ABSTRACT
In 1942, the author published under the title Testing Results in the Infant School the account of an inquiry into the attainments and attitudes of children who had received their education in Infant Schools in which spontaneous activity was the keynote and learning through play characteristic, as compared with those of children in good but ‘traditional’ schools where the curriculum was entirely planned by the teachers and took less account of the spontaneous interests of the children. Pupils in the progressive schools learned academic material more readily and gained in personality development to a marked degree. The term ‘experimental’ has been used, because there is inevitably more educational experiment in schools where the teachers are finding out and providing for the interests of each individual child or group of children than in the more traditional schools where teachers are closely following an agreed syllabus.
