forms to adult eyes. But we try to remember that children are naturally irrational. We have learned a great deal by leaving the children alone, within the limits set by safety, and watching them work out their relations on their own plans. For instance there was Billy, who was immediately drawn to Jane when she entered the nursery. He offered her his toys. He patted her. He pulled her over toward the slide. But Jane was shy and shrank from his advances. For weeks after that Billy's only interest in her was hostile. Finally one day only these two were in the nursery. Jane was acclimated. She joined Billy casually in his play. Billy's face broke into beaming smiles. He rushed to the teacher saying over and over gain. "Jane likes me, Jane likes me!" So began an enduring friendship. The hostility had been due to the rebuff. It was an expression of real emotion of the thwarted desire for friendship. This was a real relationship; much more real as a basis for human relations than a smoothly running group engineered according to the teacher's adult ethical standard of kindness, generosity, fairness, but not really touching the children's feelings at all.

Then again, the family pattern enters in. Every little child is apt to acquire a slant toward life, due to his place in age among the brothers and sisters, and carry it with him to new social situations. In this respect no home is alike for two children in it, and the family must be studied as to the effect on each child. One child may be an only child and lord it over his parents.

Another may be the baby, last of a number of children, not so much heeded, but able to get attention either by acting the cunning baby or by whining. A child of three may have acquired the habit of bullying his unresisting baby brother. Will any of these tactics work in a group of one's peers? No, indeed. Here each child has to go through the often painful process of adjusting to other children who do not respond in the same way as the people at home. He must meet them on his own merits. He must fight, not whine for his rights; he must learn to share the toys. Because it is a real need in him, he gradually outgrows his fixed reactions, attaining to free and joyful comradeship.

We are thus constantly trying at the Walden School to observe and record the child's life at home and at school, and to get behind the meaning of our objective data to understand its meaning as a whole. To understand the type of child, his inner conflicts, his identifications, his needs, and the inner direction of his life, as well as to study his response to a new approach to his problems. Year by year we meet his expanding consciousness and capacities by changes in the environment. Each phase demands a special analysis of teaching methods and school organization. In older groups, as well as in the nursery, the Walden School has developed a fresh organic form. This is the outgrowth of a conscious educational philosophy that balances and correlates the life of each child with the life of the entire social group.

HE Ruggles Street Nursery School and Training Centre occupies what for some forty years was the Ruggles Street Neighborhood House, one of Mrs. Quincy A. Shaw's charities, a trusted and important part of the "Roxbury Crossing" neighborhood. In November, 1920, when it passed into the keeping of the Nursery School Committee of the Woman's Education Association, its day nursery was one of the best in the city, and this day nursery the committee continued to operate while it searched for the head-worker who should transform it into a nursery school and training centre.

In the following May, having convinced itself that no such person was to be found ready made, the committee offered the position to Miss Abigail Adams Eliot, with the means to go to study in England. Miss Eliot, a graduate of Radcliffe College, had had six years' experience, especially with children, as a social worker in Boston and also a year's study of social problems in Oxford and London. After talking with her, Professor G. E. Johnson, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, generously offered to help her plan her school on her return and to lecture to her future students. Miss Eliot spent the summer at the Rachel McMillan Nursery School and Training Centre, and after six weeks of training accepted a paid position there for three months and a half as head of the youngest group of children. She also visited other nursery schools and training schools and through educators and social workers informed herself in regard to the whole movement.(Since that time, she has

steadily pursued her studies with Professor Johnson and has again been in England and in touch with the nursery school movement).

Miss Eliot took charge at Ruggles Street on January 1, 1922, and in the autumn began to take students in training. The number of full-time students is still only four, quite as many as is desirable at present; they are candidates for a certificate, and go out to Professor Johnson for the course in pre-school education and over to Simmons College for courses in dietetics, child care, home nursing, and for others more fundamental; practice work they get in various schools and charitable agencies, as well as at Ruggles Street. Meanwhile the demand on the school, especially from other educational institutions, to accept students for practice-work only and to permit observation on the part of groups of students, has been so great that hundreds of young women first and last have become familiar in various degrees with the school and with Miss Eliot's interpretation of it.

