Hadow (1933)

Notes on the text
Preliminary pages Membership, Analysis, Preface, Introduction
Chapter 1 History of the development of infant education
Chapter 2 Physical development of children up to 7
Chapter 3 Mental development of children up to 7
Chapter 4 Age limits and organisation of the infant stage
Chapter 5 Medical supervision, education and training of under 5s
Chapter 6 Training and teaching of children in infant and nursery schools
Chapter 7 Staffing of infant and nursery schools, training of teachers
Chapter 8 Premises and equipment of infant and nursery schools
Chapter 9 Summary of principal conclusions and recommendations
Appendix I List of witnesses
Appendix II Anatomical and physiological characteristics of 2-7 year olds (Harris)
Appendix III Emotional development of children up to seven plus (Burt and Isaacs)
Appendix IV Notes on typical nursery schools and classes
Appendix V Manchester's student nurse scheme for 'helpers'
Appendix VI Practice in Europe and US
Index

London: HM Stationery Office

Chapter 6 The training and teaching of young children in infant and nursery schools
[pages 116 - 148]

I: INTRODUCTORY

82. Our reference deals with the training and teaching of children between the ages of two plus and seven plus. For the earlier part of this period the child belongs to the home, but from the age of five he is under legal obligation to attend school, and for the remainder of the period he belongs partly to the home and partly to the school. It is accordingly convenient to divide our discussion on the proper nurture of young children into two sections: the training and teaching of children before the age of five, and the training and teaching of children after the age of five. This does not mean that the age of five marks any definite epoch in the physical or intellectual life of the child - his growth is continuous and much of what is necessary for the earlier years remains necessary after the age of five - but it marks a development in the attitude of those who have charge of children. Up to the age of five the main consideration in the mind of the teacher is how best to foster healthy growth in the right environment, physical, moral and social, for the proper development of the young life. This consideration remains fundamental after the age of five, though the teacher towards the age of six begins to direct the activities of the child towards the more formal kind of schooling.

83. The natural and best environment for the child up to the age of five is the home, and his natural guardian is his mother. Economic conditions, however, often oblige the mother to go out to work so that the home ceases to provide the right environment or guardianship. This was early recognised, and it became usual, and in many parts of the country is still usual, to allow children under the age of five to attend the public elementary school in what are commonly known as 'baby classes'. The weakness of the baby class hitherto has been that it often does little to provide the right environment for the young child and leads to a premature beginning of schooling. More recently it has been recognised that other conditions - bad housing, overcrowding, etc - often make the home an unsatisfactory environment for the young child, and that young mothers often lack the necessary knowledge how to train him. Although we look forward to a steady improvement in housing conditions, and to the influence of the child maternity and child welfare centres in instructing mothers in the care of young children, we recognise that under existing conditions it is often necessary, particularly in large and crowded towns, to establish nursery schools or classes in order to secure, for part of the day at any rate, a suitable environment for the young child. The following section deals in broad outline with the work of schools or classes of this character. These schools, however, only deal with part of the life of the child: he will still spend the greater part of his life in the home: the training of the nursery school or class must be carried into the home by active cooperation with the parents of the children. If it is to be fully effective, it must be practised in the home life of the children.

II: THE NURSERY SCHOOL, INCLUDING THE NURSERY CLASS

84. The fundamental purpose of the nursery school or class is to reproduce the healthy conditions of a good nursery in a well-managed home, and thus to provide an environment in which the health of the young child - physical, mental and moral - can be safeguarded. The younger the child, the more closely are these three aspects of development connected.

85. Physical health comes first, and attention to the physical well-being of the child will be the supreme requirement. During the pre-school period the young child is peculiarly fragile and liable to infection, and the results of infection are far more serious than at a later age. Experience has, however, shown that with intelligent precautions, both the infection and its consequences may be effectively minimised. During later years inadequate or unwise feeding may render the child temporarily inefficient, but during early life it often leaves behind it permanent defects, mental as well as physical. (1), What is true of bodily development in general is also true of nervous and mental growth during this stage. Most forms of mental deficiency are recognisable before the age of five; and many other defects which the school has hitherto accepted as unavoidable prove in fact to be preventable during the pre-school period. Most cases of moral abnormality and perversion, of nervous disorder and faulty habit formation, have their roots in these initial years of life. In all these directions the nursery school gives the doctor and the nurse an opportunity of dealing with these conditions while there is yet time.

But physical health is not only a matter for medical supervision and care. It involves opportunities for free movement, in sunlight when possible, in fresh air always, out of doors or indoors, and regular periods for lying down and sleep. It depends also on the regular practice of healthy habits, and it is the duty of the school to give wise training in the practice of those habits that are included under the general term: personal hygiene. The child should learn to carry out the daily events of hygienic routine - dressing, washing, the care of the teeth, the use of the handkerchief, eating and drinking, excretion and rest - as a matter of course. Many of these are activities due to what are called appetitive tendencies, and are concerned mainly with physiological needs. But, as has been said in Chapter 3 (2), the training must not be obtrusive. If these needs are allowed to remain dominant in the child's mental development, he may become absorbed in his own pleasures and pains. Too exclusive an insistence on the daily events of hygienic routine may easily foster this self-absorption and ultimately warp the child's emotional development. If the practice of hygienic habits is treated without fuss as part of the normal procedure of the school, the child will come to accept it as a natural incident of a healthy life.

86. The child in the nursery stage, however, needs training as well as care. But the training must be a natural training, not an artificial one. What is true of education at every period of child life is true most of all during the nursery period; its aim is not so much to implant the knowledge and the habits which civilised adults consider useful, as to aid and supplement the natural growth of the normal child. We may rightly regard the function of the nursery school or class as educational, but we must not regard it as didactic. The aim of the teacher will be primarily to assist the spontaneous unfolding of the child's natural powers. We now know that the normal child, if left to himself in a suitable environment, will learn spontaneously a large number of things that it was once supposed he could only learn through deliberate instruction. Under natural conditions, which are the very opposite of those obtaining in civilised town life, the child's everyday surroundings would be full of objects and situations calculated to satisfy the child's natural impulses and so keep him in touch with the real world about him. The nursery school must accordingly endeavour so far as is possible to plant the child in his natural biological environment, to keep him out of doors with plenty of air, sunlight and space, surrounded with trees, plants and animals, with places that he can explore, pools where he can paddle and sandpits where he can dig.

The most obvious characteristic of the tiny child is his capacity for muscular activity. Freedom for bodily movement is accordingly very important. The child should be allowed to toddle, run about, clamber and climb, as much as he pleases. The nursery school should be so planned and arranged that there need be a minimum of restriction in these respects. But although these physical activities should be to a large extent free and unhampered, they should not be entirely aimless. The children should be trained to play together as well as to play alone, to breathe properly, to use their limbs with increasing control, to move quietly when necessary.

During the nursery stage the child is also gaining knowledge of the world about him through his senses, and perfecting the use of his senses as a means of exploring his environment. The child's constant desire to be looking at things, handling things, and even pulling them to pieces, should be restricted as little as possible. The school should surround him with objects and materials which will attract his attention and provide him with scope for experiment and exploration. The school grounds should include little gardens which the children can share in cultivating, and, where practicable, there should be opportunities for stimulating interest in bird and animal life, for example, by means of dovecotes, bird baths, and the like.

