the school
authorities are providing for the whole child in their schools. Many
schools have manual training and domestic science; many schools have
school gardens and playgrounds; many schools have nature work in the
parks and squares; but in no school that I have visited did I find a
more conscious effort to unite mental and physical, hand and head, and
vocation and recreation, in one complete system.

This result, which to some may sound unbelievably like the impossible,
is accomplished first, by engaging experts to teach such special
subjects as botany and physical training; second, by abolishing grade
promotions and permitting each child to advance in his subject when he
is ready to