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is paralyzed by defect. Hence, Fröbel's choice of a cube divided into eight smaller cubes. It is easily separated into its elements and easily reconstructed. It is capable of a reasonable number of transformations, and its crude resemblances satisfy the child's crude thought. It offers no variety of form to confuse his mind, but rigidly confines him to vertical and horizontal, to the right angle and the square. Moreover, he can scarcely arrange his blocks in any way without their taking forms which will suggest some object he has seen. If he piles them one above the other a word from mother or Kindergarther enables him to see in the unsought result of his doing a tower, a light-house or a lamp post. If he arranges them side by side he is confronted with a wall, if in two parallel rows, behold the railroad! The change of a single block transforms the railroad into a train of cars, and with another movement the cars vanish in a house. Having as it were reached these results accidentally the child next directly aims to reproduce them, and thus through the suggestiveness of his material is helped from an instinctive to a self-directing activity, and from simple energy to definite production. This point once attained he triumphs over more and more complicated material, and constrains an ever increasing variety of elements to obey his thought. With planes and sticks he advances to surface representation, and prepares the way for drawing, and finally begins of himself to form letters and to spell out the names of familiar things. His progress, like that of the race, moves thus from the concrete to the abstract, from the fact to the picture, and from the picture to the sign.

In the exercises with the Gifts, great care is necessary on the part of the Kindergartner. She must see that each gift is conceived first as a whole, complete in itself, and must derive its parts by analysis. She must keep up the idea of relation by requiring the use of all the elements of the original whole in each object produced. She must show that unused material is wasted material, must encourage neatness and accuracy through care to build on the squares of the table, and must strengthen continuity of thought and imply the connection of things, by leading from the building of isolated objects to the development of sequences, in which each form grows out of the form that precedes and hints the form which follows it. She must help the child to say in words what he has said in material forms, lead him to name and describe what he has made, and connect each object produced with his life and sympathies. She must, from time to time, concentrate the activity of different children on a common end, and again, she must, through stories and songs, organize their independent creations into a connected whole. She must not impair originality by too constant direction, neither must she suffer freedom to run into license. the artist is not enslaved, but helped by the laws of artistic creation, so the young mind is not limited, but developed by wise guidance. The felt need of the child must, however, determine the help given, as

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all through life our realized lacks open our hearts to sympathy and suggestion.

Through analysis of their productions the children are slowly awakened to facts of form and relations of number, and led to the clear and precise use of language. As they grow older the analysis becomes more definite and extended, and whereas the baby beginners only name the objects they produce, the more advanced children tell how they make each object, and the graduating class must be able to resolve whatever they create into its elements, and state the facts of form, number, direction and relation which it illustrates. I consider this final stage very important, for the reason that it makes clear to the mind the meaning of all its experiences, and leads from the particular fact to the principle governing all the facts of the given class.

With children who have completed the pure Kindergarten course, the gifts may be profitably used to teach the rudiments of geometry and arithmetic. The geometric forms are first recognized, then sought under their veiled manifestations in nature, then applied in construction, then consciously produced, clearly analyzed and sharply defined, and finally shown in their relations to each other. Thus the child who begins by simply calling his building blocks "cubes," will end by recognizing in his cube, the solid, the polyhedron, the hexahedron, the prism and the parallelopiped, and will comprehend its precise definition as a rectangular parallelopiped whose faces are equal squares. So, beginning by pointing out the square corners of his cube, he ends with the definite conception of a right angle as produced when "two straight lines meet each other so as to make the adjacent angles equal." All the simple problems of geometry may be illustrated to perception and grasped as matters of fact, and the mind thus be prepared for the geometrical reasoning of later years.

