The Platoon School Library Available to Purchase

IT is quite impossible to write dogmatically about the general topic of the library and the platoon schools, any more than about the platoon schools themselves,—which differ so widely from each other in their approaches to the pedagogic problems of education. An interesting brief article by E. D. MacPhee in the August, 1917, number of The Canadian Forum on “New Horizons in Education” indicates the differences between some seven well known plans. Gary differs from Winnetka and the Dalton plan in retaining “class” teaching, while they abandon it for “individual” work, yet Gary and Winnetka agree in modifying the curriculum, while the Dalton plan retains it. Concerning the Gary work‐study‐play plan MacPhee says “a lengthened school day and week allow for class and individual work in regular school subjects and in the application of the knowledge and skill so acquired in the shop and the laboratory. There is specific training by practice in social activities.” The library hour, the gymnasium, the private music lesson, the voluntary week‐day church‐school classes to which the child may be released, the auditorium programmes, etc., are among the “social activities” which share in the extra‐academic half of the Gary child's schoolday, which lasts from 8–15 a.m. to 4–15 p.m., with an hour intermission for luncheon.