Their guardians were selected solely on the grounds of personality, and expected to work in the spirit in which Owen conceived the school.  They were gentle, without personal ambition, fond of children, caring only for their welfare; but the sole guiding principle was Owen, and this was at once the success and doom of the school, for the personality of Owen was thus made the pivot round which the school revolved; without him there was nothing to take hold of.

Very soon the experiment became known:  persons with the stamp of authority came to see it, and even official hearts were moved by the reality of the children’s happiness and their consequent development.  The visitors felt, rather than knew, that the thing was right.  Arrangements were made to establish similar institutions in London, and after one or two experiments, a permanent one was founded which was under the control of a man named Wilderspin.

Wilderspin’s contribution to education is difficult to estimate; certainly he never caught Owen’s spirit, or realised his simple purpose:  he had ambitions reaching beyond the happiness of the children; and far from trying to make their education suit their stage of growth, he sought to produce the “Infant Prodigy,” just as a contemporary of his sought to produce the “Infant Saint.”  From what we can see, his aim was what he honestly believed to be right, as far as his light went; but he sought for no light beyond his own; and his outlook was not so narrow as his application was unintelligent.  Owen was still in Lanarkshire to be consulted; Rousseau had already written Emile, Pestalozzi’s work was by this time fairly well known in England, the children were there to be studied, but Wilderspin pursued his limited and unenlightened work, until the Infant School was almost a dead thing in his hands and in the hands of those who followed.  The following is Birchenough’s account: 

“The school was in charge of a master and a female assistant, presumably his wife.  Much attention was given to training children in good personal habits, cleanliness, tidiness, punctuality, etc., and to moral training.  Great stress was laid on information....  The curriculum included reading, writing, arithmetic, geometry, lessons on common objects, geography, singing and religion, and an effort was made to make the work interesting and ‘concrete.’  To this end much importance was attached to object-lessons, to the use of illustrations, to questioning and exposition, while the memory was aided by means of didactic verse....  The real teaching devolved upon the master and mistress.  This was of two kinds:  class teaching to a section of the children of approximately equal attainments either on the floor or in the class-room, and collective teaching to the whole school, regardless of age, on the gallery.”

It is a curious coincidence that in 1816, the year of Owen’s experiment, a humble educational experiment was begun by Frederick Froebel in a very small village in the heart of the Thuringian forest.  Like Owen, his aim was education solely for its own sake, and he had a simple faith in the human goodness of the older Germany.  But he came to education as a philosopher rather than a social reformer, with a strong belief in its power to improve humanity.  This belief remained with him; it is embodied in his aim, and leavened all his work.