ANNUAL REPORT
The School is growing up with its children; slowly, as children grow, unexpectedly, as children develop, but inevitably. The children, as they go about the School, are busy, contented, and self-reliant; the School is self-reliant too, and anxious to expand.
It began in October, 1911, as a Nursery School in the St. Pancras Creche, with 12 infants, who came in the mornings only, and were to go on, at six years old, to the Council’s schools.
The next year the numbers increased to 25, and the adjoining house was taken; more and more came, and now the school is full with 57 children and a long waiting list.
From the very first the School has been experimental, and it is in order that the experiment may have a full trial that it must now develop further. So far the results have been entirely successful, and the plan of following the lead of the children has amply justified itself by producing thoroughly satisfactory children. It is easy enough to prove the charm of the place, and the progress of the children; but this is not the only aim of the School, and the difficulties that have been revealed are perhaps of even greater value than the results that have been achieved. In this direction the early years of the School have been very fruitful, and the children themselves, in the freedom in which they have developed, have exposed some of the great dangers of our conventional systems of education.
The most fundamental of these is the lack of co-ordination, both between home life and school life, and between one “lesson” and another.
In the normal course of a child’s training, violent attacks are made upon him from many different directions. Wherever he has something to learn, from there an attack comes, and one after another, candidates for his interest are forced upon him. He must “attend” tyo this or he is “naughty”: then this is over and another comes, and he must “attend” again. Person after person looms up before him trying to stamp some definite impress on his mind, and he lives through it all preserving his independence only by a stolid indifference to nearly all the excellent things that are put in front of him. His home makes