In England in 1917 we have given to us The Play Way, in which one who has tried it gives the results of his own experiments in education through play.  Mr. Caldwell Cook was not satisfied with the condition of affairs when “school above the Kindergarten is a nuisance because there is no play.”  His dream is that of a Play School Commonwealth, where education, which is the training of youth, shall be filled with the spirit of youth, namely, “freshness, zeal, happiness, enthusiasm.”

The next chapter will show that it has taken us exactly a hundred years to reach as far as public recognition of the Nursery School where play is the only possible motive.  It is for the coming generation of teachers to act so that the dream of the Play School Commonwealth shall be realised more quickly.  It is a significant fact that the lines quoted as heading for the next chapter are written by a modern schoolmaster.

CHAPTER IV

FROM 1816 TO 1919

Poor mites; you stiffen on a bench
And stoop your curls to dusty laws;
Your petal fingers curve and clench
In slavery to parchment saws;
You suit your hearts to sallow faces
In sullen places: 
But no pen
Nor pedantry can make you men. 
Yours are the morning and the day: 
You should be taught of wind and light;
Your learning should be born of play.

(Caged: GEORGE WINTHROP YOUNG.)

Had England but honoured her own prophets, we should have had Nursery Schools a hundred years ago.  In 1816, the year in which Froebel founded his school for older boys at Keilhau, Robert Owen, the Socialist, “following the plan prescribed by Nature,” opened a school where children, from two to six, were to dance and sing, to be out-of-doors as much as possible, to learn “when their curiosity induced them to ask questions,” and not to be “annoyed with books.”  They were to be prevented from acquiring bad habits, to be taught what they could understand, and their dispositions were to be trained “to mutual kindness and a sincere desire to contribute all in their power to benefit each other.”  They “were trained and educated without punishment or the fear of it....  A child who acted improperly was not considered an object of blame but of pity, and no unnecessary restraint was imposed on the children.”

But the world was not ready.  Owen’s “Rational Infant School” attracted much notice, and an Infant School Society was founded.  But even the enlightened were incapable of understanding that any education was possible without books, and the promoters rightly, though quite unconsciously, condemned themselves when they kept the title Infant School but dropped the qualifying “Rational.”  Still, Infant Schools had been started and interest had been aroused.  When the edict abolishing Kindergartens was promulgated in Germany, some of Froebel’s disciples passed to other lands, and Madame von Marenholz