THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 REPORTS OF THE COMMITTEE OF 
 NINETEEN ON THE THEORY AND 
 PRACTICE OF THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 AUTHORIZED BY THE INTERNATIONAL 
 KINDERGARTEN UNION 
 
 BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY BOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
 
 u&S 
 
 TC,l 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PREFACE. iii 
 
 LUCY WHEELOCK 
 Chairman Editing Committee 
 
 INTRODUCTION vii 
 
 ANNIE LAWS 
 Chairman Committee of Nineteen 
 
 FIRST REPORT 1 
 
 SUSAN E. BLOW 
 
 SECOND REPORT 231 
 
 PATTY SMITH HILL 
 
 THIRD REPORT 295 
 
 ELIZABETH HARRISON 
 
 1268112
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE Committee of Nineteen was originally formed 
 in response to a demand on the part of educators and 
 the general public to know what kindergarten is and 
 what the modern kindergarten does. 
 
 A restatement of Froebelian principles seemed to 
 be necessary in the light of the recent contributions 
 of biology, sociology, and modern psychology to the 
 science of education. 
 
 During the thirty years in which the kindergarten 
 has existed in this country, its ideal has been more 
 clearly defined and its practice modified to conform 
 to a better understanding of its educational instru- 
 mentalities and aims. The fundamental principles of 
 the system are accepted by all; but as truth permits 
 many angles of vision, variations in methods have 
 arisen. It was therefore impossible to harmonize all 
 views at once and issue a unified report. 
 
 The reports now submitted are the result of much 
 discussion of the psychologic foundations of the 
 kindergarten and of comparison of methods in the 
 use of the Froebelian materials and other means of 
 education. They present from three viewpoints the 
 underlying theories which control the practice of the 
 kindergarten of to-day and illuminate that practice 
 by concrete illustrations. 
 
 The Committee sends forth this volume in the hope 
 that it may help to clarify and vivify the work of the 
 kindergartner and to extend the educational influence 
 of the great apostle of childhood. 
 
 LUCY WHEELOCK, 
 Chairman of Editing Committee,
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 BY 
 ANNIE LAWS
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 AT the tenth annual meeting of the International 
 Kindergarten Union, held at Pittsburgh, April 14-17, 
 1903, it was decided to appoint a Committee of Three, 
 namely, Miss Susan E. Blow, Mrs. Alice H. Putnam, 
 at that time president of the Union, and Miss Lucy 
 Wheelock, these three to select a Committee of Fifteen, 
 including themselves, "to formulate contemporary 
 kindergarten thought" with a view to more clearly 
 defining the points of agreement and points of differ- 
 ence in theory and practice in existing kindergarten 
 centers. 
 
 The original Committee consisted of Miss Blow, 
 chairman, Mrs. Maria Kraus-Boelte, Mrs. Alice H. 
 Putnam, Miss Lucy Wheelock, Miss Elizabeth Harri- 
 son, Miss Caroline T. Haven, Miss Patty S. Hill, 
 Miss Caroline M. C. Hart, Miss Laura Fisher, Mrs. 
 Mary B. Page, Dr. Jenny B. Merrill, Miss Harriet 
 Niel, Miss Nora Smith, Miss Fanniebelle Curtis, and 
 Miss Annie Laws. 
 
 To these were afterwards added Mrs. James L. 
 Hughes, Miss Mary C. McCulloch, Miss Alice C. 
 Fitts, and Miss Nina C. Vandewalker, making a 
 Committee of Nineteen instead of the original Fifteen. 
 Miss Smith resigning later, her place was filled by 
 Miss Stovall, who also resigned, and Mrs. M. B. B. 
 Langzettel was elected to fill the vacant place. 
 
 Miss Blow called the first meeting of the Committee
 
 i INTRODUCTION 
 
 at Rochester in 1904, at which time the Committee 
 organized by making Miss Wheelock chairman and 
 Miss Curtis secretary. Later, at Buffalo, in 1909, Miss 
 Wheelock resigned from the chairmanship on account 
 of ill health, and the present chairman was elected to 
 fill the vacancy. 
 
 The Committee has held nine sessions at the same 
 time and place as the annual meetings of the Union, 
 namely, Rochester, Toronto, Milwaukee, New York, 
 New Orleans, Buffalo, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Des 
 Moines, and two special sessions, in December, 1904, 
 and December, 1911, in New York City. Each session 
 has consisted of several meetings. The session held at 
 the Hotel Westminster, New York, December 28-30, 
 1904, is noticeable as having a complete attendance of 
 the Committee, with exception of Miss Stovall, who 
 sent her resignation, finding the distance from San 
 Francisco prohibitive so far as attendance at meetings 
 was concerned. 
 
 At the second New York session, 1907, all were 
 present but Miss Harrison, and at the third New York 
 session, hi December, 1911, all were present but five, 
 making the New York sessions the most largely at- 
 tended of the eleven. 
 
 The first selection of topics for consideration was 
 under the following headings: 
 I. Plans of Work. 
 II. Materials and Methods. 
 
 III. Psychology. 
 
 IV. Symbolism. 
 
 The Committee resolved itself into three subdivis- 
 ions with the following leaders, Miss Blow, Mrs. Page,
 
 INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 and Miss Laws, for the purpose of formulating state- 
 ments for discussion. 
 
 The question of self -activity aroused a very spirited 
 discussion in one of the large meetings. The philosophic 
 and psychologic basis of practice; the place of imagin- 
 ation in the life of the child, its growth and culture 
 through constructive and aesthetic occupations, fairy 
 tales, and games, and its relation to the formation of 
 ideals, were also topics under consideration. 
 
 Plans of work formed the bases of many discussions, 
 with the object of gaining comparative views of lines 
 of work as followed in different localities, which might 
 be of practical value to kindergartners. The annual 
 conferences of training teachers and supervisors fre- 
 quently enjoyed the fruits of many of these discus- 
 sions. 
 
 One result was undoubtedly a better understand- 
 ing among Committee members, not only of working 
 principles and practice, but of one another, and the 
 acquisition of more definiteness in the formulation of 
 ideas and principles. While diversity of opinion un- 
 doubtedly existed, there was evident a unity of spirit 
 and a common desire to reach the best and see the best 
 in the work of others. 
 
 In order to meet the desire on the part of kinder- 
 gartners and educators generally for such a statement 
 as not only should embody the principles which have 
 been accepted from the beginning, but should sug- 
 gest the present trend of the movement as far as it 
 could be determined and account for some of the 
 variations of practice, the Committee selected as a 
 culminating topic the following:
 
 xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 "Fundamental differences between the so-called 
 schools of kindergarten ; essential differences in the 
 varying interpretations of Froebel's theory." 
 
 This formed the basis of discussions at the Mil- 
 waukee and New Orleans meetings. 
 
 After each member had expressed briefly her views, 
 it was finally decided to assign to three leaders the 
 presentation of the various standpoints classified 
 under the headings of Conservative, Liberal, and 
 Conservative-Liberal or Third Report; Miss Blow to 
 present the first, Miss Vandewalker the second, and 
 Miss Wheelock the third point of view. 
 
 The three authorized reports were submitted, care- 
 fully read and discussed, and signed respectively by 
 members of the Committee according as they best 
 represented their attitude of thought. 
 
 The following preamble to the reports was discussed 
 and arranged by the Committee in session : 
 
 " In thus presenting three distinct reports, the sign- 
 ers desire to state that this indicates no lack of har- 
 mony on the part of members of the Committee, but 
 an earnest endeavor to present clearly differing points 
 of view brought out in the deliberations of the Com- 
 mittee. 
 
 "The discussions which have culminated in these 
 reports have resulted in giving to the members clearer 
 insight and an increasing appreciation and respect for 
 differing points of view, and the hope is expressed that 
 in this honest presentation of view the whole body of 
 kindergartners may be stimulated to more alert thought 
 and earnest study which may lead eventually to a 
 larger synthesis."
 
 INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 These reports were presented at the business meet- 
 ing of the International Kindergarten Union in 
 Buffalo, April 29, 1909, accepted by the Union, and 
 ordered printed in the Proceedings of the Sixteenth 
 Annual Meeting, which were distributed among mem- 
 bers and branches of the Union, and copies of which 
 are still available. 
 
 The Committee was continued by order of the Union, 
 and the following two meetings were held at St. Louis 
 and Cincinnati respectively. 
 
 At the former the following resolutions were pre- 
 sented to the Union by the Committee: 
 
 "WHEREAS the kindergarten cause throughout the 
 United States has suffered an inestimable loss in the 
 death of Dr. William T. Harris: 
 
 "Resolved: That the Committee of Nineteen of the 
 International Kindergarten Union express its sincere 
 appreciation of the debt which all kindergartners owe 
 to Dr. Harris for the invaluable services, the stanch 
 support, and the wise counsel which he gave to the 
 cause, especially in its early history. 
 
 "Resolved : That the Committee also recognizes that 
 in his intellectual greatness, philosophic insight, and 
 unwavering allegiance are found the influences which 
 more than any other have given the kindergarten its 
 high place in American education. 
 
 " Resolved : That a copy of these Resolutions be sent 
 to the family, also presented to the International 
 Kindergarten Union, with the request that it be spread 
 upon the minutes and published in the Annual Re- 
 port." 
 
 This was signed by all members of the Committee,
 
 xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 and a copy appeared in the Seventeenth Annual 
 Report. 
 
 At the Cincinnati meeting in April, 1910, it was 
 decided to gather together all past papers and ma- 
 terial for presentation, but not for publication. 
 Headings for final report were arranged as follows: 
 I. Statement of type of program preferred. 
 II. Principles underlying program making. 
 
 III. Process of program making. 
 
 IV. Concrete illustrations. 
 
 Miss Blow, Miss Hill, and Miss Harrison were 
 selected to present three papers along these lines at a 
 session to be held in New York in December, 1911. 
 
 Miss Blow and Miss Hill presented reports, and Miss 
 Harrison, who was unable to be present, presented her 
 report later at Des Moines, in April, 1912. 
 
 Copies of these reports were placed in the hands of 
 the following Advisory Committee of Men who had 
 consented to give the benefit of their views on the 
 questions presented: Professor Henry W. Holmes, Dr. 
 John A. McVannel, Dr. John Dewey, Mr. James L. 
 Hughes, Dr. Angell. 
 
 The presentation of the completed report of the 
 Committee to the Union at the Des Moines meeting 
 and the arrangements for final form of publication 
 were placed in the hands of a Committee of Five, con- 
 sisting of Miss Blow, Miss Hill, Miss Wheelock, and 
 the Chairman and the Secretary ex-officio. 
 
 It was decided to eliminate former headings of 
 reports, and designate them simply as First, Second, 
 and Third Reports. 
 
 A letter from Mrs. Kraus-Boelt contained a render-
 
 INTRODUCTION zv 
 
 ing of an old fable which seemed such an apt illustra- 
 tion of some of the present conditions in the kinder- 
 garten that it was decided to include the following 
 abstract in the final report. 1 
 
 In bringing the work of the Committee of Nineteen 
 to a culmination in the presentation of its final report, 
 the hope is expressed by the members of the Commit- 
 tee that one result of the valuable experiences gained 
 through these conferences may be the formation in the 
 International Kindergarten Union of a Department of 
 Training Teachers and Supervisors in which members 
 of the Committee may find opportunity to continue 
 on a broader scale and with greater numbers the dis- 
 
 1 "A father had three sons whom he loved equally well. This 
 father owned a precious Ring said to be endowed with power to 
 bring highest blessings to its owner. Each one of the three sons asked 
 the father to bestow the Ring on him after the father's death. The 
 father, in his great love for his sons, promised the Ring to each one. 
 In his old age, the father sent for a jeweler and asked him to make 
 two rings exactly like the precious Ring owned by him. The jeweler 
 assented, and after a while he brought the three rings to the father, 
 who could not distinguish the precious Ring from the other two, so 
 well were they made. When the time came that the father died, he 
 called each of his sons separately to him, blessed him, and gave him 
 a ring. After the father's burial, the three brothers met, and each 
 one claimed the birthright and the ownership of the genuine Ring. 
 Finally, when they could not decide which was the original one, they 
 went to a Judge, who gave the decision in the form of advice, viz., 
 'As the true Ring is said to have the magic power of making the 
 owner beloved and esteemed by God and man, and as each of you 
 three brothers believes his Ring to be the genuine or original one, so 
 let each one, untouched by his prejudice, strive to reveal the power 
 of the Ring in his life by loving peaceableness, and by charity and 
 sincere devotion to God; and when in later generations the power of 
 the true Ring reveals itself, I will call upon you again, before the 
 "seat of Judgment." A wiser man than I am may be there and 
 speak.'"
 
 xvi INTRODUCTION 
 
 cussions and conferences which they have found pro- 
 ductive of so much interest and value to themselves 
 and through them to others. 
 
 The Chairman desires to express her appreciation 
 of the able manner in which the Committee was organ- 
 ized by her predecessor, Miss Wheelock, thus greatly 
 simplifying her work; and also her sincere thanks to all 
 of the members of the Committee and especially to 
 the efficient secretary, Miss Curtis, for their hearty 
 cooperation. She congratulates herself that she was 
 present at the Pittsburgh meeting when the Committee 
 was formed and has been able to attend all of the eleven 
 sessions. 1 
 
 ANNIE LAWS, Chairman, 
 Committee of Nineteen, International Kindergarten Union. 
 
 1 Since the completion of the final report of the Committee of 
 Nineteen, Miss Caroline T. Haven has been called from among us. 
 
 Miss Haven was one of the founders of the International Kinder- 
 garten Union. She served it first as corresponding secretary, then aa 
 vice-president, again as secretary, and in 1899 was elected president; 
 and this position she filled a second time. She was long on the Ad- 
 visory Committee, and from the formation of the Committee of 
 Nineteen she was one of its most honored members. Miss Haven 
 attended the last meeting of the Committee at the Hotel Marseilles 
 in New York, in December, 1911, knowing full well that the hand 
 of the angel was stretched out to her. But her attitude was always 
 one of fearless courage. A few months previous, when, as Chairman 
 of the Nominating Committee of the International Kindergarten 
 Union, she had been cautioned by a friend because of the labor in- 
 volved, she had replied, " As this is in all probability my last bit of 
 service for the International Kindergarten Union, I want it to repre- 
 sent my best effort at any cost." 
 
 No tribute that we can accord Caroline T. Haven is too great. 
 She was the rugged, sincere, invigorating friend, yet withal most 
 gracious and kindly; and these remembrances of her are the lasting 
 and dear possession of each member of the Committee of Nineteen.
 
 FIRST REPORT 
 SUSAN E. BLOW
 
 PART I 
 
 THE CONCEPTION OF THE GLIEDGANZES 
 
 THE kindergarten is one phase of the general educa- 
 tional process and will be differently conceived as that 
 process is differently understood. In other words, our 
 conception of the kindergarten will depend ultimately 
 upon our definition of education. 
 
 Definitions of education may be more or less com- 
 prehensive. Thus education may be broadly conceived 
 as a process of interaction between the individual, the 
 social whole, and the natural environment. In a still 
 wider sense history may be conceived as an educative 
 process and defined as a series of interactions continued 
 through centuries, and extended from limited to larger 
 physical and social environments. 
 
 Thus far there is quite general agreement as to the 
 nature of the educative process. It seems to be fur- 
 ther agreed that in a more specific sense education is 
 "the conscious control and direction of the process 
 of interaction"; 1 that it involves the influence of a 
 relatively mature person over a person relatively im- 
 mature; that the standard for determining educational 
 values is the civilization into which the pupil is born, 
 and that in the psychical powers and attitudes of the 
 pupil must be sought the basis for educational method. 
 
 The perplexing questions of education arise within 
 
 1 See Kindergarten Problems, pp. 3-6. Columbia University Press.
 
 4 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 the limits of these large agreements. The recognized 
 values of life are not all equally valuable. No consensus 
 of opinion has been reached as to their relative values. 
 From this lack of agreement as to relative values 
 spring differences of opinion as to emphasis upon 
 language, literature, history, and art on the one side 
 and the natural sciences and industries on the other. 
 Even more fundamental than this contrasted emphasis, 
 is the contrasted emphasis upon the ethical and intel- 
 lectual values. Finally, besides the problems relating 
 to relative emphasis upon different values, must be 
 mentioned the very serious problems arising from the 
 attempts to discriminate the specific contribution of 
 different educational agencies to the general process 
 of education. The family, the kindergarten, the eco- 
 nomic organization, the state, and the church, all 
 exercise some conscious control and direction over the 
 general process of interaction between the individual, 
 the social whole, and the physical environment. It is 
 in drawing the boundary lines between these several 
 spheres of influence that educational theory confronts 
 some of its gravest problems, and educational practice 
 some of its most serious difficulties. Shall the teaching 
 of religion be relegated entirely to the family and the 
 church, or shall any portion of such teaching be given 
 in the kindergarten and the school? How far shall the 
 common school prepare for the industries and arts, and 
 how much may it do to capacitate its pupils for citi- 
 zenship? To what extent shall the kindergarten assume 
 responsibilities hitherto conceived as belonging exclu- 
 sively to the family? What dangers are incident to the 
 assumption by one educational institution of duties
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 6 
 
 belonging primarily to another? These questions sug- 
 gest some of the more serious problems with which 
 thoughtful educators are constantly wrestling. 
 
 The various perplexities suggested in the preceding 
 questions are concerned with educational values and 
 agencies. Another series of perplexities arises when 
 we devote our attention to educational method, for, 
 while there is general agreement as to the fact that its 
 basis must be psychological, there is the widest diver- 
 gence of opinion as to the interpretation of psycho- 
 logical data, and the relative accent to be placed upon 
 different psychical capacities and attitudes. 
 
 Two great educational documents, "The Report of 
 the Committee of Ten" and "The Report of the Com- 
 mittee of Fifteen," have made all students of educa- 
 tion aware of a contrasted emphasis upon the rational 
 type of mankind, and the native tendencies of partic- 
 ular human beings which deviate from that type. The 
 Report of the Committee of Ten "proceeds upon the 
 view that each peculiar and individual expression of 
 the common human nature is the one fact of truly 
 cardinal value"; the Report of the Committee of 
 Fifteen, "upon the view that the supreme considera- 
 tion must be the type characteristically human, not 
 private and peculiar, but public, generic, and above 
 all historic." 1 
 
 The kindergarten is an attempt to mediate these 
 contrasting views. It holds with the latter view that 
 the supreme consideration is the type characteristic- 
 ally human, but it calls attention to the fact that this 
 
 1 Prof. W. G. Howison, The Correlation of Elementary Studies, 
 University of California.
 
 6 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 type itself has not been adequately realized. "One 
 generation does not follow another in facsimile. Each 
 generation is a step in human progress and each 
 new birth an unprecedented experiment." Therefore, 
 while insisting upon the "rational authority of the 
 human type historically developed and tested and 
 warranted," the kindergarten demands ample oppor- 
 tunity for that individual initiative, through which 
 the type may be more completely revealed and 
 embodied. 1 
 
 No less fundamental than the contrasting apprecia- 
 tions of educational values and the contrasting accents 
 of educational methods, are the contrasting convic- 
 tions with regard to the goal of the educational process. 
 It is held by some thinkers that the sufficient aim of 
 education is to make men ethical. Critics of this view 
 contend that it is one-sided because it ignores the 
 intellect and places all its stress upon the will, and they 
 offer as a more adequate definition of the goal of edu- 
 cation that it is "development of the theoretical and 
 practical reason in the individual." This latter con- 
 
 1 "'Man, humanity in man, as an external manifestation should 
 be looked upon, not as fixed and stationary, but as steadily and 
 progressively growing in a state of ever living development, ever 
 ascending from one stage of culture towards its aim, which partakes 
 of the infinite and eternal. 
 
