There are a few occasions when interest is in actual number relations, as when a child for himself discovers that two sixes is six twos.  One boy on his own account compared a shilling and an hour, and said that he could set out a shilling in five parts by the clock.  He looked at the clock and chose out a sixpence, a threepence, and 3 pennies.  But usually what is abstract belongs to a stage farther on.

So we can end where we began, by letting Froebel once more define the Kindergarten.

“Creches and Infant Schools must be raised into Kindergartens wherein the child is treated and trained according to his whole nature, so that the claims of his body, his heart and his head, his active, moral and intellectual powers, are all satisfied and developed.

“Not the training of the memory, not learning by rote, not familiarity with the appearances of things, but culture by means of action, realities and life itself, bring a blessing upon the individual, and thereby a blessing upon the whole community; since each one, be he the highest or the humblest, is a member of the community.”

PART II

THE CHILD IN THE STATE SCHOOL

I. THINGS AS THEY ARE

CHAPTER XIV

CERTAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF GROWTH

Early in the nineteenth century two men, moved by very different impulses, founded what might be considered the beginnings of the Infant School.  For nearly fifty years their work grew separately, but now they are merged together into something that seems to be permanent.

In a bleak Lanarkshire factory village in the south of Scotland, Robert Owen, millowner, socialist and Welshman, found that unless he could provide for the education of the children of his factory hands, no parents would consent to settle in the district and he would be without workers in his mill.  As a consequence Owen found himself in the position of education authority, privy purse and organiser, and he did not flinch from the situation; he imposed no cheap makeshift, because he believed in education as an end and not as an economic means; a twofold institution was therefore established by him in 1816, one part for the children of recognised school age, presumably over six, and one for those under school age, whose only entrance test was their ability to walk.  It is with the latter that we are concerned.

The instructions given by Owen to the man and the women he chose for his Infant School may serve to show his general aim; the babies under their care were above all to be happy, to lead a natural life, outdoor or indoor as weather permitted; learning their surroundings, playing, singing, dancing, “not annoyed with books,” not shadowed by the needs of the upper school, but living the life their age demanded.  In the light of the 1918 Education Bill this seems almost prophetic.