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 "New Education (as they call it) to accuse them of exaggeration. The only fault which we may charge them with, is a tendency to exclusiveness-to a tendency to ignore 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 men find themselves 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 th's 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 forever and ever."

The disciples of FROEBEL everywhere see the world in this way. With them the theory of the Kindergarten is a theory of the world of MAN and Nature. FROEBEL himself was as much a religious (or moral) enthusiast as a pedagogical reformer. The moral regeneration of the race is the inspiring ideal which his followers aim to realize.

I do not disparage this lofty ideal—I revere it, as the ideal which every teacher should cherish. No other one is a worthy one for the teacher of youth! But I think that any gifted teacher, in our district schools, our High Schools, or our Colleges, may as reasonably as the teacher of the Kindergarten have this lofty expectation of the moral regeneration of the race to follow from his teachings. If the child is more susceptible at the early age when he enters the Kindergarten, and it is far easier then to mould his personal habits, his physical strength and skill, and his demeanor toward his equals and his superiors, yet, on the other hand, the

High-School teacher or the College professor comes into relation with him when he has begun to demand for himself an explanation of the problem of life and it is possible, for the first time, at this age to lead him to INSIGHT-the immediate philosophical view of the universality and necessity of Principles. Insight is the faculty of highest principles and of course more important than all other theoretical disciplines. It is therefore probable that the opportunity of the teacher who instructs pupils at sixteen years and upwards is, on an average, more precious for the welfare of the individual than is the opportunity of the teacher whose pupils are under the age of six. This advantage, however, the teacher of the youngest pupils has, that she may give them an impulse that will cause them to continue their education in after life. The primary school with its fouryears' course usually gets five pupils where the grammar school with a course of four years gets only one pupil. The importance of the primary school is seen in the fact that it affects a much larger proportion of the inhabitants of community, while the importance of the high school rests on the fact that its education develops insight and directive power, so that its graduates do most of the thinking and planning for the community. But there are special disciplines which the child of five years may receive profitably that the youth of sixteen would find unproductive.

There has been for some time a clamor in favor of the introduction of the arts and trades into the common schools. It has been supposed by self-styled "practical" writers on education that the school should fit the youth for the practice of some vocation or calling. They would have the child learn a trade, as well as reading, writing, and arithmetic; and the most zealous of them demand that it shall be a trade and not much else. But the good sense of the educational world as a whole has not been moved to depart from the even tenor of its way by this clamor, and has defended its preference for technical, conventional, and disciplinary training, of a general character, useful for each and every one, no matter what his vocation shall be. Who can tell in the child what special vocation the individual will best follow when he grows up? Besides this the whole time of the child so far as it can be had without overtasking him is needed from the period of six or seven years to sixteen years in order to give him a proper amount of this training in technical, conventional, and disciplinary studies. Moreover, it is said that these several studies are the keys to the worlds of nature and man, and that they transcend in value any special forms of skill such as arts and trades, by as great a degree as the general law surpasses the particular instance. It is claimed that arithmetic, the science of numbers for example, is indispensable in a thousand arts and sciences, while each art has much in it that is special and of limited application in the other arts.

But on the other hand analytical investigation has done much in the way of singling out from the physical movements involved in the trades, those which are common and may be provided for by general disciplines of the body which may be introduced into the school along with the science underlying the art. For example, the theory and practice of drawing furnish a kind of propedeutics to all of the arts and trades and could not fail to make more skilful the workman, whatever his calling.

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Drawing then may properly enter the programme of all the schools, having its claim acknowledged to be a general discipline.

But while we may acknowledge the transcendent importance of the regular branches for the period of time claimed by the school at present— namely from the age of six to sixteen-it must be conceded that the age from four years to six years is not mature enough to receive profit from the studies of the school.

The conventional and the disciplinary studies are too much for the powers of the child of four years or five years. But the child of four years or five years is in a period of transition out of the stage of education which we have named "nurture." He begins to learn of the out-door life, of the occupations and ways of people beyond the family circle, and to long for a further acquaintance with them. He begins to demand society with others of his own age outside his family, and to repeat for himself in miniature the picture of the great world of civil society, mimicking it in his plays and games. Through play the child gains individuality; his internal-" subjective" as it is called-nature becomes active and he learns to know his own tendencies and proclivities. Through caprice aud arbitrariness the child learns to have a will of his own, and not to exercise a mere mechanical compliance with the will of his elders.

It is at this period of transition from the life in the family to that of the school, that the kindergarten furnishes what is most desirable, and, in doing so, solves many problems hitherto difficult of solution. The genius of FROEBEL has provided a system of discipline and instruction which is wonderfully adapted to this stage of the child's growth, when he needs the gentleness of nurture and the rational order of the school in due admixture. The "Gifts and Occupations " as he calls them, furnish an initiation into the arts and sciences; and they do this in a manner half playful, half serious. Of the twenty gifts which the system offers, the first six form a group having the one object to familiarize the child with the elementary notions of geometry. He learns the forms of solids: the cube, sphere, and cylinder, and their various surfaces,―also divisions of the cube and combinations of the cube and its divisions in building various objects. He learns counting and measuring by the eye, for the cube and its divisions are made on a scale of an inch and fractions of an inch-and the squares into which the surface of his table is divided are square inches. Counting, adding, subtracting, and dividing the parts of the cube give him the elementary operations of arithmetic so far as small numbers are concerned, aad give him a very practical knowledge of them. For he can use his knowledge and he has developed it step by step with his own activity.