 "It is unspeakably pernicious to look upon the development of 
 humanity as stationary and completed and to see in its present 
 phases simply repetitions and greater generalizations of itself. For 
 the child as well as every successive generation becomes thereby 
 exclusively imitative, an external copy, as it were a cast of the 
 preceding one, and not a living ideal for its stage of development, 
 which it has attained in human development considered as a whole, 
 to serve future generations in all time to come." Education of Man, 
 pp. 17-18.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 7 
 
 oeption is in accord with the ideal of Froebel as ex- 
 pressed in the following statement: "By education, 
 then, the divine essence of man should be unfolded, 
 brought out, lifted into consciousness, and man him- 
 self raised into free, conscious obedience to the divine 
 principle that lives in him, and to a free representation 
 of this principle in his life." 1 
 
 Differing appreciations of educational values, dif- 
 fering interpretations of psychologic data, and differ- 
 ing conceptions of the goal towards which education 
 should move are finally to be explained through 
 differing world- views, whether such views be the mys- 
 tical presuppositions of religion, or the consciously 
 defined and organized presuppositions of philosophy. 
 The norms of Oriental civilization differ from those of 
 Occidental civilization, because the two civilizations 
 are based upon contrasting world- views. The world- 
 view consciously or unconsciously adopted by each 
 particular educator colors all his thinking and biases 
 all his practical activity. Defining the educative pro- 
 cess in its larger sense, as one of mutual adjustment 
 between the individual and his social environment, we 
 become aware that, in our country and age, both 
 change so rapidly that we are threatened with educa- 
 tional anarchy. Furthermore, the immature individual 
 is often subjected to a bewildering variety of educa- 
 tional environments. The child of Hebrew parentage, 
 sent to a Christian kindergarten, promoted to a school 
 whose teachers have inwardly renounced Christianity 
 in favor of scientific materialism, and graduating from 
 a university whose professors are under the spell of 
 1 Education of Man, p. 4.
 
 8" THE KINDERGABTEN 
 
 pragmatism, will have lived through a series of adjust- 
 ments and readjustments with manifestly problematic 
 outcome. 
 
 In what has thus far been said there has been an 
 effort to suggest the necessity for some conscious 
 standard by which the goal of education may be deter- 
 mined, the several educational values appraised, and 
 the psychical capacities and attitudes interpreted. 
 For the disciple of Froebel such a standard is provided 
 in the conception of man as Gliedganzes. 
 
 The signers of this report hold that the conception 
 of the Gliedganzes embodies final truth which may 
 be dialectically demonstrated. In claiming for it the 
 mark of finality they mean, not that it leaves nothing 
 new to be discovered, but that all new discoveries of 
 truth will make explicit some of its as yet undefined 
 implications. 
 
 While the word Gliedganzes was coined by Froebel, 
 the conception it embodies did not originate with him. 
 It is mystically divined by the Christian conscious- 
 ness, and mystically stated in Christian creeds. As a 
 philosophic insight it has been attained by a heroic 
 struggle with the implications of self-activity. The 
 everlasting foundation of philosophy was laid when 
 Plato announced his insight into the self-moved. To 
 Aristotle it became clear that the self-movement 
 demanded was most adequately realized in the think- 
 ing activity or reason. The doctrine of the Gliedganzes 
 is simply a statement of the necessary implications of 
 a completely realized thinking activity. These impli- 
 cations have been more adequately developed by Hegel 
 than by any other philosopher. Finally, one essential
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 9 
 
 phase of the idea overlooked by Hegel has been pointed 
 out by Dr. Harris. The truth of the doctrine of the 
 Gliedganzes can be apprehended by any person who 
 will go through the necessary mental discipline. This 
 report presupposes the Gliedganzes as true, and limits 
 itself to a description, as opposed to a justification, of 
 the insight. 
 
 The word Gliedganzes means the member of a whole /, 
 who is potentially commensurate with the whole to 
 which as member he belongs, but who can make this ; 
 potentiality actual, only in and through active mem- 
 bership. Each individual human being is an incarnate 
 paradox. He is an integral member of humanity. He is 
 also ideally coextensive with humanity. Throughout 
 the vegetable and animal world there is a bridgeless 
 chasm between the individual and the species. Hence 
 nature presents the tragic spectacle of generic energies 
 which are always seeking, but never finding, their 
 .adequate embodiment. No rose can be all roses, and 
 no dog all dogs. As a physical being man is subject to 
 the same limitation, and the human species falls apart 
 into races, these into tribes, and tribes into mutually 
 excluding individuals. Spiritual humanity, on the 
 contrary, is not a whole composed of parts, but a whole / 
 composed of wholes, a totality wherein each individual 
 is also total. As an intellectual and volitional being 
 each man is ideally capable of reproducing the human 
 ^pecies within himself. He can assimilate all human . 
 experience, and order his life in free obedience to the 
 ideals which are its distilled result. The final outcome of 
 this intellectually and morally assimilated experience is 
 the development of impulses accordant with its ideals.
 
 10 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 The conception of man as Gliedganzes is not fully 
 apprehended when it is conceived as relating only to 
 the relationship between the individual human being 
 and the human species. It contains three distinct im- 
 plications, all of which must be clearly seized before 
 the doctrine itself can be adequately understood. The 
 / / first of these implications is that "that which is generic 
 or the reproducer of the species in lower forms of life, 
 becomes the Ego in man," and that it is because in 
 each man humanity is implicit that from each man it 
 may be evolved. The second implication is that this 
 generic Ego or universal self is not only the ideal 
 human, but the divine; the God immanent in man, yet 
 j \ transcendent of him. The third and final implication 
 is that this immanent-transcendent God is one with 
 the absolute first principle through which nature is 
 given its being. 
 
 No student of contemporary philosophy can fail to be 
 aware that, in all its varieties, it tends towards denial 
 of the theses which the doctrine of the Gliedganzes 
 asserts. Its general tendency is to minimize the signi- 
 ficance of human self-consciousness. The accent of 
 thought is upon will, or self-determining activity con- 
 ceived in detachment from self -consciousness, or aware- 
 ness of this self-determining activity by itself. The 
 result is an ominous one.. In proportion as self-con- 
 sciousness is minimized, self-determination or will is 
 finitized, and in proportion as will is finitized, man- 
 kind is lost in men. 
 
 The general tendency above described shows itself 
 in different forms in the several systems of philosophy 
 most in vogue. Contemporary naturalism discredits
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 11 
 
 self -consciousness altogether as a regrettable by-pro- 
 duct of evolution, and hence looks upon humanity as 
 a mere transition towards a higher race. Pragmatism 
 denies an absolute subject, active in nature, and imma- 
 nent in man as the transcendental self. Hence it knows 
 no eternal values, and its adventurous universe is with- 
 out a chart to guide its uncertain course. Contempo- 
 rary gnosticism accepts an absolute first principle, but 
 looks upon nature as a finite conscious life; conceives 
 humanity as a specification of this life and interprets 
 the relationship of individual man to the human spe- 
 cies after the biologic analogy. Finally, contemporary 
 mysticism in all its varieties denies to conscious intel- 
 lect ability to ratify and interpret the occult divina- 
 tions of the subconscious self, and therefore tends per- 
 petually to fall into agnosticism. 
 
 In opposition to all these philosophies, the doctrine 
 of the Gliedganzes presupposes a completely realized 
 self-consciousness as the absolute first principle of the 
 universe, asserts the participation of humanity in this 
 principle, declares that all valid ideals are its approxi- 
 mate definitions, recognizes that all creations of art 
 express its form, and defines the aim of education as its 
 more perfect realization in all individuals. 
 
 The object of the foregoing discussion has been to 
 describe the conception of man as Gliedganzes, and 
 to suggest that it implies in each individual participa- 
 tion in that aboriginal self-determining energy which 
 achieves in self -consciousness its ideal form. Only a 
 self-conscious being could be a Gliedganzes, because 
 only in self-consciousness does a generic energy du- 
 plicate itself in its product. Humanity is implicit in
 
 12 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 each individual of the race. This implicit humanity 
 is divine. T.O make the implicit divine explicit is the 
 goal of education. It can become explicit only in self- 
 consciousness. Hence, says Froebel, "To become con- 
 scious of itself is the first task in the life of a child as 
 it is the task of the whole life of man." 
 
 Manifestly the realization of self-consciousness 
 through the reproduction of the genus within the 
 individual is a goal which education can never reach. 
 It is none the less a goal towards which education 
 must always move. 
 
 From what has been said it should be evident that 
 the educational ideal implicit in the conception of man 
 as Gliedganzes is most inadequately defined when it 
 is limited to education for the purpose of social 
 efficiency. The conception of man as Gliedganzes im- 
 plies, indeed, that the individual shall act as a worthy 
 member of a social whole, but it also induces modesty 
 by its insistence that only in and through active mem- 
 bership can the individual either realize or know him- 
 self. "Educate your child in this manner," writes 
 Froebel, "and at the goal of his education he will 
 recognize himself as the living member of a living 
 whole, and will know that his life mirrors the life of 
 his family, his people, humanity, the being and life of 
 God who works in all and through all. Having at- 
 tained to a clear vision of the universal life, his con- 
 scious aim will be to manifest it in his feeling and 
 thought, in his relationships and his deeds. Through 
 the self-consecration begotten of this lofty ideal he 
 will learn to understand nature, human experience, 
 and the prescient yearnings of his own soul. His
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN IS 
 
 individual life will flow with the currents of nature 
 and of humanity, and move towards a realization of 
 the divine ideal immanent in both." l 
 
 In his preface to Symbolic Education, Dr. Harris 
 calls attention to the several facts that the first state- 
 ment of the doctrine of the Gliedganzes is to be found 
 in the Metaphysics of Aristotle; that this doctrine is 
 an explication of the constitution of mind; and that 
 the constitution of mind, as we know it in ourselves, 
 points towards a completely realized Gliedganzes as 
 divine first principle of the universe. "It is interesting 
 to note," he writes, "that Hegel found this thought 
 in the famous seventh chapter of the seventh book of 
 Aristotle's Metaphysics, where he speaks of the intel- 
 ligible as being the 'co-element' (crvoroixia) of the 
 thinking activity or reason (vovs). He exclaims, on 
 quoting this passage, ' One can scarce believe his eyes/ 
 at finding this thought in Aristotle; and proceeds to 
 explain the word <<rroixt'a (which is often translated 
 series} as sometimes signifying 'an element which is 
 itself its own element, and is always self -determined* 
 
 that is to say, it is a member of itself and thus a 
 whole and a part at the same time. The reach of this 
 thought is noteworthy as explaining the constitution 
 of mind or consciousness (which is subject and object 
 
 co-elements and at the same time a whole in- 
 cluding both; the subject and object are likewise 
 wholes as well as co-elements). Here we have a 
 Gliedganzes. But what man is as personality, he is 
 also in his institutions; he is a citizen of a state; the 
 parent or the child of the family; a member of any 
 
 1 Mottoes and Commentaries, p. 60.
 
 14 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 cooperative community. This, too, is expressed in 
 the highest thought man has reached, that of the 
 Invisible Church celebrated in St. John's Revelation, 
 wherein each person, inspired by the missionary spirit 
 of self-sacrifice for others, becomes a member of an 
 infinite choir or congregation, and at the same time 
 he is an individual self-active whole in himself. In- 
 deed, is not the mystery of the Holy Trinity the 
 supreme exemplar of this independence in the midst 
 of perfect unity with others? " l 
 
 The nature of man as a potential Gliedganzes is not 
 understood until it is illuminated by the conception of 
 God as an actual Gliedganzes. The Christian doctrine 
 of a triune God is a mystical statement of the divine 
 first principle as a completely realized Gliedganzes. 
 The supreme achievement of philosophy has been the 
 transfiguration of this mystic intuition into a compel- 
 ling insight which may be actively reproduced by each 
 individual thinker. The Froebelian ideal of education 
 consciously posits this coercive insight as its goal. The 
 individual shall know God as an actual, and man as 
 a potential, Gliedganzes, and his deeds and impulses 
 shall be accordant with this knowledge. 
 
 1 Symbolic Education, Editor's Preface, pp. xiv-xv.
 
 PART II 
 
 THE DEFINITION AND ORDER OF 
 EDUCATIONAL VALUES 
 
 HAVING defined the goal of education as determined 
 by the standard of the Gliedganzes, we must next 
 apply the same criterion to the definition and ordering 
 of the several educational values. These values may 
 be summarily included under the heads of Religion, 
 Ethics, Language, Literature, History, the Fine Arts 
 and Industries, Mathematics, and Natural Science. 
 It is to be understood that our discussion of these 
 values is independent of the questions of educational 
 methods and agencies. We are not asking how, or 
 by whom, the several values shall be developed, but 
 simply discussing these values in and for themselves. 
 Our reason for preceding the consideration of a kinder- 
 garten program by a discussion of educational values 
 is, that we believe each value must be conceived in its 
 entire scope, and in its relation to all other values, in 
 order that, from the beginning, it may be rightly 
 developed. 
 
 THE FIRST GREAT EDUCATIONAL VALUE: RELIGION 
 
 In the order of educational values for the Occidental 
 world, the Christian religion ranks first, because in the 
 form of a mystic experience it is the primary revela- 
 tion of God as an actual, and man as a potential Glied- 
 ganzes. The root of religion is the feeling of community
 
 16 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 with invisible beings, or with one transcendent invisi- 
 ble being God. There may, however, be different 
 conceptions of God. Christianity is that religion which 
 conceives God as transcendent, immanent, and incar- 
 nate. He is primarily the self-subsistent and transcen- 
 dent Unity God over all. He gives himself to all 
 things in so far as they are able to receive Him, and is 
 therefore immanent in nature and in humanity. The 
 goal of immanence is incarnation, and the Christian 
 God is conceived as incarnate potentially in all men, 
 and actually in one historic individual, who in virtue 
 of this incarnation becomes the concrete revelation 
 of what God is, and man ought to be. 
 
 The Christian religion teaches that what is true of 
 Christ is true of God. 1 The supreme revelation of 
 Christ's divine human life is made in the Cross, and 
 the final import of the Cross is that the historic sacri- 
 fice upon Calvary adumbrates that perpetual sacrifice 
 through which a God of perfect love communicates 
 Himself to and realizes Himself in and through his 
 creatures. Unless there be, indeed, an eternal reality 
 corresponding to the historic event, all the light of 
 sacred story gathers in vain around the Cross, and 
 that law of sacrifice which is the law of life remains a 
 ghastly and intimidating mystery. The eternal Cross 
 is God's eternal plight of love, and it is the increasing 
 penetration of God's world by God's spirit which 
 explains the sacrifice of the bird for its nestling, of the 
 
 1 Philip saith unto him, Lord, show us the Father, and it suffic- 
 eth us. Jesus saith unto him. Have I been so long time with you, and 
 dost thou not know me, Philip? He that hath seen me hath seen the 
 Father; how sayest thou. Show us the Father? John xiv, 8-0.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 17 
 
 human mother for her child, of the patriot for his coun 
 try, of the hero for his cause, of the missionary for the 
 cannibal, of Jesus for the world. 
 
 It should be evident to any thoughtful person that 
 this summarized statement of Christianity relates 
 only to the most fundamental facts of the Christian 
 consciousness, and ignores the more or less adequate 
 interpretations of that consciousness as bodied forth 
 in the varying creeds of Christendom. All Christian 
 churches accept in some form the dogmas of transcen- 
 dence, immanence, and incarnation, and all recognize, 
 though in differing degrees, the authority of one divine 
 human life. The substance of the definition given is 
 the common experience which discriminates the Chris- 
 tian from the non-Christian world, and since this 
 experience is the chief norm of Occidental civilization, 
 it seems not only reasonable, but imperative that its 
 influence should pervade all phases of education. In 
 other words, while it is the duty and privilege of each 
 Christian church to give its specific interpretation of 
 the Christian consciousness, that consciousness itself 
 should be presupposed by and clarified through all 
 education, direct and indirect, given by the family, the 
 school, the community, the economic organization, 
 and the state. The location of any point on the earth's 
 surface is accurately fixed only when it is referred to as 
 the projection of a corresponding point of the celestial 
 sphere. So each great human value is accurately de- 
 fined only when conceived as the projection of a cor- 
 responding eternal value. 
 
 Since religion belongs to the realm of the subcon- 
 scious, and embodies a mystic experience, it becomes
 
 18 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 of primary importance to discriminate between differ- 
 ent varieties of this experience. The tendency of con- 
 temporary mysticism is to assert the divinity of the 
 subconscious. It would be quite as true to assert its 
 diabolism. The subconscious as such has no character; 
 it is simply a name which we give to that part of our 
 mental life which is beyond our own ken, and it is often 
 intellectually foolish and morally perverse. A criterion 
 is necessary by which its divinations may be tested, 
 and that criterion is the form of self-activity. Since 
 this form is ours, or, more correctly stated, since we 
 are this form, it acts in us both as a creative and apper- 
 ceptive agency. Its definitions are our ideals; its self- 
 projection creates art; its selective interest directed 
 towards the phenomena of nature gives birth to science; 
 and its occult sense of its own divinity is our mys- 
 tic experience of God transcendent, immanent, and 
 incarnate. It is not the subconscious which is divine, 
 but the eternal form of self-activity present in the sub- 
 conscious, and emerging from it, first as feeling, imagi- 
 nation, and conscience, and finally as reason aware of 
 itself. Testing the dicta of our subconscious selves by 
 this criterion, we are able to judge which are of God 
 and which of the devil. 
 
 The absolute truth adumbrated in the mystic divin- 
 ations of the Christian religion is God as completely 
 objectified self-consciousness, and therefore as com- 
 pletely realized Gliedganzes. To know this true God, 
 live in communion with Him, and become assimilated 
 to Him through participation in His eternal life, is the 
 goal of human existence. It follows that education as 
 a conscious process should posit the same goal. There*
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 19 
 
 fore religion, conceived as the mystic experience of 
 God transcendent, immanent, and incarnate, is the 
 supreme educational value, and in maturity this relig- 
 ious experience should consciously define itself as 
 theologic insight. It was this conviction which led 
 Froebel to insist that as the age of Jesus demanded 
 faith, so the present age demands insight, and to 
 declare that not only should the process of education 
 culminate in a conscious world-view, but that from 
 the beginning it should be conducted with reference 
 to this world-view, and break a path towards it. 
 
 The conception of religion which has been presented 
 differs alike from the view of those who accept an 
 external revelation of divine reality, and those who 
 either deny the existence of this reality, or challenge 
 man's ability to know it. Traditionalism fails to sat- 
 isfy man's intelligence. Rationalism, which ignores the 
 heart and imagination, fails to create the religious 
 experience which is the indispensable preliminary of 
 theologic insight. Mysticism, which tacitly or openly 
 denies the competency of the intellect to know truth, 
 and which offers no criterion by which the occult divin- 
 ations of the subconscious self may be tested, must per- 
 petually relapse into vagueness and self-contradiction. 
 It is necessary, on the one hand, that eternal truth shall 
 be presented in the form of a compelling insight, and on 
 the other, that education shall provide a genetic devel- 
 opment of the normative experiences through which 
 to perpetuate the Christian consciousness which that 
 insight defines. In so far as this double requirement 
 is met, we may hope to overcome the present disas- 
 trous schism between a traditional creed formally pro-
 
 20 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 fessed, and a secular life rooted in the unregenerate 
 impulses which it is the practical aim of religion to 
 transform. 
 
