DECROLY METHOD

Across Europe, in Belgium, meanwhile, another doctor of medicine, Ovide Decroly, was pioneering in the education of the very young, also proceeding from the psychological study of abnormal or exceptional children. In 1907 he opened his École de l'Ermitage (School of the Hermitage) near Brussels. Unlike Montessori's children, however, Decroly's children worked in groups, and, like the Agazzis' children, they worked with real things drawn from everyday life. His educational system was based on three processes: observation, expression (oral, written, manual, or artistic), and association of space and time. He felt the universal needs of the child to be food, protection against danger, endurance for the frustrations of life, work, play, self-evaluation, and self-discipline.
Across the channel in Great Britain were two pioneers in the movement to improve the health and environment of the very young: Grace Owen and Margaret McMillan. Both saw the nursery school as a place for fostering health and physical development (prerequisites to any other kind of development) and as a place that should be an extension of the home. Owen wanted every housing development to have a nursery school, where children of various ages would constitute a group resembling a large family and where play would facilitate socialization. McMillan outlined a plan for a three-year course for training teachers for the nursery schools, maintaining that only trained personnel should work with children from three to six years of age. Training centres at Manchester (under Owen), at Deptford (under McMillan), and at London supplied nursery teachers for the entire British Commonwealth as well as for the early nursery schools in the United States.
The first decade of the 20th century saw the start of what might be called "collective" upbringing. In what was then Palestine the new settlers established kibbutzim, in which were established separate homes for the children in order to free the mothers to work in the commune. As the system has now evolved, all children of a kibbutz from birth to one year remain in an "infant house," cared for by a metapelet (upbringer) in charge of four or five babies. During the nursing stage mothers feed their babies in the infant house. The "toddler house," containing about eight children one to three or four years old, emphasizes socialization. All children visit home daily for a few hours. In the next stage, kindergarten, the child three or four to seven years old is under the care of a teacher and her three assistants (metapelet). The aim of this period is readiness for the first grade.