charge is often made that the graduates of our Normal Schools are lacking in earnestness, enthusiasm, and a due appreciation of the nobility of their work as teachers. There is no other means of remedying this defect so effectively as by introducing the Kindergarten. Its principles and its spirit will continue from year to year to be sources of light and inspirations of growing power in the minds and hearts of those teachers who are brought into living contact with them.

It is not indirectly alone, however, that the benefits of the Kindergarten will be shown. Its methods should be practised in all departments of Public Schools. The materials of the Kindergarten belong to the little ones, the principles apply to the teaching of nearly all studies, and to all grades of pupils. I do not think it an exaggerated statement to say, that to many teachers even a short course in Kindergarten would prove of more lasting benefit in enlarging their mental vision, in increasing their knowledge of the child, the laws of its development, and in deepening their devotion to the work of teaching, than all the rest of their Normal School training.

I am confident that a Kindergarten, either in the Toronto or Ottawa Normal school, would be fully self-sustaining if the children attending it paid the same fees paid by the other Model School pupils. The materials used by the children cost less than two dollars per annum for each pupil. A single trained Kindergartner, with the assistance of the Normal School students, and volunteer assistants who would give their services gratuitously in return for the training received, could take charge of fifty or even a hundred children. Many of the St. Louis Kindergartners have as many as one hundred pupils in charge of one director and six or seven assistants.

Fixing the number at fifty as a basis of computation, the income at present rates in the Model School, would be over nine hundred dollars per annum, after paying for the materials used by the children in their occupations.

I would also urge that as a preliminary step Miss Susan E. Blow and Mrs. Clara B. Hubbard be invited to visit Toronto. They might be invited by the Education Department alone, or by the department in connection with Toronto Public School Board. The primary object of their visit would be to give the Teachers in the Model School and the Public Schools, and the students of the Normal School a general idea of the objects and principles of the Kindergarten, and a specific training in the physical and musical departments of the Kindergarten work. A public interest would also be created in the Kindergarten itself in this way more thoroughly than it could be in any other way.

Miss Blow could explain, in a few addresses, the principles and methods of the Kindergarten as probably no other English-speaking woman could. Her voluntary study and labor in its cause extend over a period of about thirteen years. In addition to her two years of training spent with Mrs. Krans-Boelte in New York, she spent some time in Germany with the Baroness Marenholtz-Bulow, the ablest of all Froebel's associates or successors.

Mrs. Hubbard trains all the St. Louis Kindergartners in the department of physical exercise. She is the author of the best collection of Kindergarten songs yet published in English, and is gifted with rare intuitions regarding gestures and calisthenics. She could, in a couple of weeks, present the physical and musical sides of the Kindergarten to the students and teachers of Toronto in such a way as to inaugurate a new era in school progress in

Ontario. I would strongly recommend that, in case Mrs. Hubbard is invited to visit Toronto, the opportunity be afforded to the teachers in County Model Schools, and in cities and towns throughout the Province, to come to Toronto to share in the benefits of her teaching.

If one teacher was sent from each city or town, she could, on her return, communicate to her fellow-teachers what she had learned. Doubtless many School Boards would be willing to allow the lady of highest special aptitude the privilege of visiting Toronto for such a purpose.

NOTE BY THE EDITOR. On the strength of the above report, a Public Kindergarten has been established in Toronto, and was inaugurated under the personal instructions of Mrs. Clara B. Hubbard, the author of "Kindergarten Songs."

Since the above was in type we have received a letter from Mr. Inspector Hughes, the author of the foregoing Report, from which we give the portion relating to the Kindergarten movement in Toronto.

"In reply to your card, I have pleasure in stating that the Public School Board of Toronto, on my recommendation, opened a Kindergarten in connection with one of our Public Schools, in September of this year. We have a most excellent woman in charge, Miss Ada Mareau, first trained by Mrs. Krans-Boelte, of New York, and afterwards sent by our Board for a year's training under Miss Blow, in St. Louis. She has seven most earnest and intelligent assistants, and ninety-four pupils, with others waiting for admission. The interest in the institution is very gratifying. So far no word of skepticism has been heard. Our trustees would have been willing to introduce the Kindergarten some three years ago, but I objected until the people were ready, and until our regular teachers were in thorough sympathy with the movement.

