The change was not welcome to all teachers.  As late as 1907 a headmistress who was a product of the training of that time remarked:  “We have Kindergarten on Wednesday afternoons and then it is over for the week.”  But there were teachers who saw beneath the bricks and sticks and pretty movements, who felt the spiritual side and kept themselves alive till greater opportunities came.  What was imperishable has remained; the system of prescribed activities is nearly dead, but the spirit of the true Kindergarten is more alive than ever.

The change from the early ’eighties till now is difficult to describe, because it is a growth of spirit, a gradual change of values, rather than a change in outward form; there has been no definite throwing off, and no definite adoption, of any one system or theory; but the difference between the best Infant Schools of 1880 and the best Infant Schools of to-day is chiefly a difference in outlook.  The older schools aimed at copying a method, while the schools of to-day are more concerned with realising the spirit.

At present we are trying to reconstruct education for the new world after the war, and so it is convenient to regard the intervening period of nearly half a century as a transition period:  during that time the education of the child under eight has changed much more than the education of older children, at least in the elementary school; and there have been certain marked phases that, though apparently insignificant in themselves, have marked stages of progress in thought.

Perhaps the most significant and most important of these was the effect of the child-study movement on the formal and external side of Kindergarten work.  It is first of all to America that we owe this, to the pioneer Stanley Hall, and more especially here to Mr. Earl Barnes.  Very slowly, but surely, it was evident to the more enlightened teachers that children had their own way of learning and doing, and the adult-imposed system meant working against nature.  For the logical method of presenting material from the simple to the complex, from the known to the unknown, from the concrete to the abstract, was substituted the psychological method of watching the children’s way of learning and developing.  Teachers found that what they considered to be “the simple” was not the simple to children; what they took to be “the known” was the unfamiliar to children.  For instance, the “simple” in geography, in the adult sense, was the definition of an island, with which most of us began that study, and in geometry it was the point.  To children of the ordinary type, both are far-away ideas, and not related to everyday experiences; “the known” in arithmetic, for example, was to teachers the previous lesson, quite regardless of the fact that arithmetic enters into many problems of life outside school.  The life in school and the life outside school were, in these early days of infant teaching, two separate things, and only occasionally did a teacher stoop to