CERTAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF GROWTH
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.