The fundamental principle of the modern school is the unity in education. But this unity does not exclude a graduated division. The great whole of school institutions is divided into several steps; each step is a preparation for that which follows. The Kindergarten, being the first step, must be in intimate connection with the primary school, to which it serves as a basis.

This connection will only be possible when, on one side, the Kindergartners shall receive good normal training, and on the other, every primary instructor, male or female, shall be initiated into Froebel's system.

III. SPECIAL NORMAL TRAINING.

We think a measure analogous to the decree of the 27th of June, 1872, by the Minister of Public Instruction in Austria, should be introduced in every country where there is compulsory instruction. The teachers of Kindergartens, as well as the primary-school teachers, should be compelled to submit to normal training, and to pass through examinations for their certificate of capacity. To a certain point the normal training given to teachers of every degree would be identical. It would be the same for the principles, the same for the method, but there would be special instruction, according to the stage of teaching to which the candidate was going to consecrate himself. The theory and practice of the Kindergarten, including the study of psychology and general pedagogy, would be one of these specialties.

In conclusion, we would say that the Kindergartner should be thoroughly acquainted with the programme and organization of the primary grade of instruction, an indispensable condition if she wishes to prepare pupils for the primary school so that they can pursue its studies with profit. The primary school teachers should study the Froebelian pedagogy, in order to understand the principles upon which their pupils have been prepared, for there are as many points of contact between the Kindergarten and the primary school, as between different classes of the latter.

Is it desirable to apply the principles of Froebel in primary instruction? Better to answer this important question, let us examine to what degree of development the little pupil has arrived, who leaves the Kindergarten for the primary school at the age of six or seven years.

If he has attended a good Froebelian institution for three or four years, he will certainly have acquired the gift of seeing for himself, the gift of observation. Questioned upon objects that are daily striking his attention, he ought to be able to express what he sees and what he conceives in simple and precise language. He ought to be capable of designating each object which is familiar to him by its name; he ought to be able to give an account of the properties of things, of their practical use, to know their relations of size and number, to distinguish their colors, etc. Besides this general knowledge, he should be already developed in reference to individual and inventive work.

At this period the character of the child should have been outlined; conscience, will, and moral sense should be already developed in him. He should have attained that degree of human development in which,

without prejudice to the sentiment of personal dignity, he comprehends that he is to submit voluntarily and fully to the rule which is the law for the whole. He ought to know how to obey spontaneously, from a sentiment of obedience; that is, he ought to have learned to love what is good and detest what is evil. The love of his neighbor, the first germ of love to God, the germ of religious feeling, should have bloomed in his heart. As to the physical development we will not insist. Every day, every hour passed in the Kindergarten contributes to the development of strength, skill, and grace.

Is the child ready to begin study, properly so-called? Is the school ready to receive him?

Has the school, as it is organized to-day, a programme, a system of discipline and instruction adapted to continue the work of the Froebelian system? If we take everything into consideration in the public school which the child attends from his sixth to his fourteenth year, we say without hesitation, no. We recognize the progress that has been made, the immense path traversed, but for causes too numerous to be summed up here, from our own personal experience especially, we think there is room for a reform, the first step of which would be to provide a transition between the Kindergarten and the school. The founder of the Froebelian method, persuaded "that there is no leap in the human mind," that everything is coördinated, and that its development must also be coördinated, demanded this intermediate class between the Kindergarten and the school. This intermediate class, which he called the upper class of the Kindergarten, was the object of his solicitude, and we will study the hints which we meet upon the subject in his works, and the ways and means to realize its existence.

Intermediate Class.