The primary teachers in all our Public Schools are dismissed from regular work every Wednesday afternoon, that they may spend the afternoon in training with Miss Mareau. They will thus have the opportunity of becoming acquainted with the underlying philosophy of the system, and of learning practically such of the songs, games, and occupations as may at once be introduced into our primary classes.

We will open another special Kindergarten class in January. Miss Mareau will be in charge of both Kindergartens, and of any others that may be opened. Sincerely yours,

JAMES L. HUGHES.

The Kindergarten movement will always be successful if introduced in this way,extensive preparation of the public, and especially of parents of young children, and primary school teachers: the employment of a well-trained and earnest Kindergartner in charge, with suitable assistants of pupil Kindergartners, and systematic exposition of the whole system to parents and primary teachers from time to time, by which the Home and Primary Schools will be brought into harmony with the Kindergarten.

KINDERGARTEN IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM.

BY WILLIAM T. HARRIS, LL.D.,*

Superintendent of Public Instruction in St. Louis.

PRELIMINARY AND ASSOCIATED QUESTIONS.

THE question of the kindergarten cannot be settled without considering many subordinate questions.

In one sense the whole of life is an education, for man is a being that constantly develops - for good or evil. In every epoch of his life an education goes on. There are well-defined epochs of growth or of education: that of infancy, in which education is chiefly that of use and wont, the formation of habits as regards the care of the person, and the conduct within family life; that of youth, wherein the child learns in the school how to handle those instrumentalities which enable him to participate in the intellectual or theoretical acquisitions of the human race, and wherein, at the same time, he learns those habits of industry, regularity, and punctu ality, and self-control which enable him to combine with his fellow-men in civil society and in the state; then there is that education which follows the period of school education-the education which one gets by the apprenticeship to a vocation or calling in life. Other spheres of education are the state, or body-politic, and its relation to the individual, wherein the latter acts as a citizen, making laws through his elected representatives, and assisting in their execution; the church, wherein he learns to see all things under the form of eternity, and to derive thence the ultimate standards of his theory and practice in life.

The question of the kindergarten also involves, besides this one of province-i. e., the question whether there is a place for it-the consideration of its disciplines, or what it accomplishes in the way of theoretical insight or of practical will-power; these two, and the development of the emotional nature of the human being. Exactly what does the kindergarten attempt to do in these directions? And then, after the what it does is ascertained, arises the question whether it is desirable to attempt such instruction in the school; whether it does not take the place of more desirable training, which the school has all along been furnishing; or whether it does not, on the other hand, trench on the province of the education within the family-a period of nurture wherein the pupil gets most of his internal, or subjective, emotional life developed? If the kindergarten takes the child too soon from the family, and abridges the period of nurture, it must perforce injure his character on the whole; for the period of nurture is like the root-life of the plant, essential for the development of the above-ground life of the plant, essential for the public life of the man, the life wherein he combines with his fellow-men.

* Prepared for Meeting of American Froebel Union, December, 1879.

Then, again, there is involved the question of education for vocation in life-the preparation for the arts and trades that are to follow school-lifeas the third epoch in life-education. Should the education into the techni calities of vocations be carried down into the school-life of the pupil; still more, should it be carried down into the earliest period of transition from the nurture-period to the school-period?

Besides these essential questions, there are many others of a subsidiary nature, those relating to expense, to the training of teachers and their supply, to the ability of public-school boards to manage such institutions, to the proper buildings for their use, the proper length of sessions, the degree of strictness of discipline to be preserved, etc., etc. The former essential questions relate to the desirability of kindergarten education; the latter relate to the practicability of securing it.

IDEAL OF THE KINDERGARTEN.

