Early in the nineteenth century two men, moved by very different impulses, founded what might be considered the beginnings of the Infant School. For nearly fifty years their work grew separately, but now they are merged together into something that seems to be permanent.

In a bleak Lanarkshire factory village in the south of Scotland, Robert Owen, millowner, socialist and Welshman, found that unless he could provide for the education of the children of his factory hands, no parents would consent to settle in the district and he would be without workers in his mill. As a consequence Owen found himself in the position of education authority, privy purse and organiser, and he did not flinch from the situation; he imposed no cheap makeshift, because he believed in education as an end and not as an economic means; a twofold institution was therefore established by him in 1816, one part for the children of recognised school age, presumably over six, and one for those under school age, whose only entrance test was their ability to walk. It is with the latter that we are concerned.

The instructions given by Owen to the man and the women he chose for his Infant School may serve to show his general aim; the babies under their care were above all to be happy, to lead a natural life, outdoor or indoor as weather permitted; learning their surroundings, playing, singing, dancing, "not annoyed with books," not shadowed by the needs of the upper school, but living the life their age demanded. In the light of the 1918 Education Bill this seems almost prophetic.

Their guardians were selected solely on the grounds of personality, and expected to work in the spirit in which Owen conceived the school. They were gentle, without personal ambition, fond of children, caring only for their welfare; but the sole guiding principle was Owen, and this was at once the success and doom of the school, for the personality of Owen was thus made the pivot round which the school revolved; without him there was nothing to take hold of.

Very soon the experiment became known: persons with the stamp of authority came to see it, and even official hearts were moved by the reality of the children's happiness and their consequent development. The visitors felt, rather than knew, that the thing was right. Arrangements were made to establish similar institutions in London, and after one or two experiments, a permanent one was founded which was under the control of a man named Wilderspin.

Wilderspin's contribution to education is difficult to estimate; certainly he never caught Owen's spirit, or realised his simple purpose: he had ambitions reaching beyond the happiness of the children; and far from trying to make their education suit their stage of growth, he sought to produce the "Infant Prodigy," just as a contemporary of his sought to produce the "Infant Saint." From what we can see, his aim was what he honestly believed to be right, as far as his light went; but he sought for no light beyond his own; and his outlook was not so narrow as his application was unintelligent. Owen was still in Lanarkshire to be consulted; Rousseau had already written Émile, Pestalozzi's work was by this time fairly well known in England, the children were there to be studied, but Wilderspin pursued his limited and unenlightened work, until the Infant School was almost a dead thing in his hands and in the hands of those who followed. The following is Birchenough's account:

"The school was in charge of a master and a female assistant, presumably his wife. Much attention was given to training children in good personal habits, cleanliness, tidiness, punctuality, etc., and to moral training. Great stress was laid on information…. The curriculum included reading, writing, arithmetic, geometry, lessons on common objects, geography, singing and religion, and an effort was made to make the work interesting and 'concrete.' To this end much importance was attached to object-lessons, to the use of illustrations, to questioning and exposition, while the memory was aided by means of didactic verse…. The real teaching devolved upon the master and mistress. This was of two kinds: class teaching to a section of the children of approximately equal attainments either on the floor or in the class-room, and collective teaching to the whole school, regardless of age, on the gallery."

It is a curious coincidence that in 1816, the year of Owen's experiment, a humble educational experiment was begun by Frederick Froebel in a very small village in the heart of the Thuringian forest. Like Owen, his aim was education solely for its own sake, and he had a simple faith in the human goodness of the older Germany. But he came to education as a philosopher rather than a social reformer, with a strong belief in its power to improve humanity. This belief remained with him; it is embodied in his aim, and leavened all his work.

The first twenty years of his experience convinced Froebel that the neglect or mismanagement of the earliest years of a child's life rendered useless all that was done later. What came to Owen as an inspiration grew in Froebel to be a reasoned truth, and like Owen he put it into practice. In 1837 the little Kindergarten at Blankenburg was begun, with the village children as pupils; the beautiful surroundings of forest-covered hills and green slopes made a very different background from the bleak little Lanarkshire village, overshadowed by the factory, where Owen's school stood, but the spirit was the same; the children were in surroundings suitable for their growth, and the very name of Kindergarten does more to make Froebel's aim clear than any explanation. He lived to see other Kindergartens established in different parts of Thuringia, and about the middle of the nineteenth century some of his teachers came to England, and did similar work in London, Croydon and Manchester. The private Kindergarten became an established thing, and educationalists came to understand something of its meaning.

