"THE NURSERY SCHOOL."
(TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.")
SIR, It is from no desire, I hope, to recommend either my work, or my book, The Nursery School, that I ask the privilege of answering one or two of the criticisms in a very well- meaning review of The Nursery School.
To begin with, let me correct a mistake. There are, I grieve t3 say, no other open-air nursery schools, as yet. Our first illustration is still, alas! holding the field alone. I trust and believe, however, that there will soon be a small crop of them. We are giving a training to Bradford Head-Mistresses, and hope to supply Heads for the new open-air London nursery schools when they are ready.
I am accused of not teaching the system of Dr. Montessori; and it is hinted that my students will suffer therefrom, an.l even come under the ban of Mr. Fisher, a recent convert. You will forgive me for saying that all this sounds a little weird and strange, like words heard in a dream. Seguin died about forty years ago. I suppose I am his oldest disciple in this country. Certainly none of my critics had so much as heard of him twenty-four years ago when I began to make the educational world acquainted with him. That world did not listen .very attentively. They did not want my cheap insets, or the weighted pill-boxes I used. My big inset letters were not sand- papered. They were roughened, however, and I made great claims for the touch sense. It is not necessary for me to say what I tried to do in Bradford, but any one who reads my book, Education through the Imagination, written in 1904, wk.! find Montessori there. At least, the Romans; found it there, for they wrote to me in 1912 to say so.
We have moved far since 1904. My students are net ignorant of the work of Seguin. If I have planned their training so as to include much dramatic work, much art work after the method of Bois Caudron, and a new presentment of psychology, that is not because I differ from Montessori, but because two minds are not necessarily identical in their working merely
because they are debtors, more or less, to the same teacher, and received their initial impulse from him. Also I hope to have learned a little in the course of sixteen years!
As for Mr. Fisher, it is too bad to indicate that, having waited all .these years to find Seguin, he can now never get beyond Montessori, or, indeed, away from her—that no one must disarrange his mind, and that this mind, moving so late over this field, is nevertheless incapable of ever absorbing, or even digesting, a new idea. If I believed this I should have to give may students an extra year's study, not in order that they might please Mr. Fisher, but only that they might be strong to deliver him from borrowed idges fixes. Why do we assume that Ministers are always dullards, and that people who are not boomed are necessarily quite destitute of ideas, and of the conviction and courage to work them out in action F—I am, Sir,
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