Partly in order to provide for these growing numbers, the schoolhouse has this autumn been altered to accommodate some twenty more children, a total of about fifty in the two groups. In spite of a constant shortage of funds, which has kept the building somewhat shabby and the yard undeveloped, the Ruggles Street plant has the essentials: space in rooms, balcony and yard, shade trees and sunshine. It has also low tables and chairs, blackboards and pictures, blossoming plants on low window sills, an aquarium of goldfish on a low table, a canary, a sand box, a smooth, strong board, a large packing box, boxes

of mighty blocks; it has fireplaces and pianos and instruments for the use of the "band;" its floors are covered with linoleum; its closets let down their "playthings" on low shelves; kindergarten gifts, Montessori and McMillan apparatus, chalk, scissors, paste, plasticine, hammers and nails. All fittings and utensils in the toilet room are placed low so that small persons may clean themselves and their dishes in complete independence. The yard has its arbor, "junglegym," slide, velocipedes and their like, besides a sand box, a tiny pool and some borders that bloom throughout the spring and summer.

So much for the plant. On the nonmaterial side, too, Ruggles Street has the essentials. A nurse is on hand early every morning to examine each child for symptoms of contagious disease. The dietitian, a Simmons graduate, plans and prepares the dinner and minutely studies the effect of her menus. The physician in charge makes a thorough examination at regular intervals, keeps track of the record of health and growth, and orders what is needed in special treatment and follow-up work. At the habit clinic attached to the Community Health Association station, Dr. Thom stands ready to help with any puzzling problem of wrong habit formation. Many of the children are in his care and the school not only follows his directions but helps and encourages the mother to follow them at home.

It is not necessary to detail here the occupations of the two and three year olds who spend in this environment seven or eight hours a day, five days a week, the year round. Thanks to Froebel, to Montessori, to Miss McMillan, to modern psychology and modern medicine, both "curriculum" and method are today pretty well understood by everyone who is dealing professionally with the pre-school age.

Educational expert, dietitian, doctor, nurse, psychiatrist; health records and behavior records; mothers' meetings and mothers' cooperation-all are working together, with common sense and with love, to produce in the school an atmosphere of happiness, purposefulness, order, and spontaneity which is nothing less than astounding to the visitor who is not dealing professionally with the pre-school age. Says Miss Eliot: "For convenience of discussion we divide our efforts under three heads, education, health, and family relationships, but of course with a little child, the three aspects are only partly distinguishable. Our constant care is to see him as a whole."

One underlying assumption of the nursery school-that a mother needs expert help with her child even if she is not out of the house all day-was the genesis of the Cambridge Nursery School. Having watched Miss Eliot with the Ruggles Street Children, a group of young mothers of education and high standards asked her to help them inaugurate such a school for their own children. After a few months of successful experiment they built, in the summer of 1923, a bungalow, with play space about it to accommodate fifteen children. Most of them stay only during the morning hours, from nine to twelve; some return after their mid-day naps at home; a few remain all day. The McMillan graduate who directed the school for over a year has now gone to Yale to manage Dr. Gesell's nursery school, but the Ruggles Street training has supplied a successor, whose assistant is also a Ruggles Street student. The Cambridge mothers take turns in helping at the school and with the records; to more than one of them this has meant heavier work than she did for her child before he went to school, but it is work with a direct and valuable effect on

all that she is most eager to accomplish.

It is too soon, of course, to expect from the records kept any figures of general value. Nor do Miss Eliot's common sense and open-mindedness encourage the erection of beliefs into dogmas. However, she permits me to mention here two or three things that look pretty clear. For instance: (1) Though each child is studied with exhaustive care and, furthermore, handled as an individual, all group work being voluntary and all choice as free as possible, the effect of the school upon him is not to increase but to decrease his self-consciousness, not to enhance his ego but to show him the joy of companionship in service and in play. (2) The fundamentals of selfcontrol and self-direction can be learned at this early age. Though the child's independence and initiative are encouraged in every possible way, his liberty, far from degenerating into license, actually approaches the ideal of freedom within law.

