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Infant school

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Infant school (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

As of 16 September 2024, 01:43 (UTC), this page is active and open for discussion. An FAC coordinator will be responsible for closing the nomination.
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Nominator(s): Llewee (talk) 17:03, 16 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

People who grew up in the UK might remember attending an infant school or the "infants" of their primary school. What they might not be aware of is that the concept has a long and complicated history; stretching from New York to New Zealand.

This is my second featured nomination. The article has recently been promoted to good status (See:Talk:Infant school/GA1). Thank you to anyone who decides to review it.Llewee (talk) 17:03, 16 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Wehwalt

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  • Since the movement began in Scotland, could some lead mention be done as to whether infant schools flourished in Scotland?
  • Frustratingly, I haven't been able to find much information about Scotland. Charitable infant schools certainly existed there in the early part of the movement but Scotland seems to drop out of the story at the middle of the 19th century. Presumably infant schools weren't adopted into the state system there to the same extent.--Llewee (talk) 21:31, 16 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • According to David Salmon and Winifred Hindshaw," What is their profession?
  • "manager Robert Owen". Is manager the proper term or was the the owner or some such?
  • "He saw child labour as damaging and forbid children under the age of ten from working in his factory." Should forbid be forbade.
  • "Various other figures — including Robert Pole, David Goyder, William Wilson, William Allen and Thomas Bilby — also established infant schools and wrote books about the subject." Given that these are apparently not notable, though I did not check, are they worth naming?
  • "Academic David Turner" this and also Owen above, I thought false titles were disfavoured in British English?
  • "T.B Stephens" Is this properly punctuated?
  • "making it easier for them to pay infant schools relatively low fees.[47]" An apostrophe somewhere, likely after schools
  • "The number of children under seven in schools for older children also rose." I'm not a fan of having "also rose" refer back to a previous section. Perhaps begin, "Like workers' wages, the number of ..."
  • "it would be sometime" some time?
More soon.--Wehwalt (talk) 19:32, 16 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Some teachers failed to teach reading to poorer pupils, with no reason to develop an interest in the subject outside of school. " This sentence doesn't read as complete.
  • "For instance, an employee of the Board of Education, Lord Eustace Percy later wrote in his memoirs:" He appears to have been president of the Board of Education (and earlier, parliamentary secretary), which are political positions held by members of Parliament. He was not an employee.
  • "Infant-stage children solving puzzles at a school in Dominion of New Zealand (c. 1900 – c. 1947)" I would omit "Dominion of".
  • "In order to encourage the freed workers to remain working there and spread Christianity among their children." Not a sentence.
  • the owners power: missing apostrophe
  • "a system of state funded schooling in Ireland " redirects to Stanley letter. WP:EASTEREGG would seem to have some relevance.
  • I'm surprised throughout the Ireland section, there is no mention of religion.
  • The Catholic Church is mentioned a lot in the book. I've added more information about its influence into the article but I'm trying to keep the focus on topics that are specifically relevant to infant schools/classes.--Llewee (talk) 17:31, 17 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • "skepticism". I thought this was "scepticism" in BrEng.
  • Overtime maybe over time
That's it for now. I guess what strikes me at first glance is that this seems mostly about the past, the history, without much discussion of what present-day infant schools are like. Thoughts?--Wehwalt (talk) 01:27, 17 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wehwalt I think less information specific to infant schools exists for more recent times because they have gradually lost some of their separate identity. I have tried to flesh out the "part of primary education" section with more information.--Llewee (talk) 23:09, 21 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Support certainly on prose. I'm hedging some on comprehensiveness for the reasons stated above, but hope to be able to enter a full support following additional reviews. Wehwalt (talk) 13:30, 5 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Source review by Generalissima

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Some general notes:

  • I'm not sure thefreedictionary.com is the best source to use for the first ref; also, Collins and Merriam-Webster both state that its simply in use "in the UK". Since these have at least some history in Scotland, I think that'll be better to use.
  • Ref 98 has an error that needs fixing.
  • Grimshaw (1931) and Morgan (1936) needs the publisher put in title case.
  • Capitalise Co in Longmans, Green, and Co.
  • You wikilink RTE News in bibliography, but not BBC News. Try for consistency one way or another here.
  • Some of your sources aren't in title case and need to be converted to such; Garland, Keane et al, Lehane, Lewis, Pence, and Salmon.
  • University of Wales Press needs a location (Cardiff), as does Palgrave Macmillan (London), Routledge (Abingdon), Peter Lang (Laussane), and Taylor & Francis (Milton Park). Alternatively, remove location from all the cites that have it.
  • You need to wikilink either all publishers or none of them.
  • Take "others=Internet Archive" out of the Pence cite. They didn't make the book. Also take out the via, since you (rightfully) Yaren't saying Via Jstor for the JSTOR cites.
  • Add a space between the initials T.B Turner.
  • May et al Doesn't have an ISBN.
  • This is a very broad article in a field thats well-studied, so obviously we can't use all sourcing. I do feel like you're underusing modern educational journal articles though, and there might be some good ones we can find. Some sources that came up from a search which might be useful:
    • Shannon, R. L., & Shannon, D. M. (1992). The British Infant School: A Reconsideration. The Educational Forum, 56(1), 61–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131729109335177 - Good sourcing for its influence outside of the UK.
    • Monks, Claire P., and Sarah O’Toole. "Bullying in preschool and infant school." The Wiley Blackwell handbook of bullying: A comprehensive and international review of research and intervention 2 (2021): 2-19.
    • Burger, Kaspar. "Entanglement and transnational transfer in the history of infant schools in Great Britain and salles d’asile in France, 1816–1881." History of Education 43, no. 3 (2014): 304-333.
    • Luc, Jean-Noël. "The spread of infant school models in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century." In The Development of Early Childhood Education in Europe and North America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, pp. 31-50. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015.
    • Raveaud, Maroussia. "Assessment in French and English infant schools: assessing the work, the child or the culture?." Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice 11, no. 2 (2004): 193-211.
    • Blatchford, Peter, Viv Moriarty, Suzanne Edmonds, and Clare Martin. "Relationships between class size and teaching: A multimethod analysis of English infant schools." American Educational Research Journal 39, no. 1 (2002): 101-132.