In 1870 the London School Board suggested that the Kindergarten system should be introduced into their Infant Schools, and in doing so they were unconsciously the factors in bringing together the work initiated by Owen and by Froebel. The Infant School of Wilderspin, already briefly described, was almost a dead thing, with its galleries and its mechanical prodigies, its object-lessons and its theology; now it was breathed upon by the spirit of the man who said: "Play is the highest phase of child development, of human development at this period: for it is the spontaneous representation of the inner, from inner necessity and impulse." "Play is the purest, most spiritual activity of man." "The plays of childhood are the germinal leaves of all later life." "If the child is injured at this period, if the germinal leaves of the future tree of his life are marred at this time, he will only with the greatest difficulty and the utmost effort grow into strong manhood."

It is perhaps not altogether to be wondered at that teachers at first seized the apparatus rather than the spirit of the Kindergarten when we remember that we have not accepted in anything like its fulness the teaching of Froebel. Formalism and materialism always die slowly: play in the Board School was interpreted as something that had to be dictated and taught: the gifts, occupations and games were organised, and appeared on the time-table as subjects side by side with Wilderspin's theology and object-lessons. The combination must have been curious, but even with its formalism the change was welcome to the children: at least they could use their hands and do something; at least they could leave their back-breaking galleries and dance and skip, even though the doing and the dancing were according to strict rule.

The change was not welcome to all teachers. As late as 1907 a headmistress who was a product of the training of that time remarked: "We have Kindergarten on Wednesday afternoons and then it is over for the week." But there were teachers who saw beneath the bricks and sticks and pretty movements, who felt the spiritual side and kept themselves alive till greater opportunities came. What was imperishable has remained; the system of prescribed activities is nearly dead, but the spirit of the true Kindergarten is more alive than ever.

The change from the early 'eighties till now is difficult to describe, because it is a growth of spirit, a gradual change of values, rather than a change in outward form; there has been no definite throwing off, and no definite adoption, of any one system or theory; but the difference between the best Infant Schools of 1880 and the best Infant Schools of to-day is chiefly a difference in outlook. The older schools aimed at copying a method, while the schools of to-day are more concerned with realising the spirit.

At present we are trying to reconstruct education for the new world after the war, and so it is convenient to regard the intervening period of nearly half a century as a transition period: during that time the education of the child under eight has changed much more than the education of older children, at least in the elementary school; and there have been certain marked phases that, though apparently insignificant in themselves, have marked stages of progress in thought.

Perhaps the most significant and most important of these was the effect of the child-study movement on the formal and external side of Kindergarten work. It is first of all to America that we owe this, to the pioneer Stanley Hall, and more especially here to Mr. Earl Barnes. Very slowly, but surely, it was evident to the more enlightened teachers that children had their own way of learning and doing, and the adult-imposed system meant working against nature. For the logical method of presenting material from the simple to the complex, from the known to the unknown, from the concrete to the abstract, was substituted the psychological method of watching the children's way of learning and developing. Teachers found that what they considered to be "the simple" was not the simple to children; what they took to be "the known" was the unfamiliar to children. For instance, the "simple" in geography, in the adult sense, was the definition of an island, with which most of us began that study, and in geometry it was the point. To children of the ordinary type, both are far-away ideas, and not related to everyday experiences; "the known" in arithmetic, for example, was to teachers the previous lesson, quite regardless of the fact that arithmetic enters into many problems of life outside school. The life in school and the life outside school were, in these early days of infant teaching, two separate things, and only occasionally did a teacher stoop to take an example from everyday life. A little girl in one of the poorest schools brought her baby to show her teacher, and proudly displayed the baby's powers of speech—"Say a pint of 'alf-an-'alf for teacher," said the little girl to the baby by way of encouragement to both. This is the kind of rude awakening teachers get, from time to time, when they realise how much of the real child eludes them. Psychology has made it clear that life is a unity and must be so regarded.

