A Little Inter-Allied Conference What of the days when the children, little passive bored images, mechanically repeated their lessons, which were but abstract words without life or colour, days when school-tasks seemed to teachers as to pupils a punishment from Heaven?
A new joyous dawn seems to b" breaking on schools writes a French Correspondent of the Times." A number of Allied educationists, including Mr. Edmond Holmes and other distinguished British figures, grouped together under the name of "Nouvelle Education," are doing what they can to encourage initiative and develop personality in children. They have inaugurated at the Muse Pédagogique, 42, Rue Gay-Lussac, an exhibition of "work done in complete freedom by school children of eight to 13 years without help and without correction."
French. British, Belgian, Czecho-Slovak, Russian, and Japanese children are, like their fathers, holding a little inter-allied conference. But the results are more comforting. The children, taken for the most part from country primary schools, work in groups, and after their lessons discuss things, and then write down their recollections of what has been said and illustrate them with drawings. No constraint is put upon them. Whether they are dealing with "prehistoric "ages"? or a country scene their observation is direct, clear, and full of alert and gay freshness. There are also ma-gaziness entirely written and illstrated by children. As for paintings, they are distinguished by a frankness of colow and bold simplification that should be the envy of masters, and they recall at once the primitive painters and pioneers of the young school.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.