If it be true that the Infant School of to-day suffers from lack of a clear basis for its general policy, it will be profitable to have clearly before us such principles as great educators have found to be most vital to the education of young children.

We all believe that we have an aim and a high aim before us: it has been variously expressed by past educationalists, but in the main they all agree that the aim of education is conduct.

In actual practice, however, we act too often as if we only cared for economic values. If we are to live up to our educational profession, we must look our aim in the face and honestly practise what we believe.

While training of character and conduct is the accepted aim for education in general, to make this useful and practical each teacher must fix her attention on how this ultimate aim affects her own special part of the whole work. By watching the free child she will discover how best she can help him: he knows his own business, and when unfettered by advice or command shows plainly that he is chiefly concerned with gaining experience. He finds himself in what is to him a new and complex world of people and things; actual experience is the foundation for complete living, and the stronger the foundation the better the result of later building. The first vital principle then is that the teacher of young children must provide life in miniature; that is, she must provide abundant raw material and opportunities for experience.

The next question is that of the best method of gaining this actual experience. The child is unaware that he is laying foundations, he is only vaguely conscious that he finds great pleasure in certain activities, and that something impels him in certain directions. He realises no definite future, he is content with the present; he cannot work for a purpose other than the pleasure of the moment; without this stimulus concentration is impossible. In the activities of this stage he probably assimilates more actual matter than at any other period of his life, and it is the same with his acquirements of skill. In happy unconsciousness he gains knowledge of his own body and of its power, of the external world, of his mother tongue and of his relations to other people: he makes mistakes and commits faults, but these do not necessarily cripple or incriminate him. He is not considered a social outcast because he once kicked or bit, or because he threw his milk over the table; he learns to balance and adjust his muscles on a seesaw, when a fall on soft grass is a matter of little importance, and this is better than waiting till he is compelled hastily to cross a river on a narrow plank. It is all a kind of joyous rehearsal of life which we call Play. We can force a child to passivity, to formal repetitions of second-hand knowledge, to the acquisition of that for which he has no apparent need, but we can never educate him by these things. "Children do not play because they are young, they have their youth that they may play," as surely as they have their legs that they may walk.

The second principle is therefore that the method of gaining experience lies through Play, and that by this road we can best reach work.

The third principle is the nature of the experience that a child seeks to gain—the life he desires to live. How can we he sure that the surroundings we provide and the activities we encourage are in accord with children's needs?

Let us imagine a child of about five to six years of age, one of a family, living in a small house to which a garden is attached; inside he has the run of the house, but keeps his own toys, picture books and collections of treasures. We will suppose that not being at school he is free to arrange his own day, sometimes alone, and sometimes with other children, or with his parents. What does he do?

He is interested in inanimate things, especially in using them, and so he plays with his toys. He builds bricks, runs engines, solves simple puzzle pictures, asks to work with his father's gardening tools, or his mother's cooking utensils. He is interested in the life of the garden, in the growing things, in the snail or spider he finds, in the cat, dog or rabbit of the family; he wants to dig, water and feed these various things, but he declines regular responsibility; his interest is in spurts.

He is interested in sounds, both in those he can produce and in those produced by others: soon he is interested in music, he will listen to it for considerable periods, and may join in it: at first more especially on the rhythmical side. So, too, he likes the rhythm of poetry and the melody sounds of words. He is interested in making things; on a wet day he will ask for scissors and paste, or bring out his paint box or chalks; on a fine day he mixes sand or mud with water, or builds a shelter with poles and shawls; at any time when he has an opportunity he shuts himself into the bathroom and experiments with the taps, sails boats, colours water, blows bubbles, tries to mix things, wet and dry.

He is interested in the doings of other people, in their conduct and in his own; he is more interested in their badness than in their goodness: "Tell me more of the bad things your children do," said a little boy to his teacher aunt, and the request is significant and general; we learn so little by mere uncontrasted goodness. He is interested in the words that clothe narrations and in their style, he is impatient of a change in form of an accepted piece of prose or poetry. He is hungry for the sounds of telling words and phrases.

He is interested in reproducing the doings of other people so that he may experience them more fully, and this involves minute observation, careful and intelligent imitation, and vivid imagination. His own word for it is pretence.

There are other things that he grasps at more vaguely and later; he is dimly aware that people have lived before, and he is less dimly aware that people live in places different from his own surroundings. He realises that some of the stories, such as the fairy stories, are true in one sense, a sense that responds to something within himself; that some are true in another more material, and external sense, one concerned with things that really happen. He hears of "black men," and of "ships that carry people across the sea," and of "things that come back in those ships."

