ABSTRACT
The school in any form takes little cognizance of a child under three years old, but yet a large part of his education is already achieved by the time he reaches this age. At two-and-a-half a child who has been carefully trained by his parents knows a great deal, and has perhaps accomplished the most difficult tasks of his whole life. Apart from the power of language, a child of this age seems to be intellectually, though of course not physically, very much on the level of the higher animals. He is deficient in experience, and will get run over where a wise dog avoids cars, and his potentiality of development is enormously greater, but he has the same grasp of his immediate surroundings, the same powers of understanding and influencing his associates, and the same lack of conceptual thought as a dog or a cat. We can in this way roughly measure both his achievements and the path still before him.