The more primitive senses not only give the very young child far more intense pleasure than at a later age, but are relied on to a greater extent than is generally realised. The infant is more eager to smell and taste than the older child, and often gains a clearer perception of shapes and textures through touch than he can through vision. The higher senses, sight and hearing in particular, need opportunities for what is commonly known as sense training. But mere exercise does not train or strengthen the senses in the way that exercise develops the muscles. After the first few months of life the sense organs themselves are capable of no further improvement. But we can train the child to listen with attention, to respond to quiet questions, and to begin to distinguish between different sounds and to develop a taste for pleasant sounds instead of mere noise. And we can train him to notice broad (rather than fine) differences in colour, form and size, to discriminate what was previously unnoticed or confused, and help him to learn what to look for. Specially devised tasks, with appropriate apparatus, are required. The essential principle in sense training is to keep well within the limits of the child's spontaneous interests and to give his sense perceptions both a variety and meaning. Slight differences are unnoticed until they have been repeated in differing contexts and so gained a meaning for the individual child. Toys of all kinds, so long as they are not too obviously educative, play their part here, and the child should be allowed to use them as his fancy directs.

But the young child's mental life is not wholly engrossed in movement and sensation. Long before he enters the nursery school his mental processes have ceased to be entirely perceptual. As soon as he can talk he can think and has begun to enter a private life of fancy and imagination. Most English teachers disagree with the embargo that Mme Montessori places on all fiction or romance; although they recognise the child's need to experiment actively with real things.

87. When the young child enters the nursery school he becomes a member of a group, and cannot be permitted to act as though he were the only individual in the place. There must be restrictions, but these will be determined by psychological, rather than by domestic requirements as may be the case in the home. They will be reduced to a minimum, and kept as far as possible in the background and not be the first object of the training. Here the group spirit will be invaluable. Individual difficulties frequently disappear when the child is one in a group. He will soon subscribe to the daily routine as a matter of course, and will tend to do what everyone else is doing. If at times the routine conflicts with his own private inclinations, other factors will enter in to divert his thoughts from his own likes and dislikes. He will take an interest in sharing in a common activity, and on social occasions, such as the common meal, his attention is still more upon others and upon the general procedure than upon himself and his own performance.

In applying restrictions the right method will be one that is constructive rather than one that is repressive, one that gives the child a useful and productive channel into which his energy may be deflected rather than one that merely tries to stop the outflow. The child in the nursery stage is still in the main a self-centred individualist, and curiously noncooperative. It is a mistake to try to hasten the growth of the social instinct; it will come of itself when the child is ready. He should have room to behave, within reasonable limits, in the way that is most natural to the level he has reached, and provided at every stage with the formative experiences that he requires. What is essential is that space and staff should be generously provided so that individual play and loosely organised activities can be carried on side by side without the need for obvious pressure or coercion. (3)

III: THE INFANT SCHOOL

88. At the age of five the child enters the primary school. In this country it has been the custom to deal with the earlier years (five to seven plus) in separate schools or divisions, and since these are part of the primary school, it follows that the fundamental principle governing the curriculum which we enunciated in Chapter 7 of our Report on the Primary School applies broadly to the infant school also. It is the special function of the infant school to provide for the educational needs of the years of transition that separate babyhood from childhood. Our main concern must be to supply children between the ages of five and seven plus with what is essential for their healthy growth, physical, intellectual, spiritual and moral, during this particular stage of development. This does not mean that this stage is to be, or indeed can be, dealt with in isolation from what has preceded it or from what is to follow it. It is essential to keep in mind the importance of continuity with the work of the later years of the primary stage, but no one who has grasped the idea that life is a process of growth in which there are successive stages, each with its own specific character and needs, will dispute the conclusion that the best preparation for a later stage is to base the training during the particular stage on the immediate needs of that stage. In the words of our previous Report, 'no good can come from teaching children things that have no immediate value for them, however highly their potential or prospective value may be estimated'.

We therefore adopt as the guiding principle determining the training and teaching of the infant school the same principle that we laid down for the primary school as a whole: 'the curriculum is to be thought of in terms of activity and experience rather than of knowledge to be acquired and facts to be stored. Its aim should be to develop in a child the fundamental human powers and to awaken him to the fundamental interests of civilised life so far as these powers and interests lie within the compass of childhood, to encourage him to attain gradually to that control and orderly management of his energies, impulses and emotions, which is the essence of moral and intellectual discipline, to help him to discover the idea of duty and to ensue it, and to open out his imagination and his sympathies in such a way that he may be prepared to understand and to follow in later years the highest examples of excellence in life and conduct.' (4)

This general principle requires the whole span of the primary stage for its full development, and its application to the infant school will be more pervasive than direct. It would be entirely inappropriate for instance to attempt to translate it into any rigid or logically ordered curriculum for the infant school. Indeed to apply the term 'curriculum' at all to the training and teaching carried on before the age of seven plus is dangerous as suggesting a systematic procedure which is opposed to the unordered way in which the child has hitherto developed his powers. The child, even if he has unhappily missed the advantages of a good home, or a good nursery school or class, has already learnt to use his native powers over a wide field of activities and interests. He has acquired mastery of the simpler muscular movements and has begun to coordinate them. He has learnt to speak, and begun to build up a working vocabulary by which to express his needs. He has a general and in some directions an intimate knowledge of his surroundings from which he has gained simple ideas about many things. All this he has acquired through personal experience and experiment in the natural course of growth, but always without plan or ulterior motive. It is through opportunities for further experience and experiment that growth will best be fostered in the infant school.

This does not mean that the school has to stand aside and leave the child to follow the wind's way all the time. In recent years, both in this country and in America, there has been a tendency to exaggerate the childishness of the child, and to deprecate any procedure, especially in the training of the mind, which will interfere with it. The free urge of the child is not sufficient to secure his full development; the best way of doing things is not always that which occurs to the unaided mind. The school, in providing opportunities for new experiences must deal with the child as a growing person and not merely as a child. It is hardly yet realised that after infancy is over intellectual growth is in many respects quantitative, rather than qualitative, and shows itself not by the sudden appearance of the power to carry out a particular intellectual function, but by a gradual extension of the time during which that function is carried out continuously. (5) The healthy child attaches no value to his childishness; all his instincts prompt him to savour the experiences of those older than himself, and the school which would confine him entirely to childish things because it thinks them most appropriate to his years, does him a grave disservice. In the provision of opportunities for further experience and experiment the school must make a delicate compromise between the immediate powers and needs of the child and his future needs as a potential adult.

Although this duty is no simple one, it is not beyond the powers of a body of teachers who have always shown their sensitiveness to new ideas and willingness to put them to practical test. In the following paragraphs we outline what we believe to be essential for the healthy growth of children between the ages of five and seven plus. It will be seen that we have no new gospel to preach. It is probable that there is nothing suggested in these paragraphs which is not already in one aspect or another part of the normal procedure of many schools. What we do desire to see is the acceptance of a different set of values from that which has been usual in the past; less weight on the imparting of an ordered body of knowledge and more on the development of the child's innate powers, less reliance on the artificial life of the classroom and more on the experiences to be gained out of doors and the opportunities for experiment and discovery which close contact with the real world provides.

89. Physical welfare (including nutrition, hygiene, medical and nursing supervision) is the foundation upon which mental training should be based, and, if rightly understood and interpreted, it includes much of the habit and character training and the development of intelligence and alertness which is preparatory to the more direct education and training of the mind. The first place in the training and teaching of the infant school will, accordingly, still, as in the case of schools and classes for children under the age of five, be given to the physical well-being and efficiency of the child. This is the more necessary so long as only a very small proportion of children reach the infant school through nursery schools or classes, and are not medically supervised through other agencies. The after-effects of illness and lack of continuous medical care during the first five years of life have to be countered. This is not merely a matter of the provision of suitable physical or remedial exercises. It involves regular opportunities for rest, and training in all desirable bodily habits, in particular in personal cleanliness. It also involves ample provision for free movements of every kind in fresh air, and in sunshine wherever possible. A sedentary life is exceedingly unnatural for a child of infant school age, yet unfortunately in many infant schools the child is still riveted to the old-fashioned desk for the greater part of the day. Freedom for movement and full opportunities for exploring the world through the senses remain the prime requisites for the growing child.