It is always the desideratum in education to secure the maximum of self-activity in the pupil. The kindergarten gifts are the best instrumentalities ever devised for the purpose of educating children through selfactivity. Other devices may do this-other devices have done it; but FROEBEL'S apparatus is most successful. It is this fact that occasions the exaggerated estimate which his disciples place upon the originality of FROEBEL'S methods. Long before his day, it was known and stated as the first principle of pedagogy, that the pupil is educated not by what others

do for him, but by what he is led to do for himself. But FROEBEL'S System of gifts is so far in advance of other systems of apparatus for primary instruction as to create an impression in the mind of the one who first studies it that FROEBEL is the original discoverer of the pedagogical law of self-activity in the pupil. The teacher who has already learned correct methods of instruction or who has read some in the history of pedagogy, knows this principle of self-activity, but has never found outside of the kindergarten so wonderful a system of devices for the proper education of the child of five years old.

The first group of gifts, including the first six of the twenty, as already remarked, takes up the forms of solids and their division and therefore deals with forms and numbers as regards solids. The second group of gifts includes the four from the seventh to the tenth and concerns surfaces; it leads up from the manipulation of thin blocks or tablets, to drawing with a pencil on paper ruled in squares. In drawing the child has reached the ideal representation of solids by means of light and shade-marks made on a surface to represent outlines. The intermediate gifts-the eighth and ninth-relate to stick-laying and ring-laying, representing outlines of objects by means of straight and curved sticks and wires. This in itself, is

a well-devised link between the quadrangular and triangular tablets (which are treated only as surfaces) and the art of drawing—we have a complete transition from the tangible solid to the ideal representation of it.

Counting and the elementary operations in numbers continue through all the subsequent groups of gifts, but in the first group are the chief object. In the first group the solid in its various shapes is the object of study for the child. He learns to recognize and name the surfaces, corners, angles, &c., which bound it. In the second group the surface and its corners or angles become the sole object. But the child begins the second group with the surface represented by tablets (thin blocks) and proceeds to represent more outlines by means of sticks or wire, (in the eighth gift,) and then to leave the solid form altogether and to make an ideal one by means of pencil-marks on slate or paper-(in the tenth gift.) The drawing paper, ruled in squares of an inch like the kindergarten table, is the best device for training the muscles of the fingers and hand to accuracy. The untrained muscles of the hand of the child cannot guide the pencil so as to make entire forms at first. But by the device of the ruled squares he is enabled to construct forms by the simple process of drawing straight lines vertical, horizontal, and oblique, connecting the sides and corners of the ruled squares. The training of the eye and hand in the use of this tenth gift is the surest and most effective discipline ever invented for the pur

pose.

Here it becomes evident that if the school is to prepare especially for the arts and trades, it is the kindergarten which is to accomplish the object. For the training of the muscles-if it is to be a training for special skill in manipulation must be begun in early youth. As age advances it becomes more difficult to acquire new phases of manual dexterity.

Two weeks' practice of holding objects in his right hand will make the infant in his first year, right-handed for life. The muscles yet in a pulpy consistency are very easily set in any fixed direction. The child trained

for one year on FROEBEL'S gifts and occupations will acquire a skilful use of his hands and a habit of accurate measurement of the eye which will be his possession for life.

But the arts and trades are provided for in a still more effective manner by the subsequent groups of gifts. The first group, as we have seen, trains the eye and the sense of touch and gives a technical acquaintance with solids and with the elementary operations of arithmetic. The second group frees him from the hard limits which have confined him to the reproduction of forms by mere solids, and enables him to represent by means of light and shade. His activity at each step becomes more purely creative as regards the production of forms and more rational as regards intellectual comprehension; for he ascends from concrete particular, tangible objects, to abstract, general truths and archetypal forms. The third group of gifts includes the eleventh and twelfth, and develops new forms of skill, less general and more practical. Having learned how to draw outlines of objects by the first ten gifts the eleventh and twelfth gifts teach the pupil how to embroider, i. e., how to represent outlines of objects by means of needle and thread. The eleventh gift takes the first step by teaching the use of the perforating needle. The child learns to represent outlines of forms by perforations in paper or cardboard. Then in the twelfth gift he learns the art of embroidering; and of course with this he learns the art of sewing and its manifold kindred arts. The art of embroidery calls into activity the muscles of the hand and especially those of the fingers, the eye in accurate measurement, and the intellectual activities required in the geometrical and arithmetical processes involved in the work.

The fourth group of gifts (including the thirteenth to the eighteenth) introduces the important art of weaving and plaiting.

Among the primitive arts of man this was the most useful. It secures the maximum of lightness with the maximum of strength by using fragile material in such a manner as to convert the linear into the surface, and to combine the weak materials into the form of mutual firm support.

The thirteenth gift (with which the fourth group begins) teaches how to cut the paper into strips; the fourteenth weaves the strips into mats or baskets with figures of various devices formed by the meshes; the fifteenth gift uses thin slats of wood for plaiting, and the sixteenth uses the same jointed, with a view to reproducing forms of surfaces; the seventeenth gift intertwines paper, and the eighteenth constructs elaborate shapes by folding paper. This group constructs surfaces by the method of combining strips, or linear materials;— vessels of capacity (baskets, sieves, nets, etc.,) clothing of woven cloth, shelter (tents, etc.,) are furnished by branches of this art.

Wood is linear in its structure, and stronger in the direction of the grain of the wood. Hence it became necessary to invent a mode of adding lateral strength by crossing the fibres in the form of weaving or plaiting, in order to secure the maximum of strength with the minimum of bulk and weight. Besides wood, there are various forms of flexible plants (the willow, etc.,) and textile fibres (hemp, flax, cotton, linen, etc.,)