Part of this child-study movement has resulted in the slow but sure death of formalism: large classes, material results, and a lack of psychology made formalism the path of least resistance. Painting became "blobbing," constructive work was interpreted as "courses" of paper folding, cutting, tearing; books of these courses were published with minute directions for a graduated sequence. The aim was obedient imitation on the part of the child, and the imagined virtues accruing to him in consequence were good habits, patience, accuracy and technical skill. Self-expression and creativeness were still only theories.

A second interesting phase of the transition period was the method adopted for the training of the senses. From the days of Comenius till now the importance of this has held its place firmly, but the means have greatly changed. Pestalozzi's object-lesson was adopted by Wilderspin and thoroughly sterilised; many teachers still remember the lessons on the orange, leather, camphor, paper, sugar, in which the teacher's senses were trained, for only she came in contact with the object, and the children from their galleries answered questions on an object remote from most of their senses, and only dimly visible to their eyes. Similar lessons were given after 1870 on Froebel's gift II. in which the ball, cylinder and cube were treated in the same manner: progress was slow, but sometimes the children followed nature's promptings and played with their specimens; this was followed by books of "gift-plays," where organised play took the place of organised observation.

About 1890 or thereabouts the Nature Study movement swept over the schools, and "nature specimens" then became the material for sense training: as far as possible each child had a specimen, and by the minute examination of these, stimulated their senses and stifled their appreciation of all that was beautiful.

Question and answer still dominated the activity; the poor little withered snowdrop took the place of the dead camphor or leather. But underlying all the paralysing organisation the truth was slowly growing, and the children were being brought nearer to real things.

A third phase in this transition period is that known as "correlation"; most teachers remember the elaborate programmes of work that drove them to extremes in finding "connections." The following, taken from a reputable book of the time, will exemplify the principle:

A WEEK'S PROGRAMME

Object Lesson The Horse.
Phonetics The Foal, oa sound.
Number Problems on the work of horses.
Story The Bell of Atri [story of a horse ringing a bell].
Song Busy Blacksmith [shoeing a horse].
Game The Blacksmith's Shop.
Reading On the Horse.
Poetry Kindness to Animals.
Paper Cutting The Bell of Atri.
Paper Folding A Trough.
Free-arm Drawing A Horseshoe.
Clay Modelling A Carrot for the Horse.
Brushwork A Turnip for the Horse.
Brown Paper Drawing A Stable.

Underneath it all the truth was growing, namely, the need of making associations and so unifying the children's lines. But the process of finding the truth was slow and cumbersome.

A fourth phase of the early Infant School was the strong belief of both teachers and inspectors in uniformity of work and of results. It is difficult to disentangle this from the paralysing influences of payment by results and large classes: it was probably the teachers' unconscious expression of the instinct of self-preservation, when working against the heaviest odds. But it was constantly evident to the teacher that any attempt on a child's part to be an individual, either in work or in conduct, had to be arrested: and the theory of individual development was regarded as so Utopian that the idea itself was lost. Goodness was synonymous with uniform obedience and silence; naughtiness with individuality, spontaneity and desire to investigate. A frequently-heard admonition on the part of the teacher was, "Teacher didn't tell you to do it that way—that's a naughty way"; but such an attitude of mind was doubtless generated by the report of the inspector when he commended a class by saying: "The work of the class showed a satisfactory uniformity."

To obtain uniform results practice had to come before actual performance, and many weary hours were spent over drill in reading, drill in number, drill in handwork, drill in needlework. The extreme point was reached when babies of three had thimble and needle drill long before they began needlework. There were also conduct drills; Miss Grant, of Devons Road School, remembers a school where the babies "practised" their conduct before the visit of the "spectre," as they called him, he being represented as a stick set up on a chair. There is a curious symbolism in the whole occasion.

It is difficult to see the good underlying this phase, but it was there. There is undoubtedly a place for practice, though not before performance, and uniformity was undoubtedly the germ of an ideal.

All these phases stand for both progress and arrest. The average person is readier to accept methods than investigate principles; but we must recognise that all struggles and searchings after truth have made the road of progress shorter for us by many a mile.

Perhaps the chief cause of stumbling lay in the fact that there was no clearly realised aim or policy except that of material results. There were many fine-sounding principles in the air, but they were unrelated to each other; and the conditions of teaching were likely to crush the finest endeavours, and to make impossible a teaching that could be called educative.