90. It is on the open-air activities and interests of the children that we would base the training and teaching of the infant school because it is there that the child's interests first emerge. It is not by quasi-military drill that the development of the body is best promoted, but by free movements of every kind, running, romping, jumping, climbing and dancing. These activities will accordingly be largely unhampered, and the teacher will only intervene to assist children to play together, or to help them to increasing control of their movements so that they can move quietly when necessary, breathe properly and adopt healthy postures when they stand or sit. (6)

The child's interests appear first of all in the form of play. Play is a spontaneous exercise of natural or inherited tendencies which will ultimately develop into activities of prime importance for adult life, but which for the moment are mainly undertaken because they yield joy and excitement in and for themselves. (7) Since the child's inheritance fits him for uncivilised rather than for civilised life, merely to follow nature in the way older reformers have advocated would leave the child very ill-adjusted in the modern world. Nevertheless, it is these primitive tendencies that have laid the foundations of human civilisation in the past; and the child may best learn to appreciate and adapt himself to modern conditions if, so far as is possible, he builds upon interests implanted by nature. Games of hunting, fishing, building shelters, nursing dolls, constructing things with the hands, imitating the activities of adult life, all these should be utilised in the infant school, and the more formal scholastic attainments may be aided by the use of such games as these. In this way the antithesis between work and play will not exist for the child; both alike will be for him forms of welcome activity. During the infant stage the play way is the best way.

The open air provides the best environment for physical well-being, but this is not the only reason why the children in the infant school should spend a large part of their school hours out of doors. Not the home, nor the school, but the unroofed country is the child's natural laboratory or workshop where he finds the things that appeal to his primitive instincts, the plants, flowers, bushes, living animals, stream, moveable earth or sand, that are his raw material for experience and experiment. The field, the park, the garden, the woodland copse, the waste patch, all are full of interesting things which will hold the child's eye, arouse his wonder, stimulate his Inquiries, give opportunities for discovery. It is here, from observation of real things and happenings, that the foundations are best laid of most of the branches of knowledge which will be studied in later school life; geography in the changing weather, the succession of the seasons, the daily walk to school, the excursion to the park or country, the visit to the zoo; history in the work of the policeman and postman, the railway and motor, the forge and the factory; biology in the growing plant and the living animal in their natural surroundings. The cultivation of little gardens and flower borders, the care of birds and animals, the observation of trees and flowers, butterflies and other beautiful things may also be made the foundation of humane habits and of sympathy for others, and lay the seeds of a love of all things beautiful.

91. It is unfortunate that our English climate compels children to spend more time indoors than is desirable, so that much of the physical and perceptual training that is best done out of doors must be done under cover. The arrangements of the school buildings should accordingly approximate as far as possible to a free open-air life. (8) This means not only ample space for movement and play, but a larger provision of materials for experiment and discovery than is usually found in schools. These should include household materials of all kinds, paper, cardboard, canvas, muslin, laths, lengths of rope and string, glass and elastic tubing, pulleys, balances vessels for measuring liquids and solids, a few simple tools, and toys of various kinds to satisfy childish curiosity constructiveness, and an incipient spirit of scientific inquiry.

Although the school is at its best only a poor substitute for the spaciousness and fullness of the open air, its limitations provide an opportunity for realising a standard of life and acquiring the social habits which are necessary for a communal life, above all for the exercise of unselfishness and consideration for others. Although the school has to add the functions of a playground and a workshop or laboratory to its traditional function as a place where formal teaching is given and exercises worked, it should set a standard of neatness and tidiness in the maintenance of which the children take an active share and feel a personal pride. Their assistance in keeping the rooms orderly should be welcomed and encouraged. There is no reason why they should not attend to any plants, flowers or animals that may be kept, fetch, distribute and put tidily away any books or apparatus that may be required for classroom work, and undertake responsibility for the right use of the cloakroom, the order of the cupboards and the storage of materials in daily use, not only with the idea of helping their teachers but because it is their school and they are proud of its appearance. They should prepare and lay the tables for the mid-morning lunch, clear away after the meal, and undertake any washing up that is needed. And children can learn the royal road to lasting happiness in helping other children.

92. The school moreover offers opportunities for the exercise of many instinctive tendencies of the child which are more easily exercised under cover. Among these one of the most important is speech. The young child loves to chatter, not necessarily to seek or communicate knowledge: at the outset it is mainly a form of self-expression. Whether the child of five continues to talk freely depends greatly on the atmosphere of the school. In a repressive atmosphere, such as was too common in the schools of forty years ago, the desire wilts and dies. In an atmosphere of confidence and lack of restraint it blossoms.

The speech training begun during the nursery stage should be continued throughout the infant school stage. It will serve a double purpose; first, to help the child to extend his vocabulary - the new words that he hears in school must be used before they become his own - and to express his ideas more freely; second, to correct slovenly and inaccurate utterance. (9) It is important to keep these two aims distinct; the flow of words should not be interrupted in order to correct an error; the error should be noted and corrected at another time. The first aim is most successfully secured when the child's talk is about things in which he is personally interested, what he has seen and done since he was last in school, the shopping excursion for his mother, the visit to 'the pictures'. The old type of 'conversation lesson' in which the teacher initiated the talk failed too often to unloosen tongues just because it was out of touch with the children's interests. As a rule, children should have liberty to ask questions whenever they really want to know something, and these questions should be treated with respect and deference. The wise teacher will indeed judge of the effectiveness of her teaching almost as much by the questions the children put to her, as by their response to those she puts to them. The second aim can probably best be secured by connecting it with the child's sense of rhythm to which we refer in the following paragraph. Verse speech, emphasised by stepping or movement of the hand or arm, unconsciously demands clearer and more emphatic enunciation than ordinary conversation, and conscious imitation of the teacher to get the required effect leads quickly to the elimination of old bad habits of speech. The traditional 'tongue-twisters' - Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper, etc, Peter went down to the water, Down to the water went he - are also valuable and their practice easily takes on the nature of a game. The telling and retelling of stories, the repetition of nursery rhymes and simple poetry, the learning of which is an essential part of speech training, all give invaluable opportunities, not only for the practice of clear speech and continuous expression, but also for the habit of careful listening and sustained attention, an art which perhaps hardly receives at any stage of school life the attention that it deserves, though within proper limits it is not beyond the capacity even of young children.

93. The school hall or playroom also provides an outlet for the expression of children's interest in pattern and feeling for rhythm. It is, as a rule, through rhythm expressed in music, or at any rate in sound, that the rhythmic instinct of the child first discovers itself; while melody, the other essential part of music, has been called the native tongue of the child. (10)

It is natural to children to express their sense of rhythm in movement, and they should be encouraged to do so. At first they will beat out the regular accents of a piece of music by handclapping, tapping, or with the aid of simple instruments of percussion, but before long the whole body will be called into play, and children will take delight in devising ways of marking the accent in marching, skipping, hopping and galloping, and in movements of unselfconscious grace. In these modes of expression children acquire that kind of sensitiveness which Plato spoke of as eurythmia and valued highly because, though expressed in bodily bearing and movement, spiritual elements of deep importance were implicated in it and it was likely to run out into many expressions of a man's nature in his work. (11) In the infant school this grace of movement finds opportunities for expression in the joyful dance, not only linked with but expressive of simple and beautiful music.

