any existing
infant schools, and in too many instances the mere learning and
repeating of sounds by rote, or what may very properly be called the
"parrot system," has been introduced in their place. But I yet hope
that the good sense of the public will in the end remedy such defects.
In such cases the memory is the only faculty exercised, and that at
the expense of those that are higher. Where this is persisted in, the
infant system is rendered nugatory, and my labours are in vain. It
therefore cannot be too strongly insisted on, and too frequently
repeated, that one of its most fundamental principles, as regards the
unfolding, properly and easily, of the intellectual faculties, is to
communicate _notions_ and _ideas_ rather than words and sounds, or at
least to let them be done together.

As before stated, the gallery had its origin in my desire to teach the
children simultaneously. It enables a teacher more readily to secure
their full attention in all oral lessons, and establishes a sympathy
between them. More real facts may be taught children simultaneously by
the master, than can be taught by all the monitors in a school. The
little infants should always sit at the bottom, and by no means be
confined to another room. They can see and hear all that is going on,
and understand it far more than you would suppose, though they cannot
yet tell all they learn and know; but when the power of speech comes,
they will surprise you with what they have learned. It is therefore a
great error to separate children and cut them off from the advantage
of all object-lessons, and gallery-teaching, because they are the
youngest. They learn more through sympathy and communion with their
five or six year elders, than the most clever adult can teach them. An
infant-school, is, in many respects, a community in a state of nature.
What one does, the other almost involuntarily learns. The merest
infants are not an exception to this rule, and therefore the
separation in many infant-schools of the children, invariably into
two classes, sometimes in two rooms, is a great mistake, and can only
arise from ignorance of the laws under which the young mind
unfolds itself, and a misunderstanding of the first principles of
infant-teaching.

Perhaps one reason that infant-school teaching has not been kept up to
its proper point and true standing, is, the desire to make a striking
shew before the visitors in a school. I fear the grounds for this
opini