It is a knot of manifold humiliations in which the young child is caught. But there is a genuine if belated interest in his rescue. And it is of peculiar importance to note the characteristics of such schools as the desire for this rescue has called into being. These are naturally the creation of idealists who are not escaped teachers merely, but really impassioned workers in human material. And they are doers rather than talkers. The new age that they have inaugurated treads delicately and shouts no challenges. Any possible hostility the new schools disarm by calling themselves "experimental" and by honestly meriting the term. System has not so far gripped them and even "method," that fetish of the pedagogue, is a word used only in occasional discreet whispers. If the children who spend their days in these animated little laboratories learn much, their teachers learn of course a great deal more, and even the fortunate parents indirectly profit.
Individualistic and independent of each other as experimental schools are and should be, their approximately common derivation brings them nevertheless within a single group, and it is in their resemblances rather than their differences that their revolutionary character consists. A modern school may acknowledge in place of the "system" it has discarded an abstract purpose, merely. In place of "equipment" it may boast only of an atmosphere. And even if there is any uncertainty, which there usually isn't, as to just what it will do for a child, and how, there is at least no uncertainty whatever as to what it won't do—that is, as to what ancient sins it won't commit. A school of this type doesn't make it its first business to seal up the approaches to experience. It doesn't "instruct" little children, it doesn't "train" them, it doesn't "discipline"—and these are perhaps the three words that summed up the former educational cede. This means, of course, that the philosophy of "education through play" is put into practice, that authority is to a greater or less extent discarded in favour of libertarianism. It may even be taken for granted that there will be no artificial cleavage between the interests of girls and boys, and no discrimination in favour of the children of the well-to-do. Furthermore, the lowest age limit is sinking rapidly. One school that now accepts children at two hopes in time to take them at six months.
So far, this is naturally not a concrete enough program to per-