The most enthusiastic advocates of the kindergarten offer, as grounds for its establishment, such claims for its efficiency as might reasonably be claimed only for the totality of human education, in its five-fold aspectof nurture, school, vocation, state, and church. If what they claim for it were met with as actual results, we certainly should realize the fairest ideals of a perfected type of humanity at once. Such claims, however, can be made only of a life-long education in its five-fold aspect, and not of any possible education which lasts only from one to four years in the life of the individual. Notwithstanding this exaggeration, it may prove to be the case that the kindergarten is justified in claiming a province heretofore unoccupied by the school or by family nurture, and a province which is of the utmost importance to the right development of those phases of life which follow it. It is, indeed, no reproach to the friends of the "new education" (as they call it) to accuse them of exaggeration. The only fault which we may charge them with is a tendency to ignore, or under-rate, the educational possibilities of the other provinces of human life, and especially those of the school as it has hitherto existed.

To illustrate the breadth of view which the advocates of the kindergarten entertain in regard to the theory and practical value of the kindergarten, I quote here a statement of its rationale, furnished me by Miss Elizabeth Peabody, justly considered the leading advocate for the new education in this country:—

"The rationale of Froebel's method of education is only to be given by a statement of the eternal laws which organize human nature on the one side and the material universe on the other.

"Human nature and the material universe are related contrasts, which it is the personal life of every human being to unify. Material nature is the unconscious manifestation of God, and includes the human body, with which man finds himself in relation so vital that he takes part in perfecting it by means of the organs; and this part of nature is the only part of nature which can be said to be dominated vitally by man, who, in the instance of Jesus Christ, so purified it by never violating any law of human nature-which (human nature) is God's intentional revelation of Himself to each-that He seems to have had complete dominion, and could make

Himself visible or invisible at will; transfiguring His natural body by His spiritual body, as on the Mount of Transfiguration; or consuming it utterly, as on the Mount of Ascension. Whether man, in this atmosphere, will ever do this, and thus abolish natural death, or not, there is no doubt there will be infinite approximation to this glorification of humanity in proportion as education does justice to the children, as Froebel's education aims to do it; for it is his principle to lead children to educate themselves from the beginning-like Socrates's demon-forbidding the wrong and leaving the self activity free to goodness and truth, which it is destined to pursue for ever and ever."

A writer in the Canadian School Journal gives utterance to the following estimate of the value of kindergartens:

"Graduated from a true kindergarten, a child rejoices in an individual self-poise and power which makes his own skill and judgment important factors of his future progress. He is not like every other child who has been in his class; he is himself. His own genius, whatever it may be, has had room for growth and encouragement to express itself. He therefore sees some object in his study, some purpose in his effort. Everything in his course has been illuminated by the same informing thought; and, therefore, with the attraction that must spring up in the young mind from the use of material objects in his work, instead of a weariness, his way has been marked at every step by a buoyant happiness and an eager interest. Any system that produces such results is educationally a good system. But when you add that all this has been done so naturally and so judiciously that the child has derived as much physical as mental advantage, and an equally wholesome moral development, who can deny that it is superior to any other yet devised or used, and that, as such, it is the inalienable birthright of every child to be given the advantages of its training? . . . Before the time of Froebel, the science of pedagogics was founded upon abstruse thought, although sometimes introducing as in the various object-systems-the concrete form as a means of education; but Froebel, by a Divine inspiration, laid aside his books, wherein theory mystified theory, and studied the child. He said, God will indicate to us in the native instincts of His creature the best method for its development and governance. He watched the child at its play, and at its work. He saw that it was open to impressions from every direction; that its energies were manifested by unceasing curiosity and unceasing restlessness; that, if left to itself, the impossibility of reaching any satisfactory conclusions in its researches, little by little stifled its interest; the eager desire to explore deeply the world of ideas and objects before him passed into a superficial observation, heeding little and sure of nothing. He saw that the law which made it flit from object to object in this unceasing motion was a law of development implanted by God, and, therefore, good; but that, unless it were directed and given aim and purpose, it became an element of mischief as well. Then what could be done? How was the possible angel to be developed, and the possible devil to be defeated? Froebel said: 'If we take God's own way, we must be right; so let us direct into a systematic, but natural course of employment all these tender fancies, these fearless little hands and feet.