In the common school, drawing-which has obtained only a recent and precarious foothold in our course of study-is the only branch which is intended to cultivate skill in the hand and accuracy in the eye. The kindergarten, on the other hand, develops this by all of its groups of gifts.

Not only is this training of great importance by reason of the fact that most children must depend largely upon manual skill for their future livelihood, but, from a broader point of view, we must value skill as the great potence which is emancipating the human race from drudgery, by the aid of machinery. Inventions will free man from thraldom to time and

space.

By reason of the fact, already adverted to, that a short training of certain muscles of the infant will be followed by the continued growth of the same muscles through his after life, it is clear how it is that the two years of the child's life (his fifth and sixth), or even one year, or a half-year, in the kindergarten will start into development activities of muscles and brain which will secure deftness and delicacy of industrial power in all after life. The rationale of this is found in the fact that it is a pleasure to use muscles already inured to use; in fact, a much-used muscle demands a daily exercise as much as the stomach demands food. But an unused muscle, or the mere rudiment of a muscle that has never been used, gives pain on its first exercise. Its contraction is accompanied with laceration of tissue, and followed by lameness, or by distress on using it again. Hence it happens that the body shrinks from employing an unused muscle, but, on the contrary, demands the frequent exercise of muscles already trained to use. Hence, in a thousand ways, unconsciou to ourselves, we manage to exercise daily whatever muscles we have already trained, and thus keep in practice physical aptitudes for skill in any direction. The carriage of a man who appears awkward to us is so because of the fact that he uses only a few muscles of his body, and holds the others under constraint as though he possessed no power to use them. Freedom of body, which we term gracefulness, is manifested in the complete command of every limb by the will. This is the element of beauty in the Greek statuary. The gymnastic training may be easily recognized in a young man by his free carriage-as he moves, he uses a greater variety of muscles than the man of uncultivated physique. It follows that a muscle once trained to activity keeps itself in training, or even adds by degrees to its development, simply by demanding its daily exercise, and securing it by some additional movement which it has added as subsidiary to activities in which other muscles are chiefly concerned. In his manner of sitting or rising, of walking or running, even of breathing, of writing, or reading, one man varies from another through the use or disuse of subsidiary muscles, thus kept in training or allowed to remain as undeveloped rudiments.

I have in this protracted discussion of the significance of Frocbel's gifts as a preparation for industrial life, indicated my own grounds for believing that the kindergarten is worthy of a place in the common-school system. It should be a sort of sub-primary education, and receive the pupil at the age of four or four and a half years, and hold him until he completes his sixth year. By this means we gain the child for one or two years when he is good for nothing else but education, and not of

much value even for the education of the school as it is and has been. The disciplines of reading and writing, geography and arithmetic, as taught in the ordinary primary school, are beyond the powers of the average child not yet entered upon his seventh year. And beyond the seventh year the time of the child is too valuable to use it for other than general disciplines-reading, writing, arithmetic, etc., and drawing. He must not take up his school-time with learning a handicraft.

The kindergarten utilizes a period of the child's life for preparation for the arts and trades, without robbing the school of a portion of its needed time.

Besides the industrial phase of the subject, which is pertinent here, we may take note of another one that bears indirectly on the side of produc tive industry, but has a much wider bearing. At the age of three years the child begins to emerge from the circumscribed life of the family, and to acquire an interest in the life of society, and a proclivity to form rela tionship with it. This increases until the school period begins, at his seventh year. The fourth, fifth, and sixth years are years of transition, not well provided for either by family life or by social life in the United States. In families of great poverty, the child forms evil associations on the street, and is initiated into crime. By the time he is ready to enter the school he is hardened in vicious habits, beyond the power of the school to eradicate. In families of wealth, the custom is to intrust the care of the child in this period of his life to some servant without pedagogical skill, and generally without strength of will-power. The child of wealthy parents usually inherits the superior directive power of the parents, who have by their energy acquired and preserved the wealth. Its manifestation in the child is not reasonable, considerate will-power, but arbitrariness and self-will-with such a degree of stubbornness that it quite overcomes the much feebler native will of the servant who has charge of the children. It is difficult to tell which class (poor or rich) the kindergarten benefits most. Society is benefited by the substitution of a rational training of the child's will during his transition period. If he is a child of poverty, he is saved by the good associations and the industrial and intellectual training that he gets. If he is a child of wealth, he is saved by the kindergarten from ruin through self-indulgence and the corruption ensuing on weak management in the family. The worst cle. ments in society are the corrupted and ruined men who were once youth of unusual directive power-children of parents of strong wills.

