us, but
even with its formalism the change was welcome to the children: at least
they could use their hands and do something; at least they could leave
their back-breaking galleries and dance and skip, even though the doing
and the dancing were according to strict rule.

The change was not welcome to all teachers. As late as 1907 a
headmistress who was a product of the training of that time remarked:
"We have Kindergarten on Wednesday afternoons and then it is over for
the week." But there were teachers who saw beneath the bricks and sticks
and pretty movements, who felt the spiritual side and kept themselves
alive till greater opportunities came. What was imperishable has
remained; the system of prescribed activities is nearly dead, but the
spirit of the true Kindergarten is more alive than ever.

The change from the early 'eighties till now is difficult to describe,
because it is a growth of spirit, a gradual change of values, rather
than a change in outward form; there has been no definite throwing off,
and no definite adoption, of any one system or theory; but the
difference between the best Infant Schools of 1880 and the best Infant
Schools of to-day is chiefly a difference in outlook. The older schools
aimed at copying a method, while the schools of to-day are more
concerned with realising the spirit.

At present we are trying to reconstruct education for the new world
after the war, and so it is convenient to regard the intervening period
of nearly half a century as a transition period: during that time the
education of the child under eight has changed much more than the
education of older children, at least in the elementary school; and
there have been certain marked phases that, though apparently
insignificant in themselves, have marked stages of progress in thought.

Perhaps the most significant and most important of these was the effect
of the child-study movement on the formal and external side of
Kindergarten work. It is first of all to America that we owe this, to
the pioneer Stanley Hall, and more especially here to Mr. Earl Barnes.
Very slowly, but surely, it was evident to the more enlightened teachers
that children had their own way of learning and doing, and the
adult-imposed system meant working against nature. For the logical
method of presenting material from the simple to the complex, from the
known to the unknown, from the concrete to the abstract, was substituted
the psychological method of