 THE SECOND GREAT EDUCATIONAL VALUE: ETHICS 
 
 In the order of educational values religion ranks 
 first because, as has been said, it is the primary revela- 
 tion of God as an actual, and man as a potential, 
 Gliedganzes. The second rank in the hierarchy of 
 educational values must be assigned to ethics. By the 
 word ethics we designate "the whole of the formal 
 part of life that fits man to live in the institutions of 
 civilization." l It is in and through the great institu- 
 tions of the family, civil society, the state, and the 
 church that the individual learns practically to live 
 as a Gliedganzes. In the elementary and secondary 
 schools the medium for the study of social institutions 
 is history, which is really a study of the development 
 of man's corporate selfhood. In the kindergarten the 
 medium for a primary revelation of institutions is the 
 dramatic game. 2 
 
 Each one of the great institutions of society has a 
 special function and a distinctive principle. The func- 
 tion of the family is nurture, and its principle is love. 
 The function of civil society is reciprocal service, and 
 its principle is economy. The function of the state is 
 
 1 Rosenkranz, Philotophy of Education, p. 150. 
 
 1 This report omits history in the discussion of values because in 
 its true sense it has no place in the kindergarten. It may, however, 
 be claimed that the kindergarten prepares in some slight degree for 
 the study of history by inducing children to make periodical retro- 
 spects of their own typical experiences, by stories of heroes; and by 
 celebrating the birthdays of great representative men.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 21 
 
 to safeguard liberty, and its principle is justice. The 
 function of the church is revelation of eternal verities, 
 and its principle is faith. Love is the emotional equiva- 
 lent of the idea of the Gliedganzes. Economy is the 
 wise use of the members of a totality by setting to each 
 the task to which he is by nature best adapted. Jus- 
 tice is recognition of the dignity and responsibility of 
 that freedom which belongs to the individual in virtue 
 of his character as actually member of a whole, and 
 ideally commensurate with that whole. Faith is the 
 spontaneous leap of the human spirit towards its own 
 Eternal Ideal. 
 
 Not only does each human institution develop some 
 aspect of the nature of man as Gliedganzes, but each 
 institution also manifests a tendency towards expan- 
 sion of which the realization of the Gliedganzes is the 
 impelling motive. It has frequently been observed 
 that the social nature of self-consciousness is adum- 
 brated in the feeling of love. "Love," says Hegel, "is 
 in general the consciousness of the unity of myself 
 with another. I am not separate and isolated, but win 
 my self-consciousness only by renouncing my inde- 
 pendent existence and by knowing myself as unity of 
 myself with another and another with me. The first 
 element in love is that I will to be no longer an indepen- 
 dent self-sufficing person, and that if I were such a 
 person I should feel myself lacking and incomplete. 
 The second element is that I gain myself in another 
 person in whom I am recognized as he again is in me." l 
 Love is the principle of the family, and its ideal nature 
 as the feeling of the Gliedganzes is suggested in its 
 1 Hegel's Philosophy of Right, S. W. Dyde, p. 165.
 
 22 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 extension from husband and wife to children, sons and 
 daughters-in-law, and grandchildren. Beginning as a 
 union of two persons it becomes a union of many per- 
 sons and points for its consummation to the union of 
 all persons. 
 
 In the civic community we observe a similar expan- 
 sion. The individual has wants which he can satisfy 
 only by means of other individuals. Hence arises the 
 economic organization with its principle of economy. 
 The expansion of this great institution from the par- 
 ticular community to the nation and from the nation 
 to the world is too patent to need illustration. The 
 goal towards which it aspires is the devotion of each 
 individual to the service for which he is best fitted and 
 the dower of each individual with the fruits of univer- 
 sal toil and the wealth of universal experience. 
 
 The unity of men in man (or the ideal nature of man 
 as Gliedganzes) felt in the family as love, and embodied 
 in civil society as reciprocal dependence, is recognized 
 in the state as law. Hegel has defined the state as 
 "will that wills will." If we conceive will as self- 
 determining energy, we shall have no difficulty in 
 understanding this definition. All actions that inter- 
 fere with the free exercise of self-determination attack 
 will. All actions that abet this exercise reinforce will. 
 The ability to curtail self-determining energy is im- 
 plied in its possession, and hence the recurrent spec- 
 tacle which so terrifies the weak-hearted of "freedom 
 free to slay herself and dying while men shout her 
 name." The great aim of providential education 
 throughout the centuries is to teach men to do only 
 those deeds which, being in conformity with freedom,
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 23 
 
 enhance and diffuse it. The laws of a state define the 
 substance of freedom so far as any given people has 
 learned to understand it. In the eyes of the law men 
 are not unique individuals, but persons participating 
 in a common power of self-determination. Thus con- 
 ceiving man as a free agent in the world of reality, 
 the state metes to him the reward or punishment of 
 his deeds. The treaties and alliances between nations; 
 the growth of international law; the establishment of 
 an international tribunal are heralds of the great world- 
 union wherein each participant state shall pledge its 
 life, its fortune, and its honor to secure equal and exact 
 justice. 
 
 The object of this rapid survey of our secular insti- 
 tutions has been to suggest that all of them imply the 
 social nature of conscious intelligence and the unity of 
 all beings participating in this intelligence; that is, the 
 nature of man as Gliedganzes. In the family this unity 
 is felt as love; in civil society it is embodied in recipro- 
 cal dependence; in the state it is recognized by a com- 
 mon law. All of these institutions suggest a goal which 
 no one of them realizes and imply an origin which no 
 one of them explains. The Christian church mystically 
 explains the unity, proclaims the origin, and prophesies 
 the consummation. It declares men to be one in virtue 
 of their derivation from a common Father; it reveals 
 to them their generic ideal in a concretely presented 
 divine life; it proclaims their fellowship in one indwell- 
 ing spirit; and it holds before them the hope of immor- 
 tal citizenship in a cosmic community, where shall be 
 gathered together the intelligent spirits not of a single 
 world but of all worlds, and where at last each shall
 
 84 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 be in, through, and for all, and all shall be in, through, 
 and for each. 
 
 It is admitted by all students of education that the 
 standards for educational values are the norms of the 
 civilization into which the pupil is born, and it must 
 now be again insisted that the supreme norm of all 
 Western civilization is man's vision of himself as 
 Gliedganzes, and that the more or less clearly dis- 
 cerned ideal which forever beckons him is that of 
 "membership in a society of accordant free agents." 
 "It is at the mental summons of this ideal," writes 
 Professor Howison, "that the West as a stadium in 
 historic progress emerges from the hoary and impas- 
 sive East; and the entire history of the West as diver- 
 gent from the Oriental spirit, as the scene of energetic 
 human improvement, the scene of the victory of man 
 over nature, and over his merely natural self, has its 
 controlling and explanatory motive in this ideal alone. 
 It is the very lifeblood of that more vigorous moral 
 order which is the manifest distinction of the West 
 from the Orient. Personal responsibility and its cor- 
 relate of free reality, or real freedom, are the whole 
 foundation on which our enlightened civilization stands; 
 and the voice of aspiring and successful man as he 
 lives and acts in Europe and America speaks ever more 
 and more plainly the two magic words of enthusiasm 
 and of stability Duty and Rights. But these are 
 really the signals of his citizenship in the ideal City of 
 God. By them he proclaims: We are many, though in- 
 deed one; there is one nature in manifold persons; per- 
 sonality alone is the measure, the sufficing establishment 
 of reality; unconditional reality alone is .sufficient to
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 25 
 
 the being of persons; for that alone is sufficient to a 
 moral order, since a moral order is possible for none but 
 beings who are mutually responsible, and no beings can 
 be responsible who do not originate their own acts." l 
 
 THE THIRD GREAT EDUCATIONAL VALUE: LANGUAGE 
 
 Tested by the standard of the Gliedganzes, language 
 must be assigned the third place in the hierarchy of 
 educational values. Indeed, were we making a study 
 of values in the order of their genesis, language would 
 perforce be promoted to the first place, because without 
 speech there could be no development of corporate 
 life. But the order of history is not identical with the 
 order of value, and language study, considered either 
 in its formal aspect as training in the habits of correct 
 speech and as equipment of the individual with the 
 intellectual tools of reading, writing, and grammar, 
 or in its substantial aspect as study of literature, is 
 manifestly subordinate in value to religion, to the 
 quickening of institutional ideals, and to the formation 
 of habits accordant with those ideals. On the other 
 hand, since language is the instrument which makes 
 possible the organization of human activity and the 
 transmission of human experience, there can be no 
 dispute of its claim to be ranked as third in importance 
 of the great educational values. The man who lacks 
 sufficient mastery of speech to make other men under- 
 stand what he means will have no co-workers. He who 
 cannot understand other men's meanings will be able 
 neither to aid nor to oppose them. 
 
 1 The Conception of God, by Josiah Royce, Joseph LeConte, G. H. 
 Howison, and Sidney Edwards Mezes, p. 93.
 
 26 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 Not only is language the indispensable instrument 
 of corporate life; it is also the chief means for the 
 expansion of personality. Without speech each man 
 would be immured forever in the prison cell of his own 
 nature. The man who cannot read and write is able 
 to expand his personality only to the size of those with 
 whom he communicates through oral speech, and there- 
 fore is condemned to remain provincial and temporal. 
 He who is able to read and write, but who fails to extend 
 his knowledge of language beyond a colloquial vocabu- 
 lary, can never enrich his personality with the larger 
 experience of his own age, or the great experience of 
 the historic past. He who knows only a single lan- 
 guage must be cramped by its limitations of vocabulary 
 and structure. He who is ignorant of the languages o! 
 the three great peoples who have contributed to the 
 modern world its religion, its law, and its artistic and 
 literary forms, can never fully understand his own pro- 
 cess of becoming. In short, it is through spoken and 
 written language that the interchange of contempo- 
 rary experience is possible. It is through the written 
 and printed forms of speech that the experience of the 
 past is preserved and disseminated. Without language 
 there could be no emancipation of the individual by 
 the vicarious toil of the race, no illumination of the 
 individual by its vicarious thought, no redemption of 
 the individual by its vicarious suffering. 
 
 In addition to its objective values as the instrument 
 which makes corporate life possible and as the chief 
 means of expanding human personality, language 
 study is important because it reveals the universal 
 form of our mental activity, and thereby admits us to
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 27 
 
 some knowledge of the nature of man as Gliedganzes. 
 Grammar discovers that all speech has the form of a 
 judgment. Every judgment is an expression of that 
 essential act of the Ego wherein self-recognition is 
 effected through the positing and annulment of self- 
 separation. When for example, we say, "'The rose is; 
 it is red, it is round, it is fragrant,' we separate what 
 belongs to the rose from it, and place it outside of it, 
 and then through the act of predication unite it again. 
 The fundamental act of self-consciousness, which is a 
 self-separation and self -identification united in one act 
 of recognition, is repeated in all acts of knowing" and 
 embodied in the judgments which express such acts. 1 
 The final objective value of language is that through 
 its adumbration of the form of subject-objectivity it 
 points us to God, in whom alone that form is completely 
 realized. As has been said, all human speech has the 
 form of a judgment. Confining ourselves to judgments 
 of determinate being, we observe that in all such judg- 
 ments an individual is identified with a class; for exam- 
 ple, the rose is red; the dog is a quadruped; John is a 
 man. Manifestly the identity expressed in these judg- 
 ments is not true. John is or may be a very defective 
 specimen of the class man. The dog is a quadruped, 
 but so are the cat and the cow. The rose may have red- 
 ness, but it is not identical with red, and moreover pos- 
 sesses only one shade or tint of red. Thus in one respect 
 it is larger, and in another smaller, than the class with 
 which it is identified. The identity between subject 
 and predicate which the judgment expresses breaks 
 down in every concrete case. Therefore, we are incited 
 1 Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. i. pp. 118-19.
 
 98 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 to ask, what does this expression of identity mean, 
 and whence does it proceed? 
 
 The answer to this question gives us new reverence 
 for language as revealer of the form of subject-object- 
 ivity, characteristic of mind, and implied in the con- 
 ception of the Gliedganzes. In the judgment mind 
 imposes its own infinite form upon a finite experience. 
 The form fits only eternal realities. When we identify 
 rose and redness we seek a correspondence not to be 
 found in the realm of sense-perception. This lack of 
 correspondence between our general terms and the 
 particular objects we subsume under them, has led 
 many contemporary thinkers to deny that truth in the 
 sense of correspondence exists at all. It has led others 
 to a profound conviction that mind itself is truth, 
 and that in its form of subject-objectivity as com- 
 pletely realized in God, we find at last that perfect cor- 
 respondence between generic energy and its product, 
 which nature and history seek, which language in the 
 form of the judgment affirms, whose necessary im- 
 plications are studied in rational psychology, and 
 whose outcome is the conception of God as Absolute 
 and of man as potential Gliedganzes. 
 
 Besides its objective values, language has a series 
 of psychologic values. In acquiring the power of 
 speech the child acquires the power of seeing each 
 particular object as member of a class; becomes aware 
 of differences between the particular specimens of 
 the class; and hence perceives around each object a 
 ' penumbra of shining possibilities. Seeing possibilities 
 or unrealized ideals, mind acquires motives for action 
 and develops will power. Finally energizing to realize
 
 THE KINDERGAKTEN 29 
 
 these possibilities, it becomes aware of its own causa- 
 tive power; for to change a possibility into a reality is 
 to cause to exist what did not exist before. Hence in 
 learning to speak, the child unfolds will properly so- 
 called out of blind desire and also achieves a measure 
 of true self-consciousness. 
 
 A second psychologic value of language is suggested 
 by the fact that since it employs signs it calls for dis- 
 crimination between the sign and the thing signified, 
 and therefore involves a double act of mental analysis. 
 To acquire the power of speech, words must be recog- 
 nized by external sense as sounds addressed to the ear, 
 and their meaning must be recognized by internal 
 sense or introspection. In learning to read and write, 
 words must be recognized as forms addressed to the eye; 
 these visible forms must be identified with the sound 
 signs previously familiar, and finally the corresponding 
 idea must be called up by thought. In the study of 
 etymology, words are not only recognized as visible 
 forms, identified with sounds and interpreted by 
 thought, but by a deeper act of introspection identi- 
 fied as parts of speech. Finally, with the study of the 
 sentence and its construction, there is advance from the 
 recognition of signs as expressions of particular mean- 
 ings to the use of signs as instruments for expressing 
 organic unities of thought by relating meanings. 
 
 Thus far our attention has been given to language in 
 its formal aspect as a system of signs related to mean- 
 ings. We must now pass on to consider language rela- 
 tively to its content, or in other words to discuss its 
 value as embodied in literature. 
 
 It will be conceded without dispute that, aside from
 
 80 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 other values, literature is the chief instrumentality 
 through which man acquires distinction of thought and 
 speech. The language of men and women who do not 
 read is prone to gyrate in a tedious round of conven- 
 tional words and phrases. "Dear to me as a God," 
 says Plato, "shall be he who can accurately divide and 
 define." Ordinary men do not make clear distinctions 
 in thought, and as a consequence their speech lacks 
 precision. Whether in spoken or written language, 
 style is simply the outward expression of intellect and 
 character. When thoughts are accurately defined, 
 speech is clear. When fine shades of thought and feeling 
 are inwardly distinguished, speech becomes delicate, 
 subtle, and discriminating. When each thought illum- 
 inates and is illuminated by many others, style be- 
 comes comprehensive and suggestive. When all par- 
 ticular ideas are organized by a master thought, style 
 attains unity. When this master thought is freedom, 
 style acquires nobility. When the ideals of freedom have 
 been felt as imperatives and faithfully obeyed, style 
 becomes commanding and coercive. When ideals are 
 not only obeyed, but loved, style becomes fervent and 
 glowing. When a man has lived long, intimately, and 
 lovingly with his thoughts, they will have associated 
 with themselves interpreting natural images and cor- 
 respondences. To see clearly, define precisely, asso- 
 ciate largely, love fervently, believe with conviction, 
 act with fidelity, and live in constant communion with 
 one's own spirit, is the only way to create linguistic 
 expression which is lucid, comprehensive, glowing, 
 commanding, poetic, and beautiful. In short, nothing 
 but distinction of mind can create distinction of speech.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 31 
 
 Literature is the expression of distinction of mind in 
 ascending degrees. To study literature is to achieve 
 some measure of this distinction. The pupil becomes 
 aware of inarticulate depths in himself. The feelings 
 which vaguely stirred his heart, the thoughts which 
 haunted his subconsciousness are made known to him. 
 As he learns to understand himself, he begins also to 
 understand his fellows. If it be true that the proper 
 study of mankind is man; if it be granted that the most 
 practical knowledge is that which enables the individ- 
 ual to combine with his fellow men; then there can be 
 no question of the high rank of literature in the hier- 
 archy of educational values. 
 
 The attempt has been made to show that literature 
 helps the individual to know himself and his fellow men 
 by defining and illustrating wide ranges of thought and 
 subtle intricacies of feeling. It has, however, an even 
 higher mission, for it is in and through literature 
 that the genetic evolution of human deeds is revealed. 
 Goethe has likened the characters in a great drama or 
 novel to watches with crystal cases. Looking through 
 one face of the crystal case, we see the moving hands; 
 looking through the other, we see the power that moves 
 them. In our contact with living men and women, we 
 become aware of what they do, and explain their deeds 
 by an act of more or less feeble introspective analogy. 
 In studying the men and women of literature, we are 
 helped by the introspection of great geniuses who have 
 discovered in themselves the emotional and intellectual 
 antecedents of all human deeds. "It may be said in 
 general," writes Dr. Harris in Psychologic Founda- 
 tions of Education, " that a literary work of art, a poem,
 
 32 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 whether lyric, dramatic, or epic, or a prose work of art, 
 such as a novel or a drama, reveals human nature by 
 showing the growth of a feeling or sentiment first into a 
 conviction and then into a deed: feelings, thoughts, 
 and deeds are thus connected in such a way as to explain 
 the complete genesis of human action." 1 
 
 With regard to the value of this revelation the same 
 great educator writes as follows: 
 
 "No matter how well equipped we might be as 
 mathematicians or scientific experts of any kind, if we 
 lacked the power of seeing this genesis of actions out 
 of feeling in our fellow men and in ourselves, our lives 
 would become a chaos of misdirected endeavor. We 
 never could adjust ourselves to our human environ- 
 ment, we should take offense where none was intended 
 and make collisions with our associates; for we should 
 first misunderstand their motives; next, seize on the 
 wrong means of persuasion and conciliation; finally, 
 end in misanthropy. With regard to ourselves, we 
 should be equally powerless to control our passions and 
 desires, not knowing whither they tended nor where 
 they were to be repressed. 
 
 "The narrow life can be lived through without much 
 knowledge of literature. Intuitive practice in reading 
 the feelings of one's fellows, and in noting the effect 
 of the^e feelings on their actions which follow, fits the 
 individual for his narrow sphere. But there is as much 
 difference between the knowledge of human nature 
 that rests entirely on individual observation of the 
 people of one's environment and that founded on an 
 acquaintance with the best literature as there is be- 
 1 Psychologic Foundationt of Education, p. 327.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 33 
 
 tween an Indian doctor's acquaintance with plants and 
 the lore of a skilled botanist." l 
 
 The attempt has been made to suggest two great 
 values of literature. It creates distinction of thought 
 and speech. It reveals the growth of action and habit 
 out of feelings and ideas, and thereby helps men to 
 understand themselves and their fellows. A third and 
 still higher value derives from the fact that literature 
 portrays man as a member of social institutions and 
 is therefore a revelation of the Gliedganzes, or divine 
 human type, so far as this has been discovered, and also 
 a revelation of the agreements or disagreements of 
 individuals with this generic or divine humanity. 
 
