and most of the unlovely machinery of public schools, at least, has been invented in the interests, not at all of education, even as this has been understood, but of sheer ruthless subordination of the vital impulse. But this ancient distinction between the joy of living and the discomfort of being educated, experimental schools have done their best to annihilate. Part of every school day the children spend outdoors; and city schools, when they haven't a yard, have at least a roof to be devoted to this purpose. Conducted excursions, of the sort that only an inspired uncle ever used to have time for, occur frequently. It is a matter of course that there must be beds for naps and equipment for frequent meal-times. Both outdoors and in, the facilities for play conform to the best knowledge so far attainable. And at least one school chooses in its equipment to minister to a sense of beauty that isn't always postulated to exist in children. Rugs, hangings, chairs, the china that they use daily, all these are not only of arresting design, but authentic and beautiful.
Naturally enough, under such conditions as these, those traditional misdemeanours of infancy, as to which the unconverted parent will not fail to express concern, scarcely constitute a problem. It is not difficult to avoid that emotional waste in children for which unwise relatives or nurses are usually responsible. Children engaged in "purposeful activities" under wise and gentle direction, rarely have those outbursts of of "naughtiness," which are often a mere protest against being mishandled. Similarly, those of us who are out of jail have no impulse to organize hunger strikes.
All this is of course but the rudest outline of the sort of education that is beginning to be offered little children, so far as it may be generalized about, and so far as it may be seen from the outside. This outline the idealist who attempts to create a school fills in as individual inspiration or as borrowed wisdom may suggest. Probably nothing better could happen for childhood than that educational theory should always remain fluid, each new school contenting itself, as the experimental schools now do, with a modest working hypothesis. Meanwhile, it is precisely these hypotheses that furnish an extremely interesting basis of comparison.
Mrs. Johnson, for instance, whose Fairhope school is probably the best known of its type, bases her work on the central idea that