It is unnecessary to enlarge upon the evident adaptation of the gifts to the teaching of arithmetic. Infinitely varied exercises in counting, and in the four fundamental rules, may be given with the sticks, while the divided solids offer striking illustrations of fractional parts-halves, quarters and eighths must grow clear through the right use of the third and fourth gifts, while the fifth and sixth lead on, in their natural division, to thirds, ninths and twenty-sevenths, and may also be used to illustrate halves, quarters, sixths and twelfths. The salient features of the method are, first, to excite interest in the relations of numbers rather than to give mechanical drill; second, to constantly associate number and form, making them mutually illustrative; third, to apply numbers to mechanical and artistic production. Whereas in the Kindergarten proper the child abstracted from his productions numerical facts, he now directly seeks in his constructions to solve numerical problems. To illustrate with a given number of blocks the children are required to build a house of stated height, breadth and thickness, with a fixed number of windows and doors of definite dimensions, and

having built it, to calculate its square and cubic contents; with their tablets they make squares, oblongs, rhombs, etc., of different sizes, noting length, breadth and contents, or with their sticks develop symmetrical figures from different mathematical centers, calculating themselves the number of sticks required for each new addition. Gradually they grow capable of abstract exercises, and far from finding vexation in multiplication and madness in fractions, their lessons in arithmetic are to them a delight and an inspiration.

From this imperfect survey of the Gifts let us turn now to the Occupations. These are Perforating, Sewing, Drawing, Intertwining, Weaving, Folding, Cutting, Peas-work, Card-board and Clay Modeling.

The perforating tool is a sharp needle fastened into a wooden handle. Holding this in a perfectly vertical position the child pricks small round holes in paper. Little children are provided with drawings in bold lines, and by perforating these lines produce on the opposite side of the paper a raised outline of the drawn figure. As they grow more expert they produce pictures in relief by delicately perforating the surface between the lines. They also receive paper marked off in squares, and first pricking the corners of these squares and then by careful perforations connecting these corners obtain vertical and horizontal lines of different lengths. These are next united to form figures and as the eye gains accuracy and the hand precision, advance is made to slanting and curved lines and their combinations.

Squared paper perforated only at the corners and outline pictures perforated at distances of about the eighth of an inch give the basis of the sewing exercises. Armed with worsted and an embroidery needle the child connects the corners of the paper and makes various combinations of lines, or carefully re-traces the outlines of pictures. The salient feature in the new occupation is variety of color-and through this simple work the harmonies and contrasts of color may be indicated and the attention directed to the colors of natural objects.

Sewing and pricking culminate in drawing, which again emphasizes both combinations of lines and representation of objects, hinting on the one hand the elements of design and on the other the first principles of artistic reproduction. Beginning by copying the outlines they have laid with sticks, the children advance to reproduction of the figures. resulting from combinations of tablets, and from these first to front views, and finally to simple perspective representations of the solids and their transformations. As the first step in drawing is to learn to see correctly, it is evident that all the exercises both in gifts and occupations prepare for the use of pencil and chalk. As the mediation of word and object drawing is of vast importance in its reaction on the mind and as the soul of all technical processes, it is the indispensable basis of industrial education.

The material for intertwining consists of strips of paper of different colors, lengths and widths, which folded lengthwise and plaited accord

ing to definite rules represent a great variety of geometric and artistic forms. The plaiting by rule must however lead up to free combinations.

In the occupation of mat plaiting the child weaves strips of paper into a leaf of paper cut into strips, but with a margin left at each end to keep the strips in place. Designs are not imitated from patterns, but produced by numerical combinations. In this mediation of number and form lies the special significance of the weaving exercises, which however are also valuable for cultivating the sense of color.

The folding material consists of square, rectangular and triangular pieces of paper with which a variety of figures are produced by slight modifications of a few definite ground forms. Through this occupation ideas of sequence and connection are emphasized, and the relation of mathematics to artistic production indicated.

In the occupation of cutting, a square or triangle of paper is folded and cut by rule, and the pieces into which it is thus separated are combined in symmetric forms and mounted on a sheet of paper or cardboard. The child is also encouraged to originate cuts.