 The theme of a literary work of art is usually an 
 attack of the individual upon some one of the great 
 human institutions, and the recoil of that institution 
 upon his attack. It is in virtue of the fact that it por- 
 trays collisions between the individual and the social 
 whole that literature becomes an adequate revelation 
 of human nature. To quote Dr. Harris once more: 
 "When at harmony with the social environment the 
 individual does not reveal the limits of his individuality 
 nor the all-conquering might of the institutions of 
 society. It is only in the collisions between the indi- 
 vidual and the social order in which he exists that the 
 whole of human nature is revealed in both its phases as 
 individual and as social whole." 2 
 
 No one who has studied the great world-poets 
 
 1 William T. Harris, The Educational Value of the Tragic as com- 
 pared with the Comic in Literature and Art, p. 5. 
 
 2 William T. Harris, The Educational Value of the Tragic as com- 
 pared with the Comic in Literature and Art, p. 60.
 
 34 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, and Goethe can fail to be 
 aware how largely he owes to them knowledge of him- 
 self, understanding of his fellows, insight into the 
 trend of human history, and comprehension of the 
 value of human institutions. It is only necessary to 
 summon before imagination the figures of Achilles, 
 Agamemnon, Ajax, Odysseus, Clytemnestra, Helen, 
 Penelope, Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, Desdemona, Portia, 
 Faust, Mephistopheles, Wilhelm Meister, Lothario, 
 Mignon, and Natalia to assure ourselves that without 
 the concrete types of character exhibited in literature, 
 we should know little either of ourselves or of the men 
 and women with whom life brings us into relations. It 
 is only necessary to recall the theme and structure of 
 each of the great world-poems to realize how wonder- 
 fully they interpret history and clarify the meaning of 
 human institutions. The Iliad re-creates in its readers 
 the impulses out of which Occidental civilization was 
 born and flashes a warning light upon that brittle in- 
 dividualism by which alone it may be wrecked. The 
 Odyssey portrays in a series of poetic images the con- 
 scious emergence of those domestic, social, national, 
 and religious ideals which the history of the West has 
 been one long struggle to embody. The Divine Comedy 
 paints each typical deed which man can do; describes 
 its emotional antecedents; traces its social conse- 
 quences; tests it by the standard of human solidarity, 
 and points as the goal of earthly existence to divine 
 life realized in a cosmic community. The dramas of 
 Shakespeare show a series of collisions between the 
 individual and some ethical ideal, and portray the 
 recoil of the social whole upon his deeds. The last
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 35 
 
 world-poet advances unshrinking into that eternal hell 
 where the conscious spirit is at war with its own form, 
 and writes in words of flame the battle with and victory 
 over agnosticism. To study with sympathy and interior 
 comprehension Goethe's exhibition of Faust "in con- 
 flict with himself, in conflict with family, society, and 
 state, and in conflict with art and religion," is to be 
 redeemed by vicarious experience from the torments 
 of intellect damned by the knowledge that it cannot 
 know. 
 
 The attack of the individual upon social order and 
 the reaction of that order upon the attack is the per- 
 sistent theme of literature. The principle underlying 
 both the attack and the recoil is that of human freedom. 
 It is in virtue of the fact that man has formal freedom, 
 or the power to act as he may choose, that the individual 
 is able to make his attack upon the social whole. It is 
 in virtue of the fact that the social whole has attained 
 some degree of substantial freedom, or vision of the 
 kinds of deeds which are consistent with freedom itself, 
 that it is able to mete to the individual just rewards 
 and penalties. The final revelation of literature, there- 
 fore, is the revelation of human freedom with its cor- 
 relate of moral responsibility, and so great is its re- 
 spect for the freedom it celebrates that it leaves its 
 votaries free even to reject freedom. It wins by allure- 
 ment, but never coerces by authority. It announces 
 no moral imperatives, but appeals to "admiration, 
 hope, and love;" stirs liberating and aspiring impulses 
 and is content to warn against evil by portraying its 
 ugliness and tracing its results. Free itself through 
 love, it dares to trust man's love and freedom, and by
 
 36 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 this generous faith calls forth the energy through which 
 he "erects himself above himself." 
 
 The reader who is able to recognize identity of 
 thought under dissimilarity of statement will need no 
 assurance of the fact that, alike in its language, its 
 portrayal of concrete types of character, its evolution 
 of deeds out of feelings and ideas, its projection of the 
 impulses which have determined the march of history 
 and its revelation of a social solidarity which guaran- 
 tees free individuality as the goal of human existence, 
 literature is one of the great revelations of man as 
 Gliedganzes. It remains to be said that alike in poetry 
 and prose the art of literature adumbrates through 
 the sensuous elements of rhythm, symmetry, and har- 
 mony, that form of self-consciousness of which the 
 Gliedganzes is the final explication. The psychology 
 of these several elements will be considered in greater 
 detail in connection with the educational values of 
 architecture, sculpture, painting, and music. Litera- 
 ture has been treated in detachment from the other 
 fine arts because of its higher rank in the order of edu- 
 cational values. 
 
 The reader who has followed understandingly the 
 discussion of the three great norms of religion, social 
 institutions, and language will be aware that an effort 
 has been made to set forth both their objective or 
 practical, and their subjective or psychological value 
 as determined by the common standard of the Glied- 
 ganzes. In brief epitome of the thoughts suggested, 
 it may be said that the objective value of the Christian 
 religion is that it offers an eternal guarantee for that 
 conception of humanity through which the single
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 37 
 
 spirit "knows itself as self-active member of a mani- 
 fold system of persons," and that its psychologic value 
 lies in the fact that it stimulates the highest degree of 
 self-activity by endowing each individual with super- 
 natural value through its revelation of self-conscious- 
 ness as the form of the divine first principle. From the 
 practical point of view the value of the four great 
 human institutions is, that through the family infant 
 humanity is protected and nurtured; through the or- 
 ganization of civil society the individual human being 
 is fed, clothed, sheltered, and enlarged by participa- 
 tion in the wider human experience; through the state 
 justice is meted to responsible men; through the 
 corporate life of the church altruism becomes the in- 
 carnate ideal. From the psychologic point of view 
 the value of the family lies in its development of the 
 feeling of love; the value of civil society, in its substi- 
 tution of reciprocal service for selfish greed; the value 
 of the state, in its power so to quicken the sense of 
 corporate selfhood that for its sake the individual is 
 ready to renounce his life; and the value of the 
 church, in its appeal to those celestial impulses of 
 faith, hope, and charity which are the emotional 
 equivalents of a compelling insight into the nature of 
 divine reality as absolute Gliedganzes. 
 
 Passing from the summarized values of religion and 
 ethics to those of language, and considering language 
 first in its formal aspect, we define its psychologic 
 values as the gift of power to see universals, and the 
 development of introspective activity in deepening 
 degrees. Its objective values are that it is the instru- 
 ment of human combination and of rational invest!-
 
 38 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 gation, and that in its structure it reveals the essential 
 nature of thought. In its aesthetic aspect as literature 
 its objective merits are that it assists human combina- 
 tion through increasing man's power to understand his 
 fellows; that it reveals the nature of human institu- 
 tions and the trend of history; and that hi the formal 
 elements of rhythm, symmetry, and harmony it 
 enshrines the structure of reason. From the psycho- 
 logic point of view the merits of literature are that by 
 its exact and subtle distinctions it makes men aware 
 of their own inarticulate depths, and confers upon 
 them some degree of ability to define themselves; and 
 that by tracing the evolution of actions and habits 
 out of feelings and ideas, it stimulates introspective 
 and retrospective activity, and makes men aware of 
 their own process of becoming. 
 
 The three great values considered lead all others in 
 every stage of the educational process. The remaining 
 values differ in their relative rank in different stages 
 of that process. For example, the relative ranks of 
 mathematics and the fine arts differ in the kinder- 
 garten and the elementary school, as do also the rela- 
 tive ranks of the sciences and industries. In the re- 
 mainder of this report we limit ourselves to that order- 
 ing of educational values which, tested by the standard 
 of the Gliedganzes, seems appropriate to the best devel- 
 opment of children between the ages of four and six. 
 
 It has been said more than once in this report that 
 only a self-conscious being can be a Gliedganzes, 
 because only in self-consciousness can a generic 
 energy duplicate itself in its product. It has also been 
 stated that self-consciousness is the realized form of
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 39 
 
 self-activity. The justification for this statement is 
 that in self -consciousness alone is the self -active energy 
 its own environment. It follows that the ascending 
 stages of human development may be described as 
 ascending degrees of the realization of self-activity, 
 in self -consciousness, and it also follows that the order 
 of this ascent should determine the order of education. 
 In short, self-activity is the principle of psychology, 
 and therefore should be the consciously accepted 
 principle of education. 
 
 Granting that self -activity is the principle of psy- 
 chology and education, we set ourselves the intro- 
 spective task of observing what it does and soon dis- 
 cover in ourselves one invariable method of pro- 
 cedure. We act: then we become conscious of as much 
 of ourselves as that action reveals; finally we reflect 
 on the form of the activity itself and thereby ascend 
 to higher self-knowledge. This method of self -activity 
 justifies the educational procedure of the kindergarten, 
 which for children between the ages of four and six 
 assigns a higher value to the practical and fine arts 
 than to science and mathematics. It is through self- 
 expression in the several forms of industry and the 
 several forms of the fine arts that the native curiosity 
 of children is directed towards the simpler questions 
 which science asks and answers, and it is through 
 the relations of form, size, number, and proportion to 
 practical problems of construction that native interest 
 in mathematics is best developed. Hence, the fourth 
 place in the order of educational values as represented 
 in the kindergarten must be assigned to the practical 
 and fine arts.
 
 40 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 THE FOURTH GREAT EDUCATIONAL VALUE: THE 
 INDUSTRIES AND THE FINE ARTS 
 
 Having given our reasons for assigning to the prac- 
 tical and fine arts a relatively high rank in the order 
 of kindergarten education we must now consider their 
 more general significance as two of the great human 
 values. We begin with the value of industry, not 
 because we rank it higher in the educational order 
 than the value of the fine arts, but because it will be 
 easier to show the superior value of the latter after 
 consideration of the former. 
 
 The Value of Industry 
 
 In a pregnant passage of the Education of Man, 
 Froebel attacks the conventional view that the chief 
 end of industry is the supply of material needs. "The 
 debasing illusion," he writes, "that man works, pro- 
 duces, creates only in order to preserve his body, in 
 order to secure food, clothing, and shelter, may have 
 to be endured, but should not be diffused and propa- 
 gated. Primarily and in truth man works that his 
 spiritual, divine essence may assume outward form, 
 and that thus he may be enabled to recognize his own 
 spiritual, divine nature and the universal being of 
 God. Whatever food, clothing, and shelter he obtains 
 thereby comes to him as an insignificant surplus." 1 
 
 The two distinctive deeds of man throughout the 
 centuries are the making over of himself and the mak- 
 ing over of the world. The objective value of industry 
 is that it is the instrument through which the trans- 
 formation, or re-creation, of the world is effected, and 
 1 The Education of Man, p. 32.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 41 
 
 the final motive of industry is the desire of the creative 
 divine spirit immanent in man to fulfill the purpose 
 of the same spirit immanent in nature. "If," writes 
 Professor Miinsterberg, "we observe the economic 
 factors, wherever commercial and industrial life find 
 their proudest development, we must feel that egotistic 
 greediness has been on the whole the small coin in the 
 market, but that all great transitions and develop- 
 ments demanded very different impulses. To create, 
 and to create with the whole soul for that wonderful 
 work of the economic development is the desire and 
 the ambition of the true worker. The gam is estimated 
 because it indicates that the problem is solved, and 
 that the conquest is completed; and that which is 
 earned is used again for new progress. To take part 
 in the work, to toil for the enterprise, is the joy of 
 life. In pioneer days it comes to its most enthusiastic 
 expression. Young and old, poor and rich, are joined 
 by the one feeling that it is a gigantic work which 
 they are to build up together. To open a land, to 
 make the desert fertile, to dig out the treasures of the 
 soil, and to send the works of industry over the globe, 
 to awaken in the millions new and ever new demands, 
 to satisfy them in a million ways that is an inspir- 
 ation and ideal which stands, in the feeling of the 
 worker, not lower than justice and freedom and truth 
 and morality. Where one blade grew and two are now 
 growing, where one railroad track went through the 
 valley and now two are built, where one chimney 
 smoked and now a thousand testify to useful labor, 
 there an absolutely valid progress has been secured 
 by which the world has become more valuable. And
 
 42 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 such a noble view of economic life is detachable from 
 the soil as well as art and philosophy; it can spread 
 and has always spread at the periods of the golden 
 ages of industry." 1 
 
 The ideal described frees us from the debasing illu- 
 sion that industry is merely the means by which man 
 supplies his material needs, and defines it as a more or 
 less conscious effort to complete the desire for develop- 
 ment in nature by helping nature to fulfill its mission 
 as servitor of man. "Economy," writes the author 
 already quoted, "is always a system of natural goods 
 serving the human community." Conceiving nature 
 "in its purposive adjustment as the real content of 
 economy, the way is open to estimate economy also 
 as pure value. " The community which satisfies its 
 hunger and protects itself against the climate, or which, 
 many stages higher, gathers together the treasures of 
 the globe by steamers and railroads to enjoy life, ful- 
 fills only personal purposes. But the nature which 
 nourishes and protects man, and in endless transforma- 
 tion distributes itself everywhere in order to fulfill the 
 human purpose, really offers an over-personal value." 
 "Just as the conscious labor of the arts alone can com- 
 plete that aim of the outer world towards inner unity 
 which manifests itself in the beauty of nature, in the 
 same way the desire for development in nature com- 
 pletes itself only in the industrial life." 2 
 
 The thesis maintained in the passages cited is that 
 through industry man satisfies a desire and realizes a 
 purpose resident in nature. Reverting to the concep- 
 
 1 MUnaterberg, Eternal Value*, pp. 308-09. 
 
 MUnsterberg. Eternal Value*, pp. 310, 311. 316.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 43 
 
 tion of the Gliedganzes and reminding ourselves of its 
 final implication, we would complete this thesis by 
 defining matter as a "mode of motion of spirit," and 
 by the statement that in the light of this definition 
 fulfillment of a desire resident in nature really means 
 fulfillment of the will of God. It is the spirit immanent 
 in nature which feels the desire; it is through the self- 
 sacrifice of that spirit in taking upon itself the lowly 
 form of matter that man is blessed with a world which 
 he can re-create and thereby realize in himself the 
 image of his creator. 
 
 Epitomizing this discussion of the values of industry, 
 we may say that through the practical arts the pur- 
 posive aim of nature is realized, and thereby the divine 
 will energetic in nature is fulfilled. It is not claimed 
 that a conscious awareness of and sympathy with this 
 will is characteristic of the great majority of workers. 
 The claim is, rather, that industrial life should be ele- 
 vated by awakening in the minds of all laborers the 
 ideal of which it is the expression. The industrial 
 world has proved by the invention of special vocations 
 that it understands one great feature of economy. The 
 joy which comes to each worker who has found the 
 vocation to which he is adapted by native gifts and 
 impulses should give him some presentiment of the 
 meaning of all vocations as instruments for realizing 
 ideals resident in nature and wakening to conscious- 
 ness in the mind of man. 
 
 If man be really a Gliedganzes, if he can realize 
 that ideal only as he becomes truly self-knowing, and 
 if he can attain self-knowledge only by putting himself 
 out of himself, and then looking at what he has done,
 
 44 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 then, tested by the standard we have adopted, the 
 practical arts have an inalienable right to a place in 
 the educational process because they are among the 
 important instruments of self-revelation. It does not 
 fall within the province of this report to discuss the 
 agencies through which education in the arts should 
 be given to older children. We limit ourselves to con- 
 fession of our conviction that they have a distinct 
 place and value in the kindergarten, and we offer as 
 reasons for our conviction the two facts already 
 pointed out, that exercises in the practical arts satisfy 
 the native desire for creative activity and meet the 
 psychologic demand that the mind shall express in 
 order to know itself. 
 
 It is a fact, fraught with deeper meaning than many 
 of us realize, that the practical arts tend constantly 
 to take on the form of the fine arts. The cultivation 
 of the soil is a practical art, but the garden, with its 
 rhythmic arrangements, its contrasts of light and 
 shade, its accordant colors, and its consciously studied 
 adjustments to the surrounding landscape, is a work 
 of fine art. Pottery and weaving are practical arts, 
 but the vessels which man shapes into fair proportions 
 and the rhythmic and symmetric designs with which 
 he adorns his fabrics are works of fine art. The rude 
 hut built for shelter against the elements is a work of 
 industry, but the forum and temple with their harmon- 
 ies of adjustment are works of fine art. This tendency 
 of the practical arts to take on the form of the fine 
 arts is explained by the fact that man puts himself into 
 whatever he does, and since he is intrinsically a self- 
 active being "the shining of self -activity " will be
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 45 
 
 manifest in the work of his hands. The "shining of 
 self-activity," as we shall attempt to show, is beauty, 
 and wherever man creates beauty he creates a work 
 of fine art. 
 
 Plato's definition of the beautiful as "the splendor 
 of the true" has become so familiar that its meaning 
 has been lost. It is only really understood when inter- 
 preted in the light of his insight into the self-moved as 
 divine first principle of the universe. Self-movement 
 is another name for self-activity, and the philosopher 
 who recognizes self-activity as final truth can only 
 mean by the "splendor of the true" the "shining of 
 self -activity " in and through material things. "One 
 of the good definitions of art," writes Dr. Harris, 
 "describes it as a means of manifesting the divine in 
 material form for the apprehension of the senses and 
 the reason. This definition makes art one of the 
 three highest products of the soul. The three highest 
 activities of the soul deal with the beautiful, the good, 
 and the true. Religion deals with the revelation of the 
 divine as good; art deals with its manifestation as the 
 beautiful; and philosophy deals with the definition of 
 the divine for pure thought." 1 Defining the divine as 
 realized self-activity, we define beauty as the manifes- 
 tation of self -activity, whether in the works of nature or 
 of art. 
 
 The first characteristic of self-activity is that it is 
 self-originated, and therefore free. It follows that 
 objects are beautiful in so far as they reveal freedom. 
 We are potentially free beings and denizens of a uni- 
 verse which may be best described as a struggle to- 
 1 Psychologic Foundations of Education, p. 351.
 
 46 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 wards freedom. Any object is beautiful which suggests 
 either the struggle for freedom, the devout aspiration 
 towards freedom, or the physical adumbration of free- 
 dom. Beautiful is the serene moonlight and its reflec- 
 tion in the tossing sea; beautiful the mountain which 
 aspires towards the sky; beautiful the free flight of the 
 bird; beautiful the athlete who has made of each limb 
 the willing servitor of free energy; beautiful the face 
 which expresses the triumph of the free spirit over all 
 chaotic and warring impulses. 
 
 Defining beauty as the shining of self-activity and 
 art as the manifestation of the beautiful, we conclude 
 that " material things become works of art when they 
 are so disposed that they seem to manifest the self- 
 determination of a living soul within them." 1 We 
 demand of a work of art that it shall seem to be alive 
 both as a whole and in its parts. "To a sympathetic 
 vision," writes Professor Sturt, "the stones and beams 
 of the cathedral are severally instinct with life. The 
 strong straight pillars sustain the upper fabric with an 
 air of well-girt purpose; the arches spring; the timbers 
 knit the roof; the buttresses thrust sturdily against the 
 pressure of the roof; the spire soars into the sky. The 
 eye instinctively interprets these dead mechanic things 
 in terms of living power; and those forms are grateful 
 to it which assist its instinctive interpretation." 2 In 
 short, the unifying principle of art is interest in a vital 
 whole. 
 
 A self-activity must first of all act. Its action, in so 
 far as it is self-determined, is free. Hence beauty, or 
 the "shining of self-activity," is, as we have seen, 
 
 1 Professor Sturt, Personal Idealism, p. 297. * Ibid., p. 297.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 47 
 
 primarily a revelation of freedom. In acting, however, 
 an indivisible self-activity necessarily creates an or- 
 ganic unity, or in other words its product is a living 
 whole wherein each part is both means and end to all 
 other parts and to the whole. If, therefore, the end of 
 art is beauty, and beauty is the shining of self -activity, 
 all works of art must not only reveal freedom, but must 
 exhibit that organic character which results whenever 
 manifold parts or elements are made instrumental to 
 the manifestation of a single meaning or purpose. The 
 natural organism which manifests most completely 
 the highest type of self-activity is the human form. 
 Hence the greatest works of art take on this form. 
 Hence also man tends to view as quasi-personal, 
 " every totality which subserves meaning in a way an- 
 alogous to the human body." 1 
 
 It has been shown that since man is a self-active 
 being he will so dispose the material things through 
 which he expresses himself that they will manifest 
 freedom and exhibit organic unity. There remains for 
 consideration the significant fact that precisely as in 
 freedom and organic unity man celebrates the sub- 
 stance or nature of self-activity, so through the manner 
 in which he disposes material he exhibits in ascending 
 degrees the structure of that self -consciousness which 
 is the realized form of self-activity. 
 
 Analyzing self-consciousness we discover that it 
 implies, first, identity of the self with the self; second, 
 distinction of the self from the self; third, the active 
 process of mediation between the self as subject and 
 the self as object, whose outcome is the pervasion of 
 1 Personal Idealism., p. 298.
 
