In 1915, John Dewey’s Schools of To-morrow was published. The final chapter is entitled ‘Democracy and Education’ and may be regarded as a prelude to his magnum opus with the same title that was published the following year. The book discussed schools working with a curriculum that is “truly representative of the needs and conditions of a democratic society” (Dewey and Dewey, 1962, p. 208).
The most comprehensive example in the book is the Gary Plan (also known as ‘the platoon system’ or ‘the work-study-play school’) worked out by William Wirt (1873-1938). Gary was ‘the Magic City of Steel’ (McShane & Wilk, 2009) and the Gary schools became a showplace for educational innovation in both curriculum and school architecture. The system attracted national attention and literally hundreds of school systems in the US ‘Garyized’ by adopting all or part of the system or took inspiration for their own school reforms from Gary (Zilversmit, 1993).
For all its novelty and pioneering, the Gary system nevertheless left much to be desired, and the system soon engendered a good deal of controversy, in Gary and elsewhere (Cremin, 1961). In 1960, the system in Gary had finally died, and the schools would more closely resemble the mainstream (Cohen, 2002).
Although the Gary Plan has already been extensively discussed in American history of education, today the system seems to have “passed into the limbo of things forgotten” (as predicted in the visionary article by B. Stair, As education advances: The Gary Plan only one step toward a better school system. The New York Times, 12 January 1916).
This paper grasps the hundredth anniversary of Dewey’s seminal works mentioned above in order to examine critically the existing scholarship by adding another story that is also taking into account the aftermath of the Gary Plan and the tragedy Gary went through that turned the city in an economic and social wasteland (O'Hara, 2011).