Singing has for long held a prominent place in the activities of the infant school. The traditional hymns, nursery rhymes and game-songs should form the natural repertory for the younger children, and are better than some action songs which often make the mistake of exaggerating the childishness of the child.

Another basic interest of children for which the school should provide an opening is the love of acting. Dramatisation in fact serves a twofold purpose. On the one hand, with music it helps to develop the power of expression in movement which is so closely knit with the development of perception and feeling; on the other hand, it provides opportunity for the practice of speech. We have already laid stress on the importance of both for the growing child.

94. The impulse on the part of children to use their hands and fingers for constructive and creative work develops rapidly between the ages of five and seven. Froebel was the first in modern times to include in his kindergarten opportunities for satisfying this impulse, and when his ideas began to permeate English practice, timetables began to show a new subject of instruction called 'occupations'. Since it was easier to get hold of Froebel's 'gifts' than to grasp his ideas, the new subject was treated with much the same formality as the 3Rs, and the emphasis was placed on construction in a very limited range of materials, which the children carried out in making objects of the teacher's choice and in the teacher's way. Only slowly was the value and importance of creative work recognised. Creation has always been hampered by the narrow choice of materials provided, and this has limited, stereotyped, and made unreal much of the children's work. Too much stress has been laid on what is called 'expression work', too little attention paid to the practical bearing of what is done. Even today there are schools in which 'handwork' is treated as an isolated subject of the curriculum, and the importance of constructive work in adding reality and life to all the activities of the school is hardly realised. (12)

Constructive work ought to occupy an important place in the activities of the school. From his earliest years the child has used his hands to explore the nature of his material surroundings, and has thus learnt something of the properties of different materials. He wants to use his powers and knowledge in making objects which will give reality to his make-believe world, and the school should help him to do so, in one direction by increasing his knowledge of different materials so that by personal experience he may know what can and what cannot be done with them, in another direction by developing his control of hand. There is little doubt that manual and aesthetic development are better secured when the child is left to make what he likes, how he likes and, within reason, when he likes, than by any set lessons. His teacher will find ample scope in helping him to overcome difficulties of construction as they occur, for example, how to make the wheels of a cardboard model of a motor turn round.

The same considerations apply to the allied art of drawing. Drawing is as natural a form of expression for the child as speaking. He is eager to draw the things that interest him in the world, and is not deterred because these things - living creatures in action, the machines of man's invention, rapidly changing natural phenomena - are hard to draw. He delights in bright colours. He likes large sheets of paper so that he can 'draw big'. He draws from memory best because his visual memory is charged already with the pictures of the things that interest him. In all this the school should encourage the child's creative impulses. The teacher will find ample scope in helping him to improve on his crude drawings when they cease to satisfy his growing judgement, and will help the child more in this way than by any premature attempt to make him draw from the object.

95. 'At the heart of all teaching is the teaching of religion'. This is the leading motive behind the numerous syllabuses of religious instruction which local education authorities in recent years have published for use in council schools and have recommended for adoption as a common basis of religious education in other schools. (13) It is recognised that the first religious questionings of children are prompted rather by the beauty and wonder of the world about them than by the commonplaces of life which they take for granted, and that simple hymns and poems dealing with the wonders of creation and songs of praise and aspiration should form an important part of their early religious training. The Gospel story and the stories of other of God's children who have served Him in the light of their knowledge since the world began, will unfold to them God's love for man. In all this, oral narration will play the greater part, and the narrative will be imbued with the spirit of the original story, and animated by the actual words of Scripture. Finally, nothing should be done to lead children to the impression that religion is something apart from or superimposed on the life of the school. The teaching can have no greater assistance than through the constant practice of the Christian virtues in the daily life of the school.

96. The young child's natural activity and his zest for living fully, impose a severe tax on his growing physique, and he needs periods of rest. Very few children attending infant schools spend in bed the proportion of time that is necessary for healthy growth. (14) The adoption of 'summer time' has shortened the night for children during the months when they live most actively, and the distractions due to broadcasting interfere with their proper hours of sleep. Up to the age of five children need a sleep during school hours, and other opportunities for repose. The need for the midday sleep diminishes between the ages of five and six, but throughout the infant stage the child still requires occasions for rest when his limbs and his brain can recuperate.

These quiet periods are the time for the teacher to tell stories (15) and read aloud to the children, not with the idea of any subsequent exercise or recapitulation on the children part, but, as a mother in a cultured home reads to her children, to satisfy their love for a story and to make them for a time forget in the interest of the narrative the urge to activity. Story telling and reading aloud, of course, serve other ends, but these should be kept subservient: if the teacher has a calm and distinct utterance and a pleasant voice - and any one who does not possess these is seriously handicapped in teaching young children - her reading will set a standard of speech to which the children will unconsciously tend to conform; through listening their vocabulary will grow and their experience will be widened, for language is only exactly adapted to the child when it is a little beyond the language that he naturally uses. There is a wide range of stories which can be drawn upon, beginning from nursery rhymes and standard tales like the Three Bears, fairy stories like Cinderella, fables, animal stories, stories about great heroes in the past and in the present. For reading there are the fairy stories of Hans Andersen and the brothers Grimm, and stories of the doings of children, and animals, while history, provided it is not written as a textbook for schools, is not out of place.

But the books which are read aloud to children should not be only those that are written in prose; children delight in poetry with its appeal to their pleasure in rhythm, and enjoy ballads and vigorous narrative. Towards the end of the infant stage they will listen spellbound to such a poem as Tennyson's Gareth and Lynette. The one thing that matters is that what is read must not be written down to suit the supposed childishness of the child, for children are quick to detect condescension and insincerity. Nor should the reading be interrupted overmuch to explain words or details.

97. The spontaneous unfolding of certain inherited powers that accompanies growth in natural surroundings is not the only aspect of mental development, nor of itself will it carry the child far. Mental development also includes the acquisition of certain forms of knowledge and skill that are neither natural nor innate. In particular before an individual can take his place in the civilised world, he must acquire the use of certain instrumental subjects. Among these the 3Rs are the key to all the rest.

In the 3Rs the child learns to recognise and use the symbols which man has long since devised to simplify his mental processes, to express and clarify his thoughts and wishes, to record and communicate them to others. No other invention has contributed so much to his mastery over material conditions. The use of symbols is no novelty to the child. He has used them in his play; a walking stick becomes a horse, a row of chairs a train, as the mood moves him. He is intensely interested from early years in the symbols which his elders employ. Sooner or later, and more often sooner than later, the healthy child wants to know more about them.

In the past attention has been focused too exclusively on reading, writing and arithmetic, and they have received so large a share of the school time that other activities of equal importance to the young child have been starved. It is part of the English educational tradition (16) that children when promoted to the primary school at the age of seven to eight should be already equipped with the mechanical elements of these fundamental processes. It has commonly been assumed that this means that it is necessary to begin formal education low down in the infant school. The result is that reading, writing and arithmetic are begun in England earlier than is usual in continental countries or in America.