By fastening sticks sharpened at the ends into peas soaked in water, our little worker next produces the skeletons of real objects and of geometric forms. This occupation leads to close analysis of form, connects different solids with their corresponding planes and prepares for perspective drawing.

While peas work throws into relief the outlines of objects, card-board modeling represents their surface boundaries, and clay work brings us back to the solid itself. By modifications of the sphere, cube and cylinder, a variety of objects are represented, and these typical forms are more definitely recognized in the works of nature and of man.

Taken as a whole the occupations apply the principles suggested by the gifts and give permanence to their vanishing transformations. It will be observed that particular occupations connect with particular gifts. Thus pricking, sewing and drawing, which are essentially one, connect with the sticks and rings, intertwining and mat plaiting connect with the slats, folding and cutting with the tablets and peas work, card-board and clay modeling with the undivided and divided solids of the first six gifts. It is also noticeable that while the gifts move from the solid to the surface, the line and the point, the occupations, reversing this movement, develop from point to line, surface and solid, and that while the determined material of the gifts limits to the combination and arrangement of unchangeable elements, the plastic material of the occupations is increasingly subservient to the modifying thought and touch of the embryo artist.

As has been repeatedly said the aim of the Kindergarten is to strengthen and develop productive activity. But we must be conscious of ideas before we can express them, and we must gain the mastery of material before we can use it as a means of expression. Hence the first use of the gifts is to waken by their suggestiveness the mind's sleeping thoughts, and the first use of the occupations to train the eye and the

mind to be the ready servants of the will. While the child is still imitative in the occupations he becomes inventive in the gifts, but as he grows to be more and more a law unto himself he turns from the coercion of his blocks, tablets and sticks to obedient paper and clay, and ultimately outgrowing the simpler occupations, concentrates his interest in the exercises of drawing, coloring and modeling. These artistic processes, with a technical training according to the very successful Russian plan, might it seems to me be profitably introduced into our regular school course.

The effect of Kindergarten training in the increase of health, in the development of grace, and in the formations of habits of cleanliness, courtesy, neatness, order and industry, are now so readily acknowledged that it is unnecessary here to do more than allude to them. Its power to develop ideas of number and form, to give mastery of material through technical training, to impresss fundamental perceptions sharply on the mind, to lead to nice discrimination and choice use of words, and to hint the truths which are the forms in which all creation is cast, has probably been sufficiently illustrated in the preceding pages. But there are other results obvious to any open-eyed mother or teacher to which the attention of those who cannot study the Kindergarten for themselves should be directed.

First among these I should emphasize happiness. I do not venture to say that the complacent misery and self-satisfied despair which are the fashion of the day have their roots in the peevish discontent and selfish exactions of a childhood untrained to work and unaccustomed to give, but I never look at the bright faces or watch the busy fingers of children in a Kindergarten, that I do not feel sure they will grow up into men and women who will look upon idleness as a vice, and persistent unhappiness as a crime; whose awakened minds will with increasing enthusiasm increase in knowledge and power; whose trained wills will know the joy of ceaseless striving, and whose hearts will enter with a shout and a bound into each fresh privilege of love. The Kindergarten emphasizes mental activity in opposition to mental dissipation, and a healthy objectivity as opposed to a sickly pre-occupation with self, and my observation of children who have had its training enables me to say that they like better to work and play themselves than to be amused by others; that they prefer study, to diverting reading; that their imagination seeks healthful embodiments; that their moral tendencies are rather practical than sentimental, and that in consequence they are merry as the crickets and full of glad song as the birds.

Another noticeable result is the developed spirit of helpfulness. If the supreme revelation of Christianity is the fatherhood of God, and its supreme duty practical recognition of universal brotherhood, then I know no spot on earth nearer to the kingdom of heaven than the true Kindergarten. The director, essentially the sympathetic helper of the children, teaches them by her example to help each other, and the motherliness of the older girls, the eager desire of all the children to

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