in play may be, it receives severe tests.  So much of the play at first seems to be aimless running and shouting, or throwing about of toys and breaking them if possible, so much quarrelling and fighting and weeping seem involved with any attempts at social life on the part of the children; there seems very little desire to co-operate, and very little desire to construct; as a rule, a child roams from one thing to another with apparently only a fleeting attempt to play with it; yet on the other hand, to make the problem more baffling, a child will spend a whole morning at one thing:  quite lately one child announced that he meant to play with water all day, and he did; another never left the sand-heap, and apparently repeated the same kind of activity during a complete morning; visitors said in a rather disappointed tone, “they just play all the time by themselves.”  One teacher brought out an attractive picture and when a group of children gathered round it she proceeded to tell the story; they listened politely for a few minutes, and then the group gradually melted away; they were not ready for concentrated effort.  If those children had been in the ordinary Baby Room of a school they would have been quite docile, sitting in their places apparently listening to the story, amiably “using” their bricks or other materials according to the 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.