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Show Ford Develops Education Setup At Greenfield Many of the 500,000 visitors to Greenfield Village near Detroit this year discovered that this is the heart of a far-flung educational system. More than 2000 pupils are being educated edu-cated under theories developed by Mr. Ford, and already there are 6000 graduates of the system. Two hundred hun-dred fifty of these pupDs are at Dearborn which is part of the City of Dearborn school system but unlike un-like any school anywhere. In England, Eng-land, Mr. Ford is teaching mechanical me-chanical farming. Near his winter home at Ways, Georgia, he is running run-ning six schools for negro children, a vocational training center and a village high school. In six or eight small Michigan villages he has taken hold of the rural schools, revitalized re-vitalized them and incorporated his educational theories into' them. The story of Mr. ord as an educator edu-cator is told in a book, "Henry Ford and Greenfield Village," which has just been presented to the local library li-brary by the Alpine Motor Company Written by William Adams Simonds, the volume offers a complete and fascinating story of the village itself as well as the educational experiment experi-ment going on therein. He believes children should be taught to do things that are useful and have value and will help them to earn, that children should have fun while learning. "Schools fail if they turn out boys and girls who have to buy all their pleasures," he says. Beginning in the Greenfield Village Vil-lage kindergartens, tne children are encouraged to participate in the gardening project. The surplus is sold by students at a roadside market mar-ket and the money divided equally. This past summer it amounted to more than forty dollars per pupil. Mr. Ford's ideas are summed up in a recent interview in which he said: "My experiences as an employer showed me long ago that there was not enough kinship between what a man knew and what he could do. The vital connections between life and education are broken, and we aim to repair the break. We are trying to keep life in our schools as nearly as possible like life in the world." |