[Spearpoint,] Sylvia Ashton-Warner's report of her experience in an "open" primary school in Colorado, is delightful, literate and personal. She knows she is a good teacher; she is openly pleased or displeased with herself and with others, or with the whole shebang; and she unselfconsciously and meticulously records her teaching triumphs and failures.

But the book is more than a record of her slow and sometimes impatient progress toward order and discipline in the face of their opposites … and toward the development of a teaching that is successful, to the degree that it is also a learning. Working "organically" with the children, she is also aware of the organic tie between the American classroom, or whatever it may be called, and the great American outside….

[Despite her] emphasis on and exploitation of uniqueness, Miss Ashton-Warner, like any teacher, is tempted to make generalizations to ease her work. Every...