not endowed parents with some feelings and perceptions which would enable them to diagnose their children's nature and minister to their needs. But does it follow that parents have the necessary insight to prepare them for adjustment to the world of people and things in which they must live today?

The life of man today is very different from what it was when his progenitors lived in the forest, or in the cave, or when they wandered from place to place in search of food and adventure and were not attached to any spot that they could call home. In those distant days, only a small group lived together as a community, and in comparison with the conditions now their life was exceedingly simple and uncomplicated. The adults in these communities did little that the children could not do. There were almost no learned activities performed in those times; life was lived on an instinctive or impulsive basis very largely. A child born into that type of social organization would be equipped with about all that was necessary to adjust himself to the people and the objects in his environment. His training then would be a simple matter. It would not be difficult for an adult to diagnose his nature or his needs, for the adult then did not grow very far away from the child in his development; childhood and adulthood had much in common and so it was comparatively easy for the adult to understand the child and minister to his needs on an instinctive or impulsive basis.

But how different the situation is today. The child comes into life now with substantially the same equipment of impulses, instincts, tendencies, as was the case in remote days; but the problems which are encountered in adjustment of the world now are almost infinitely more complicated than they were then. The original nature

of the child does not equip him adequately for adjustment; practically all that is essential must be learned either de novo or as a differentiation or modification of what he brings into life with him. In the same way, the natural equipment of the parent for helping the child to adjust himself to present-day complex conditions is apparently inadequate to meet the requirements of the situation. The child tries to make his original tendencies and impulses function in contemporary American life, and there is naturally much friction, irritation, and conflict. The parent tries to deal with the problem on an instinctive basis because he has little else to serve as a guide, and this is the cause of the mis-education which anyone who is interested in the situation may observe in a large proportion of our American homes. To state the matter in a summary way, most parents are utterly unprepared and so incapable of dealing wisely with their young children in respect to many of the adjustments which they must learn to make in present-day life.

There is another condition which is tending to render it constantly more difficult for a parent to train his children efficiently in the home. We are crowding together in congested centers, with the result that freedom of movement is being curtailed and is already severely restricted in many places. Homes are being contracted until they present no semblance to the original home of man, the type of home which the child is equipped by nature to live in and adjust himself to. This means that in America our homes are becoming unsuited to minister to the primitive nature and needs of young children.

It would be illuminating to any parent who is attempting to teach his child certain kinds of responses that he thinks are necessary for adjustment to present-day life if he would follow the child when he

goes to play with his group, and observe how quickly he will accept a restriction which is observed by all the members of the group or perform an action which is performed by those about him. The typical parent does not try to teach by emulation but rather by command, and it is this method, which is practically necessary in the typical home, which sets up resistance in the child and tends to develop in him a hostile, disobedient, refractory attitude. One who has observed children in different situations knows that a rebellious child in the home will often be docile and compliant in a group of his own age. He will exercise restraint and practice activities in the group which he will not do at all in the home unless under compulsion, and then he will be in a rebellious attitude, and on appropriate occasion he will assert this attitude.

One way out of the difficulty seems to be to develop institutions which will undertake the care and culture of the pre-school child for part of the time, just as it has been necessary to develop institutions for the education of children from the sixth year on to the completion of the educational process. Children of pre-school age in most homes would probably be helped in their physical, intellectual, and temperamental development if they could begin at two years of age to have an hour or two out of the home each day in an institution where educational influences would be organized and administered purposefully for the benefit of the child. With each additional year, the child could, with advantage, spend additional time in this type of school. It would be constructed and fitted up with appliances adapted to the nature and needs of children of pre-school age. It

would be presided over by persons who by nature, by special study, and by experience would understand the general traits of very young children and who would be able to diagnose individual peculiarities and use influences to remedy any wrong tendencies.

