Free Download School Bell Sound Mp3
Emelia Lute
It should come as no surprise to close observers of invented histories of education that Gatto would have something to say (in almost all his books, in fact) about the tyranny of the bell. He was, after all, one of the most influential promoters of the "school-as-factory" narrative: that the origins of mass schooling are inextricably bound to the need to reshape a rebellious farming nation's sons and daughters into a docile, industrial workforce. It's a powerful, influential story, sure, but it's a pretty inaccurate history.
Bells, primarily handbells, have been a technology of school since their outset, well before "the factory" they were purportedly modeled on. They were used, as were the bells in churches, to summon students to ye old one room schoolhouse for the beginning of the day.
(Insurance Engineering issued a widely-cited report in 1913, decrying the condition of some 250,000 schools in the US as "built to burn." "In 1911," the Moline, Illinois Dispatch worriedly detailed, "the value of school and college buildings destroyed by fire approximated $3,000,000. Estimates of the frequency of fires are as high as ten a week."(4) The story, incidentally, blames the introduction of a new piece of ed-tech for many of the blazes: the film projector.)
The ringing of the bell to signal the beginning and end of a class period, rather than just the beginning and end of the school day is often traced to William Wirt, who became superintendent of schools in Gary, Indiana in 1908. Wirt, a student of progressive educator John Dewey, devised a system in which, when the bell rang, students would move from room to room for instruction, not only in reading, writing, and arithmetic, but in music and shop, as well as time outdoors on a playground.
Generally, children had two ninety-minute periods or three hours a day in the basic subjects, and six thirty minute periods in special subjects the other three hours of the school day. Obviously to function effectively this scheme required a high degree of administrative planning and precision timing in the moving of children. This was particularly true if the schools were large, as they were at Gary, where some of them included all twelve grades and eventually had as many as 3,000 students." (5)
The question [Wirt] tried to answer was this: What did the Gary children need to make them good citizens and happy and prosperous human beings, and how could the money available for educational purposes supply all these needs? The industrial features of his schools will be taken up later, but it may be well to point out in passing that they were not instituted to turn out good workers for the steel company, nor to save the factories the expense of training their own workers, but for the educational value of the work they involved. In the same way it would be a mistake to consider the Gary schools simply as an attempt to take the unpromising immi- grant child and turn him into a self-supporting immigrant, or as an attempt to meet the demand of an industrial class for a certain sort of training. (6)
That John Dewey insisted what became known as the Gary Plan wasn't designed to condition students to become factory workers should maybe count for something. Maybe? It doesn't mean, of course, that the system didn't have incredible appeal to those reformers in the early twentieth century who were determined to reshape public education into a more efficient endeavor. Indeed as Callahan argues in his classic Education and the Cult of Efficiency, the Gary Plan was often showcased as an example of scientific management applied to schooling. But note: this was not because it trained children as workers but because it enabled a more efficient usage of the school building. That schools were empty at nights and on weekends and certain classrooms unused during the day was such a waste of money to those reformers, who argued that schools needed to be run more like businesses, indeed more like factories. ("Keep the students in the buildings year round, dammit!")
Although the "platoon school" fell out of favor after 1930, with teachers and even some administrators decrying the Taylorization of education, the influence of efficiency-based reforms remained. Moreover, the adoption of the Carnegie Unit and the standardization of curricular requirements and teachers' workloads in the early twentieth century ha led to the adoption of a school schedule that appears, at least in some way, platoon-school-like: the day divided into 45-minute class periods.
But by and large, through much of the twentieth century, schools did not ring bells to move students from class to class, from room to room. Automated school bells, along with public announcement systems, were available but were not widely adopted until after World War II. Indeed, it was well into the 1960s that many schools finally wired every classroom up to an automated PA system so that the bell, rather than the teacher with an eye on the clock, dismissed class. (And in many communities, it was the PTA that led the fundraising for this bell equipment. You know the PTA, that bastion of bourgeois values so very committed to their children being trained by bells to become factory workers.)