 48 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 all the details of thought and life by a single meaning. 
 Differently stated, in its primary and most abstract 
 self-recognition the Ego can only say I am I; ascend- 
 ing to higher self-knowledge, it defines itself not only 
 as identical, but as antithetical; attaining its highest 
 consciousness, it knows itself as a unity pervading a 
 manifold of distinctions. 
 
 When we study the history of the fine arts, we be- 
 come aware of an order of development correspondent 
 to the several phases of this analysis of self-conscious- 
 ness. In the earliest stage of its history, the exclusive 
 accent of each art is upon regularity or rhythmic suc- 
 cession, and through the tireless iteration of a single 
 sound, or a single architectural, graphic, or plastic 
 element, the self symbolizes that identity which is the 
 primordial fact of conscious intelligence. In the next 
 higher stage of development, emphasis is placed upon 
 symmetry which expresses not abstract sameness, but 
 identity under difference. In its highest forms, art 
 "boldly discards both regularity and symmetry as 
 chief ends, while retaining them in subordinate details, 
 and concentrates its effort upon that expression of the 
 subordination of matter to the soul to which has been 
 given the name of harmony. The Apollo Belvedere, for 
 example, has no symmetry of arrangement in its limbs 
 and yet the disposition of each limb suggests a differ- 
 ent disposition of another in order to accomplish some 
 conscious act upon which the mind of the god is bent. 
 All is different, yet all is united in harmony for the 
 realization of one purpose." l In a word, harmony is 
 
 1 Psychologic Foundations of Education, p. S56. I have taken the 
 liberty of making some condensations and transpositions.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 49 
 
 that particular disposition of material things through 
 which organic unity is manifested, and as an art form 
 it corresponds to the highest stage of self -consciousness, 
 which knows itself as an identity pervading its own 
 differences. 
 
 The careful reader of this report will have observed 
 that, while in the discussion of literature attention 
 was concentrated chiefly upon its content, the discus- 
 sion of the fine arts has concentrated attention chiefly 
 upon their form. All that has been said of the form 
 of the fine arts in general applies to literature, which 
 like architecture, sculpture, painting, and music 
 reveals the distinctive quality of self-activity which is 
 freedom; creates the organic unities which, alike in 
 life and thought, are the integrated expressions of 
 self -activity, and in the sensuous elements of rhythm, 
 symmetry, and harmony adumbrates the structure of 
 self-activity. Conversely, all that was said of the con- 
 tent of literature is true of the content of the other 
 arts, which like literature portray the collisions of 
 passion with a rational social order; the conflict of 
 lower and higher ethical ideals and the ascending 
 insights into Divine Reality. 
 
 Comparison between the Industries and the Fine Arts 
 
 Having considered the respective functions of the 
 industries and fine arts, it is not difficult to show that 
 in the order of educational values the latter take 
 precedence of the former. In both the industries and 
 the fine arts man transforms or re-creates the objects 
 of nature; in both the final incentive of activity is self- 
 revelation in the interest of self-knowledge; but the
 
 50 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 self-revelation of man in the fine arts is far more com- 
 plete than in the practical arts because it unveils the 
 structural form of reason. It is something to build a 
 hut: more to build a Parthenon; something to shape a 
 basin: more to model a Jove; something to stain a floor 
 or dye a cloth: more to paint a Transfiguration. It 
 means something to the little child to practice the 
 industries, but it means far more to receive an initia- 
 tion into the fine arts. 
 
 The mystic Plotinus says of nature that she is greedy 
 of beholding herself. Therefore she completes the 
 process of her self-development in man. Translating 
 this thought into language determined by the concep- 
 tion of the Gliedganzes, we affirm that the divine 
 spirit immanent in nature cannot be satisfied until it 
 duplicates its own form in a self-conscious being. As 
 participant in the divine form man in turn will 
 be greedy of beholding himself; will aspire to create 
 images of freedom and organic unity ; and will impress 
 upon his creations those ascending forms of order 
 which are ascending revelations of the structure of self- 
 consciousness. 
 
 THE FIFTH GREAT EDUCATIONAL VALUE: MATHEMATICS 
 
 Reverting once more to the fact that this report 
 attempts the double task of discussing the great 
 human values in and of themselves and of ordering 
 them in their relation to the education of children 
 between the ages of four and six, we remind our readers 
 that the industries and fine arts were granted prece- 
 dence over mathematics because of the psychologic 
 order of development. To those who have compre-
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 51 
 
 bended that order it should be evident that through 
 creative exercises in the several forms of the practical 
 and fine arts there will be awakened in the minds of 
 children a sense of mathematical relations and a 
 demand for mathematical aid, and that with this 
 emergence of mathematics into the field of conscious- 
 ness it should be granted its own distinct place in the 
 circle of educational activities. With this brief state- 
 ment of our reason for its assignment to the fifth place 
 in the educational order of the kindergarten, we pass 
 on to consider its several values in the process of 
 education as a whole. 
 
 The traditional course of study in elementary and 
 secondary schools assigns high importance to mathe- 
 matics in the several forms of arithmetic, algebra, 
 geometry, and trigonometry. The practical value of 
 this course in mathematics is that it confers upon 
 students some degree of mastery of the instrument 
 through which man theoretically and practically mas- 
 ters nature. Without mathematics that discovery of 
 quantitative relations which is the greatest deed of 
 science would be impossible. Without mathematics 
 there could be no adequate development of the prac- 
 tical arts. To mathematics we owe our ability to make 
 that estimate of the relative values of different kinds 
 of labor upon which depends the interchange of pro- 
 ducts, and to the same great discipline we are indebted 
 in large measure for development of the machines 
 which are emancipating men from drudgery and com- 
 pelling them to qualify themselves for higher forms of 
 economic activity. Finally, it is by the help of mathe- 
 matics that we estimate those quantitative relations
 
 52 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 whose knowledge is so indispensable to the successful 
 struggle with poverty, illness, vice, and crime. 
 
 Greater than the utilitarian values of mathematics 
 are its psychologic values. The first of these is that, 
 through concentrating attention upon universal and 
 necessary truths, mathematics confers mental stability 
 and equipoise. It has been defined as "the science 
 which draws necessary conclusions," and again, as 
 "the universal art apodictic." 1 For whether mathe- 
 matical concepts have been evolved from experience 
 or are free creations of the mind, the relations between 
 these concepts are necessary and absolute, and hence 
 the study of mathematics is one great instrument of 
 deliverance from the conception of truth as a man- 
 made product which changes with man in the process 
 of interaction between himself and his environment. 
 
 The second psychologic value of mathematics is 
 that it involves a transition from the thought of each 
 object, as related to an environment different from 
 itself, towards the thought of self-relation. The 
 mathematical studies of elementary and secondary 
 schools deal with the category of quantity. This cate- 
 gory, as Dr. Harris points out, involves a double 
 thought. "It first thinks thing and environment 
 (quality) and then thinks both as the same in kind 
 or as repetitions of the same. A thing becomes a unit 
 when it is repeated so that it is within an environment 
 of duplicates of itself." "It is manifest that we cannot 
 count objects except in so far as we abstract from their 
 
 1 Definitions by Professor Benjamin Peirce and Professor 
 William Benjamin Smith, cited by Professor Keyser in his mono- 
 graph on Mathematics.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 53 
 
 difference. We can count one, two, three oxen, but we 
 cannot say that one ox, one sheep, and one tree are 
 three oxen, or three sheep, or three trees ; but we can 
 say that they are three things, or three units of any 
 class that includes them. We must abstract from their 
 quality, that which distinguishes them from others, 
 and go back to a common class in order to count 
 them. The same is true of all extensive magnitude. 
 We must regard the mass as made up of similar units 
 of extension. Take together a cubic yard of wood and 
 the same amount of sand, and we do not have two 
 cubic yards of sand or of wood; but we do have two 
 cubic yards of material substance. In short, in order 
 to have quantity there must be some common genus 
 or species and repetitions of the same individual." 1 
 
 Let us suppose for a moment that there existed in 
 the world but a single specimen of each given object. 
 We should then speak of the house, the tree, the apple, 
 but we should not speak of one house; one tree; one 
 apple; nor of a house, a tree, or an apple. One means 
 component unit of a group of similar ones, or, in other 
 words, it means one member of a class of objects. 
 Membership in a class implies common origin. The 
 members of any true class are simply a number of 
 individual objects produced in the same way, or for 
 the same final purpose. Broadly speaking, productive 
 processes are of three kinds the mechanical pro- 
 cesses of inorganic nature, the generative processes of 
 the vegetable and animal worlds, and the adaptive 
 processes by which human beings convert objects of 
 nature to their own uses. To illustrate, the first kind 
 1 Psychologic Foundations of Education, pp. 342-43.
 
 54 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 of process sand is defined as small grains of stone 
 derived from the disintegration of rocks ; snow is the 
 vapor of the atmosphere congealed by cold and aggre- 
 gated into flakes. Passing to the classes of the organic 
 world, it may be claimed that if evolution has proved 
 any one thing more clearly than another, it is that the 
 word class in biology stands for a number of plants or 
 animals having a common ancestry. Ascending from 
 the works of nature to the works of man, the same 
 conception of class meets us as the only satisfactory 
 one. Tables, for example, are objects made by similar 
 processes for common ends, and the same is true of 
 houses, bridges, railways, and all other objects of 
 human production. They can only be defined in terms 
 of the purposes for which, and the processes by which, 
 they are produced. In short, to think a class is to 
 think a causal energy and its products. 
 
 It is not contended that mathematics directs con- 
 scious attention to classes conceived as generative 
 energies plus their products, but merely that even in 
 its most elementary form it involves withdrawal from 
 the stage of sense perception which thinks object and 
 environment, and a leap of the mind towards the 
 thought of self-relation. 
 
 The third psychologic value of mathematics is that 
 in its ascending forms it demands constantly increas- 
 ing degrees of introspective activity. This demand 
 becomes clear to us when we consider that all forms of 
 mathematics deal with ratios, and that the difference 
 between elementary and higher mathematics is that 
 the former deals more with the terms of the ratio, the 
 latter with the ratio itself. "In counting, the ratio
 
 THE KINDERGAETEN 55 
 
 between any given sum and its constituent units is 
 merely stated in terms of the constituent unit. Addi- 
 tion, subtraction, multiplication, and division are 
 devices for speed by using remembered countings." 
 The fraction is "an expressed ratio of two numbers." 
 A further step is taken in considering the relation of 
 a single number to itself as power and root. Algebra 
 "drops out the definite expression of the two orders of 
 units between which the ratio exists and deals alto- 
 gether with ratios." Higher mathematics deals with 
 the relations of ratio. It is needless to do more than 
 suggest that the advance from the simple to the com- 
 plex relations of ratios involves deepening degrees of 
 introspective analysis. 1 
 
 Great as are the utilitarian and psychologic values 
 of mathematics, they are surpassed by its higher 
 objective value as an exploration and projection of the 
 world of logic or pure thought. "It should be borne in 
 mind," writes Professor Keyser, "that there are two 
 kinds of observation: outer and inner, objective and 
 subjective, material and immaterial, sensuous and 
 sense-transcending; observation, that is, of physical 
 things by the bodily senses, and observation, by the 
 inner eye, by the subtle touch of the intellect, of the 
 entities that dwell in the domain of logic and consti- 
 tute the objects of pure thought. For, phrase it as you 
 will, there is a world peopled with ideas, ensembles, 
 propositions, relations, and implications, in endless 
 variety and multiplicity, in structure ranging from the 
 
 1 See Psychologic Foundations of -Education, pp. 344-50, and the 
 Report of the Committee of Fifteen, pp. 242-44. See "Development of 
 Mathematics and their Mutual Relations," by George H. Howison, 
 Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. v, pp. 144-79.
 
 56 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 very simple to the endlessly intricate and complex." 1 
 "Now, and this is the point I wish to stress, just 
 as the astronomer, the physicist, the geologist, or other 
 student of objective science looks abroad in the world 
 of sense, so, not metaphorically speaking but literally, 
 the mind of the mathematician goes forth into the 
 universe of logic in quest of the things that are there; 
 exploring the heights and depths for facts ideas, 
 classes, relationships, and the rest." 2 Finally the math- 
 ematician not only explores the inner world, but he 
 also projects it. Says the author already quoted: "To 
 facilitate eyeless observation of his sense-transcending 
 world, the mathematician invokes the aid of physical 
 diagrams and physical symbols in endless variety and 
 combination; the logos is thus drawn into a kind of 
 diagrammatic and symbolical incarnation, gets itself 
 externalized, made flesh, so to speak; and it is by at- 
 tentive physical observation of this embodiment, by 
 scrutinizing the physical frame and make-up of his 
 diagrams, equations, and formulae, by experimental 
 substitutions in, and transformations of, them, by 
 noting what emerges as essential and what as acci- 
 dental, the things that vanish and those that do not, 
 the things that vary and the things that abide un- 
 changed, as the transformations proceed and trains 
 of algebraic evolution unfold themselves to view it 
 is thus, by the laboratory method, by trial and by 
 watching, that often the mathematician gains his best 
 insight into the constitution of the invisible world thus 
 depicted by visible symbols." * 
 
 1 Cassius Jackson Keyser, Mathematict, p. 25. 
 /M-, pp- 85-86. Ibid.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 57 
 
 It has been shown that mathematics explores and 
 projects the facts and relations of mind. It remains to 
 be said that pure logic "is the theory of the mere form 
 of thinking"; 1 or to state the same truth in terms 
 determined by the conception of the Gliedganzes, pure 
 logic is an explication of the mode of behavior of that 
 self-determining energy which achieves in self-con- 
 sciousness its perfect realization. With this insight we 
 define mathematics as an exploration and projection 
 not only of the contents of mind, but of the structure 
 of mind, and therefore as a discipline which breaks one 
 more path towards the conception of a completely 
 realized self-consciousness as absolute first principle 
 of the universe and towards the conception of man as 
 duplicate of the divine form. 
 
 THE SIXTH GREAT EDUCATIONAL VALUE: SCIENCE 
 
 In his Grammar of Science, Professor Karl Pearson 
 asserts that "the classification of facts and the forma- 
 tion of absolute judgments upon the basis of this 
 classification, judgments independent of the idio- 
 syncrasies of the individual mind, essentially sum 
 up the aim and method of modern science." 2 On a 
 later page this statement is amplified and illustrated as 
 follows: "The unity of all science consists in its method, 
 not in its material. The man who classifies facts of any 
 kind whatever, who sees their mutual relations and 
 describes their sequences, is applying the scientific 
 method and is a man of science. The facts may belong 
 
 1 Professor Royce, The Problem of Truth in the Light of Recent 
 Research. For an explanation of the "form of thinking," see Part 
 in of this report. 
 
 2 Karl Pearson, Grammar of Science, p. 6.
 
 58 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 to the past history of mankind, to the social statistics 
 of our great cities, to the atmosphere of the most dis- 
 tant stars, to the digestive organs of a worm or to the 
 life of a scarcely visible bacillus. It is not the facts 
 themselves which form science but the method in 
 which they are dealt with." l 
 
 To all who accept this definition it must be evident 
 that the category of science is relativity. Relativity 
 means dependence. Since each thing is relative to 
 every other there is reciprocal dependence. To truly 
 apprehend any object is to apprehend the totality of 
 its relations. Discovery of this totality of relations is 
 the goal of science. That the goal is an endlessly reced- 
 ing one does not alter the fact that it determines the 
 direction of all scientific activity. 
 
 The objective values of science can scarcely be 
 overestimated. This great discipline is transfiguring 
 our domestic, economic, political, and religious creeds. 
 It is modifying social conduct. It is changing the treat- 
 ment of disease and forcing a serious consideration of 
 all the tendencies of contemporary civilization which 
 conspire to produce a degenerate and feeble race. It 
 has revolutionized our means of transit, indefinitely 
 increased the agencies of intercommunion, and proved 
 itself one of the mightiest of the many influences now 
 cooperating towards the creation of that cosmopolitan 
 humanity wherein the ideal of the Gliedganzes shall 
 be approximately realized. 
 
 Passing from the objective to the psychologic values 
 of science, we would mention, as the first of these, that 
 science disciplines the mind to think essential relations. 
 1 Karl Pearson, Grammar of Science, p. 12.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 59 
 
 It is the great path of escape from that mischievous 
 habit of arbitrary analogizing which led the pigeon in 
 Wonderland to brand Alice as a serpent because she 
 ate eggs. It is also the instrument of emancipation from 
 puerile superstitions belonging to the neolithic plane 
 of intelligence, yet still tyrannizing the minds and weak- 
 ening the wills of the great majority of human beings. 
 
 A second psychologic value of science is that it forms 
 the habit of suspending judgment and testing infer- 
 ences. It seeks no short cuts to reality. It knows no 
 "holy back stairs." It dares to call its inferences 
 working hypotheses and subjects them -to the most 
 rigorous tests before promoting them even to the rank 
 of accredited theories. The discipline of science tends, 
 therefore, to develop intellects whose processes are 
 rigorous and whose conclusions are sound. 
 
 The moral influence of science is an exalted one. The 
 scientist is a votary of the search for truth. He is 
 prompt to surrender his dearest hypothesis if it fail 
 to bear the experimental test. He renounces prejudice 
 and pride of opinion. He loves truth more than any 
 preconceived idea of truth. He is "an endless experi- 
 menter with no constraining past at his back" and his 
 mind is plastic to the full extent that the growth of 
 knowledge requires. 
 
 The final psychologic value of science is that through 
 disciplining the mind to think essential relations it con- 
 fers upon its loyal votaries the power to "see by 
 wholes." " Agassiz," writes Dr. Harris, " saw the whole 
 fish in a single scale; Lyell could read the history of 
 the glacial period in a pebble; Cuvier could see the 
 entire animal skeleton in one of its bones. The spirit
 
 60 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 of specialization aims to exhaust one by one the 
 provinces of investigation with a view to acquire this 
 power to see totalities." 1 
 
 In the Second Part of Faust, Goethe has pictured the 
 outcome of scientific specialization under the image 
 of Homunculus, the little man in the bottle. He has 
 also pictured the aspiration of science in the longing of 
 Homunculus to break his bottle. He who really sees 
 a relative whole will desire to see the inclusive or abso- 
 lute whole. Hence science continually aims to extend 
 the vision of totalities from mere limited provinces of 
 the world to the world itself. 
 
 While the ultimate aim of science cannot be realized 
 in any finite time, we must be forever grateful to this 
 great discipline for the bridge it has even now con- 
 structed between the conception of the cosmos as an 
 infinitude of particulars to the conception of the cos- 
 mos as an interrelated totality. For, as has been said, 
 the category of science is relativity, and, as may now 
 be added, universal relativity implies an independent 
 self-related whole. If A depends upon B and B in turn 
 depends upon A, then both A and B are complemental 
 elements of a whole which includes and transcends 
 them. 
 
 As the supreme practical achievement of science is 
 the universal intercommunion through which cosmo- 
 politan humanity (the human Gliedganzes) shall be 
 created, so its supreme theoretical achievement is the 
 transition it makes from the category of atomism to 
 that category of self-relation which is an initial defini- 
 tion of the divine Gliedganzes. 
 
 1 See Psychologic Foundations of Education, pp. 86, 234.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 61 
 
 The survey and appraisement of educational values 
 now completed will have fulfilled its lesser purpose if 
 it convinces readers of this report that representatives 
 of the Froebelian ideal have a conscious standard by 
 which they seek to determine the subject-matter and 
 the goal of education. It will have accomplished its 
 greater purpose if it commends the criterion accepted 
 to the judgment of candid students. It seems to us 
 self-evident that the goal of education should be a true 
 world-view and a conforming life. It seems also self- 
 evident that if this goal be accepted, both the subject- 
 matter and method of education should be determined 
 by it. Finally, we are convinced that the substance 
 of a true world-view is embodied in the conception 
 of God as realized Gliedganzes, of man as potential 
 Gliedganzes, and of nature as a process whose goal is 
 a being possessing the form of self -consciousness. 
 
