teacher's directions, but they would
not, in the real sense, have been playing. This is an example of the
need for both principle and courage.

It is into this chaotic method of gaining experience that the teacher
comes with her interpretive power--she sees in it the beginnings of all
the big things of life--and like a bigger child she joins, and like a
bigger child she improves. She sees in the apparent chaos an attempt to
get experience of the different aspects of life, in the apparently
aimless activity an attempt to realise and develop the bodily powers, in
the fighting and quarrelling an attempt to establish a place in social
life. It is all unconscious on the part of a child, but a necessary
phase of real development.

Gradually the little primitive man begins to yield to civilisation. He
is interested in things for longer and asks for stories, music and
rhymes, and what does this mean?

As he develops a child learns much about life in his care of the garden,
about language in his games, about human conduct from stories; but he
does these things because he wants to do them, and because there is a
play need behind it all, which for him is a life need; in order to build
a straight wall he must classify his bricks, in order to be a real
shopman he must know his weights, in order to be a good workman he must
measure his paper; all the ideas gained from these things come to him
_along with sense activity_; they are associated with the needs and
interests of daily life; and because of this he puts into the activity
all the effort of which he is capable, or as Dewey has expressed it,
"the maximum of consciousness" into the experience which is his play.
This is real sense training, differing in this respect from the training
given by the Montessori material, which has no appeal to life interest,
aims at exercising the senses separately, and discourages _play_ with
the apparatus. It is activity without a body, practice without an end,
and nothing develops from it of a constructive or expressive nature.

In the nursery class therefore our curriculum is life, our apparatus all
that a child's world includes, and our method the one of joyful
investigation, by means of which ideas and skill are being acquired. The
teacher is player in chief, ready to suggest, co-operate, supply
information, lead or follow as circumstances demand: responsibility must
still belong to the children, for while most of them know quite
naturally h