While the industrial preparation involved in the kindergarten exercises is a sufficient justification for its introduction into our school system, it must be confessed that this is far from satisfactory to the enthusiastic disciples of Froebel. They see in the kindergarten the means for the moral regeneration of the human race, and they look upon the industrial phase of its results as merely incidental and of little consequence; and, indeed, they regard those who attempt to justify the kindergarten on an industrial basis as sordid materialists. That they have good reason to claim more than this preparation for manual arts is evident from the fact that the games, gifts, and occupations are symbolic, and thus propedeutic to subsequent intellectual and moral training. Every conscious intellectual

phase of the mind has a previous phase in which it was unconscious, and merely symbolic. Feeling, emotion, sensibility—these are names of activities of the soul which become thoughts and ideas by the simple addition of consciousness to them-i. e., the addition of reflection. What smoke is to the clear flame, in some sort is instinct to clear rational purpose. Thoughts and ideas preexist, therefore, as feelings and impulses; when, later, they are seen as ideas, they are seen as having general form, or as possessing universality. As feelings, they are particular or special, having application only then and there; as thoughts, they are seen as general principles regulative of all similar exigencies.

The nursery tale gives the elements of a thought, but in such special grotesque form that the child seizes only the incident. Subsequent reflection brings together the features thus detached and isolated, and the child begins to have a general idea. The previous symbol makes easy and natural the pathway to ideas and clear thought.

OTHER ADVANTAGES.

Besides the industrial training (through the " gifts and occupations") and the symbolic culture (derived chiefly from the "games"), there is much else, in the kindergarten, which is common to the instruction in the school subsequently, and occupies the same ground. Some disciplines also are much more efficient in the kindergarten, by reason of its peculiar apparatus, than the same are or can be in the common school.

The instruction in manners and polite habits which goes on in all wellconducted kindergartens is of very great value. The child is taught to behave properly at the table, to be clean in his personal habits, to be neat in the arrangement of his apparatus, to practice the etiquette and amenities of polite life. These things are much better provided for in Froebel's system than elsewhere. Moreover, there is a cultivation of imagination and of the inventive power which possesses great significance for the future intellectual growth. The habits of regularity, punctuality, silence, obedience to established rules, self-control, are taught to as great a degree as is desirable for pupils of that age, but not by any means so perfectly as in the ordinary well-conducted primary school. The two kinds of attention that are developed so well in a good school: (1) the attention of each pupil to his own task-so absorbed in it that he is oblivious to the work of the class that is reciting, and (2) the attention of each pupil in the class that is reciting, to the work of pupil reciting-the former being the attention of industry, and the latter the attention of critical observation-are not developed so well as in the primary school, nor is it to be expected. The freedom from constraint which is essential in the kindergarten, or in any school for pupils of five years of age, allows much interference of cach pupil with the work of others, and hence much distraction of attention. It is quite difficult to preserve an exact balance. The teacher of the kindergarten is liable to allow the brisk, strong-willed children to interfere with the others, and occupy their attention too much.

As regards imagination and inventive power, it is easily stimulated to an abnormal degree. For, if it is accompanied by conceit, there is a corresponding injury done to the child's faith and reverence which must

ין

accompany his growth if he would come to the stores of wisdom which his race has preserved for him. The wisest men are those who have availed themselves most of the wisdom of the race. Self-activity, it is true, is essential to the assimilation of the intellectual patrimony, but it is a reverent spirit only that can sustain one in the long labor of mastering and acquiring that patrimony.

The cultivation of language-of the power of expression-is much emphasized by the advocates of the kindergarten, and, I believe, with fair results.

