Text 1: The nursery where the oldest pupil is ninety-one, by Daniel Redfearn

An original contemporary online feature.

I will admit that I arrived at Larchfield expecting to disapprove. Larchfield is a care home for sixty elderly residents, many of them living with dementia, and three years ago it opened a nursery for twenty-four children under five in its former conservatory. Every morning the two groups spend an hour together. I had read the brochure. I had also, as the father of a toddler who treats every cold as a group project, thought about germs, noise, and whether it was fair to bring small children into a place where people are very ill.

The hour began with singing. Residents in armchairs and children on cushions formed a lopsided circle, and a care assistant with a ukulele led them through a song about five little ducks. The children did the actions. So did a former bus conductor called Stan, aged ninety-one, who quacked with more conviction than anyone in the room.

Then came painting, and the room broke into pairs. A girl of three called Hanna sat on the arm of a chair and showed Mrs Dora Pike how to make a handprint. Mrs Pike, who had been a headmistress for thirty years, listened to the instructions with great seriousness and then did exactly as she was told.

The nursery’s manager, Gemma Okafor, has heard my objections before. ‘The children learn to be patient, and gentle, and not frightened of people who look different,’ she told me. ‘And the residents get a reason to get up in the morning. Nobody here is on the receiving end all the time. Everybody gives something.’ Staff have noticed that some residents who rarely speak will talk to the children.

I watched it happen. A man in a cardigan, who the staff told me had said almost nothing for weeks, was building a tower of bricks with a boy of two. Each time it fell, the boy laughed, and each time the man said, very quietly, ‘Again.’

I am not entirely converted. There were moments of confusion, and one resident wept, though nobody could tell me why. But I left wondering why we ever decided that the very young and the very old should be kept in separate buildings.

Text 2: A morning at a kindergarten, by Josiah Lightowler

An original essay written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this essay, written in 1872, the writer describes a visit to a kindergarten, a new kind of school for young children based on play.

I went to the kindergarten in Mortimer Street with the prejudice of an old schoolmaster, for I had heard that the children there did nothing but play, and I believed that a child of four who did nothing but play would grow into a man of twenty who did nothing at all.

I found twenty-four little persons, of three to six years, seated at low tables marked out in squares, each with a small box before him. The boxes, which the mistress calls the gifts, contained wooden balls, cubes and little bricks, and with these the children were building, by turns, a chair, a bridge and a church, the mistress asking them all the while how many sides a cube possessed, and which way the light fell upon it. Not one child was idle. Not one was weeping. There was no cane in the room, and I do not believe there was any need for one.

Afterwards they folded coloured papers into boats and stars, and then went out into a little garden where every child has a plot of earth, with his own name upon a stick, in which he grows peas and mustard and cress. A small boy showed me his plot with the pride of a landowner, and told me that his peas were the tallest in London.

Lastly they stood in a ring and sang a game about the birds and the nest, with movements of the hands, and the mistress sang with them.

I have seen infant schools where a hundred children sat in a gallery, chanting the multiplication table at the tops of their voices, and understood not a word of it. I confess that I learned more in Mortimer Street than they did. Whether these happy children will be ready for the hard work of life I cannot yet say. But I do not think they will hate learning, and that is more than can be said for most of us.

Both of these texts are about new kinds of schools for very young children.

Compare:

• what the writers say about these new kinds of schools
• how the writers present their changing attitudes to them

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