To sum up, let this brief sketch conclude with the opening paragraphs of a descriptive pamphlet issued in May, 1924, by the two schools in question:

"It is obvious to this distracted age that the hope of the world lies in education. To begin education in the nursery, where psychologists now know that it must be begun, is the purpose of the nursery school.

"Each of the two nursery schools described in this pamphlet, besides educating its own group of pupils, accomplishes two other ends: it serves (1) as an object lesson in the art of pre-school education and (2) as a laboratory for advancement in the science of that education.

"The Ruggles Street school also offers systematic training in this new field of teaching. It intends this training to produce the expert teacher of tiny children who is now so difficult to find.

"Both Ruggles Street and Cambridge, dealing as they do with two very different types of families, regard the cooperation of the home as essential to their right to existence. As far as possible, mothers must learn the art and advance the science. Unless the nursery school results in better homes, it is a failure.”

ELIOT, ABIGAIL A. Two Nursery Schools. Child Health Magazine, March, 1924.

MORSE, EDNA RICH. "Little Children Should Be Good to Animals." Kindergarten and First Grade Magazine, September, 1924.

Ruggles Street Nursery School and Training Centre, Cambridge Nursery School Report, May, 1924.

HE birth and infancy of the Nursery School movement in England has been difficult, but its future is not doubtful. It started from its official side when in 1908 the Board of Education sent out a circular making proposals as to the care of young children of pre-school age children who had up to that time had no part or lot in the educational system of the country.

The Board of Education was on new ground but it was natural and right that they should trust a little to precedent, and the axioms of earlier reformers. So they began by saying that the Nursery Schools should be small, not exceeding forty. Even now after fourteen years many are haunted by the supposed need of the schools being very small. In point of fact the small schools, though staffed by brave and devoted women have been a serious menace to the growth of the movement. I never hear of one without feeling as Wellington felt when he looked at some new recruits: "I don't know what effect they will have on the enemy. By God, they frighten me."

Well may they frighten us. The reactionaries fasten on them as on a raft in mid-ocean. "See these small schools. They cost on an average from £25 to £30 a year, per head. We can not afford it. We shall never be able to afford it. Therefore, the movement can not grow." So well has this argument served that the Moderate Party of the London County Council, albeit including some real friends of Nursery Schools, has slipped back from the policy of 1919 which encouraged them to go forward, backed by a subsidy of £25,000 from the government and has allowed the whole matter to stand over" from that date!

It can not stand over." A vital and powerful principle reforms it and builds for itself the agencies by which in years to come it will be expressed. In our teeming streets, and crowded warrens there live and move nearly two millions of little children who have no nursery but the streets, no playground but a dark court or a narrow and crowded room where a whole family lives and moves like a flight of birds in a small cage. These suffer. They sink into ill health, into mental slackness or stupor. They fail as producers of wealth, as fathers and mothers, as citizens. And the state pays for them great sums to keep many of them in a wretched world.

Now in order to save this vast army alive, we have to think not of small classes, or of tiny centers, or even of research clinics (valuable as these are). We have day by day before our eyes the results of our city life and the results of our whole system of education as a modifying and active influence. We know where we fail. The evil that destroys the work of devoted teachers is at the foundation of our people's life. It is in its very roots. We produce our own problems long before we begin to find their solution. And we have produced illness and weakness so rapidly and so generally that in the districts of London 80 to 90 per cent of all the children are rickety at the age of two. Nothing that we have hitherto done, outside the Open-Air Nursery School, even professes to meet this terrible situation. It is true, of course, as Sir George Newman says, that more is done now for children than was done by any earlier generation. The eight hundred or nine hundred clinics in the country work on at the task of treatment and cure. How far are they success