In following this program, the child would not by any means be separated from his parents. They would continue to play the principal role in caring for him and forming his character. Mother love would be the chief sustenance of the child all through the nursery school; but this mother love would be affected to some extent by the work of the nursery school. Standards of treatment would be set in the nursery school which could be observed in the home. Thus the nursery school would constantly play into the home, would supplement its work, and would in no sense seek to detach the child from or be a substitute for the home. It would conduce to the stability of an individual and to his success and comfort in life if he were not brought up to be dependent in his thinking and feeling upon anyone, mother or father, brother or sister, governess or teacher, or anyone else. It would promote his well-being if different personalities should impress themselves upon his well-being during his developmental period, so that he might early gain confidence in the good-will of other persons than his parents or other members of his immediate family. It would probably be better for the mother, too, if quite early she could become accustomed to the detachment of her child for part of each day; the inevitable weaning in the teens would be easier if preparation were made for it quite early.

HE nursery group, whether run as an organization separate from a school or as the founda

tion of an entire modern school organization, speaks of the failure of education in the past to consider the earliest years of childhood as truly significant in the process of education. Many nursery school groups of children varying in age from one to four years have sprung up in America, England, and other European countries. In order to develop a real life in a significant environment among children as young as two or three, the nursery schools have done much serious and im

portant experimenting on the conditions of physical environment, new equipment, and flexible educational technique.

Since several directors of these nurseries will discuss such problems, I shall limit myself to the special significance of the nursery group in the organization of the Walden School. For it must be kept in mind that behind the nursery, primary, and high school groups of this school exists a unified educational philosophy. In discussing at present the problems of the nursery age child, keep in mind the fact that the educational generalizations about a child of two or three are valid for older children as well. The problem shifts but the underlying principles of educational adjustment and growth remain fundamentally the same.

The Walden School was founded ten years ago by Margaret Naumburg. It started with a group of children between the ages of three and five, and grew consciously from this foundation until it now includes the beginnings of a high school department. But the two and three year

old children in the nursery groups still remain the cornerstone of the Walden School. Therefore a discussion of the essential ideas and methods adapted in the nursery groups is necessarily a discussion of the educational theory and practice of the entire school.

Education must span through childhood an ever widening distance. A child today must cover centuries of human development from the starting point of the primitive infant to the goal of a cultured and socialized member of modern society. This is being attempted consciously or unconsciously by education all the time. But is it really being achieved? The problem of speeding up the child's experience to carry him during the few years devoted to his education from the primitive to the socalled civilized condition of the modern adult is much deeper and more complex than educators have apparently realized. The difficulty is twofold. The civilizing process may seem to be successful and an external adjustment may be achieved, but the individual is often struggling against inner mal-adjustment so deep that it renders him ill or unhappy. Again the adjustment may be reached by approaching the ordinary group norm so successfully, that not only are socially undesirable traits erased from the individual, but his native creative capacities have vanished also. Extreme examples of such mal-adjustment are often pointed out by workers in the field of mental hygiene. But this condition is not the exceptional one of pathological cases. All modern life shows this increasing failure of men and women to live their own lives soundly, creatively, and richly. And inevitably this registers on the life of

the entire community.

The new education must work out such a technique that children grow in their own way, along the lines laid down by their individual type, and at the same time it must prepare them to meet the demands of the actual world. The problem is to develop children to meet life not as an adult in an adult world, but as a child in a child's world. If one considers education then as dealing with the emotional development of the whole human being, it begins at birth, not at an arbitrary "school age." Since it is so difficult for us to be aware of the dawning consciousness of infancy, we are apt to underestimate the extreme separateness of the infantile consciousness from the reality of the outer world. It takes a child infinite time and effort to understand with any approximation of accuracy the phenomena and concepts of this strange adult world. We have all seen babies experimenting with their own hands or feet as if they were objects outside themselves. Even the concept of one's self as distinct from other objects and people, has to be learned by experimentation. To cite a concrete example: an unusually intelligent four year old child saw nothing unusual in her description of a strange object flapping in the sky as a dead bird. Certainly it looked like one. In the world as she knew it this was no irrational

Occurrence.

