The nursery school / by Margaret McMillan.

  • Margaret McMillan
Date:
1919
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The nursery school / by Margaret McMillan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    finding refuge in America, but waiting for full recognition of the value of his labours for at least thirty years after his death. In 1896 when I first made acquaintance with his work it was impossible to buy a copy of his book in England; and I was obliged to come up from Bradford to London in order to read his work in the British Museum. Edouard Seguin was a teacher of defective children and a follower of Pinel, Itard and Esquirol. Absorbed in the great task of drawing the idiot and the imbecile from the abyss in which they are plunged, he was led by his toil for these to lay bare and expose many of the processes whereby human beings are prepared for a human destiny. Near the teeming ports of the New World he saw the exiles of poverty, of tyranny, and of despair arrive from every European country, and having been faithful to the poor idiot, he had a gift in his hand for this new world, and for every freed people also of the old. We also hope we have a gift for the millions who are not idiots, not sub-normal, but who are yet driven back from the outgoing life of civilised humanity by the poverty or rigour of their lives. Nearly forty years have passed since Seguin’s death. Sixty have gone since Froebel left this world. It would be absurd to say that nothing has been discovered, nothing invented, nothing im¬ proved in the work of child nurture and education
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