According to Froebel, the plays, talks, exercises, and occupations of the system should be continued in this intermediate class. The occupations are far from being exhausted in the Kindergarten proper; they are scarcely half disposed of; they should be continued, then, and a more preponderating part given to the instruction, of which they represent the intuitive element; the building-blocks, the sticks, the folding, the weav ing, etc., help the processes of calculation and intuitive geometry. The folding into squares, rectangles, triangles, etc., will initiate the child into the knowledge of a great many plane figures, their different angles, the value of these angles in relation to their position, etc. In the same manner, the building, modeling, and box-making will initiate him into the knowledge of solids. These exercises, which are quite intuitive, are the point of departure for plane geometry and stereometry (or the measuring of solids), whose elements the child acquires without scientific definitions. or having recourse to abstraction. Not a lesson can pass without his being called upon to compare the relations of objects and their properties The rings and the sticks, used separately or in combination, give an opportunity for invention, and the charming figures that can be made with them, and afterwards copied, give a great attraction and a powerful impulse to drawing, for the Kindergarten hardly exhausts the elements

which prepare for the admirable method of linear drawing that Froebel composed. It is in the intermediate class and the primary school that the teaching of linear drawing will find its true place. It constitutes an excellent preparation for the study of penmanship, of which the pupil now gains his first notions.

ures.

It is well known that the use of the little sticks in the Kindergarten is the preparation for arithmetic. The child counts there with these sticks as he counted with cor aters, cubes, etc., without going beyond twelve. In the intermediate class, he does not go beyond twenty, but restrained in these limits, he passes intuitively through all the different operations of arithmetic, progressing strictly from the known to the unknown, imitating the little sticks upon the slate, then gradually replacing them by figAs to the talks and object lessons to which selected poems serve as illustrations, they take a more instructive character in the intermediate class, and serve (as well as in the lower classes of the primary school) as preparation for natural history and geography. But another advantage can be taken of them. At the end of every talk the teacher can sum up, in a few simple, clear, concise sentences, some elementary notions to which the little story or object-lesson has led. These short propositions, pronounced clearly and correctly, are the points of departure for the study of the mother-tongue, or rather of its first steps, reading. Then these propositions can be analyzed into words (five or six words), the words into syllables, the syllables into sounds. This first initiation into the constituent elements of language may occupy six months at least, and prepare for the reading lessons which the child will receive in the lower stage of the primary school. Then the symbol, the sign, the letter will be given him for the sound which he knows. This preparatory work abridges and facilitates the study of reading, takes from it all its dryness, and secures its results. This intermediate class for children six or seven years old is a very important one. We will even say that we think it indispensable, in order to secure, through the coming years of study, the advantages of Froebel's system; indispensable to the primary school, provided the primary school accepts the Kindergarten as its basis, and its points of departure, and consents to be the continuation, the natural consequence of it. The intermediate class opens the way; it alone can render possible the introduction and application of the principles of Froebel to the primary school; it is the necessary link which will one day make of the Kindergarten and the primary school an organized whole.

Education by Doing.

But the intermediate class is, as we have said, only the first step of the reform which Froebel looked forward to for the present primary school. This reform is to consist especially in the introduction of the Froebelian principle of work, of intelligent, methodical work, which demands the concurrence of all the activities of the child, and which procures him the satisfaction that every effort brings which is crowned with success. Το make work anything but a hard and inevitable law, to make it loved for the pure enjoyment of which it is the source, this is to be the result of the Kindergarten in the future.

A great point in this conception of work is that it alone permits the parallel development of the physical and intellectual forces. The thought of organizing classes of industrial labor does not date from the present time; and wherever the trial has been made, it has given excellent results.* The pupils prepared in the Kindergartens occupy a distinguished place in them, and prove their skill and intelligence. To introduce manual labor, we are told, is an impossible thing; the programmes are never executed. Where is the necessary time? We are among those who think that in the actual execution of the programmes there is much time lost, many forces frittered away. Before his tenth or eleventh year the child is still too young to be restrained during several consecutive hours in a purely intel lectual labor, without injuring the development of his faculties. Besides, reading, writing, arithmetic, having been prepared for in a rational man ner, the difficulties and delays against which the teacher has struggled, and which absorb much precious time, no longer existing, we should see the hours of study diminish of themselves. Three hours a day conse crated to actual study would be sufficient, and would allow two hours devotion to manual labor. The progress of the pupils, far from suffering by it, would gain by it; for the child, always on the alert and well disposed, would bcam with pleasure and eagerness. The occupations of the Froebel method, developed and adapted to the age of the pupils, would find their place here, and would do excellent service, especially in the first two or three classes of the primary school. The branches mentioned in the following list are those whose introduction into the programme of the primary school we think both desirable and possible. We join to the list of the occupations the number of hours that might be devoted to them: weaving, two hours a week; paper-cutting, one hour; folding, two hours; drawing, two hours; modeling, two hours; box-making, two hours.

