lementary arithmetic by laying out a garden, of letters
by inscribing his name on a little signboard in order to identify his
patch--for the moment private property. And this principle is carried
through all the grades. In the Gary Schools and elsewhere the making of
things in the shops, the modelling of a Panama Canal, the inspection of
industries and governmental establishments, the designing, building, and
decoration of houses, the discussion and even dramatization of the books
read,--all are a logical and inevitable continuation of the abstract
knowledge of the schoolroom. The success of the direct application of
learning to industrial and professional life may also be observed in such
colleges as those at Cincinnati and Schenectady, where young men spend
half the time of the course in the shops of manufacturing, corporations,
often earning more than enough to pay their tuition.

Children are not only prepared for democratic citizenship by being
encouraged to think for themselves, but also to govern and discipline
themselves. On the moral side, under the authoritative system of lay
and religious training, character was acquired at the expense of mental
flexibility--the Puritan method; our problem today, which the new system
undertakes, is to produce character with open-mindedness--the kind of
character possessed by many great scientists. Absorption in an
appropriate task creates a moral will, while science, knowledge, informs
the mind why a thing is "bad" or "good," disintegrating or upbuilding.
Moreover, these children are trained for democratic government by the
granting of autonomy. They have their own elected officials, their own
courts; their decisions are, of course, subject to reversal by the
principal, but in practice this seldom occurs.

The Gary Schools and many of the new schools are public schools. And the
principle of the new education that the state is primarily responsible
for the health of pupils--because an unsound body is apt to make an
unsound citizen of backward intelligence--is now being generally adopted
by public schools all over the country. This idea is essentially an
element of the democratic contention that all citizens must be given
an equality of opportunity--though all may not be created equal--now
becoming a positive rather than a negative right, guaranteed by the state
itself. An earnest attempt is thus made by the state to give every
citizen a fair start that in later years