EDUCATION IN THE HOME, THE KINDERGARTEN, AND THE PRIMARY SCHOOL. BY ELIZABETH P. PEABODY. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY E. ADELAIDE MANNING. LIR Come, let us live with our children."-FROEBEL. CF TITE UNIVE CALL LONDON: SWAN SONNENSCHEIN, LOWREY & CO., PATERNOSTER SQUARE. 1887. INTRODUCTION. AMONG those who in the last twenty years have helped to spread a knowledge of the educational principles of Froebel beyond the limits of his native country, Miss Elizabeth Peabody's name deserves to be specially remembered. It is mainly owing to her enthusiastic efforts that the value of the Kindergarten was early recognised in the United States, and that its first American promoters were encouraged to maintain, amid many difficulties, a standard of real efficiency for the teachers of Froebel's system. Miss Peabody had long occupied herself, theoretically and practically, with educational subjects. Not satisfied by merely intellectual methods of instruction, and impatient of the superficiality which was too often approved, she made it her great aim to train character, and, by a simultaneous development of children's mental capacities and of their moral nature, to prepare them for the responsible duties of life. It was not surprising that when Miss Peabody, holding such views of education, came in contact with the ideas and the work of Froebel, she at once experienced the delight always attached to the discovery that the problems exercising our own minds have been successfully solved by some one who has started from principles such as ours, and who has cultivated the same ideal. She found that Froebel had carried into practice that very kind of training of which she had realized the immense importance, and that he had placed in a clear light truths which she had already more dimly perceived. Eager to inform herself about the new system, Miss Peabody travelled, in 1868, to Europe, on purpose to visit in Germany the Kindergartens established by Froebel, who was no longer living, and by his best pupils. On her return to America, she |