 In presenting the objective and psychologic values 
 of the several great educational norms, we have tried 
 to suggest that we conceive the supreme value of each 
 one of them to be the emancipation of the human spirit 
 by revelation of its ideal nature, and challenge to the 
 exercise of its free activity. Every human value is an 
 end to itself, not the instrument of an end external to 
 itself. Every human activity in so far as it takes on 
 ideal form becomes akin to play, 
 
 We conceive creation as an eternal play of the divine 
 spirit. We recognize in the plays of childhood a pri- 
 mary revelation of the free self-activity of the human 
 spirit. We conceive all great human values as higher 
 forms of play. The true lover of any great value de- 
 votes himself to it not because of a purpose it subserves,
 
 62 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 but because of the joy with which it blesses. The free 
 spirit seeks ever and alone its own worthy end 
 freedom. 
 
 It remains to be frankly confessed that we ourselves 
 do not believe our educational ideal can be realized 
 without regeneration of our entire social life. While 
 life is pagan, education cannot be truly Christian. We 
 hold that the substance of Christianity is embodied 
 in the conception of the Gliedganzes. We hold also 
 that in so far as Occidental civilization has a distinc- 
 tive and worthy impulse it is in the incarnation of this 
 ideal. We are convinced that the time has come when 
 our domestic, social, economic, political, and religious 
 life should be renewed through attempts for its more 
 adequate embodiment. We believe that the universal 
 unrest of men is the pledge of their confused search 
 for a higher social order. Froebel was wont to affirm 
 that the world needed renewal of life. Not until the 
 old order has changed, making way for the new, can 
 we achieve that unification of life which was his con- 
 fessed aim. Meanwhile we conceive the kindergarten 
 and the kindergarten normal school as agencies con- 
 spiring to the creation of that higher order necessary 
 to their own adequate embodiment.
 
 PART III 
 
 THE GENETIC-DEVELOPING METHOD 
 
 THE phrase genetic-developing method occurs for 
 the first time in educational literature in Froebel's 
 letter to the philosopher Krause written in 1828. 
 The following very general formula of that method 
 had been given in the Education of Man, published 
 in 1826: "Do this and observe what follows in this 
 particular case from thy action and to what knowl- 
 edge it leads thee." l In the letter to Krause this 
 formula is repeated and amplified. 
 
 "The point of departure for all manifestation, all 
 existence, all knowledge and insight, is Doing or the 
 Deed." 
 
 "From the deed, therefore, must true education 
 proceed; in the deed must it germinate; out of the 
 deed must it grow. Upon the deed must it found itself. 
 It proceeds from the living, creative deed; from the 
 creative, self-observant deed; from the deed which sees 
 into and through itself. All true doing instructs, 
 strengthens, creates, and is itself creative. Therefore 
 all true doing at its culmination point reacts to protect 
 life, to sustain life, to nurture life. Life, deed, recog- 
 nition, these are the three notes of a single chord. Now 
 the emphasis must be upon one note, now upon an- 
 other, now upon two united. When they are uncon- 
 1 Education of Man, p. 5.
 
 64 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 ditionally separated, the result is what we see and feel 
 so constantly in life, a struggle between life and death, 
 a suspension between the two." l 
 
 Thoughtful kindergartners are sometimes perplexed 
 by an apparent contradiction between these descrip- 
 tions of the genetic-developing method and the re- 
 current statement of Froebel that the point of depar- 
 ture for all human development is the heart. To quote 
 only one of these statements, we read in the Pedagogics 
 of the Kindergarten that "the center, the real founda- 
 tion, the starting-point of human development and 
 thus of the child's development, is the heart and emo- 
 tions: but the training to action and thought, the 
 corporeal and the spiritual goes on constantly and in- 
 separably by the side of it; and thought must form 
 itself into action and action resolve and clear itself 
 in thought, but both have their roots in the emotional 
 nature." * 
 
 The German word translated in this passage by the 
 phrase emotional nature is Gemuth. As used in the 
 writings of Froebel, this word always refers to the un- 
 diff erentiated totality of the spiritual nature and implies 
 the submergence of thought and will in that emotional 
 awareness which is the aboriginal mode of conscious- 
 ness. We cannot feel without feeling about something, 
 neither can we feel without a tendency to do some- 
 thing. On the other hand, feeling can only be known 
 as it is manifested. When a child smiles, we infer one 
 state of feeling, when he screams we infer another. 
 Running and romping indicate a tone of feeling dia- 
 
 1 Am FroebeT* Leben, pp. 141, 42. Italics are mine. 
 1 Pedagogic* of the Kindergarten, p. 42.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 65 
 
 metrically opposed to that suggested by a quiet pos- 
 ture, meditative eyes, and folded hands. In a word, 
 spontaneous deeds imply and reveal emotional atti- 
 tudes and it is in action as revealer of Gemiith that 
 education finds its point of departure. 
 
 If education is to begin with the deed, it is mani- 
 festly of great importance to know the kind of deed 
 with which it should begin. We must be generous 
 enough to acquit Froebel of the foolish fallacy that 
 it makes no difference what one does provided only 
 he is doing. The aim of the kindergarten is to induce 
 children to do the kind of deeds from which will follow 
 educative results. When little children act spontane- 
 ously, they act from some impulse. Whether such im- 
 pulses be good or bad, they are strengthened by ex- 
 pression. It is the duty of education to stimulate the 
 actions which express healthy impulses, and to restrain 
 the actions which express evil or morbid impulses. The 
 best way of restraining the latter is by inciting the 
 former. The little child vents his feeling of all kinds. 
 Out of these vented feelings we are to select those 
 whose reactions will result in forming the type of 
 character implied in the conception of man as Glied- 
 ganzes, and by carefully considered incitements we 
 are to get these selected deeds constantly repeated. 
 
 Thus far we have considered only that first demand 
 of the genetic-developing method which may be sum- 
 marized in the statement that children are to be edu- 
 cated through the incitement of selected forms of self- 
 expression. It should, however, be evident to any 
 student, who gives serious attention to Froebel's de- 
 scription of the method, that it is very imperfectly
 
 66 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 apprehended if it is limited to a demand for self- 
 expression even in selected forms. This limitation has 
 reacted most injuriously upon the practical conduct 
 of kindergartens, and it is therefore important to call 
 attention to the fact that as conceived by its originator 
 the genetic method demands not only self-expression, 
 but contemplation both of the product and process of 
 self-expression. It is not satisfied with the deed, but 
 insists upon the self-observant deed. It will tolerate 
 no lax and careless self -observation, but calls for the 
 self -penetrating deed; the deed which sees into and 
 through itself. Mental activity in all its forms in- 
 volves introspection, and introspection in turn often 
 involves retrospection. To the failure of education 
 to guide introspective activity are due many intellec- 
 tual perversions and moral catastrophes. It is there- 
 fore of the highest importance that children should be 
 helped to exercise sane introspection and wise retro- 
 spection. Let us be bold and avow our conviction 
 that Froebel's emphasis upon the "self -penetrating 
 deed " is no less novel and original than his emphasis 
 upon the creative deed, and that, unless we con- 
 sciously aim to influence creative, introspective, and 
 retrospective activity, we do not fully carry out the 
 genetic method. 
 
 It is easy to make Froebel's idea seem ridiculous 
 by imputing to him approval of degrees of introspec- 
 tion and ranges of retrospection which any sane person 
 would condemn. In a condensed statement it is dif- 
 ficult not to create misunderstanding. But kinder- 
 gartners who know the Mother Play will recognize 
 in its pictures and commentaries the delicate indirect-
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 67 
 
 ness and wise restraint with which both introspective 
 and retrospective activities are incited and guided. 
 The "All-Gone" picture, for example, aims to awaken 
 in children through varied illustrations of heedlessness 
 a nascent sense of the nature and consequences of 
 their own heedless acts. The "Little Window" and 
 the "Bridge" use visible analogues to quicken aware- 
 ness of emotional attitudes. The picture and com- 
 mentary which interpret the "Light-Bird" make a 
 transition from catching and holding with the hands 
 to catching with the eyes and holding with the mind. 
 In the commentary to the "Pigeon House," Froebel 
 describes a mother who helps her little child to over- 
 look the experience of a single day. The "Children 
 on the Tower" is the retrospect of a longer period, 
 and the "Little Artist" a bold attempt to make and 
 project a still more comprehensive survey of experi- 
 ence. The kindergartner who halts before the ideal 
 of encouraging some degree of introspective and retro- 
 spective activity must not only reject the pictures and 
 commentaries mentioned, but admit her lack of sym- 
 pathy with the spirit of the entire Mother Play. 
 
 It is in their relationship to moral development that 
 introspective and retrospective activities are most im- 
 portant, and the chief demand of the genetic method is 
 that a mass of subconscious experience shall not be 
 allowed to give direction to life and character, but 
 that from earliest childhood the free human being 
 shall be helped to take possession of himself. 
 
 Within the past two decades Froebel's view on this 
 subject has received indirect confirmation from an 
 unexpected source. The source referred to is the
 
 68 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 psycho-analytic method of studying functional ner- 
 vous disorders. The basis of this method is described 
 as follows by Dr. James J. Putnam, Professor of 
 Neurology at the Harvard Medical School: "The 
 method rests on the view that as each person's mental 
 life goes on, and almost from the moment of his birth, 
 he stores up the experiences, motives, and emotions 
 which are to largely form the basis of his character 
 and conduct by collecting them into two groups. The 
 first of these groups of experiences and emotions com- 
 prises those which represent the life we will to lead 
 or which we acquiesce in in other words, the life 
 of morals and conventions; the other group con- 
 tains those experiences and emotions which we cannot 
 utilize in our willed life and so strive to suppress and 
 hide even from ourselves." 
 
 The treatment of nervous disorders based upon this 
 view sets as its aim the unification of the self through 
 wisely guided introspection and retrospection. The 
 educational hint conveyed by the treatment is that 
 schism of the self might be prevented by helping chil- 
 dren from the beginning of life to face the experiences 
 they instinctively hide and suppress. 
 
 No person possessing the least degree of introspec- 
 tion can fail to be aware of a difference between his 
 ideal and actual self. Such awareness is, indeed, the 
 condition of moral progress. To be aware of an ideal 
 greater than our present achievement, but towards 
 which we are honestly and resolutely pressing, is, 
 however, a very different thing from the duplicity 
 which either indulges, tolerates, or hides an actual 
 self different from the self which we accept as ideal.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 69 
 
 There must be difference between vision and attain- 
 ment, but there need not be inner contradiction with 
 its correlates of hypocrisy and despair. 
 
 Every disciple of Froebel knows that he conceived 
 education as a process for the unification of life. He 
 consciously aimed to prevent that awful schism be- 
 tween the better and worse self which is the hidden 
 torment of so many human lives. He believed that j^b 
 little children might be so watched, guarded, and guided 
 as to preclude the subconscious accumulation of dis- 
 astrous tendencies, and he was sure that they should 
 be helped to face all their little sins and follies, and 
 
 instead of hiding them from themselves and others 
 
 - 
 
 
 look into and through them and turn away from them. 
 The word Sammlung, translated by the phrase inner - 
 collectedness, suggests the ideal of Froebel as it re- 
 lates to moral education. From the beginning of life 
 children shall be helped to deliver themselves from 
 slavery to imperative appetite and inordinate desire. 
 They shall look into and through the acts into which 
 they have been betrayed by heedlessness, greed, and 
 vanity, and through "the self -observant deed" master 
 the driving impulse. 
 
 Two demands of the genetic method have been con- 
 sidered. It begins with the deed. The deed must see 
 into and through itself. One more explanation must 
 be made before the method can be understood. We 
 are told it must move from life and that its outcome 
 is to protect, sustain, and nurture life. To interpret 
 this statement it is necessary to know the meanings 
 which for Froebel are stored up in the word life. A 
 careful scrutiny of his use of this term in many differ-
 
 70 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 ent contexts indicates that it means to him experience 
 in its twofold aspect, as, on the one hand, a series of 
 immediately presented persons, objects, and events, 
 and on the other as an immediate emotional response 
 to this presentation. The statement that education 
 must move from life means, therefore, that we must 
 seek our point of contact with children in immediate 
 presentations and native reactions. The statement 
 that the outcome of the genetic method is to nur- 
 ture life means that its final issue is the regeneration 
 of the emotional nature. Regeneration is effected 
 through selection from among immediate presenta- 
 tions and native reactions, of those having ideal value, 
 and through the creative, introspective, and retrospec- 
 tive activities by which these selected presentations 
 are assimilated. 
 
 The writer of this report halted long between alter- 
 native presentations of the genetic method. Allured 
 by the desire to present all of its implications in logical 
 order, she rebelled against the illustrations which dis- 
 tract attention from a process of thought in order to 
 clarify some one of its stages. But the rebellion of 
 intellect was overcome by the constraint of sympathy, 
 and in view of the fact that the primary object of this 
 report was to help kindergartners to clearer under- 
 standing of the kindergarten, it was decided that the 
 simpler implications of the genetic method should be 
 illustrated before passing on to consider those which 
 were more difficult. We therefore pause in our exposi- 
 tion of the method in order to apply our present 
 knowledge of it to the development of the first and 
 greatest educational value the value of Religion.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 71 
 
 THE GENETIC METHOD ILLUSTRATED THROUGH THE 
 EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 
 
 In the earlier part of this report an attempt was 
 made to discriminate between Christian theology and 
 the Christian religion* The Christian religion em- 
 bodies a mystic consciousness of God as transcendent, 
 immanent, and incarnate. Christian theology inven- 
 tories, organizes, and interprets the data of the Chris- 
 tian consciousness, and thereby attains the ontologic 
 insight defined in the conception of God as completely 
 objectified self-consciousness and therefore as com- 
 pletely realized Gliedganzes. The aim of Christian 
 education should be to provide a genetic development 
 of the normative experience through which the Chris- 
 tian consciousness is perpetuated. This normative 
 experience is dependence upon and communion with 
 a God whom we know as our Father; as incarnate 
 in a historic person; and as a spirit energizing within 
 our own souls and recognized by each one of us as also 
 immanent and energetic in all other souls. 
 
 The genetic development of this normative experi- 
 ence implies its possession by the person who assumes 
 the responsibility of religious education. She who 
 aspires to give Christian education should first of all 
 look honestly, piercingly, and persistently into herself, 
 in order to assure herself of her participation in the 
 Christian consciousness. A few questions may be 
 suggested which will blaze a path for this indispen- 
 sable act of introspection. 
 
 Do you know as a fact of inward experience that 
 something speaks within you which is greater than 
 yourself? Does this greater something sometimes
 
 72 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 appeal to you, sometimes warn you, sometimes chide 
 you, sometimes command, sometimes commend you? 
 Are you at peace when it approves and at war when it 
 condemns? Do you recognize the presence of this 
 greater something in other people as well as in yourself? 
 Do you know its voice when it speaks in great litera- 
 ture? Do you detect its lineaments when embodied in 
 great art? Do you recognize it as the unseen power 
 that guides human history and shapes human institu- 
 tions? Does it reveal itself to you in the speech of the 
 great prophets and the love of the saints? Are you 
 sure that in the words of One who speaks with author- 
 ity you hear its clearest utterances? If you can hon- 
 estly answer all these questions in the affirmative, 
 you are a participant in the religious experience whose 
 characteristic mark is its "immanent-transcendence" 
 and whose final presupposition is defined in the doc- 
 trine of the Holy Spirit. 
 
 When you have discovered in yourself this great 
 experience, ask yourself a second series of questions. 
 Do you know that this immanent -transcendent Spirit, 
 which you will now be ready to say is trying to get 
 itself incarnated in you, has succeeded in incarnating 
 itself more completely in other people than in your- 
 self? Are the heroes who die for great ideals, the 
 statesmen who consecrate themselves to the upbuild- 
 ing of noble states, the great missionaries flaming with 
 love for cannibals and lepers, more perfect incarna- 
 tions of the immanent-transcendent Spirit than you 
 or I? And finally, did this Spirit dwell most surely, 
 incarnate itself most completely, in the great historic 
 personality from whom our religion takes its name?
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 73 
 
 Whoever can answer these questions affirmatively is 
 a participant in that religious experience whose theo- 
 logical presupposition is the Logos or Incarnate Word. 
 It may seem strange that the religious experience 
 whose theological presupposition is the doctrine of an 
 Eternal Father has not been given priority over the 
 experiences defined in the doctrine of an indwelling 
 Spirit and an Eternal Logos. Is not the order of exper- 
 ience from the Father to the Son and the Spirit? It 
 is because we answer this question in the negative 
 that we have ventured to present the inverse order. 
 Doubtless we recognize a power which smites our eyes 
 in the lightning's flash and our ears in the thunder's 
 roar; which shakes our souls with terror when the storm 
 wind rages on land and sea, and which hovers before 
 intelligence in its most general form as the final in- 
 visible cause of all visible effects. But we do not know 
 this great First Cause as a loving Father until we have 
 learned to know the Spirit and the Son. It is the still 
 small voice of the divine within us and the concrete 
 revelation of the divine in the world which make pos- 
 sible apprehension of the transcendent and eternal 
 reality as a loving Father. Without the sense of com- 
 munity and the historic manifestation of self-sacrifice 
 we may know an omnipotent cause, but we cannot 
 know a God of love, who has given us the one perfect 
 gift Himself, and who asks of us the one adequate 
 return ourselves. 1 
 
 1 This statement must not be construed to mean that children 
 shall not begin to know a Heavenly Father until after they have 
 learned to know the Spirit and the Son. The analogy of human 
 fatherhood may suggest Divine Fatherhood. But a progressive 
 Christian experience follows the order indicated.
 
 74 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 If the foregoing description of Christian experience 
 be accepted, and if we wish to apply the genetic 
 method to the supreme educational value, we must 
 next seek the indigenous germs in the child's soul 
 from which may be developed the several conceptions 
 of God immanent, God incarnate, and God trans- 
 cendent. To epitomize thoughts which will be illus- 
 trated in the remainder of this section of our report, 
 there must be an evolution of the knowledge of God 
 as indwelling Spirit from the original sense of com- 
 munity; an evolution of God incarnate from concrete 
 embodiments of the divine self that slumbers, dreams, 
 and stirs in every human soul and from the struggle 
 within each soul between the divine and the natural 
 self. Finally, from the native impulse to search for 
 causes a path may be broken towards the thought 
 of a great first cause; and through the reaction of 
 the sense of community and the incarnate ideal upon 
 this thought there will develop the living conception 
 of Divine Fatherhood. 
 
 We read in the Education of Man that " the feeling 
 of community first uniting the child with mother, 
 father, brothers, and sisters, and resting on a higher 
 spiritual unity, to which later on is added the unmis- 
 takable discovery that father, mother, brothers, sisters, 
 human beings in general, feel and know themselves 
 to be in community and unity with a higher principle, 
 with humanity, with God, this feeling of com- 
 munity is the very first germ, the very first beginning of all 
 true religious spirit, of all genuine yearning for unhin- 
 dered unification with the eternal, with God." This 
 sense of community is explained as a stirring of the
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 75 
 
 immanent Spirit and it is added that "the Spirit that 
 lives and is manifest in the finite has an early though 
 dim feeling of its divine origin, and that this vague 
 sentiment, this exceedingly misty feeling, should be 
 fostered, strengthened, nurtured, and later on raised 
 into clear consciousness into full comprehension." l 
 
 Let us carefully epitomize the several statements in 
 this very suggestive paragraph. 
 I. The young child has a native feeling of commun- 
 ity with others. 
 II. He discovers that all the people who make up his 
 
 little world have communion with each other. 
 III. He recognizes likewise that they commune with 
 an invisible Person. 
 
 IV. The recognized feeling of community is the be- 
 ginning of a religious life. 
 
 V. The source of the feeling of community is the 
 Divine Spirit that dwells in man. 
 
 VI. One great object of religious education is to lift 
 the dim feeling of the divine within the soul into 
 clear consciousness. 
 
 Since the feeling of community implies both actual 
 relationships and an emotional reaction, it fulfills 
 the initial demand of the genetic-developing method. 
 Whenever this sense of community is fostered, a pre- 
 liminary form of religious education is being given. 
 The point of departure for such a religious education 
 is to be found in the relationship between mother and 
 child. From this initial point the sense of community is 
 extended to other members of the family, to friends, 
 to human beings in general, and (in virtue of the fact 
 1 Education of Man, p. 25.
 