It results from what precedes, that the question of introducing the principles of Froebel into the primary school should be, according to us, answered in the affirmative, but that this introduction is only possible by the assistance of an intermediate class, annexed as an upper step to the Kindergarten, and forming the connection between this and the primary school, which, on its side, is to adopt the principles of the great philosophic pedagogue. To develop the instrument of labor, the hand, and also the intelligence, to make the body strong and supple, and the mind lucid and profound, to educate men and not scholars, would not this be a great step towards the solution of the social problem? We will not deny that this aim is an ideal one, but we think with our great compatriot, Emmanuel Kant, "that we ought to educate children not according to the present condition of the human race, but according to a better possible condition in the future, that is to say, according to the idea of humanity, and its completed destiny."

*See Barnard's Journal of Education:

Labor in Juvenile Reform Schools, III.. 12. 382, 393, 566, 821.

Kindermann and Schools of Bohemia, XXVII., 811.

Realistic Studies and Labor, XVII., 33, 151; XIX., 628; XXI., 202.

Technical Schools in Europe Generally, XVII., 33; XXI., 9-800; XXVIII., 1014.

Labor Element in Systems of Pestalozzi, Fellenberg, and Wehrli, X., 81; XXX., 268. Manual Labor in American Schools, XV., 231; XXVII., 257.

Labor Element in English Schools, X., 765; XXII., 23-250.

KINDERGARTEN AND CHILD CULTURE IN FRANCE.

INFANT ASYLUMS-CRADLE SCHOOLS-KINDERGARTEN.

ASYLUMS for children form a subject of the greatest interest and importance, particularly in a country lise France, where the custom of sending infants out to be nursed has been universally prevalent for a long time. The social position of the parents will of course determine the fate which awaits the tender infant during the first months of its existence. If the parents be wealthy, or even belong to the middle class, a healthy nurse is procured, according to the advice of an experienced physician; nothing is left undone that tends to ameliorate the condition of the infant, and all possible precautions are taken to meet successfully the many dangers incidental to its young life. Far different is the case with that vast majority of infants whose parents either live in abject poverty, or who, in order to earn a scanty livelihood, are both obliged to work from early morn till late at night away from home. That which, with rich parents, is only a close adherence to a long-established custom, intended to meet the wants of an effeminate age, becomes to poor people a dire necessity.

The danger of this whole system of sending infants out to be nursed was fully exposed by M. Mayer, who, in his capacity as physician, could speak from experience, and in 1865 he published an appeal to the public, in which he says: "This is a crusade which we are going to wage against an absurd and barbarous custom, that of abandoning, a few hours after its birth, a cherished being, whose advent has been ardently desired, to the care of a rough peasantwoman, whom the parents have never seen before, whose character and manners the real mother does not know, who carries away the dearest treasure to some unknown village in the provinces, the name of which perhaps is not even given on the map of France. There is something so revolting to the moral sense in this, that twenty years hence it will hardly be credited. There are excellent mothers who resignedly submit to this sacrifice without any other sign of being shocked than some furtive tears, which they carefully hide, as too great an indulgence to human weakness. If we add that the mother has not always even the satisfaction of placing the newly-born infant directly in the hands of the person who is to nurse it, but that at certain seasons of the year women from the country come to Paris to gather the nurselings and to distribute them afterwards through the provinces, we shall seem to exceed the bounds of truth; yet this is strictly in accordance with the facts, and it forms a regular branch of industry, a trade no less productive of strange developments than the slave-trade."

To remedy this state of things M. Mayer proposed to form a "Society for the protection of infants," the aim of which is to be:

1. To guard the infants against the dangers usually attending the nursing by hired nurses, far from their parents, without sufficient superintendence and without satisfactory guarantee.

2. To put into practice the regulations laid down by the present advanced medical science for the physical development of infants, before undertaking to cultivate their mental powers.

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