In New York the private and benevolent Free School Society began operations in 1805 because there were too few schools for the poor in the city, and it treated education as a regular separation from a seductive yet frightening world. Perhaps the most neglected and misunderstood period in the history of an organization whose activities have been examined by many scholars, the years between 1826 and 1832, stand as the Society's most vigorous time of internal change. It was then that the Society first thought to modify its practice of the Lancastrian system and began to offer special infant classes for the poor children of the city under six. Behind these reforms was an ill-fated attempt to make the Society's schools appealing and common to all instead of primarily for the poor, an experiment which proved both unworkable and detrimental to the trustees' conception of their schools as sanctuaries for preparing children to cope with a disorderly world. In the late 1820's when the Society experimented with common schools and infant education, there was some strong sentiment among the trustees for making education a more heterogeneous, open, and stimulating experience. But the trustees' anxieties about the changes taking place in New York inclined them after only a brief fling at reform to return almost completely to their original refuge mentality. (Author/JM)