 76 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 that the Divine Spirit immanent in man is also resi- 
 dent in nature) to animals, plants, and even so-called 
 inorganic forces. It is superfluous to add that no amount 
 of formal training can enable a mother or kindergart- 
 ner to perform these nurturing deeds. The Froebelian 
 ideal of education demands the intellectual, moral, 
 and emotional rebirth of those who attempt to carry 
 it out. The sense of community can be truly fostered 
 only by those who with whole hearts believe that it is 
 the primal witness of an indwelling Divine Spirit and 
 to whom the one thing needful is conscious union with 
 this Spirit. 
 
 There is a prophecy current in the Christian church 
 that its history is to include three great dispensations, 
 of which the latest shall be the dispensation of the 
 Spirit. Many signs indicate that we are in the morning 
 twilight of this final dispensation. Within the visible 
 church there has burst forth a fresh flame of missionary 
 impulse and a conscious aspiration for unity among all 
 the various creeds in Christendom. In Asia, whose one 
 great deed seems to be the creation of religions, there 
 has arisen a prophet whom his disciples describe as the 
 heart or life center of all the impulses towards brother- 
 hood now circulating throughout the great human 
 organism. Whatever may be the errors or insufficiencies 
 of socialism, it is another witness to the prevailing 
 power of a deeper sense of community between men. 
 But most significant of all the omens of a new dispen- 
 sation is the undeniable fact that out of the synthesis 
 of many differing peoples in our own country there is 
 developing that "cosmopolitan affection" which is the 
 indispensable condition of a higher social morality.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 77 
 
 These differing but convergent phenomena point 
 towards a world-transforming process. The seemingly 
 impossible mandate, " Thou shalt love thy neighbor 
 as thyself," is translating itself into a native impulse, 
 and "from the depths of anonymous life" there is 
 emerging an "imperious kindliness" which constrains 
 to altruistic deeds and which will not permit men to 
 be happy while their fellowmen are miserable. 1 The 
 Froebelian method of education which consciously 
 begins the evolution of religion by fostering the feeling 
 of community is therefore one expression of an impulse 
 which in different forms is characteristic of our age and 
 in which the devout observer detects with awe the hand 
 of God shaping a new historic era. 
 
 It is well to begin religious education by fostering 
 that sense of community which is the pledge of human 
 brotherhood. He that loveth not his brother whom he 
 hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not 
 seen? But brotherhood is not religion, neither can it 
 be maintained without religion. Communion between 
 men implies the generic unity of mankind. The generic 
 spirit which makes all men one is the God in man. 
 Communion with this indwelling God is prayer. 
 Prayer is the characteristic act of religion, and the 
 chief aim of religious education as a whole should be 
 to foster the prayerful spirit. The mere definition of 
 this aim suggests a revolution in the prevalent con- 
 ception of religion and in prevalent methods of reli- 
 gious education. There is a widespread tendency to 
 conceive the essential act of religion as an effort to 
 speed the coming of an ideal civilization, and there- 
 1 Jane Ad Jams, Newer Ideals of Peace, pp. 20, 21.
 
 78 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 fore to spend much time running about trying to 
 improve the world without any clear idea in what im- 
 provement consists. The conception of religion de- 
 fended in this report holds, on the contrary, that 
 religion is a progressive tendency towards communion 
 with God transcendent, God immanent, and God in- 
 carnate; that such communion is based upon com- 
 munity of nature between man and God, and that its 
 issue is a serene life whose outward deeds are its 
 natural and spontaneous self-expression. 
 
 It may be because our conception of prayer has 
 remained savage and heathen that we find it so dif- 
 ficult to enter sympathetically into the idea of its cen- 
 tral position in a truly Christian experience. To limit 
 prayer to petition, and above all to petition for material 
 and transient goods, is really to deny Christianity, 
 and there can scarcely be a grosser caricature of 
 religion than that which conceives God as a vast 
 reservoir of power to be drawn on at our will and for 
 our benefit. The aim of religious communion is not to 
 prostitute divine energy to human whim, but to regen- 
 erate human intellects, consecrate human wills, and 
 renew human hearts by making them participant in 
 divine purposes. To fix thought on the eternal is 
 prayer. From this highest consecration of our power 
 of voluntary attention spring repentance for sin and 
 gratitude for the great gift of being, ceaseless aspira- 
 tion towards the source of being, trust in divine good- 
 ness, and the spontaneous leap of partial towards 
 perfect love. 
 
 If a mother be herself religious, or in other words if 
 her life be lived in constant dependence upon God, she
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 79 
 
 will pray. The reaction of her prayer upon the mind of 
 her child is his second forward step in the religious life. 
 Indeed, it may be said that actual religion as distinct 
 from its germinal cell (the sense of community) begins 
 with the child's feeling that the one person upon whom 
 he is dependent depends in her turn upon an invisible 
 power. "It is, therefore," writes Froebel, "not only a 
 touching sight for the quiet and unseen observer, but 
 productive of eternal blessings for the child, when the 
 mother lays the sleeping infant upon his couch with 
 an intensely loving look to their Heavenly Father, 
 praying Him for protection and loving care." 
 
 "It is not only touching, and greatly pleasing, but 
 highly important and full of blessings for the whole 
 present and later life of the child, when the mother, 
 with a look full of joy and gratitude towards the 
 Heavenly Father, and thanking him for rest and new 
 vigor, lifts from his couch the awakened child, radiant 
 with joyful smiles ; nay, for the whole time of the related 
 life between mother and child this exerts the happiest 
 influence. Therefore, the true mother is loath to let 
 another put the sleeping child to bed, or to take from it 
 the awakened child." 1 
 
 After a while the child who has seen his mother pray 
 will wish to pray himself. One of the most remark- 
 able songs and commentaries in the Mother Play shows 
 with what tender and delicate indirectness this nascent 
 and only semi-conscious desire should be met. Its first 
 suggestion is that sacred acts must not be intruded 
 upon secular moments, and therefore that we must 
 await some signal from the child himself before we 
 1 Education of Man, pp. 25, 26.
 
 80 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 venture to incline his heart towards prayer. The song 
 and picture referred to presuppose that it is evening, 
 and that the little one who all day long has been busy 
 with many things will soon be laid to sleep. His quiet 
 posture, clasped hands, and introspective eyes assure 
 us of the meditative moment, and apprize us that from 
 fragmentary thoughts, feelings, and deeds he has with- 
 drawn into the wholeness of his central selfhood. 
 Gently and carefully the mother seeks to quicken a 
 vague awareness of what is passing within him. She 
 tells him a story of little children and all they did 
 in one happy day. She shows him a picture of these 
 happy children, tired and sinking into sleep. She 
 clasps her own hands to represent the sleeping children 
 and sings the prayer they said before they slept. The 
 little child's own intertwined fingers begin to mean 
 something to him. They are children who played as 
 he has played, who were tired as he is tired, who are 
 sleeping as he would sleep, and who before sleeping 
 prayed as now he feels he would like to pray. 
 
 The sympathetic reader is doubtless already aware 
 that with the experience just described we have ad- 
 vanced to that phase of the genetic method which 
 demands introspection and retrospection. The child 
 has been helped to look into himself. He has been 
 helped to take a backward glance over a single day. 
 Finally, he has been helped to discover a desire stirring 
 faintly below the threshold of consciousness. 
 
 We have considered the three primary stages in the 
 evolution of Christian experience and have sought to 
 show that their root is the native sense oi community; 
 their blossom a nascent longing to pray, made aware
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 81 
 
 of itself; and their final presupposition the God imma- 
 nent in, and yet transcendent of every human soul. 
 We must now consider that second path of approach 
 towards the Christian consciousness which begins with 
 recognition of our own double selfhood and whose 
 climax is the vision of God incarnate. 
 
 This report presupposes in its readers awareness of 
 an ideal self which is different from the actual self; of a 
 universal self which is different from the particular 
 self; of a permanent self different from and transcend- 
 ent of the series of selves created and outgrown. Only 
 those who know their own double selfhood can under- 
 stand that its discovery creates the most dramatic 
 moment in the life of a child. It is a moment fraught 
 with fate, and there is no crisis of experience demand- 
 ing clearer insight in order to meet it with a redeem- 
 ing response. The child has discriminated between his 
 actual self and an ideal self. The self he recognizes as 
 ideal is the one he has learned to define through the 
 reaction of those about him upon his deeds. What 
 they praise he has begun to call good, what they 
 blame he has begun to regard as evil. Three great 
 dangers threaten him. Through desire for social ap- 
 proval he may try to seem what he is not and so fall 
 into duplicity. Duplicity in himself will make him 
 suspect duplicity in others and betray him into de- 
 basing views of human nature. Finally, he will hide 
 from himself as well as others the acts and feelings 
 which contradict the accepted ideal self and thereby 
 will distribute all his experiences into two mutually 
 repellent groups. In short, while vision of an ideal 
 self is the condition of moral development, it brings
 
 82 .THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 with it the possibility of a disastrous schism in the 
 soul. 
 
 Spiritually naked and unashamed the young child 
 has wandered hitherto in the Eden of his home. Now, 
 to him as to his great forbear, there is revealed what 
 he should and should not do. Betrayed chiefly by 
 heedlessness, temper, and lust into actions which con- 
 tradict the revealed ideal, he begins that terrible game 
 of hide-and-seek which often continues throughout 
 life. He hides through fear; he hides through shame; 
 he hides through vanity; he hides from mother and 
 father, from brothers and sisters, from the world, from 
 God, and from himself. He sews for himself concealing 
 garments of hypocrisy; he skulks in caves of hidden 
 motive; he parries attack with keen-edged blades of 
 sophistry; he retreats into solitary fastnesses of pride. 
 He will not be known and he will not know himself. 
 Worst of all, he hides under masks of conscience, blind 
 to the fact that his imperious ought is nothing but an 
 enthroned passion or a crowned ambition. Hiding and 
 hidden, he steals through life haunted forever by pre- 
 monitions of the great unmasking which awaits every 
 soul made in the image of God. 
 
 It argues something very wrong in our education of 
 children that transition from the unmoral to the moral 
 life should so often make them worse instead of bet- 
 ter, and perhaps the most important question which a 
 mother or kindergartner can ask herself is: How shall 
 I help the child to see an ideal and guide himself by 
 conscious choices of the will, without betraying him 
 into hypocrisy and falsehood and creating in him a 
 contradiction so great that he will never be able to
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 83 
 
 resolve it? As has been said, progress in the moral life 
 demands vision of an ideal beyond present attainment. 
 An unattained ideal must not only beckon but con- 
 demn. The question to be solved is : How shall we con- 
 duct the young soul safely through the dangers inevit- 
 ably associated with self-condemnation and thus pre- 
 vent a necessary schism from deepening into an in- 
 soluble contradiction? 
 
 We know the answer made by religion to this ques- 
 tion when it was asked by man in the childhood of the 
 human race. In that mystical account of man's first 
 discovery of his double selfhood which reaches into the 
 profoundest depths of the soul, we read that contempo- 
 rary with the revelation of sin was the promise of a 
 redeemer. A child born of woman should bruise the 
 serpent's head. 
 
 With the deepening of moral consciousness came the 
 conviction that the redeemer from sin must be born 
 not only of woman but of God, or, translating this 
 mystic intuition into terms of conscious intelligence, it 
 was felt that there could be no deliverance of man from 
 the curse of sin, no attainment by man of the ideal self, 
 no reconciliation of man with the cosmic order, unless 
 generic humanity was divine humanity, and it were 
 possible that God immanent should become God 
 incarnate. 
 
 The redemptive power of this insight derives from 
 the fact that the ideal revealed is one of perfect love. 
 The God who cares so much for men that He cannot 
 be satisfied until He has given them all He has and all 
 He is, is not a God before whom any soul need shrink 
 in cowardly terror even when smitten by the sense of
 
 84 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 sin. He is not a God from whom man needs to hide. 
 Rather is He a God towards whom every sinning soul 
 may run for succor. Emerson proved his interior 
 vision of Christianity when he wrote 
 
 " Fear not, then, them child infirm, 
 There's no god dare wrong a worm"; 
 
 and Browning showed the boldness born of faith that 
 "sees into and through itself" when he dared affirm 
 
 that 
 
 "A loving worm within its clod. 
 Were diviner than a loveless God." 
 
 In the light of this revelation of religion we discern 
 an answer to the question how a young soul may be 
 safely conducted through the dangers incident to the 
 dawning vision of an ideal. This answer is that when 
 we reveal the true ideal, which is love, the dangers 
 vanish. The revelation is first made through the atti- 
 tude of the mother. The child who trusts his mother's 
 love will not hide his naughtiness, but run to her to 
 be delivered from it. Her response to his appeal must 
 reveal love as both pitiful and imperious. No mother 
 does redeeming work unless she makes her child feel 
 that the demands of love are as inexorable as its for- 
 giveness is assured. Love implies either actual or 
 potential worth in its object. It challenges to perfec- 
 tion because, it believes perfection possible. It can 
 forgive so long as forgiveness is needed, because it 
 knows that this possibility, however delayed, can never 
 be lost. Love is, therefore, the ever renewed confession 
 of faith in divine immanence, the ever renewed hope of 
 divine incarnation. 
 
 The attempt has been made to describe that crisis
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 85 
 
 of experience marked by the birth of conscience. It 
 has been shown to involve four phases. The child has 
 recognized his own double selfhood. He has recog- 
 nized the double selfhood of those around him. He 
 has discerned a coercive ideal hovering over himself 
 and others. He has violated that ideal and is smitten 
 with the sense of sin. The mother has responded to 
 his troubled conscience with a love which suffers while 
 it delivers. Is it only a mother who can thus meet and 
 overcome evil, or may it be that her redeeming love is 
 but a reflection of the redeeming love of God? 
 
 The moment has come for the revelation of a deliv- 
 erer, but this revelation must be very gentle and indi- 
 rect. For a revelation which outruns need will create 
 skepticism, and as every premature disclosure of good 
 is the ancestor of evil, so every premature disclosure 
 of truth is the ancestor of a doubt or a denial. 
 
 The world literature of the childhood of the race 
 abounds with stories which meet the needs of the 
 child in this most momentous crisis of his history. 
 Wide-eyed he will listen to tales of the beautiful 
 princess held captive by a wicked giant, and of the 
 hero who journeys far, suffers long, and combats 
 mightily for her deliverance. Sometimes he will iden- 
 tify himself with the wretched captive, sometimes with 
 the conquering hero, because in very deed he is both, 
 and in his own soul as battle-ground must meet and 
 slay himself as foe, and free himself as captive held in 
 chains. Later he will be stirred with strange surmises 
 as he hears the great myth of Herakles or listens to the 
 story of Achilles renouncing wrath and freely accept- 
 ing death for the sake of his cause. But the question
 
 86 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 which these and kindred tales may help to quicken in 
 his soul will be fully answered only by the legends and 
 history of the race elected to answer it for all man- 
 kind. The myth of Eden interprets the first act in the 
 history of his soul. By the free decision of Moses to 
 forsake a palace and throw in his lot with slaves, new 
 ardors are inspired and new horizons won. At last the 
 revelation of the Cross sets the seal of eternity upon 
 time and the seal of the cosmic order upon the noblest 
 impulse of man. Then is the final ardor quickened and 
 the infinite horizon spread. 
 
 When we attempt to state Christian experience in its 
 simplest terms, we say it is assurance of the fact that 
 looking into the face of Jesus we behold the face of 
 God. Christianity is worship of a God whose character 
 is like the character of Jesus. Jesus so loved men that 
 he gladly embraced death in order to save them. If 
 God be like him his eternal life is an eternal cross and 
 passion. It is this conception which defines Christian 
 faith. It is the command, Take up thy cross and follow 
 me, which defines Christian duty. The trouble with 
 our moral conventions is that they have not recognized 
 the centrality of loving-kindness. It is only as every 
 duty is conceived as derivative from and related to this 
 supreme obligation that it can be enjoined without 
 creating that deplorable schism which makes so many 
 men not one person, but two or even many persons. 
 
 A genetic development of ideal human character is 
 possible because some degree of love is present in all 
 men in the form of immediate impulse. Moral educa- 
 tion should be centered in the effort to abet the native 
 struggle of this divine impulse against all the impulses
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 87 
 
 which contradict it. Religious education should be 
 centered in the effort to reveal God as love. The con- 
 crete revelation of love is made in the Cross. Without 
 the sacrifice of Calvary, Jesus might have been the 
 world's greatest teacher and prophet. With it, he 
 becomes the world's Redeemer, a figure unique in 
 history and resplendent with the glory of eternity. In 
 the temporal world, Love hangs forever on the Cross; 
 in the Eternal world, it is enthroned upon the seat of 
 judgment and summons all men to its dread assize. 
 In the order of time there is no last judgment for any 
 human soul, but in the permanent order of the spiritual 
 universe self-sacrificing love is the ultimate criterion 
 of character, and men are in hell or heaven as it repels 
 or attracts them. 
 
 There is a widespread and uneasy sense that some- 
 thing is wrong with our moral conventions. Such un- 
 easiness indicates that the collective mind is in travail 
 and a nobler social conscience about to be born. Con- 
 ventions are agreements which embody the results of 
 collective experience. It is because through that ex- 
 perience for nearly two thousand years has been work- 
 ing the leaven of the Christian ideal that our domestic, 
 economic, national, and religious conventions are now 
 being challenged, and that the hearts of men every- 
 where are crying for renewal of life. The Cross is the 
 sacred symbol of an infinite and eternal Reality. 
 Eternal Reality is what in human life we call the un- 
 realized ideal. It is not wonderful that two thousand 
 years should be insufficient for the realization of an 
 ideal that is infinite. The miracle is rather that in the 
 paltry period of two thousand years it should be ac-
 
 88 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 cepted by so many souls as a moral imperative and 
 that the conscience of the Occidental world should be 
 convincing itself of sin and panting for deliverance 
 from the baser instincts inherited from brute and 
 savage ancestors. 
 
 We have traced two aspects of that genetic-develop- 
 ing experience through which an approach is made 
 towards the Christian conception of God. There re- 
 mains for consideration the conception of God trans- 
 cendent, and its approach through ascent from effects 
 to causes and from all secondary causes to a primal 
 cause. 
 
 It is characteristic of the human intellect that it 
 begins at once to be dissatisfied with the immediate 
 aspect of experience and to explain all that is percept- 
 ible by the senses as effects of outlying causes. This 
 search for causes is itself explained by the fact that 
 being a causative being man knows himself as producer 
 of objects and acts, and therefore divines an analogous 
 origin of all things and events. Furthermore, he knows 
 himself as the single cause of a related multiplicity of 
 acts, and projects this self-knowledge as an intuition 
 of one great primal cause. 
 
 The characteristic attribute of a great first cause is 
 sovereignty. As God immanent is the pledge of cosmic 
 fellowship and God incarnate the revelation of cosmic 
 love, so God conceived as transcendent or as primal 
 cause gives assurance of cosmic power. It has been 
 well said that failure to hold to the sovereignty of God 
 is a lapse into the impiety of the intellect. God is love: 
 but if love be not omnipotent, then love is not God. 
 Recognition of its sovereignty is our apprisal that it will
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 89 
 
 never abate its challenge to perfection, never withhold 
 the pangs which failure to respond to that challenge 
 must forever provoke. 
 
