times, and enjoying themselves in such fashion as this. But you prefer not to be too readily bamboozled. You linger a little and you try to ask an intelligent question or two.
So you discover, further, that the infant individualists choose their own occupations. Everything is within reach, nothing is forbidden. The teachers, instead of being expected single-handed to force cohorts of from forty to sixty children to do the same thing at the same time, are present, as Miss Caroline Pratt so well puts it, "to enrich each individual child's performance; to awaken and help him to satisfy his curiosity; to direct him to sources of information; to help him to adjust his social difficulties." With a school full of "play material," ranging from hammers and nails to pollywogs, there is probably no child who won't feel an urge to use this material to do something, to make something, or to dramatize something. Indeed, children placed in an environment of this sort and given genuine liberty, react in a fashion to astound both parents and unreformed teachers. The absorption, the continuity of interest that they exhibit, both so much more rarely noted in the relatively frivolous atmosphere of the home, do strikingly bear out the current theory that not only does the child educate himself through spontaneous play, but that this is the only way in which he can become educated.
And the followers of the play theory hold to it in strict detail. They are quite innocent of any conspiracy, through the medium of lettered blocks, or the like, to entrap playboys and playgirls into premature acquaintance with alphabet or numerals. In fact these cornerstones of the "learning" to which we in our earliest days were encouraged to aspire, are as nearly in the nature of forbidden fruit as anything can consistently be in these libertarian gardens. Mrs. Marietta Johnson, whose famous school at Fairhope has been so warmly endorsed by Professor Dewey, holds an extreme position on the ground, one hopes still debatable, of infant literacy, and discourages reading and writing until her pupils are several years beyond the conventional school age. The lay onlooker is of course at liberty to believe that with a child of really lively intelligence this prohibition couldn't humanely be made effective.
In the days that we all remember, there was a sharp dividing line between school hours and the rest of one's existence. It has even been considered tonic for children that this should be the case,
