INFANT SCHOOLS. Oberlin (q.v.), the pastor of Waldbach, in France, may be regarded as the founder of infant schools. He appointed females in his own parish to assemble the little children between the ages of two and six, his object being to interest them by conversation, pictures, and maps, and to teach them to read and to sew. The first infant school attempted in this country was in connection with Robert Owen's socialistic establishment in Scotland; it was taught by James Buchanan. In 1819, through the efforts of lord Brougham and lord Lansdowne, an infant school was set on foot in London.. One of the first teachers was Wilderspin, whose labors in connection with the extension of infant schools are well known. His methods, based on the Pesta lozzian system, were further matured by the home and colonial infant school society, founded in 1836. This society, by training teachers and instituting model infant and juvenile schools, has done more than any other to propagate the infant-school system.
Infant schools are not yet very numerous either n. or s. of the Tweed; but they have certainly been more extensively encouraged in the southern than in the northern half of the kingdom. Two causes have operated to prevent their more rapid increase—the want of means, it being necessary to devote to juvenile schools the money which can be col lected for educational objects; and the defects which have hung about the system. and brought it into disrepute. Too much has frequently been attempted-in the way of direct instruction. In Germany, under the name of Eleinkinderschulen and Kindergarten,, infant schools are numerous. In France, under the name of " Asylums," they are very widespread. See KINDERGARTEN.
Infant schools, like other seminaries which arc not purely professional in their aims, ought to keep in view the threefold nature of the child's mind, and appeal to its different faculties in turn. But while the intellect, the moral nature, and the imagination ought to receive their proper food, it has to be borne in mind that we contradict the laws of nature when we omit an element more powerful and exacting than any of these; we mean the physical, and that love of play, fun, and nonsense which is connected with it, and which is peculiar to infancy, and not unbecoming even the gravity of manhood. By marching, exercises, toys, and, above all, by the judicious use of a large open play ground, full provision should be made for the muscular restlessness of children, and for their love of play. The room in which they are collected should be little more than a well-ordered, covered playground. In the playground, whether open or covered, order, obedience, kindness, consideration, civility, cleanliness, good-temper, are to be taught, and the moral objects of the infant school attained. Play, and the moral training which may be connected with it, should be the leading ideas of the place, and to these every thing else should be subordinated. Next to this, the intellectual nature of the infant has
to be considered, its future anticipated, and the elements of reading taught, but with the help of such methods and books as call for the minimum of mental exertion. An infant school which has cultivated the moral nature of its children through games and exer cises, and has taught them to read easy monosyllabic sentences by the time they reach the age of six, has accomplished its work well. At the same time, other means of awakening interest and intelligence may be resorted to with advantage, hut under this restriction, that if they fail to call forth spontaneous and unconscious attention, either through the want of skill on the part of the mistress to present them in an attractive form, or through some defect in the apparatus at the command of the mistress, they should at once'be given up. We refer to songs of a moral or narrative kind—rhymes and nursery jingles—descriptions of cbjects and pictures by the children under the teacher's guidance (object-kssons)—the concealed purpose being to cultivate the percep tive faculties of form, color, number, size, etc.—and lessons in arithmetic on a ball frame. Then, again, the teacher may collect the children around her and read to them fairy tales and simple stories of incident and the affections. All this may be and actually Is attained; but the qualifications in the teacher for the attainment of them are rarely to be met with. So far as these qualifications are of a moral or imaginative kind, they are natural endowments; but they may receive enlightenment and direction by a judicious system of training. In the first report of the home and colonial school society, it is truly said, "that few situations in life require so much discretion, so much energy, so much tenderness, so much self-control and love, as that of a teacher of babes." Without a consciousness that she possesses these qualifications, especially the last-named, no woman should for a moment contemplate the career of an infant-school mistress.
The question still remains to be considered—whether infant schools are desirable at all, and whether the family hearth, and the fields, or the streets, do not constitute the best, because nature's infant school. The answer given by many would be that, were society in a healthy and normal condition, infant schools are hurtful even at the best, and that, when we bear in mind the chances of their being badly conducted, they may he generally denounced as a public nuisance. But we are not in a normal state; and while infant schools proper are, perhaps, superfluous in rural parishes, they are in populous places a boon and a blessing, if not a necessity.