"We find in the child's spontaneous choice the nature of the surroundings and of the activities he craves for; in other words, he makes his own curriculum, and selects his own subject matter."

The next problem we have to solve is how to unify the bewildering variety of ideas and activities that a child seeks contact with during a day. We found that the curriculum of the Infant School of to-day presented a rather confusing variety of ideas, not necessarily arranged as the children would have chosen; they would certainly not have chosen to break off some intense interest, because an arbitrary timetable hurried them to something else, and they would have been right. If we asked the children their reasons for choosing, we would find no clue except that they chose what they wanted to, neither could they tell us why they spent so much more time over one thing than another. If a similar study were to be made of a child from a slum also free to arrange his day, we should find that while certain general features were the same others would be different: he would ask for different stories, probably play different games, or the same games in a different way, his back-yard would present different aspects, the things he made would be different.

It is evident that the old correlation method has little or nothing to do with the matter; a child may or may not draw the rabbit he feeds, he certainly does not play a rabbit game because of the rabbit he has fed, nor does he build a rabbit-hutch with his bricks. He might try to make a real one if the rabbit really needed it, but that arises out of an obvious necessity. If he could put his unconscious promptings into words, he would say he did the things because he wanted to, because somebody else did them, or because of something he saw yesterday, and so on; but he would always refer back to himself. The central link in each case is in the child, with his special store of experiences derived from his own particular surroundings; he brings to new experiences his store of present experiences, his interests not always satisfied, his powers variously used, he interprets the new by these, and seeks for more in the line of the old. It is life he has experienced, and he seeks for more life.

How then can we secure for him that the new experiences presented to him in school will be in line with the old? We will take three typical cases of children to illustrate the real nature of this problem.

The first is the case of a child living in a very poor district of London or of any large town. The school is presumably situated in a narrow street running off the High Street of the district, the street where all the shopping is done; at the corner is a hide factory with an evil smell. Most of the dwelling-houses abut on the pavement, some with a very small yard behind, some without any. Several families live in one house, and often one room is all a family can afford; as that has to be paid for in advance the family address may change frequently. The father may be a dock labourer with uncertain pay, a coster, a rag and bone merchant, or he may follow some unskilled occupation of a similarly precarious nature; in consequence the mother has frequently to do daily work, the home is locked up till evening, and she often leaves before the children start for morning school. It is a curious but very common fact that, free though these children are, they know only a very small radius around their own homes. They are accustomed to be sent shopping into High Street, where household stores are bought in pennyworths or twopennyworths, owing to uncertain finance and no storage accommodation. Generally there is one tap and one sink in the basement for the needs of all the families in the house. There is usually a park somewhere within reach, but it may be a mile away; in it would, at least, be trees, a pond, grass, flowers. But an excursion there, unless it is undertaken by the school, can only be hoped for on a fine Bank Holiday; there is neither time nor money to go on a Saturday, and Sunday cannot be said to begin till dinner-time, about 3 P.M., when the public-houses close, and the father comes home to dinner.

It is difficult to imagine the conversation of such a household; family life exists only on Sunday at dinner-time; the child's background of family life is a room which is at once a bedroom, living room and laundry. There is nearly always some part of a meal on the table, and some washing hanging up. Outside there are the dingy street, the crowded shops, the pavement to play on, and both outside and in, the bleaker and more sordid aspects of life, sometimes miserable, sometimes exciting. On Saturday night the lights are brilliant and life is at least intense. Bed is a very crowded affair, in which many half-undressed children sleep covered with the remainder of the day's wardrobe.

What store of experiences does a child from such a neighbourhood bring to school, to be assimilated with the new experiences provided there? What do such terms as home, dinner, bed, bath, birth, death, country, mean to him? They mean something.[34]

[Footnote 34: See Child Life, October 1916.]

Not a mile away we may come to a very respectable suburb of the average type; and what is said of it may apply in some degree to a provincial or country town or, at least, the application can easily be made. The school probably stands at the top corner of a road of houses rented, at £25 to £35 per annum, with gardens in front and behind. The road generally runs into a main road with shops and traffic. Here and there in the residential road are little oases of shops, patronised by the neighbourhood, and some of the children may live over these. The home life is more ordinary and needs less descriptive detail, but there are some features that must be considered. The decencies, not to say refinements of eating, sleeping and washing are taken for granted: there is often a bath-room and always a kitchen. The father's occupation may be local, but a good many fathers will go to town; there is generally a family holiday to the sea, or less often to the country. In the house the degree of refinement varies; there are nearly always pictures of a sort, books of a sort, and the children are supplied with toys of a sort. They visit each other's houses, and the observances of social life are kept variously. Often the horizon is very narrow; the mother's interest is very local and timid; the father's business life may be absolutely apart from his home life and never mentioned there. The family conversation while quite amiable and agreeable may be round very few topics, and the vocabulary, while quite respectable, may be most limited. Children's questions may be put aside as either trivial or unsuitable. In one sense the slum child may be said to have a broader background, the realities of life are bare to him on their most sordid side, there is neither mystery nor beauty around life, or death, or the natural affections. The suburban child may on the contrary be balked and restricted so that unnecessary mystery gives an unwholesome interest to these things and conventionality a dishonest reserve.

