The City Country School Formerly The Play School 14 Macdougal Alley New York 1919 1920 PDF Download

Excerpt from The City Country School: Formerly, the Play School, 14 Macdougal Alley, New York, 1919-1920 We are constantly asked, especially by parents who are trying to place their children in what they consider a good school, how our school differs from the kindergarten, and again how it differs from the Montessori schools. The kindergarten is a system of teaching. It undertakes to teach children to play in such a way that through the process they will become educated. The formal kindergarten is fixed I and arbitrary, as much so as any school system. It acknowledges the activities of children in general but not their individuality. It attempts to socialize activities at a time which is pretty generally acknowledged to be a period of individual development. This is only partially true of some of the "radical" kindergartens. They have modified their practice so as to permit more individual play, but even so it is not unfair to say that these kindergartens are teaching systems in the main. The Montessori system is a system of training. It gives the children more freedom in their environment than the kindergarten. That is, the children may move about and choose what they will do. The material from which they choose, however, is training material. Instead of the teacher as a trainer the odium is thrown upon the insensitive blocks, bits of fabric, weights, sand paper letters and figures. This training material the children may not use freely to carry out purposes of their own, but they must do that one thing for which the material is designed. So the freedom of choice lies between a very limited set of activities. One of the signs of the passing of babyhood is to be found in the growing purposefulness of children's activities. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.