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.

Its

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. 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

show each other their work, the glad approval breaking out into audible praise, and the blame of wrong which blends with pity and helpfulness for the wrong doer, these are daily expressions of the moral life of the Kindergarten which tell us what human life might be were the truths we profess so glibly the real movers of our souls. That great philosopher to whom so many of our strongest religious thinkers owe so much of their best thought, has said that "Christianity carries in its bosom a power of renovation which is still unsuspected," and that when acting no longer only on individuals it becomes "the internal and organizing force of society, it will reveal itself to the world in all the depth of its conceptions and in all the richness of its blessings." Could Fichte have peeped into the Kindergarten he would have seen there the beginning of the end, and rejoiced in the sway of that spirit which shall yet solve the problem of the many and the one.

Another flower which blossoms freely in the Kindergarten is loving faith in "grown-up people." The great necessity of human hearts is comprehension. The sharer of our lives and thoughts is the one who influences both. Understanding of the instrument gives the power to play upon it at will. Understanding guided by love and consecrated to help makes the power of the Kindergartner, and explains why the happy children turn to her as flowers turn to the sun. Finding their dumb needs met, their blind energies directed, their unasked questions answered, and their groping fingers clasped in a firm yet tender hand and guided to a rewarding work, they grow in faith as they grow in wisdom and match increasing power with increasing love. And just as the lisping baby calls all men "papa" and in every ceiling finds the sky, so the child brimming over with love for one wise friend believes in the friendliness of all older persons and turns to them with instinctive sympathy. This is no fancy sketch of an unrealized possibility. It is a fact which I have noticed many times in many different Kindergartens, and the experience of which is the rich reward of each one who faithfully tends the living plants in her living garden.

I shall, perhaps, express the crowning result of the Kindergarten most clearly if I say that in proportion as children respond to its training, they learn to live their lives consciously. They know the powers in whose exercise they rejoice, and blessings brighten to them without taking flight. They feel the unity of life and see their own morning hours growing towards the noon-day, and to them, as to the poets of old, all things are aglow with a revelation of God. In these richest fruits of Fröbel's method I cannot be mistaken, for I had noticed them long before I understood their significance, and it was, indeed, through them that I was led finally into the secret of his thought.

The struggle of life is a struggle towards complete self-consciousness. Power existing, exerted, comprehended,-separation tending ever to a closer union, spirit through incarnation rising to self-recognition, the whole creation groaning and travailing together in pain, until, in the fullness of time, the self-conscious creature reflects the eternally self

conscious Creator,-this is the history alike of the universe and of the individual soul. Light may flash from the jewel and sparkle in the dewdrop, paint the morning sky with roses, and transfigure the clouds of evening into a golden glory, but not until the living eye comes forth to see, is the secret of the sun revealed. So, too, the angry waves may dash themselves against the shore, the thunder roll in the sky, and the wild wind bow the grain and uproot the trees, yet the silence of Nature never breaks into sound until confronted with the living ear. Darkness gives way to light and chaos to order, nebulous masses compact themselves into worlds, worlds crown themselves with trees and flowers, and earth and water bring forth abundantly the living creature that hath life, yet, "The fleeting pageant tells for nought Till orbed in mind's creative thought."

It was Fröbel's aim to aid this struggle of the soul in that first period of life, when thought is potential, character faintly outlined in tendency, and will expressed only in an indefinite energy. In the light of this aim we understand his method. Recognizing companionship as a condition of growth, that mind reflects mind as "eye to eye opposed salutes each other with each other's form, "Fröbel, contradicting Rousseau and advancing upon Pestalozzi, demands that the child shall see himself in children. Recognizing “ obedience as the organ of spiritual knowledge," and the trained will as the condition of the enlightened mind, he foreshadows moral facts through their corresponding virtues, and through the performance of small duties, prepares for the comprehension of great truths. Recognizing that there can be no knowledge of external things without seizing the distinctions between them, and no self-recognition without estrangement from self, he presents on the one hand that organized sequence of contrasts through which the child learns to know the world without, and on the other that organized system of work through which he reflects the world within.

Describing the influences which had most strongly affected the evolution of his own thought, Fröbel said that the field had been his school-room and the tree his tutor; the nursery his university, and little children his professors. From the tree he learned the continuity of life and traced the successive differentiations which mark the process of organic growth; studying children he beheld the continuity of life melt into the varied unity of creative thought, and learned to see in the course of development through progressive differentiations the embodiment of thought's eternal distinction of the self from the self. Hence his final word is that there is nothing true but thought, and his fundamental educational maxim to teach children to think by training them to do. In development through an activity which is both receptive and productive lies the secret of his method and the explanation of the child's otherwise inexplicable growth in "self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control; " the three, that "alone lead life to sovereign power."

THE KINDERGARTEN SYSTEM.

A STUDY OF THE SYSTEM IN ST. LOUIS FOR TORONTO MODEL SCHOOL.

7

INTRODUCTION.

The following admirable exposition of the System of Child Culture, known as the Kindergarten, so far as the same is embodied in the Public School System of St. Louis, is taken from special report of James L. Hughes, one of the School Inspectors for the Province of Ontario, to the Minister of Education for that Province, and printed in the Annual Report of the Department to the Legislative Assembly at Toronto, for 1883.

SPECIAL REPORT OF JAMES L. HUGHES.

In accordance with your instructions, I visited St. Louis for the purpose of making an examination into the practical working of the Public School Kindergartens of that city. Through the courtesy of Miss Susan E. Blow, the founder of the St. Louis Kindergartens, and of her associate supervisors, I was enabled to make a thorough investigation of the system, and to obtain much valuable information regarding it.

The following report contains:

1. A brief statement of the objects of the Kindergarten.

2. The introduction and progress of the Kindergarten in St. Louis.

3. Suggestions regarding its introduction into Ontario.

1.OBJECTS OF THE KINDERGARTEN.

The objects of the Kindergarten may best be briefly stated in Froebel's own words; "To take the over-sight of children before they are ready for school life; to exert an influence over their whole being in correspondence with its nature; to strengthen their bodily powers; to exercise their senses; to employ the awakening mind; to make them thoroughly acquainted with the world of nature and of man; to guide their heart and soul in a right direction; and to lead them to the Origin of all life, and to union with Him." We have become so accustomed to regard the function of the school as limited to the cultivation of the intellect alone, that it is difficult to form a just estimate of the real value of a system which trains and develops the entire being morally, mentally, physically and socially. It will be quite impossible to explain in the compass of this report, the details of the methods employed in the Kindergarten to accomplish the work outlined by Froebel. It took him thirty years to complete his system, and it requires at least a two years' course to become a proficient Kindergartner. It may be of service to state at the onset, that the Kindergarten is not a school in the ordinary acceptation of that word. It is not a place to teach reading, writing, etc.; but consists chiefly of practice with (1) Gifts, balls of different colors, cubes, spheres, cylinders, squares, triangles, etc.; (2) Occupations, weaving paper