Acceptance of the Froebelian doctrine of the sufficiency of self-activity has led many to doubt the wisdom of the English procedure. It is well known that the postponement of formal instruction does not handicap the child in the long run, that the child of eight or nine learns to read in a shorter time and soon overtakes in arithmetic children who have begun the 3Rs at an earlier age, and is as well equipped as they are. Recent research in America has been devoted to the discovery of what is the best age to begin reading and arithmetic, (17) and concludes that formal instruction in reading and arithmetic should be postponed until the child attains the mental age of about six years and six months. Professor Burt practically agrees with this finding when he says 'there should be little or no formal instruction before the age of six at the very earliest', although he would allow the child who wishes to read or write or cipher to do so at an earlier age.

This last indeed is the right course to adopt, and the only one which really carries out Froebel's principle. The question when a child can most easily learn to read or write or deal with number is unimportant in comparison with the necessity to satisfy his demand for new fields of activity. The child should begin to learn the 3Rs when he wants to do so, whether he be three or six years of age. Only in this way will the acquisition of the 3Rs come about incidentally as a part of widening interests and appear natural both to child and teacher and be no longer a catastrophic change in their relations. Of the 3Rs reading is incomparably the most important, though there are many children who find arithmetic more fascinating.

Much attention has been paid in this country to methods of teaching reading to a group of children, and a variety of methods is employed by different teachers. In all the first step is to secure word recognition; in the old 'look and say' method the child learns to recognise words by their appearance through their repeated occurrence in simple reading matter, while the various 'phonic' methods aim at making the child independent of his teacher by giving him a method by which he can discover the pronunciation of a word for himself and analyse longer words into their phonetic elements. In the more recent 'sentence' methods the child is introduced to words in the performance of their natural function as components of a complete sentence, and thus learns to recognise them as part of a whole. Each of these methods emphasises important elements in learning to read, and most teachers borrow something from each of them to meet the need of the moment or the special difficulties of different children. Whatever method is chiefly relied upon, the fact remains that the ability to read is only acquired by much individual practice, and one of the problems which the teacher of a class is called upon to solve is how to devise means for giving adequate practice. One solution frequently adopted is to divide the class into small groups for the reading lesson. The old-fashioned lesson in which the children in a large class read a sentence or two in turn gave insufficient individual practice and made learning to read a slow business. Given sufficient practice, there is no reason why a child should not be able to read with pleasure to himself any book suitable to his age by the time he leaves the infant school, even if he has only begun to learn to read at the age of six. The home can also help here, for it is common experience that young children will supplement their reading in school by reading at home when suitable books are available.

Writing is closely allied to reading and should be begun at the same time. It is usual in infant schools to teach a simplified form of Roman type in order to maintain the association with reading, and the printing of words, alone or in sentences, helps to fix the mental picture of a word and its recognition in fresh connections. The usual practice is to base the earliest teaching on tracing, the child learning the arm and finger movements employed in printing by tracing over the outlines of sandpaper letters with the fingers and repeating the movements on a sandtray before printing them on paper with chalk or pencil. Much exercise in free drawing will naturally precede this beginning of writing. The use of pen and ink can well be left to the primary school, where also the use of a cursive style of handwriting can be taught. (18)

Writing, however, soon acquires an independent value the discovery of which can be left to the child from observation of the habits of his elders. When he has seen how his elders use writing as a means of recording and communicating facts and ideas, he will want to copy them. His earliest spontaneous attempts will naturally be based on his personal experiences and the events of his daily life in the home, the street and the school. If these early attempts are received with respect and encouragement he will continue to write, and there is no need to formalise the practice of a natural activity by prescribing set subjects on which to write or a premature attention to technique. The child's first attempts will probably be spelt phonetically, but his interests can easily be aroused in spelling, and the experience of many schools shows that the habit of correct spelling is acquired without difficulty. (19) If the child is encouraged to write freely in his own way and on things which interest him, he will do so before he leaves the infant school.

Many teachers who are convinced of the desirability of beginning reading and writing in the infant school are doubtful about beginning arithmetic. On the other hand, the recent American research quoted above lends little support to the view that ability for arithmetic is a later phase than ability for reading. Moreover, except in sheltered homes, few children reach the age of five without considerable experience of shopping including simple practical money operations, and some rudimentary knowledge of number. Where this is the case, refusal to recognise and make use of this experience can only result in cramping the natural growth of the child. As a matter of fact most young children are extraordinarily interested in number, and in schools where the teaching is based on this interest they do not find the study of arithmetic tedious or dull or useless. Children soon find in arithmetic a field in which they can measure their growing mastery of the tool and their growing powers of concentration. The child's natural interest in and curiosity regarding shape, size and number is the justification for his beginning arithmetic in the infant school.

The child's natural approach to arithmetic and mathematics is through the fitting of flat wooden inlays of various geometrical shapes into their respective frames, and through construction in which he learns to recognise shape and the importance of measuring, through play in which he imitates grown-up activities such as shopping and playing at trams, and through number games such as nine pins or throwing at a target. Through these activities he becomes interested in counting, measuring and calculating. Counting introduces the child to the ordinal use of number and the first step in arithmetic is to establish the proper order of the numbers in the child's mind and to associate the words 'three, four,' etc with the numerical symbols 3, 4, etc. Measuring, the handling and comparison of groups of real objects, and games of shopping will introduce the cardinal use of number with which arithmetic really begins.

In the past it was usual to proceed systematically to the analysis of numbers up to 10, then from 10 to 20, and so to establish the simpler arithmetical operations for small numbers. The experience of schools, however, which set children to experiment with counters, beads, sticks or pebbles, shows that this formal treatment is not necessary. The 'addition' and 'subtraction tables' are learnt as effectively and more quickly. Nor, when the child is ready for them, is there any difficulty in dealing in the same way with the 'multiplication table', multiplication and division by personal experiment with the same tools. Progress will be materially aided if the children are allowed to compose their own examples and taught to prove their answers.

The range of work that is practicable will naturally vary with the capabilities of individual children. No uniform standard should be expected, but each child should be allowed to go as far as he is capable of going at his own rate of progress. Experience suggests that most children will, before the age of eight, have acquired at least the power to work straightforward sums in the fundamental processes and in money, provided that the numbers are not too large, and will have acquired some knowledge of shape through personal experiment.

There are two final observations to be made. It has often been urged that all the arithmetic in the infant school should be 'concrete'. We referred to this matter in our note on 'Arithmetic and Simple Geometry' in our report on The Primary School (Chapter 12). As we said then, if by 'concrete' it is meant 'that the child must only deal with numbers of articles and never with number in the abstract, must add horses to horses and take nuts from nuts, and never add three to four or take seven from twelve, it is pure pedantry. It is common experience that abstract numbers present no difficulties to children while to label quantities in a sum adds nothing to their sense of reality. The truth is that the fundamental operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division belong to the abstract side of mathematics and are most simply and effectively dealt with in the abstract.' The use of counters or other simple articles such as cardboard coins for money operations gives the child the necessary confidence that his operations are real.

The second observation relates to the use of problems. We do not think that children in infant schools should be bothered with questions set in the form of problems, however simple may be the operations concerned when they are picked out from the wording of the questions. The only problems which a child should be expected to solve are those of his own construction.

98. With the 3Rs we complete the enumeration of the aspects of training and teaching that we desiderate [desire] for children during their life in the infant school. For the practical purpose of school organisation it is convenient to group them roughly under four heads: (a) religious instruction; (20) (b) natural activities including physical training, open-air life, rest and play; (c) expression training, including speech, dancing and singing, handwork and drawing; and (d) formal instruction in the 3Rs. We recommend that in arranging the life of the school, the time available for secular occupations might with advantage be divided more or less equally between (b) and (c) in the case of the younger children, and between (b), (c) and (d) in the case of the older children who have begun the 3Rs, and in their case the largest share of the time allocated to (d) should be devoted to reading. This classification must not be taken too rigidly: it is obvious that one group of activities - in particular those included under (c) - overlaps other groups. Opportunities for the practice of speech cannot be limited to the lesson periods given to (c). What we are concerned to secure is adequate attention to the aspects included under (b) and (c) and no encroachment on the time allotted to these in the interests of formal teaching of the 3Rs.

