sion made for the
teaching of children under that age; in fact, all scholars under seven
years of age are classified together and form the Junior Division of the
school.

Such a state of matters reflects but little credit on the educational
leaders of Scotland, and indicates an imperfect conception of the real
nature of the educative process. For if education is the process of
acquiring and organising experiences in order to render future action
more efficient, it is surely the height of folly to allow the young
child to gather his early experiences as he may. Moreover, in the case
of the children of the slums, to allow them during their early years to
gather into their brain without any correcting agency "all the sights
and scenes of a slum is sheer social madness." "The child must be
removed, or partially removed, from such an atmosphere, since it has
reached the imitative stage, and is nearing the selective stage of life.
For the moment he imitates anything; presently he will imitate what
pleases him, what gives him momentary pleasure. Before the unmoral
selective stage is reached, the stage which inevitably precedes the
moral and immoral selective stage, it is essential that children should
receive definite and deliberate guidance, that the imitative faculty
should be controlled."[37] In the case of the children of the poorer
districts this can be done only through the agency of the Infant School.
Much may be done by making the instruction of the school attractive, to
counteract the evil influences of the home and social environment, and
to lead the child to acquire and organise experiences which will issue
in moral and not in immoral conduct.

Hence what we need in the poorer districts of our large towns is Free
Kindergarten Schools from which all formal teaching of the three R's is
abolished, where for several hours in each day the child may be trained
to use his senses in the accurate discrimination and accurate
systematisation of sense knowledge; where he may have his constructive
activities evoked by the expression in concrete form of what he has been
led to perceive through the medium of the senses; where he may be
trained to habits of order, of cleanliness, of submission to authority;
and where for a time, at least, he may be accustomed to live in a purer
and healthier atmosphere than he can find at home or in the street, and
where for a brief space he may have that feeling of home which he cannot
find at h