The scientific laboratory, the field of Nature where the teacher will be initiated into "the observation of the phenomena of the inner life" should be the school in which free children develop with the help of material designed to bring about development. When she feels herself, aflame with interest, "seeing" the spiritual phenomena of the child, and experiences a serene joy and an insatiable eagerness in observing them, then she will know that she is "initiated."
Then she will begin to become a "teacher."
[V]
ENVIRONMENT
Not only must the teacher be transformed, but the school environment must be changed. The introduction of the "material of development" into an ordinary school cannot constitute the entire external renovation. The school should become the place where the child may live in freedom, and this freedom must not be solely the intimate, spiritual liberty of internal growth. The entire organism of the child, from his physiological, vegetative part to his motor activity, ought to find in school "the best conditions for development." This includes all that physical hygiene has already put forward as aids to the life of the child. No place would be better adapted than these schools to establish and popularize reform in the clothing of children, which should meet the requirements of cleanliness and of a simplicity facilitating freedom of movement, while it should be so made as to enable children to dress themselves. No better place could be found to carry out and popularize infant hygiene in its relation to nutrition. It would be a work of social regeneration to convince the public of the economy they might effect by such practises, to show them that elegance and propriety in themselves cost nothing—nay, more, that they demand simplicity and moderation, and therefore exclude all that superfluity which is so expensive.
The above applies more especially to schools which, like the original "Children's Houses," might be instituted in the very buildings inhabited by the parents of the pupils.
Certain special requirements must be recognized in the rooms of a free school: psychical hygiene must play its part here as physical hygiene has already done. The great increase in the dimensions of modern class-rooms was dictated by physical hygiene; the ambient air space is measured by "cubature" in relation to the physical needs of respiration; and for the same reason, lavatories were multiplied, and bathrooms were installed; physical hygiene further decreed the introduction of concrete floors and washable dadoes, of central heating, and in many cases of meals, while gardens or broad terraces are already looked upon as essentials for the physical well-being of the child. Wide windows already admit the light freely, and gymnasia with spacious halls and a variety of complex and costly apparatus were established. Finally, the most complicated desks, sometimes veritable machines of wood and iron, with foot-rests, seats, and desks revolving automatically, in order to preclude alike the movements of the child and the distortions arising from immobility, are the economically disastrous contribution of a false principle of "school-hygiene." In the modern school, the uniform whiteness and the washable quality of every object denote the triumph of an epoch in which the campaign against microbes would seem to be the sole key to human life.