That's about it for now. Let me know when you want me to take a second look, @Llewee:. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 18:32, 16 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Generalissima, I have responded to each of your points now and expanded the article with information from journals. I hope you will be able to have another look when you have time.--Llewee (talk) 11:36, 24 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Took a look back over - apologies that this took a while - but I think it's in a lot better spot now! Happy to support on source review. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 02:58, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Image review

  • File:British_Central_School_Borough_Road.png: when and where was this first published? Ditto File:Infant_gallery.png, File:Beckside_Infants_c.1900s_(archive_ref_DDPD-2-2-8)_(25384528296).jpg, File:First_Infant_School_in_Green_Street,_New_York_MET_MM82866.jpg
  • I've replaced this image with File:St Marys Infants School children in Saturday Market, Beverley for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee 1899 (archive ref DDPD-2-2-8) (25381071806).jpg. It was taken in 1897 and does not appear to have been published until it was released on Flickr in 2016.--Llewee (talk) 10:35, 29 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • File:Which_is_your_Right_Hand%3F_A_study_in_an_Infant_School._(Graphic,_1898).jpg: copyright terms turn over on the new year, so life+100 tagging won't be correct until 1 January 2025.
  • File:The_dog_(BM_1846,1219.12).jpg: the permission field and the licensing tags are contradictory here - NC images are considered non-free for our purposes
  • File:The_Infant_Model_School,_with_Owen's_Original_clocktower.png: what is the specific source?

Also, not an image issue, but I would suggest a thorough review of the article for style. Nikkimaria (talk) 16:33, 17 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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  • There are 9,279 words, which will take half an hour to read. That's 0.3 tomats, so a third of a short novel. This is pushing the upper end of WP:SIZE, and reduces the odds that the whole article will get read.
  • It is missing obvious links to articles such as Moral education, Physical exercise, and Playground. I've looked at a sample of 188 randomly selected articles over 5,000 words in length, and they typically have between 200 and 500 links to other articles (median of 312, mean of 376). Infant school is at the low end, so it could be a case of needing more links, or it could be a case of not choosing the right links. I think that the former is more likely than the latter.

WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:33, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Pessimistic drive-by from UC

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I'm not sure that this article really is what it says on the tin -- there is comparatively little, indeed almost nothing as far as I can see, about what an infant school actually is in the modern day, how they work, what it's like inside them, how important they are, the problems facing them, and so on. What we currently have, I think, is closer to an article like History of primary education in the United Kingdom.

Similarly, I think the section on Ireland would be better re-thought: as the scope of the article is currently conceived, we need one, and yet it really doesn't have the substance to do what it needs to do -- we have barely anything there after the 1960s, which clearly won't do for an article that purports to be the port of call for infant schools in Ireland as they exist right now.

Unfortunately, I am not sure that these issues can be easily remedied, at least not within the scope of an FAC. UndercoverClassicist T·C 09:31, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

UndercoverClassicist I have added more information on present day infant schools in the UK and will do more research into them in Ireland. I think the overall structure of the article is inevitable as they are mainly notable for their historic role. There aren't that many separate infant schools left and the term doesn't seem to be used much officially.--Llewee (talk) 20:36, 14 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Our article says that 10% of children of the relevant age attended one in 2018, and there are 1,700 of them -- that's not a small number, though it is obviously much smaller than the figure for primary schools. More generally, throughout the article, I think the distinction between those two things often gets muddy: as alluded above, I don't get the sense that the article really knows how it defines its scope between "infant schools" and "the education of children under about 8". UndercoverClassicist T·C 07:18, 15 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For the most part, with the exception of the earliest infant schools, I don't think there is much distinction between the two. The article says the term infant school "might refer to a separate school or a department within a larger school". The UK government uses the term infant classes for all children in the relevant age group.--Llewee (talk) 12:10, 15 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Right, but we have this article (Infant school), a separate article for primary education (Primary school), a specific article for primary education in Wales and a lengthy article on education in England with relevant sections that don't fully overlap any of those categorisations. We then have History of education in Ireland and Education in the Republic of Ireland on the Irish material.
In my view, this is a scope-of-article problem, not a scope-of-subject one -- I think it would help for you to have a look at that set of articles, work out how they do (or should) fit together, and then think about where the material you want to write about would be best located. As it stands, I think this article is quite a comprehensive history of how young children have been educated in Britain, but it wouldn't be enough for the article about cars to be primarily a history of how cars used to be built. UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:38, 15 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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