ABSTRACT
Owen based his allegations on the supposedly weak link at Westminster. In the pages of the New Moral World in I 836, and later in his L[fe, Owen alleged that Westminster Infant School was a "lame attempt" to imitate New Lanark and that Wilderspin, though "aided by the frequent hints which he thankfully received from me", derived his first notions of an infant school from the "inferior model" at Westminster. 1 Educational historians have tended to follow, and elaborate on, Owen's views. We need examine here only two of the most recent and representative examples of the genre -~ Harold Silver's The Concept of Popular Education (1965) and Nanette Whitbread's The Evolution of the Nursery-Infant School (1972).2 Essentially they make two points. On the one hand New Lanark Infant School is depicted as a highly informal institution, in which marching to music, dancing, fife-playing, amusement and exercise in the playground are virtually the only activities and from which both religious teaching and books are excluded. On the other hand the English infant school is alleged to be (in Whitbread's words) "a much more rigid instrument for instruction and discipline" than the New Lanark original, and Wildcrspin in particular is represented as deliberately turning away from Owen's concept of education to "something much more rigid and theology-centred" (as Silver puts it), with a concentration on formal curriculum, words rather than things, "books, lessons and apparatus" and the premature development of the intellectual powers.
