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Among the various educational experiments of the recent post-war world, that carried out at the Malting House School at Cambridge has
undoubtedly been one of the most promising, and great regret was felt in many quarters when circumstances necessitated the closing of the school after only a few years of work. These few years were sufficient, however, for the able director of the school to collect a great wealth of valuable psychological and pedagogical material—material which she is now proposing to present to the world in a series of three volumes, of which this book is the first. In conformity with the title and with the general scheme of presentation, the cognitive aspects of the mind are here selected for treatment in relative isolation, while the second and third volumes are to be devoted to 'Social Development in Young Children' and 'Individual Histories' respetively.
As is now well known, the school aimed at attaining the maximum of freedom, with a view particularly to the study of mental development under circumstances that required only the smallest possible measure of interference and restraint. At the same time careful records were kept both of the spontaneous individual and social behaviour of the children and of their reactions to adult influences. These records were written down by the educational staff in note-books constantly carried about, and in moments snatched from active participation in the doings of the children, though towards the end of the experiment it was found possible to take down strictly verbatim stenographic records by assistants not actually engaged in teaching—a procedure which, though of course more cumbersome and expensive, is undoubtedly preferable from the theoretical point of view (since, as the author points out, the observer is then in a sense outside the child's immediate world and less likely herself to influence it).
Mrs. Isaacs is, however, careful to draw attention to the fact that even the principle of minimal inte