He is interested in the immaterial world suggested by the mysteries of woods and gardens, he has a dim conception that there is some life beyond the visible, he feels a power behind life and he reveals this in his early questions. He is keenly interested in questions of birth and death, and sometimes comes into close contact with them. He feels that other wonders must be accounted for—the snow, thunder and lightning, the colours of summer, the changeful sea. At first the world of fairy lore may satisfy him, later comes the life of the undying spirit, but the two are continuous. He may attend "religious observances," and these may help or they may hinder.

He is keenly interested in games, whether they are games of physical skill, of mental skill, or games of pretence. Here most especially he comes into contact with other people, and here he realises some of the experiences of social life.

Such are the most usual sides of life sought by the ordinary child, and on such must we base the surroundings we provide for our children in school, and the aspects of life to which we introduce them, commonly called subjects of the curriculum.

Our third principle is therefore, evident: we find, in the child's spontaneous choice, the nature of the surroundings and of the activities that he craves for; in other words, he makes his own curriculum and selects his own subject matter.

The next consideration is the atmosphere in which a child can best develop character by means of these experiences. A young child is a stranger in an unknown, untried country: he has many strange promptings that seek for satisfaction; he has strong emotions arising from his instincts, he feels crudely and fiercely and he must act without delay, as a result of these emotions. He is like a tourist in a new strange country, fresh and eager, and with a similar holiday spirit of adventure: the stimulation of the new arouses a desire to interpret, to investigate and to ask questions: it arouses strong emotions to like or dislike, to fear, to be curious; it leads to certain modes of conduct, as a result of these emotions. Picture such a young tourist buttonholed by a blasÉ guide, who had forgotten what first impressions meant, who insisted on accompanying him wherever he went, regulating his procedure by telling him just what should be observed and how to do so, pouring out information so premature as to be obnoxious, correcting his taste, subduing his enthusiasm, and modifying even his behaviour. The tourist would presumably pay off the unwelcome guide, but the children cannot pay off the teacher: they can and do rebel, but docility and adaptability seem to play a large part in self-preservation. For the young child freedom must precede docility, because the only reasonable and profitable docility is one that comes after initiative and experiment have been satisfied, and when the child feels that he needs help.

The world that the free child chooses represents every side of life that he is ready to assimilate, and his freedom must be intellectual, emotional and moral freedom. In the school with the rigidly organised time-table, where the remarks of the children provoke the constantly repeated reproach: "We are not talking of that just now," where the apparatus is formal and the method of using it prescribed, where home life and street life are ignored, where there are neither garden nor picture books, where childish questions are passed over or hastily answered, where the room is full of desks and the normal attitude is sitting, where the teacher is teaching more often than the children are doing, there is no intellectual freedom.

Where passion and excitement are instantly arrested, where appreciation for strong colours, fierce punishments, loud noises, is killed, where fear is ridiculed, where primitive likes and dislikes are interpreted as coarseness, there is no emotional freedom. A child must have these experiences if he is to come to his own later: this is not the time to stamp out but only to deflect and guide; otherwise he becomes a weak and pale reflection of his elders, with little resource or enthusiasm.

Where it is almost impossible to be openly naughty, where there is no opportunity for choice or for making mistakes, where control is all from the teacher and self-control has no place, there is no moral freedom. The school is not for the righteous but for the so-called sinner, who is only a child learning self-control by experience.

Self-control is a habit gained through habits; a child must acquire the habit of arresting desire, of holding the physical side in check, the habit of reflection, of choice, and most of all the habit of either acting or holding back, as a result of all this. If in the earliest years his will is in the hands of others, and he has the habit of obedience to the exclusion of all other habits, then his development as a self-reliant individual is arrested, and may be permanently weakened. There is no other way to learn life, and build up an ideal from the raw material he has gained in other ways. In the rehearsal of life at school he can do this without serious harm; but every time a mode of conduct is imposed upon him when he might have chosen, every time he is externally controlled when he might have controlled himself, every time he is balked in making a mistake that would have been experience to him, he will be proportionally less fit to choose, to exercise self-control, to learn by experience, and these are the chief lessons at this impressionable period.

The fourth principle therefore is that the atmosphere of freedom is the only atmosphere in which a child can gain experiences that will help to develop character and control conduct.

These four vital principles will be applied to practical work in the following chapters.