With the division of time between these groups of activities the main purpose of the timetable in smaller schools and divisions is fulfilled, and a more detailed division of the school hours is more likely to hamper than to help the teacher. In larger schools where several classes have to take their turn in the use of the hall and playground, more definition of the timetable is inevitable. Even here the teacher should have a large discretion in the use to which a particular block of time is put. The infant school is not a microcosm of the school for older children, and no greater mistake can be made in its organisation than to copy the pattern of the timetable designed for the needs of older children. A patchwork or mosaic of this kind only bewilders the young child by its rapid alternation of unrelated topics. It was of a school day organised in this way that a child remarked, 'I like school except for the interruptions'.

Nor should any hard and fast rule he adopted for the length of lessons. Different activities require different allowances of time. A wide distinction must be drawn between periods of oral instruction, which should be short, and periods in which children are actively employed. The child loves a job, but he likes to finish it, and it is bad for him not to finish it; (21) ideally the lesson period should be long enough to allow him to do so. The only criterion by which the length of a lesson should be determined is the decline of interest or activity. The notion that all lessons should be short smacks of the study. It was never proposed by the child.

99. It is usual in infant schools in this country to classify children according to age, so usual that the classes are often spoken of as the 'fives', 'sixes' and 'sevens', and some local education authorities have followed the same custom when they divide the infant school stage into three 'grades '. This tradition can be justified because differences in intelligence are not so wide as they become in later stages; broadly speaking it is only in the formal subjects that the differences are at all obvious, and modern methods of procedure make it possible to deal with them without changing the classification. In the other activities of the school the retarded child probably gains as much from the normal course as he would from special treatment. Classification by mental age is accordingly not often adopted. On the other hand, many schools have experimented with what is known as a 'vertical' classification. Here each class contains children of all ages from five to seven or eight, each occupied with work appropriate to his powers, and they remain throughout the infant stage in the care of the same teacher. It is claimed that young children gain much from the longer association with a single teacher whom they have time to learn to love and trust, that the teacher gains a far more intimate knowledge of her children when she lives with them for two or three years than when she only has charge of them for a single year at most, that the younger children profit from the example and guidance of the older children while the older profit by living with those younger than themselves, that the classroom life approximates to the nursery life of a large family where children of different ages live and play together, and learn to give and take from one another. This system of organisation obviously calls for special gifts in the teacher, but it 'works'.

100. We now come to the important question of procedure, the broad lines on which the teacher arranges for the training and teaching that she imparts.

The present procedure of the English infant school is a composite, founded on the traditional practice of schools during the days of payment by results, but coloured since 1900 by the pooling of experience and ideas which took place in child study circles and other societies for teachers of young children, by the influence of American practice, (22) by the introduction of medical inspection, but above all - and here the training colleges have played a notable part - by the steady penetration of the humanising ideas of Froebel, of Mme Montessori, and in very recent days the growing influence of Margaret McMillan.

With few exceptions, the infant school of 1890 was still a place to which children were brought to learn, regimented in large classes - often with more than sixty children - and taught in the mass. School life for the child was largely a mechanical drill of behaviour and instruction. He had to conform to those habits which alone made possible the uniform instruction of large numbers of children; to sit still, only to speak when spoken to, to give prompt and automatic response to the word of command. His natural impulses of curiosity, experiment, inquiry, and expression of thought through speech and gesture, were firmly suppressed. He was tied down to a definite and narrow range of work and compelled to advance at a definite and average pace. Yet, children did learn under this drill, and enjoyed their school life when under an amiable and skilful teacher.

The letter of Froebel's teaching reached the infant school before the spirit. At first it meant only the addition of new lessons to the timetable, the use of the 'gifts', 'occupations', and, to a limited extent, opportunities for play, all of which were still governed by the old ideas of mechanical drill. Since, however, these new activities reduced the time available for the 3Rs, they did something to limit the domination of these subjects though they did not break it. Nor did they break the idea that the class was the unit for instruction. The early years of the century also saw the beginnings of 'correlation', an attempt to apply Froebel's belief in the unity of all things, in which the syllabus of work for a definite period was ingeniously centred round a single topic, chosen by the teacher and generally illustrative of the march of the seasons, and the snowdrop, the primrose and the sparrow in turn gave a strained unity to all the activities of the school.

That the spirit of Froebel's teaching was harder to absorb was largely due to the way in which it was presented. Froebel was a mystic and a sentimentalist, and his mysticism and sentimentality for long interposed a fog between the teacher and her children. It was only when thoughtful teachers began to question the efficacy of class instruction that the true implications of Froebel's teaching became clear. These teachers saw that class instruction assumes the existence of a common rate of progress for the class as a whole, whereas their experience showed that different children progress at very different rates. They realised that the common rate was only bought at a price which the child had to pay. They were led to the conclusion that the child, not the class, was the real unit for instruction, and that school procedure must be so modified that each child should have liberty to grow in his own way, and to learn by doing. This is Froebel's master principle, and his enduring contribution to educational theory.

The first English experiments in applying this principle were made in the years immediately before the [First World] War, and were in the main directed towards the teaching of the 3Rs because it was here that the rule of class instruction was most absolute, and because it was here that the crux of the problem lay - how to replace formal class instruction by personal effort and achievement when classes contained from fifty to sixty children. With the discovery that children were ready and eager to work by themselves and profited by doing so, what was popularly known as 'individual work' became a feature of the infant school. Its rapid spread in recent years owes much to the teaching and practice of Mme Montessori.

Mme Montessori, like Froebel, stands for the right of the child to unfettered growth, but while Froebel approached the problems of education from the standpoint of theology and metaphysics, Mme Montessori has approached them from the standpoint of modern physiology and psychology. This difference in approach throws light on their differences in practice. Froebel envisaged the school as a garden in which the teacher lived with her children, played with them, and shared in their initiative; Mme Montessori has made the school a kind of laboratory, furnished it with scientifically designed apparatus, and bids the teacher to stand aside and watch the children while they learn through the use of the apparatus. Froebel stressed learning through play, Mme Montessori stresses learning through absorption in the job, the job for the younger children enriching their sense experience, for the older children leading to the mastery of the 3Rs. These are extreme views because procedure is viewed from widely different angles, yet both contribute valuable elements to educational practice. The school is neither a garden nor a laboratory, but something between the two, and the limitations of existing buildings and playgrounds make it very difficult to arrive at the ideal compromise in procedure. English teachers as a rule have had to be content to do their best under their circumstances to borrow from each system those elements which can be fitted harmoniously into their educational philosophy. They have, however, in general maintained the underlying principle of both systems that, so far as possible, the child should be put in the position to teach himself, and that the knowledge that he is to acquire should come, not so much from an instructor, as from an instructive environment. Margaret McMillan, by substituting shelters in a garden for classrooms and a drab playground, has shown how the limitations imposed by buildings can be broken down. She believed that an open-air environment is of paramount importance for promoting the mental and physical development of children, and she proved that it is practicable to provide it in the very midst of a poor and crowded neighbourhood. (23)

101. It is the acceptance of this principle of the instructive environment that has led to the prominent part which didactic apparatus plays in the modern infant school. In the past apparatus was a tool for the teacher to illustrate her teaching and add to its effectiveness. Today it is a tool for the child and its use has a threefold justification. It leads more quickly to a mastery of the formal subjects; it helps the child to acquire the habit of discovering things for himself; it escapes the damage to character which too often ensues when instruction is forced upon the child by an external and personal authority. Its use, however, was at first dictated by more practical considerations. If in a large class children are to learn to read, write and cipher by doing and trying for themselves, they must, in the early stages at least, have tools for the purpose. Didactic apparatus provides these tools. There is no necessity for elaborate apparatus, as a rule the simplest is the most suitable. The best apparatus is that which the teacher has designed and made for herself in full conviction of its necessity and with confidence in her own idea. It should be so simple that children can use it without much guidance from the teacher, and wherever possible be self-corrective so that children may know for themselves if it has been rightly used. It should be progressive in character, for although children will repeat an operation until they feel that they have mastered it, a time comes when they ought to turn to something else.