A suburb of this type is described by Beresford in Housemates:—"In such districts (as Gospel Oak) I am depressed by the flatness of an awful monotony. The slums vex me far less. There I find adventure and jest whatever the squalor; the marks of the primitive struggle through dirt and darkness towards release. Those horrible lines of moody, complacent streets represent not struggle, but the achievement of a worthless aspiration. The houses, with their deadly similarity, their smug, false exteriors, their conformity to an ideal which is typified by their poor imitative decoration, could only be inhabited by people who have no thought or desire for expression…. The dwellers in such districts are cramped into the vice of their environment. Their homes represent the dull concession to a state rule; and their lives take tone from the grey, smoke-grimed repetition of one endlessly repeated design. The same foolish ornamentation on every house reiterates the same suggestion. Their places of worship, the blank chapels and pseudo-Gothic churches rear themselves head and shoulders above the dull level, only to repeat the same threat of obedience to a gloomy law…. The thought of Gospel Oak and its like is the thought of imitation, of imitation falling back and becoming stereotyped, until the meaning of the thing so persistently copied has been lost and forgotten."

A third case is that of the country child, the child who attends the village school. Many villages lie several miles from a railway station, so that the younger children may not see a railway train more than once or twice a year. The fathers may be engaged in village trades, such as a shoemaker, carpenter, gardener, general shop merchant, farm labourer, or farmer. The village houses are often cramped and small, but there is wholesome space outside, and generally a good garden which supplies some of the family food; milk and eggs are easily obtainable, and conditions of living are seldom as crowded as in a town. The country children see more of life in complete miniature than the slum or the suburban child can do, for the whole life of the village lies before him. The school is generally in the centre, with a good playground, and of late years a good school garden is frequent. The village church, generally old, is another centre of life, and there is at least the vicarage to give a type of life under different social conditions.

The home intellectual background may vary, but on the whole cannot be reckoned on very much; though in some ways it is more narrow than the suburban one, it is often less superficial. In a different way from the slum child, but none the less definitely, the country child comes face to face with the realities of life, in a more natural and desirable way than either of the others. It is difficult to estimate some of the effects of living in the midst of real nature on children; unconsciously, they acquire much deep knowledge impossible to learn through nature study, however good, a kind of knowledge that is part of their being; but how far it affects them emotionally or enters into their scheme of life, is hard to say. As they grow up much of it is merely economic acquirement: if they are to work on the land, or rear cattle, or drive a van through the country, it is all to the good; but one thing is noticeable, that they take very quickly to such allurements of town life as a cinema, or a picture paper or gramophone, and this points to unsatisfied cravings of some sort, not necessarily so unworthy or superficial as the means sought to satisfy them.

From these rather extreme cases we get near the solution of the problem; it is quite evident that each of these children brings to school very different contributions of experience on which to build, though their general needs and interests are similar. Therefore the curriculum of the school will depend on the general surroundings and circumstances of the children, and all programmes of work and many questions of organisation will be built on this. The model programme so dear to some teachers must be banished, as a doctor would banish a general prescription; no honest teacher can allow this part of her work to be done for her by any one else.

Therefore the central point is the child's previous experience, and on this the experience provided by school, i.e. curriculum and subject matter, depends. One or two examples of the working out of this might make the application clearer. Probably the realities of life in relation to money differ greatly. The kind of problem presented to the poor town child will deal with shopping in pennyworths or ounces, with getting coals in pound bagfuls. Clothes are generally second-hand, and so ordinary standard prices are out of the question. Bread is bought stale and therefore cheaper, early in the morning. Preserved milk only is bought, and that in halfpenny quantities. Only problems based on these will be real to this child at first.

The suburban child's economic experience may be based on his pocket-money, money in the bank, and the normal shopping of ordinary life.

The country child is frequently very ignorant of money values; probably it will be necessary to take the country general shop as the basis. He could also begin to estimate the produce of the school garden.