The Infant System
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Researchers in preschool education and the history of education who need primary-source support
- Teachers and students at teacher-training institutions seeking to understand the origins of modern early childhood education thought
- Educators and writers concerned with the evolution of ideas about children's education
- History readers interested in nineteenth-century British society and education
Not a good fit for
- Parents hoping for modern parenting methods they can apply directly
- General readers who prefer plot-driven reading and lack the patience for theoretical texts
- Readers with limited English reading ability who do not wish to use reference tools
Reading tips
- Begin with the table of contents and preface to grasp the book's structure and the author's basic positions, then select chapters for close reading.
- Take notes as you read on similarities and differences with contemporary educational ideas to build a critical understanding.
- Read alongside general works on the history of education to place the text back in its nineteenth-century context.
- For the original English edition, use an electronic dictionary as an aid; when encountering long sentences, identify the main clause first before reading closely.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
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About the author
Samuel Wilderspin (1791–1866) was a British educator whose most important contribution lay in early childhood education; he was one of the key figures in the British infant school movement. In practice he founded infant schools and devoted himself to exploring methods of early education and to teacher training, seeking to give more young children organized care and initial instruction before they entered formal schooling. His representative work, The Infant System, embodies his thinking on the infant school model, discussing children's daily management, teaching arrangements and habit formation, and offering a model for the newly emerging early childhood institutions of his time. The book also helped spread his educational ideas widely and had a lasting influence on the development of infant schools in Britain. Public information about him is limited and details of his life are scant, yet on the strength of this educational practice and writing alone he holds a place in the history of early education.