Valuable as this use of educational apparatus is, it is not without its dangers. It is very easy to forget that the use of apparatus is only a means to an end, and to think that so long as children are occupied with apparatus all is well. Apparatus must not be used too mechanically, and the graduation that suits one child does not necessarily suit all. The time will come, too, when these artificial aids are a hindrance rather than a help, and the child should cease to use them. Most of all, it is fatal for a teacher to assume that, because a scheme of work bears a great name, it is therefore all-sufficient, and that she herself can now stand aside and leave every child, the dull and inert as well as the bright and active, entirely to himself.

102. Individual work sets the teacher free as well as the children. But her responsibilities will be increased, not lessened. If the children are unaware of the syllabus and its subdivisions, there is all the more reason that the teacher should have a clearly formulated scheme at the back of her mind. The children will need closer observation than before; but they will reveal their own strong points and weaknesses with a clarity which is impossible in the ordinary class; and the teacher, being less absorbed in keeping discipline and conducting the lesson, will have more time to watch and more leisure to spend on individual attention. As we show below, the oral lesson will still be necessary but it will take on a new character.

Those who have introduced the principle of individual work have been equally insistent on the need for individual records: those who have copied the principle have too often supposed that they could apply the one and dispense with the other. Without a record of each child's progress it is impossible to know what ground has been covered and which child is making no advance at all. With a large class a progress book for each scholar will be impossible. A simple tabulated schedule will be sufficient; and often the child can profitably be allowed to mark off his own little successes for himself. The regular use of records of this kind to control progress is the only way to meet the criticism of desultoriness and lack of purpose which has often been made on the work of schools which have adopted the practice of individual work without a clear understanding of the conditions necessary to make it successful.

103. If the child is placed in natural surroundings, and if his time is occupied with natural activities and interests, the problem of moral discipline almost solves itself. Class management in an infant school used to be notoriously difficult, but it was difficult because the problem set was essentially unnatural. Too often it meant keeping children silent, still, and inactive, in order to aim at measurable results. For such purposes fear and repression are the easiest instruments, but at this stage more than any other they may do irretrievable damage to the child's moral character and nervous system. And while they seem to be solving the difficulties of control, they are actually multiplying them.

Freedom is essential; and freedom only becomes dangerous when there is nothing to absorb the child's restless activity and provide an outlet for his experimental spirit. Collective action is indispensable, and proper social behaviour must be cultivated. But if the bulk of the work is individual work, the child will be all the more ready to sit still and listen when the moment arrives for class teaching, or to cooperate with others in collective work.

There need be little fear that those who are brought up under conditions of freedom will find it difficult to accept authority later on. Experience shows that if authority has not been imposed upon the child too early, at a stage before he can really understand it and while restriction still means a mental strain, then he is more, and not less ready to accept the inevitable discipline later on. The fact that he is internally free and has learnt to discipline himself makes him all the more willing to submit to external authority when necessary without resistance or resentment. It is the child that has fretted under the arbitrary restraints imposed by a narrow home or school who tends to rebel against authority later on when he feels himself stronger and more independent.

104. The provision of didactic apparatus and the practice of individual work will not of itself satisfy the needs of the growing child. All progress depends on the child's acquiring new ideas and new interests at the right moment. In the past this was almost entirely done through formal class instruction. The course of work in arithmetic, for example, was determined in advance, and parcelled out into a series of lessons which were given by the teacher at a stated time and to the class as a whole, without regard to the fact that the lesson might be otiose for some children and premature for others. This divorce between the supply of ideas and the demand for them contributed greatly to bring the formal class lesson into disrepute in the early days of individual work.

Children gather many new ideas from the talk and example of other children, from the home and the outer world, from visits to other classes in their own school or to other schools to see what kind of things other children are doing. But these, though not to be despised, are not sufficient, and it is now recognised that the oral lesson has still a definite place in the school procedure. In no other way can many new ideas be so effectively introduced with economy of time and effort. The occasion of such lessons will not be governed by a timetable but by the actual needs of the children as they occur. However wide may be the range of attainment between the most and least advanced members of the class, there will always be some sufficiently level in attainment to be treated as a group and these children will be gathered together when necessary for a short oral lesson in which their difficulties of the moment may be explained, or the new ideas for which they are ready may be introduced. Many concrete problems which will appeal to individual children can also be studied, or at any rate started, best in class. These oral lessons, and the occasions when the teacher tells stories or reads aloud to the children, will help them to acquire the important habit of listening carefully. The ability to give a good oral lesson still remains one of the most important qualifications of the teacher of infants.

Nor will group work be neglected. Individual work rightly emphasises the value of the child as an individual, but he is also a member of a community and the conditions of civilised life make it necessary for him to learn to work harmoniously with others and to subordinate his free impulses to the necessity of common action and a division of functions, if the job which he and his fellows have undertaken is to be successfully accomplished. Here the project which calls for the united service of many hands, the shop, the market, the farm, the ferry boat, is invaluable, provided the underlying idea is proposed by the children themselves. The one essential for success is that the project shall arise spontaneously from the children's interests. Then, and then only, Froebel's dream of 'correlation' becomes a living thing.

105. What then can we fairly expect of the child at the end of his life in the infant school? He should have had reasonable opportunities by suitable surroundings, games and other physical activities, for ensuring good physical development and acquiring good physical habits. He should have developed some power of steady concentration, some appreciation of the importance of effort, some knowledge of his own achievement and how these compare with those of his fellows. He should have learnt something of how to live as an individual who is also a member of a group. He should have acquired some first-hand knowledge of the world around him by direct and active experiences and experiments, so that he is prepared for the right interpretation of later book knowledge. He should be able to express himself readily in clearly articulated speech and in movement, and should have had an opportunity of enjoying beauty in language, music and colour. He should have begun to acquire by means of various practical activities some power over material. He should have learnt to listen carefully to what is said to him, and to read very simple matter with enjoyment, and should have acquired the skill to write legibly and with some ease with a soft pencil. He should have been taught to perform some simple arithmetical operations.

In none of this should a uniform standard to be reached by all children be expected. The infant school has no business with uniform standards of attainment. Its business is to see that children in the infant school stage grow in body and mind at their natural rate, neither faster or slower, and if it performs its business properly there will be as much variety of attainment as there is of intellectual ability. The only uniformity at which the infant school should aim is that every child at the end of the course should have acquired the power to attack new work and feel a zest in doing so. Many of our teacher witnesses spoke of a tendency on the part of teachers in primary schools to demand more, and complained that the shadow of the general examination at eleven was already falling on the infant school. It would be deplorable if it should be allowed to do so, and a disastrous interference with the proper function of the school.