There is a species of philosophy sometimes connected with the system which undoubtedly exercises a great influence over the minds of the followers of Froebel. It is, apparently, a system founded on a thought of Schelling-the famous "identity system"-which made the absolute to be the indifference or identity of spirit and nature. Its defect is, that it deals with antitheses as resolvable only into "indifference" points; hence the highest principle must be an unconscious one, which makes its philosophy a pantheistic system when logically carried out. But Froebel does not seem to have carried it out strictly. He uses it chiefly to build on it as a foundation his propedeutics of reflection, or thinking activity. Antithesis, or the doctrine of opposites (mind and nature, light and darkness, sweet and sour, good and bad, etc.), belongs to the elementary stage of reflection. It is, however, a necessary stage of thought (although no ultimate one), and far above the activity of sense-perception. But, compared with the thinking activity of the comprehending reason, it is still very crude. Moreover, from the fact that it is not guided by a principle above reflection, it is very uncertain. It is liable to fall from the stage of reflection which cognizes antithesis (essential relation) to that which cognizes mere difference (non-essential relation). Such imperfection I conceive to belong rather to some of the interpreters of Froebel's philosophic views than to Froebel's system as he understood it. It is certainly not a fault of his pedagogics. His philosophy is far deeper than that of Pestalozzi, while his pedagogical system is far more consistent, both in theory and in practice.

MORAL DISCIPLINE.

As regards the claimed transcendence of the system over all others in the way of moral development, I am inclined to grant some degree of superiority to it, but not for intrinsic reasons. It is because the child is then at an age when he is liable to great demoralization at home, and is submitted to a gentle but firm discipline in the kindergarten, that the new education proves of more than ordinary value as a moral discipline. The children of the poor, at the susceptible age of five years, get many lessons on the street that tend to corrupt them. The children of the rich, meeting no wholesome restraint, become self-willed and self-indulgent. The kindergarten may save both classes, and make rational self-control take the place of unrestrained, depraved impulse.

But the kindergarten itself has dangers. The cultivation of self-activity may be excessive, and lead to pertness and conceit. The pupil may get to be irreverent and overbearing-hardened against receiving instruction

from others. In fact, with a teacher whose discernment is dimmed by too much sentimental theory, there is great danger that the weeds of selfishness will thrive faster among the children than the wholesome plants of self-knowledge and self-control. The apotheosis of childhood and infancy is a very dangerous idea to put in practice. It does well enough in Wordsworth's great ode, as a sequence of the doctrine of preexistence; and it is quite necessary that we should, as educators, never forget that the humblest child-nay, the most depraved child-has within him the possibility of the highest angelic being. But this angelic nature is only implicit, and not explicit, in the child or in the savage, or in the uneducated. To use the language of Aristotle, the undeveloped human being is a “first entelechy," while the developed, cultured man is a "second entelechy." Both are, "by nature," rational beings; but only the educated, moral, and religious man is rational actually. "By nature" signifies "potentially," or "containing the possibility of."

NATURE AND NATURAL METHODS.

There is no technical expression in the history of pedagogy with which more juggling has been done than with the word "nature." As used by most writers, it signifies the ideal or normal type of the growth of any thing. The nature of the oak realizes itself in the acorn-bearing monarch of the forest. The nature of man is realized in the angelic, god-like being whose intellect, and will, and emotions are rational, moral, and pervaded by love. We hear the end of education spoken of as the har- · monious development of human nature, physical, intellectual, moral, and affectional. This "nature," in the sense of ideal or normal type, is, however, liable to be confounded with "nature" in the opposite sense, viz., nature as the external world (of unconscious growth). This confusion is the worst that could happen, when we are dealing with the problem of human life; for man, by nature (as unconscious growth), is only the infant or savage-the mere animal-and his possible angelic "nature" is only possible. Moreover, this possibility never will become actuality except through his own self-activity: he must make himself rational, for nature as the external world will never do this for him. Indeed, where nature as the external (unconscious) world is most active in its processes-say, in the torrid zonee-there the development of man will be most retarded. Nature as external world is a world of dependence, each thing being conditioned by everything else, and hence under fate. The humblest clod on the earth pulsates with vibrations that have traveled hither from the farthest star. Each piece of matter is necessitated to be what it is by the totality of conditions. But the nature of man-human nature-must be freedom, and not fate. It must be selfdetermined, and not a mere "thing" which is made to be what it is by the constraining activity of the totality of conditions. Hence, those who confuse these two meanings of "nature" juggle with the term, and in one place mean the rational ideal of man-the self-determining mind-and in another place they mean a thing, as the product of nature as external world. The result of this juggling is the old pedagogical contradiction found in Rousseau throughout, and now and then in the systems of all