History
Named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson High School opened in September of 1908. The first school in the world to fully incorporate Dr. William A. Wirt's "Work, Study, Play" educational platform, Emerson was state of the art for its time. The school boasted mechanical shops, science labs, a student-run bank, a student-run zoo and was the first educational facility in the nation to have an indoor swimming pool. Emerson High School is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Emerson High School closed in 1981 due to under population. However, the building reopened during the mid-80s as Emerson VPA, the first Visual and Performing Arts schools in the state of Indiana. In 2008 the Emerson building was shuttered once again due to mold issues. The district moved its visual and performing arts program first to the former Kennedy King Middle School and then into the former William A. Wirt High School building in Gary's scenic Miller Beach community. In 2009, the district renamed the school "Wirt-Emerson Visual and Performing Arts High Ability Academy."
Read more about this topic: Emerson School For Visual And Performing Arts
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification of the spirit.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)