Finally, our whole conception of the training and teaching of the infant school depends upon the teacher; it will be successful in so far as she has faith in the underlying principles and confidence in her ability to interpret them. To train young children is not an easy undertaking, and entails a continuous nervous strain on those who attempt it. It is easy to love young children, but hard to retain a youthfulness of mind when constantly occupied with a limited sphere of work, harder still when classes are large. The ever present danger is a lapse into a mechanical routine, and nothing makes it easier to fall into mechanical ways than a close internal definition of the scope and method of work. In this chapter we have deliberately refrained from detail because the last thing that we desire to see is a standardised infant school. We believe that the interests of children will be best served by giving to the teacher the same liberty in planning and arranging her work that we claim for the children in these early years.

NOTE ON THE PROBLEM OF THE TWO LANGUAGES IN INFANT SCHOOLS IN WALES

106. The question of the two languages in Wales was discussed in our report on The Primary School. In that report (24) we quoted the following passage from the Suggestions for the Consideration of Education authorities and Teachers (Memorandum No. 1) issued in 1929 by the Welsh Department of the Board of Education:

'That there be no attempt to give formal instruction in a second language, whether English or Welsh, in any infant school. Simple rhymes, folk-songs, and games, however, can be taken in that language, mainly as mimetic exercises, so as to take advantage of the plastic state of the child's vocal organs at this early age, and accustom it to utter sounds in the second language, which it would master with greater difficulty at a later stage. It is considered that the chief function of the infant school is to reinforce the child in the home language, whether English or Welsh.'

It may be stated here that the home language in its relation to the child would often in fact appear to be English, even when the parents use Welsh in addressing each other, since English is the language which the child uses in speaking to its parents and its brothers and sisters and is frequently the language used by the parents in speaking to the child.

We have found no reason to modify the view that the chief function of the infant school is to reinforce the child in its use of the home language, whether it be English or Welsh. That stands uncontroverted as a general principle, but a rigid interpretation of the phrase 'formal instruction' might restrict unduly, and unnecessarily, the efforts of teachers in districts where various degrees of bilingualism already exist and where interesting experiments are being tried.

In support of the general principle, it may be pointed out as one example that, during the past four years, Welsh has been (with very few exceptions) the language of instruction in the infant schools and infant divisions of Cardiganshire - an area where Welsh is predominantly the home language. We understand that the degree of general attainment and mental development observed in infant classes and 'standard I' in this area has received the approval of the inspectors of the Board of Education.

The study of English in areas where Welsh predominates begins generally when the child is between seven and eight, and gradually becomes more intensive. The average progress made is so rapid that the attainments in English by about the age of ten are at least equal to those when English is used as a language of instruction from a much earlier age. Similarly, when English is the child's home language, the language of instruction in the infant school should be English, and the formal teaching of Welsh may with advantage be deferred until the child reaches the primary school.

There are, however, schools where the problem of two languages is far from simple. In some schools the number of Welsh speaking children and English speaking children is approximately equal, in others there is a marked preponderance of one or other. Again, there are individual children who are bilingual even at the age of five. Generally in such cases the home language is Welsh, but English influences outside the home have been such that these children can understand almost anything said to them in English and can speak the language fairly well.

It would be impossible to offer any general suggestions which would be equally applicable to such a wide variety of cases, but a suggestion which can be made, unhesitatingly, is that all teachers in districts where these conditions exist should be thoroughly bilingual, so that no child shall suffer, in any sense, through being unable to speak to his teacher in the language that he understands best. Where the numbers of Welsh speaking and English speaking children in a school are roughly equal, the formation of 'parallel' classes provides a solution, but many schools are too small to permit this. In such cases, a 'vertical' rather than a 'parallel' classification seems to be desirable, which results in a greater age range within the two linguistic groups. Teachers in small schools have long been used to this and are solving the difficulty by well considered schemes of individual work carefully supervised.

The problem is more pronounced where the number of English speaking or of Welsh speaking children is so small as not to permit of classification, either 'parallel' or 'vertical', although these children are tenacious of their home language even in the playground where, usually, all language differences among children tend to disappear. In such cases, it is not easy to arrange for this minority to be taught through the language best calculated to promote development, unless the staffing conditions are favourable.

The sound educational principle would seem to be that during these early years the child should be taught through the language it understands best and that in the majority of cases little if anything is lost by deferring the formal teaching of the second language until the end of the infant school stage.

Footnotes

(1) See Chapter 2 and Appendix II.

(2) See Chapter 3, Section 52. Since the training of the nursery school or class is largely based on what is known of the mental development of the young child, it is inevitable that in this chapter there should be some repetition of what has been said in Chapter 3.

(3) A fuller account of the activities of the nursery school or class will be found in Chapter 5.

(4) Report on the Primary School, Chapter 7, Section 75.

(5) Compare Graham Wallas, The Art of Thought (1926), pages 231 to 237, also Report of the Consultative Committee on Psychological Tests of Educable Capacity (1924).

(6) The exercises and games for young children contained in the Syllabus of Physical Training (1933) and other publications published by the Board of Education, form a useful guide to the teacher in arranging the more formal physical activities of the children in infant schools.

(7) Compare Karl Groos The Play of Man, translated by Elizabeth L Baldwin, London, 1903, pages 2-4.

(8) See Chapter 8, Sections 115 and 116.

(9) 'Speech training involves consideration of the use of dialect. There can be no doubt that an attempt to correct local peculiarities too early has a depressing effect upon the child's power of speech. With young children, the capital aim must be to secure that they begin to use language freely and easily; a nearer approach to standard speech may be dearly bought by an unnatural reticence on their part.' Report of the Consultative Committee on The Primary School (1931), Chapter 12, English.

(10) Handbook of Suggestions for Teachers, 1927, page 239.

(11) Report on The Primary School Chapter 7, Section 76.

(12) Some of our witnesses said that the introduction of standard apparatus was responsible in some schools for a tendency to thrust handwork into the background.

(13) What is said here is subject to the statutory requirements concerning religious instruction.

(14) See Annual Reports on The Health of the School Child by the Chief Medical Officer of the Board of Education. cf. Handbook of Suggestions on Health Education (1933), pp. 27 and 70.

(15) Compare Chapter 7, Section 109.

(16) Compare Chapter 1.

(17) See Mabel Morphett and Carleton Washbourne, When should children begin to read? Elementary School Journal, Vol. XXXI, March 1931; and Carleton Washburne [sic], Mental Age and the Arithmetic Curriculum, Journal of Educational Research, March 1931, which summarise the findings of the Committee of Seven of the Northern Illinois Conference on Supervision. The first paper concludes that 'it pays to postpone reading until a child has attained a mental age of six years and six months', the second that the minimum mental age at which arithmetic should be begun is six years five months, and the optimum mental age is seven years four months. By minimum mental age is meant the age before which 'it is ineffective, if not futile to teach' a topic; by optimum mental age the age at which the topic can be begun most economically of time and effort.

(18) See Report on The Primary School, Chapter 12, English.

(19) There is some evidence to show that children who have been taught to read by the 'sentence' method have less difficulty in learning to spell correctly.

(20) We only separate this because religious instruction is governed by the Education Acts, and is subject to external regulations as regards the timetable. The time allocated to religious instruction is not included in the rough allocation of time suggested above.

(21) See the Report by the Consultative Committee on The Primary School.

(22) In which we specially include the work of Professor Dewey.

(23) See Appendix IV: London, Deptford, Rachel McMillan Nursery School.

(24) Chapter 12.