"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.