In this overstimulating modern life there is a real danger that the infant's slow absorption of reality on his own level of consciousness is too greatly hurried. With the acquisition of language adults are apt to assume an understanding on the child's part of the concepts behind the words. This is far from the rule. The child is apt to become lost in a haze of auditory and visual sensations, words and experiences, which are beyond his range, and which therefore

carry no real meaning for him. It is important for little children to have much contact with simple material with which they can experiment themselves. Then it has real significance. A play of Shakespeare's, an ocean steamer, a library, have no reality to the small child because they have no meaning at the nursery age. The most important equipment for small children is largely physical, because they get their contact with life largely through experimenting with materials and in testing their own physical powers. Later on this carries over into other fields and activities. We note the beginnings of scientific experiment in the procedure of the little boy who threw a ball straight up in the air. It fell on his face as he looked up at it. So, without a word, he carefully measured arms length, threw it up again, and watched to see where it would fall. The joy of discovering the simplest facts or inventing the simplest play material is as thrilling to the child as are world-famed inventions to an Edison. Learning to manipulate and balance himself on apparatus, climb stairs, and use seesaws, gives a child such a sense of security in himself that it carries over into other phases of life.

During the past years psychologists have laid more and more emphasis on the extreme importance of the early years of infancy. The line between the comparative weight of heredity and environment in determining character has always been a fascinating field of study and a fertile one for controversy. Much light has been shed on the subject by recent research. Behaviorist studies in the laboratory show how an infant's reactions of fear and pleasure to certain objects or people may be conditioned by the circumstances under which they were experienced so that this feeling is permanently attached to the object. Analytical psychology in probing the mys

teries of the adult psyche finds that tendencies and attributes previously assumed as inherent in the "personality" of the individual are the result of the emotional colorings of earliest years.

The nursery school has a real opportunity of contributing something to this field. For here we have children, living quite naturally, in an environment that is planned to suit their needs and which they are free to mold. Here is a place for real child study, the study of children trying to live their own lives, not as measured by some artificial adult standard. Over and over again we find that children come to school with characteristics and attitudes which seem at first sight to be fixed and permanent. Careful study of personality shows that many of these apparent character traits are nothing but the protective reaction to home environment. A fundamental change in handling the child results in an equally fundamental change in personality. Even children as young as two years show signs of distorted functioning of personality in school that tell the tales of difficulties of the family life. But in the nursery school all is so fluid that there is the best opportunity of modifying these tendencies and helping the child to grow from the base of his own true self.

Into the utterly unconscious state of infancy people enter but slowly. The child learns little by little to distinguish between himself and the people around him, and this haziness of identity persists unconsciously all through life. The all important person to the child is the mother. This is as it should be. But this relation of love and dependence of the child to the parents has gradually to be transferred to other people and withdrawn into the child himself, so that he may stand on his own feet emotionally, and learn to have a mature relation with the people he meets in the world

instead of repeating a child to parent relation in all later human contacts. The teacher is aware of this problem. The child on coming to school transfers his feelings for the mother to her. But suppose that he is used to the solicitous attention of an over-fond mother, who gives him a feeling of his great importance to her. His slightest difficulty brings her anxious aid. He can always grieve her by refusing to eat or to go to sleep, and so exercise his power over her. The new mother at school responds to none of his pattern reactions. She shows her real affection for him and wins his confidence. But he sees that she is equally interested in the rest of the group. He dwindles in importance. Because the teacher is less identified with the child emotionally, she responds less emotionally to his difficulties and disobedience. She is able gradually to help him to do things for their own sake rather than for their effect on his mother. He becomes more integrated within himself. The relation to the teacher is an intermediate step between the home and the creating of new relations in life outside.

Equally important with the relation of child to adult is the relation of the children to each other. We often think of the individual and the group as necessarily opposed, and look upon socializing as something that must be forced from without. In the Walden School nursery we see the beginnings of social relations on the most primitive level. The children when they enter are like separate little worlds. They sooner or later, according to the type of child, begin to take a genuine interest in one another. They explore other children as part of the environment, and are much interested when they get a human response. They desire to attract each other's attention, to win approval and affection. Their social intercourse is apt to take strange