Therefore the central point is the child’s previous experience, and on this the experience provided by school, i.e. curriculum and subject matter, depends.  One or two examples of the working out of this might make the application clearer.  Probably the realities of life in relation to money differ greatly.  The kind of problem presented to the poor town child will deal with shopping in pennyworths or ounces, with getting coals in pound bagfuls.  Clothes are generally second-hand, and so ordinary standard prices are out of the question.  Bread is bought stale and therefore cheaper, early in the morning.  Preserved milk only is bought, and that in halfpenny quantities.  Only problems based on these will be real to this child at first.

The suburban child’s economic experience may be based on his pocket-money, money in the bank, and the normal shopping of ordinary life.

The country child is frequently very ignorant of money values; probably it will be necessary to take the country general shop as the basis.  He could also begin to estimate the produce of the school garden.

THE NURSERY SCHOOL PROGRAMME

It is quite obvious from the nature of play at this stage that a time-table is out of the question and in fact an outrage against nature.  Only for social convenience and for the establishment of certain physical habits can there be fixed hours.  There must be approximate limits as to the times of arrival and departure, but nothing of the nature of marking registers to record exact minutes.  Little children sometimes sleep late, or, on the other hand, the mothers may have to leave home very early; all this must be allowed for.  There should be fixed times for meals and for sleep, and these should be rigidly observed, and there should be regular times for the children to go to the lavatories; all these establish regularity and self-control, as well as improving general health.  But anything in the nature of story periods, games periods, handwork periods, only impedes the variously developing children in their hunger for experiences.

Their curriculum is life as the teacher has spread it out before them; there are no subjects at this stage; the various aspects ought to be of the nature of a glorious feast to these young children.  Traherne says in the seventeenth century:—­

“Will you see the infancy of this sublime and celestial greatness?  Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had in my infancy, and that divine light wherewith I was born, are the best unto this day wherein I can see the Universe....  Verily they form the greatest gift His wisdom can bestow, for without them all other gifts had been dead and vain.  They are unattainable by books and therefore will I teach them by experience....  Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world than I when I was a child.