culcate upon the child the notion of vertical, horizontal, of the angle, the quadrilateral, the triangle, etc. In short, the little sticks which have served in the kindergarten for the intuition of numbers, can serve in the lower class of the primary school as the most instructive counting implements, because the pupil has them in his hands.

Folding can be conveniently used as an auxiliary means of teaching mathematics. If we look for a moment at the simple folding leaf, it shows us immediately lines, angles, figures of all kinds, on which depend the intuitions of form and size, from which we can show, according to the intelligence and degree of development of the child, the most simple geometric laws. The frequent folding of the primitive form of the paper and the continual repetitions of the proportions, prepare the children for the higher steps of geometric and mathe. matical demonstration, in such a manner that the rules and laws will present nothing strange and difficult to their apprehension. The fold ing rightly used serves as an auxiliary to the teaching of drawing.

The paper-cutting, combined with pasting, may be divided into geometric cuttings, and the cutting of various forms. This last is subdivided into special cuttings from given outlines, free cutting without preliminary drawing, and fancy cutting, that is, cutting from the child's own fancy, unaided. The cutting of forms is not only a good preparation for drawing for children from seven to eight years of age; it has another real value, for if at that age drawing cannot be carried so far as to the representation of animals, this specialty becomes important and even necessary in cutting. While cutting the forms of plants and animals, flowers and leaves, these are strongly impressed upon the memory of the children.

Geometric cutting is easily distinguished from the cutting of drawings by the difference of character. This character no longer gives outlines of objects, but interrupted surfaces in which the parts of the figures are to have an exact relation to each other and to the whole. It follows that the understanding of geometric forms immediately awakens the sense of harmony and symmetry. The cut forms are then to be pasted upon the colored paper, regard being had to the exact adaptation of colors. In this manner our children will form groups of forms which will still give them pleasure when a long time after they attend school. Embroidering, which in the kindergarten is an occupation for both boys and girls will continue to be such only for girls in the school for whom alone it can have any practical application; in this sense it constitutes, in the exact perception of colors and their shades, an exercise of taste for the ornamentation of divers articles made by women.

Embroidering has this advantage over cutting, that it occupies itself not only with mere outlines but with the great lines that represent objects. The principal features which designate the parts and members of the organized forms, are more vigorously salient than in the drawing, because they appear one after the other and thus claim special attention, and also because they are detached in relief, and thus are clearer.

The combination of li'tle sticks by peas, little bits of cork or little balls of clay or wax can be made as interesting as instructive in the school. With these materials, the children reproduce mathematical forms and the forms of crystallization which by their transparency are understood more clearly than in any other representation. Here the different axes of the mathematical solids allow themselves to be clearly seen, while in any other way they are invisible. The mathematical solids may be used as patterns for drawing and for modeling in clay. Besides this, many common forms, like houses, churches, etc., sometimes in connection with folding, sometimes with cuttings in imitation of household utensils, or garden tools, constitute a very advantageous preliminary exercise for the acquisition of skill and technical dexterity. The clay modeling may be considered a preparatory study for the plastic arts, and offers the opportunity to bring out in all its juvenile brilliancy that sense of form which has already been cultivated in different ways in the kindergarten. Most people occupy themselves with the effects which may result from the transposition of forms. For all these an early education of the taste cannot but be advantageous. Certainly by so instructive an occupation, the natural disposition of some future artist may be increased to a shining light, for it is especially by the free reproduction of isolated forms that we can judge whether the child possesses any such native tendency. The representative domain of modeling is a very extensive one; nature, art, industry, the family, everything furnishes subjects for modeling in clay, which may also be perfectly utilized for the reproduction of mathemati cal forms. Box making is particularly useful in reference to these last solids. In the beginning, the materials consist only of card-board which is easily cut and managed, and which changes by degrees with the help of a very liquid paste. The art may be begun by making little boxes for seeds, etc. Later, larger boxes may be made for keeping caterpillars or for the preservation of their cocoons; then may follow portfolios for collecting and preserving plants. All these should be covered with colored paper, or narrow bands of different colored papers should be pasted on the edges.

As a consequence of all that has been touched upon here, upon the principle of concentration, all the works that have been designated as suitable for the primary school must be put into relation with the other branches of instruction and be introduced as auxiliary to these. In this way that objection will fall to the ground which is so often repeated, namely, that the modern school embraces too many topics for it to be possible to add any new branches, for the instruction properly so called, gains in intuition and practical value what it may lose in time by the introduction of these new branches.

[Mr. Fischer closes with the remark, that the occupations proposed for the school do not necessitate special place and tools, and are adapted to girls as well as boys. He also attaches great value to school-gardens.]

FURTHER DEVELOPMENT AND ADAPTATION

OF FRÖBEL'S SYSTEM.

BY M. JULES GUILLIAUME.

QUESTIONS BEFORE INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS.*

What are the developments and adaptations of which Fröbel's system is susceptible?

Is it suitable to apply Fröbel's principles to Primary School Teaching, and by what means can it be done?

