Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/822

704 education should be "organic," and schools founded by her disciples give themselves in fact the rather grim name of "organic schools." The idea is simply that the organic or natural development of the human being should be reverently heeded and that particular violence is done the child by interrupting or perverting the sequence of nature. Thus stated, this theory has almost a conservative sound. It is in its application that it has arrested attention. The organically educated child becomes miscellaneously experienced in "hand work" before he learns to read. The type that the organic method particularly strives to avoid developing is the "over-intellectualized child"—precisely the type that parents will recognize as having for so long been their especial pride.

Statements of purpose that are perhaps more concrete are made by that popular resort of liberalized infancy, the City and Country School in New York. Miss Pratt's idea is that the all-round growth of the child is best stimulated by interesting it in the actual and familiar, the near at hand, and in following out the lines these interests lead to. Her little children are assisted in unravelling the "humming activities of the streets," so far as possible at first hand. A serviceable scheme, even though at least as good a case could, one may suspect, be made out for the theory that the natural point of departure for infant interest is something unreal or distant, something uncomprehended and vast.

Again, in the school and baby garden which they conducted at Stony Ford, Mr. and Mrs. Hutchinson laid their main stress upon the educational value of practical co-operation in a school family conducted strictly on a single social level. Even the youngest children developed a sense of responsibility for the affairs not only of schoolroom, but of kitchen and garden. The difference between this communal life and that period when "Adam delved and Eve span" is, of course, that nowadays Eve is expected to take her turn at the spade and Adam to take his at the wheel. To softly reared children these conditions must seem at first a little austere, as is perhaps the case also at the Ferrer School at Stelton, but against their beautiful reasonableness there is nothing valid to urge.

To see children either baking the bread they are to eat, or organizing the drama they are to produce, is to grasp the principle behind the activity and to judge, perhaps, of the success of its application. But the main effort of such a school as Miss Margaret