The questions thus formulated by the International Congress of Education are of the highest importance. It cannot be concealed that there is not only disparity, but antagonism, between the kindergarten and the school: in the one we see regulated liberty; the teacher meets the curiosity of the child, provokes its questions, urges it to incessant activity and motion, and play: in the other, constraint dominates; silence and perfect quiet are the rule; the child has not the right to make itself heard; the monotony of interminable lessons is scarcely allowed to be broken by even automatic exercises (rise, sit down, clap your hands, etc.). The result is that the wide-awake, curious pupils, -the best pupils who are from the kindergartens,—are homeless in the school where they with difficulty escape the detentions, double tasks and other punishments calculated to make them feel that work is a punishment imposed upon men since the remotest antiquity; the obtuse and sleepy scholars, on the contrary, who need to be excited by stimulants, are generally considered the good pupils, made examples for their wis dom and docility, and crowned with green laurels to the sound of trombones. In all the countries where Frobel's method has been planted, the children who have been subject to it are marked as the most intelligent, but at the same time the most refractory to the discipline of the school. The antagonism duly verified, it remains to examine how far it is in the nature of things, and to investigate whether Fröbel's method, which is still a blind alley, can become a path of communication to conduct the child to its destination. First we must take account of the thought of its inventor and inquire if he did not perceive that there was a solution of continuity between his creation and that of his forerunners, and if he has not done something to effect a transition between the two stages of elementary instruction.

I. THE IDEA OF THE KINDERGARTEN UNIVERSAL.

The name of Fröbel is inseparably connected with the organization of kindergartens. The education of early childhood is, in general opinion, the special, unique and exclusive work of Fröbel, the mark of his individuality. Until his time it had been thought that this stage

* Congrès International del' Enseignement, Bruxelles, 1880, Rapports Préliminaires, xlvi+301+98+94+112+112+216=982. Translated by Mrs. Horace Mann.

of education belonged to the mother who did the best she could, or to the nurses who had learned by milking cows how to educate children! Fröbel, starting from the principle recognized by other pedagogues, who came before him, that the education of man begins at the moment of his birth, had the original idea of subjecting him to a rational method, instead of abandoning him to chance. But after the seventh year he occupies himself no longer with the child; he delivers him bound hand and foot to the school, leaving to the latter the care of replacing the maternal milk by a more substantial nourishment. Such is nearly the idea of those people who take the kindergartens for nursery schools where children are instructed by mere play.

Fröbel's Education of Man.

Is it necessary to say that nothing is more false than this conception? Before he became the creator of kindergartens, Fröbel was and always remained the author of the Education of Man, his Didactica Magna, unfortunately unfinished, which embraced, like those of Comenius and J. J. Rousseau, the whole period of the growth and development of the human being, from his cradle till after he leaves the university. The first volume, the only one published, leads him till beyond the first childhood. Far from admitting that there are gaps between the periods designated by the names of nursling and child, boy or girl, young man or girl, man and woman, old man and matron, Fröbel proclaims on every page the necessity of the unification of education in order to arrive at the unification of life: "All the operations of the mind," he says in the beginning, "having for their condition as phenomena in the end, a chronological series, a consecutiveness, a succession, it is absolutely necessary and inevitable that if man has neglected, at any epoch, however near or distant, to produce his strength, to raise it to the condition of work, or at least to display it in view of a work or an action, he will one day be sensible of some imperfection growing out of this neglect; he will not be what he might have been if he had faithfully wrought out his vocation by utilizing his forces."

The mother-idea of the book is the organization of a vast scheme of education in which all sorts of knowledge, instead of being scattered and parceled out, are presented to the child serially and co-ordinated, then brought back to a higher principle, unity. Long before Fröbel, his precursor Comenius had already traced out the plan of an institution in which each stage of instruction should form a whole which should be reproduced in each of the following stages; he directly offered to the pupils an encyclopedia of what they had to learn, which was to be developed more and more: "Let all knowledge," he said, "be given first in a broad and coarse sketch, without isolating the different parts. Every language, every art is to be taught first from its own most simple rudiments, then more completely by rules and examples, and at last systematically with the addition of anomalies, etc."

Fröbel proceeds equally by way of stratification. As he never ceases

to repeat, his principles as well as his educational processes apply not only to the kindergartens but to every subsequent stage of the instruction; not only to youth, but to manhood; and it is with reason that one of his disciples* required as a primary and essential condition of the playthings of the child, that they should be and should remain in their detail and in their totality, his elements of education in all the stages of his development, or, in other words, that the pupil should constantly discover new properties in them, according to his age and his faculties.

If this is true, if the materials of the kindergarten are sufficient for the school also, the questions in the programme of the Congress are very nearly answered; for it is no longer the question to seek, by means of mutual concessions, compromises and half-measures, for the means of reconciling two contrary things; and, in fact, it would be of no use to say, for example, that the school will tolerate a part of the liberty which reigns in the kindergarten, if we did not point out at the same time how that could be put in practice without order having to suffer for it; nor to take the love of work as the sole motive power without also having the means of making the work interesting. It is clear that the adaptation of Fröbel's principles cannot be made except with the views and means which he has himself indicated. From the moment that he is no longer looked upon merely as the founder of kindergartens, but as the creator of a system of education of all degrees, the question is only to assure one's self that the expedients proposed by him are as suitable for the school as for the kindergarten; everything is reduced consequently to a simple verification based upon an exact acquaintance with his plays and occupations.

In the Education of Man, Fröbel, although still glued to the formulas of Pestalozzi, gives us the general plan of his own conception; afterward, and to the very end of his life, it is to the Education of Man that he refers, "although," he says, "for a quarter of a century and more that it has been written and published, it has been rounded out and simplified in different ways in its methodology." It is at this fountain that we must seek for his own exposition of the generation of forms of which the different plays of the kindergarten are only the applications.

II. DEVELOPMENT OF FORCE IN NATURE.

Force appears to be the first principle of all things, and of every manifestation in nature; it is force which effects the separation of objects and thus produces their individuality.

Every individuality, all diversity claims, besides force, a second necessary condition of form, which is substance.

Matter and force constitute an undivided unity; one does not exist without the other; properly speaking, one cannot be conceived without the other.

*A. Köhler, Kindergarten und Elementar-Klasse, 1861, no. 4.