 A genetic development of the idea of divine sover- 
 eignty is made by abetting the conscious search for 
 causal explanation and by fostering the presentiment 
 of one great first cause through a series of illuminating 
 analogies. When we incite children to trace the his- 
 tory of a piece of bread, through baker, miller, farmer, 
 to the wheat field, and to discover the dependence of 
 the growing grain upon earth, sun, air, dew, and rain; 
 or, again, when we call attention to the relationships 
 between the needs of nestlings and the localities in 
 which birds build their nests and the season in which 
 they hatch their eggs, we are stimulating causal inter- 
 est and forming a habit of mind which will issue in that 
 search for ever completer chains of causality which 
 must culminate in intellectual vision of a primal 
 cause. But we cannot be content to postpone the 
 sense of divine sovereignty until it is discovered as 
 a logical necessity by conscious intellect. We crave 
 the benign and stimulating influence of this concep- 
 tion upon the child's unfolding intelligence and will. 
 Therefore, recognizing the saltatory power of mind 
 and aware that the prescient imagination must out- 
 run understanding, we foster the power of mystic 
 divination by means of those natural analogies which 
 so powerfully affected the evolution of religion in the 
 childhood of the race, and through the lightning flash, 
 the invisible but mighty wind, the overarching sky, 
 and the all-revealing light, quicken the solemn sense 
 of pliyine transcendence and omnipotence. For now,
 
 90 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 as in the days of yore, Jove hurls his thunderbolts 
 from Olympus; Ahura-Mazda triumphs over the fiend 
 of darkness; Jehovah rides upon the wings of the wind, 
 and forever above and beyond this world gleams the 
 Eternal City which hath no need of the sun, neither 
 of the moon to shine in it, for the Lord God doth 
 lighten it and the Lamb is the light thereof. 
 
 It has seemed best to illustrate what we have thus 
 far learned of the genetic method through the evolu- 
 tion of the supreme educational value. It is hoped 
 that the following points have been made clear: 
 I. The point of departure for the genetic method 
 is life conceived as interaction between the indi- 
 vidual and his social and natural environment. 
 II. The environment presents itself as a fellowship 
 to be shared, an ideal to be obeyed, and a world 
 to be investigated and re-created. The indi- 
 vidual responds with a feeling of community, a 
 consciousness of double selfhood, a tendency to 
 search for causes, and a desire to exert causal 
 activity. 
 
 III. The presupposition of the threefold incitement 
 and response is the completely realized Glied- 
 ganzes, or Triune God, and the Christian religion 
 may be defined as an ever growing awareness of 
 this presupposition and an ever increasing voli- 
 tional and emotional response to that ideal of per- 
 fect love which it embodies and defines. 1 
 
 1 It has been no part of our purpose to consider the agencies by 
 which religious education should be given. In order, however, to 
 avoid all possible misconception, we desire to affirm our entire sym-
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 91 
 
 FURTHER IMPLICATIONS OF THE GENETIC-DEVELOPING 
 METHOD 
 
 It has been already said in this report that the prin- 
 ciple alike of psychology and education is self -activity. 
 It is characteristic of this principle that it is also a 
 method. For self -activity must have some way of acting, 
 and this general mode of action will be its method. 
 Self-activity achieves its ideal form in self-conscious- 
 ness. Self-consciousness involves awareness both of 
 the results of self-activity and of its process. We first 
 act: then look at what we have done: and finally at 
 the way we did it. It is through this introspective 
 and retrospective gaze that mind ascends from undif- 
 ferentiated feeling to sensation, perception, concep- 
 tion, and all higher forms of mental activity. The 
 ascent from sensation to perception is made by an act 
 of introspection which looks both at the result and the 
 process of sensation; the ascent from perception to 
 conception is made by a deeper introspective act which 
 scans the product and process of perception. In short, 
 every ascent of mental activity is accomplished 
 through an introspective survey of the next inferior 
 mode of action, and the so-called "faculties" of the 
 mind must therefore be conceived as vortical ascents 
 of a single indivisible energy. 
 
 The genetic-developing method is nothing more nor 
 
 pathy with that national ideal which prohibits the teaching of any 
 particular creed in our public schools. 
 
 The aim of our discussion has been twofold first, to suggest 
 an insight which as it seems to us may be assimilated by different 
 religions and become the basis of one universal world- view; and 
 second, to indicate the incitements by means of which the emotional 
 equivalents of this insight may be generated in the hearts of little 
 children.
 
 92 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 less than the conscious attempt to apply the native method 
 of self-activity in education. We spy upon mind and 
 discover how it acts; then make its spontaneous mode of 
 procedure our criterion of educational method. 
 
 It has been customary to describe three principles 
 as fundamental to Froebel's educational theory, 
 the principle of organic unity, the principle of develop- 
 ment, and the principle to which is sometimes given 
 the name of self-activity and sometimes the name 
 of interaction. We are urgent in our insistence that 
 Froebel's educational theory has but one fundamental 
 principle the principle of self -activity; and we hope 
 that as this report proceeds our reason for this insist- 
 ence will become clear. For the moment, we limit 
 ourselves to a statement of our reasons for preferring 
 the older word self -activity to the newer word interac- 
 tion, and to an attempt to show that development and 
 organic unity must be conceived as descriptions of the 
 process and result of self -activity. 
 
 The substitution of the word interaction for the 
 word self -activity is defended on the ground that "in 
 an organic unity there cannot be any arbitrary or 
 external action of one part upon another, it is rather 
 an interaction of the parts of an organic unity." l We 
 hail this thought as a notable advance over the idea 
 of a fixed environment, to which the individual must ad- 
 just himself and the idea of a predetermined self, that 
 is, a self in which faculties exist prior to their exercise. 
 We cannot, however, accept organic unity as our high- 
 est principle. Such acceptance seems to us the out- 
 
 1 "Kindergarten Problems," Teacheri College Record, November, 
 1909, p. 355.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 93 
 
 come of one of the most dangerous of those biologic 
 analogies to which are due so many of the confusions 
 of contemporary thought. The members of an organ- 
 ism are complemental elements in a whole which for- 
 ever transcends them. They differ from each other 
 and from the whole to which as members they belong. 
 Furthermore, no organism is ever at any one moment 
 the whole of itself, nor does any particular organism 
 ever duplicate the species to which it belongs. 
 
 The final principle accepted by the signers of this 
 report is not organic unity, but the Gliedganzes con- 
 ceived as completely realized self-activity. In the 
 light of this completely realized self-activity we in- 
 terpret all lesser forms and degrees of self-activity. 
 
 We freely grant that the self -activity of little chil- 
 dren, and, indeed, of human beings throughout life, 
 is of inferior type. A perfect self-activity would have 
 to be self-environing. Only a creative subject which 
 has duplicated itself in its object can be wholly self- 
 related and therefore perfectly self-active. The term 
 interaction appropriately describes one aspect of that 
 inferior mode of self -activity manifested by the mem- 
 bers of an organism. It may also be generously inter- 
 preted as referring to the fellowship or communion of 
 individuals in a social whole. But even under the most 
 liberal interpretation it fails to suggest the fact that, 
 whether perfect or imperfect, self -activity has a con- 
 straining form or inner law, and that in human beings 
 this inner law affects both creative and apperceptive 
 deeds. Hence the acceptance of organic unity as the 
 comprehensive principle of education, and the degra- 
 dation of self -activity into a mere phase of this prin-
 
 94 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 ciple, create in the kindergarten a practical procedure 
 foreign to and subversive of that genetic-developing 
 method which is Froebel's most original contribution 
 to the art of education. 
 
 It should not be difficult for any one who has insight 
 into the principle of self-activity to understand that 
 development is its process of unfolding and that educa- 
 tion may abet this process by stimulating related deeds. 
 We have all been made familiar with the idea that we 
 cannot have a single sensation which is unaffected 
 by our previous sensations. It is no less true that 
 deeds subsequent are affected by deeds antecedent. 
 It is, however, to some extent inevitable that the feel- 
 ings and deeds from which development proceeds will 
 not always agree, and hence that there will be clashes 
 and contradictions in the developing process. The aim 
 of education should be so far as possible to avoid these 
 contradictions by inciting concordant deeds and emo- 
 tions. 
 
 Students of abnormal psychology are at present 
 having much to say of obsessions or extra-voluntary 
 ideas, feelings, or emotions, presenting themselves 
 automatically in consciousness either alone or in com- 
 bination. These obsessions arise when particular 
 mental states get dissociated from the main stream 
 of the self-conscious personality and then connect 
 themselves with other contents to form a kind of iso- 
 lated complex. Any analogous experience will then 
 call up this disliked and intrusive complex, and the 
 resisting personality becomes temporarily or perman- 
 ently the victim of a fixed idea. In normal persons 
 a similar contradiction exists in inferior degree. One
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 95 
 
 value of recent studies of the abnormal is that they 
 have given a genetic explanation of a fact of common 
 experience and thereby have cast light on the problem 
 of how this regrettable and painful experience may be 
 minimized. Manifestly, one of the efforts of early ed- 
 ucation should be to prevent the formation of these 
 dissociated complexes. Hence the unifying of con- 
 sciousness through stimulating concordant deeds and 
 through introspective scrutiny and rejection of clash- 
 ing deeds is one of the most important means of pre- 
 serving mental health. It is towards this unification 
 of consciousness that Froebel aims in his effort to abet 
 continuity of development. 
 
 The bearings of the ideal of continuity upon the de- 
 velopment of intellect are no less important than its 
 bearings upon the development of will and feeling. 
 In this final relation it calls for a genetic evolution of 
 the several great human values which it conceives as 
 revelations of that aboriginal self-determining energy 
 whose realized form is self-consciousness. An effort 
 has been made in this report to illustrate the earlier 
 stages in the evolution of a single value. The Froe- 
 belian method will be adequately understood only 
 after it is applied to the evolution of all values and to 
 all stages in the evolution of each value. 
 
 It is inevitable that large ideas should shrink when 
 they enter small minds, and it must be frankly con- 
 fessed that in this way the ideal of continuity in de- 
 velopment has too often shrunken into a method of 
 arrest. Not discerning its wider implications as re- 
 lated to the evolution of human values, and not under- 
 standing that, in evolving from within the child the
 
 96 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 norms of his generic selfhood, she was developing him, 
 the narrow-minded kindergartner has fondly fancied 
 that all she had to do was to make every possible 
 combination of vertical and horizontal lines before 
 venturing to use a slanting line, or every possible 
 combination of the numbers one and two before dar- 
 ing profanely to dream of applying the number three. 
 Through this shrinkage of the idea of continuity into 
 what was called the logical evolution of the gifts and 
 occupations, the developing method was changed into 
 a method of stultification which deserved all the scorn- 
 ful criticism it received. It is doubtless true that even 
 to-day some representatives of the kindergarten do 
 this arresting work. But the time is past when any 
 intelligent person can suppose that Froebel would 
 have countenanced such a caricature of his idea. 
 Furthermore, among the kindergartners who follow 
 Froebel no practical tendency is at present stronger 
 than the tendency to oppose the imposition of fixed 
 series, to curtail so far as possible the given elements 
 out of which series unfold, and to recognize that sal- 
 tatory power by which in proportion to their natural 
 vigor of intelligence children leap from differences of 
 degree to differences of kind. 
 
 Conceiving the child as self-active, believing that 
 education might abet the process of self-activity and 
 save it from falling into glaring self-contradiction by 
 genetic evolution of the values which are its own ap- 
 proximate self definitions, and by incitement of the 
 deeds and feelings which are the volitional and emo- 
 tional equivalents of these values, Froebel held finally 
 that upon every plane of development there might be
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 97 
 
 that integration of experience which he sometimes 
 described as a spherical totality and sometimes as an 
 organic unity. When he used the phrase spherical 
 totality to express this idea, there hovered before him 
 the thought of a force which since it projected equal 
 radii in all directions could be conceived as terminat- 
 ing in successive spheres of increasing size; when he 
 used the phrase organic unity his mind was influenced 
 by the famous Kantian definition of an organism as a 
 living whole wherein each member was both means 
 and end to all the other members and to the whole. 
 In both cases he was trying to think as clearly as pos- 
 sible a self -determining energy which through a variety 
 and succession of interrelated acts, feelings, and ideas 
 integrates itself into a structural unity. 
 
 The aim of the foregoing analysis has been to show 
 that Froebel has but one fundamental principle 
 the principle of self -activity which approximately 
 realizes itself in processes and integrates itself in their 
 results. The so-called principles of development and 
 organic unity are in reality interrelated aspects of self- 
 activity. 
 
 Thus far in our discussion of the genetic method 
 we have suggested only its more obvious implications. 
 It has been shown that its presupposition is life; its 
 point of departure the deed; its first demand, the in- 
 citement of deeds pointing towards the values of life 
 and restraint of deeds which antagonize those values; 
 its second demand, the introspective and retrospective 
 scrutiny through which deeds become self -penetrating, 
 or in other words through which self-determining 
 energy becomes aware of itself. It has been further
 
 98 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 shown that the genetic method is simply the conscious 
 attempt of education to reinforce the native principle 
 of self-activity in its spontaneous effort to objectify 
 itself in processes of development and integrate its 
 results in a vitally related totality or organic unity. 
 
 Froebel's own statements of the deeper implications 
 of the genetic method are contained in his references 
 to and discussions of what in kindergarten terminology 
 is known as the law of Mediation of Opposites. Our 
 next task, therefore, must be to explain as briefly as 
 possible what we understand to be the meaning of the 
 Froebelian law. 
 
 The first requirement necessary to the correct un- 
 derstanding of the Mediation of Opposites is a precise 
 definition of the word law. Many persons seem to 
 think of a law as external to the energy it guides and 
 restrains and to assume that were it not for this ex- 
 ternal coercion the energy itself would behave in quite 
 other ways. Understood in this sense any law imposed 
 upon mind would be an attack upon its freedom. The 
 question emerges whether this is a correct conception 
 of law. The physicist speaks of the law of gravitation 
 and affirms that in virtue of this law all objects attract 
 each other in direct proportion to their mass and 
 in inverse proportion to the square of their distance. 
 Manifestly, the law of gravitation merely summarizes 
 our experience of the way in which this force behaves. 
 Should we ever find, as some physicists are beginning 
 to claim, that facts contradict the formula, we should 
 conclude we had been mistaken in our law. 
 
 Understanding that a law is not an external edict 
 binding a reluctant energy, but a fixed form in which
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 99 
 
 an energy acts in virtue of its own constitution, we 
 may briefly define the Froebelian law as the universal 
 mode of action of the energy we know as mind. Be- 
 cause mind is what it is, it behaves spontaneously and 
 yet unvaryingly in a certain way. This spontaneous 
 and yet unvarying mode of behaviour may be called its 
 law. 
 
 "I wish," said Alice to the Cheshire Cat she met 
 in Wonderland, "I wish you wouldn't keep appear- 
 ing and vanishing so suddenly. You make me quite 
 giddy." 
 
 "All right," said the Cat, and this time it vanished 
 quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail and 
 ending with the grin, which remained some time after 
 the rest of it had gone. 
 
 "Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin," 
 thought Alice; "but a grin without a cat, it's the 
 most curious thing I ever saw." 
 
 Anybody may see anywhere a cat without a grin. 
 It is only in Wonderland that one may see a grin with- 
 out a cat. The kindergartner who aspires towards a 
 real understanding of the Froebelian law must be pre- 
 pared to go through with an experience which for a 
 time will make her no less giddy than Alice. The form 
 or law of mind will appear and vanish, and just when 
 she is most sure she has seen it, it will disappear most 
 completely from her sight. Let her, however, be 
 patient and resolute, for after a while the vanishings 
 will cease, and when the vision abides there abides 
 with it a joy which transfigures life. 
 
 If it be understood that the phrase " form of mind " 
 means simply an unvarying way in which mind be-
 
 100 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 haves, we may next look into ourselves to discover if 
 in reality there be any one mode to which our mental 
 activity always conforms. We shall perhaps recognize 
 this mode of action most readily in our moral life and 
 as summarized hi such formulas as "It is only with 
 renunciation that life, properly speaking, can be said 
 to begin " ; " Surrender happiness and win blessedness " ; 
 "Create selfhood by crucifying self"; or, in most 
 vigorous epitome, "Die to live." No one who has 
 made an honest and persistent moral struggle can fail 
 to know hi HIM- If as an incarnate paradox. As was said 
 in an earlier portion of this report, each human being 
 is a slave, an enslaver, and a deliverer, and is engaged 
 in a war wherein he is both of the contending parties, 
 the ground of conflict and the fruit of victory. The 
 paradox thus illustrated hi the moral conflict holds 
 in all spheres of human experience and may be pictori- 
 ally suggested by all forms of achievement. Each man 
 is an architect, who is also the quarry whence comes 
 his marble and the temple he rears; a sculptor who is 
 his own clay and the statue he molds; a musician who 
 is the symphony he creates and the instrument upon 
 which it is played; a poet who is at once his own legen- 
 dary material and his song; in short, a self -active 
 energy which is its own creator, its own stuff, and its 
 own product, and which in order to achieve its prod- 
 uct must overcome the persistent obstacle variously 
 suggested by the malleable yet resisting clay, the 
 recalcitrant marble, the imperfect musical instrument, 
 and the obscure legend. 
 
 These crude and external pictures of an unpicturable 
 reality are only intended to assist unaccustomed minds
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 101 
 
 to approach a difficult thought. That thought itself 
 is most briefly stated as negative self -relation. The 
 kindergartner who wishes to understand the Mediation 
 of Opposites must discipline herself in thinking until 
 she can see with her own intellectual eyes that any 
 pure self-activity must be a self-related negative, 
 and until she is able to deduce from this insight its 
 more obvious consequences. 
 
 This difficult thought may be gradually approached. 
 We are to think a pure self -activity, that is, an activity 
 which acts upon itself. For if it acted upon anything 
 other than itself it would be related to this other in- 
 stead of being self -related, and relationship to another 
 always implies some degree of determinism, and there- 
 fore contradicts the idea of pure self-activity. 
 
 When we see that a pure self -activity must act upon 
 itself, we are ready to approach the more difficult in- 
 sight that in so doing it dirempts itself at once into 
 determiner and determined, or into energy and pro- 
 duct. In acting upon itself, therefore, a pure self- 
 activity produces within itself a realm of passivity and 
 particularity. It makes itself, and necessarily makes 
 itself that which it is not. Hence its act is negative 
 to itself. 
 
 It is easy to illustrate the essential negativity of a 
 pure self -activity by the analogy of all imperfect self- 
 activities. Every generic energy in the vegetable and 
 animal world is an imperfect self-activity, and every 
 such energy is at any given moment contradicted by 
 its product. Neither the acorn, the sapling, nor the 
 full-grown tree duplicates the generic energy, oak; 
 nor is this energy duplicated even in the total process
 
 102 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 of life which includes these several products. For the 
 generic energy we name oak includes many species, 
 and the particular oak is only a single specimen of a 
 single species. A generic energy which is always try- 
 ing unsuccessfully to duplicate itself is a negative 
 which can negate itself but not negate its negating act, 
 and which therefore is unable to overcome the tragedy 
 of its inherent form. 
 
 The relation of a negative activity to itself may be 
 illustrated on a higher plane through our own processes 
 of thinking and willing. The particular thought is only 
 one of myriads which we might think, the particular 
 deed only one of myriads which we might do. Hence 
 every thought is in a very real sense an arrest of think- 
 ing, and every particular deed, as Goethe tells us, 
 "impedes the onward march of life." 
 
 We implicitly recognize this contradiction between 
 thinking and doing on the one hand, and thought and 
 deed on the other, by our condemnation of the in- 
 tellectual narrowness and rigidity due to mechan- 
 ical reiteration of accustomed thought, and by our 
 disapproval of action which has so long limited 
 itself to fixed ruts as to be incapable of pioneer 
 effort. 
 
 The contradiction with self into which the act of 
 determining must plunge a pure self-activity supplies 
 the incitement to renewed act. For reflect: A pure 
 self-activity must be an energy having the mark of 
 universality. It is the potentiality of all possible deeds. 
 It acts, and by this act determines itself as particular. 
 Being universal, it is repelled by this particularity and 
 acts again to annul it. In its first aspect, this act of
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 103 
 
 annulment is a restoration of universality; in its sec- 
 ond aspect, it is a new determination which again 
 plunges self -activity into contradiction with itself and 
 incites new effort to cancel the contradiction. Hence 
 through its own inherent constitution a self-related 
 negative becomes its own perpetual self-incitement 
 and maintains itself as an eternal process, which, in 
 the words of the philosopher who has seen most deeply 
 into the miracle of self -activity, "pulsates within itself 
 without moving itself and vibrates within itself without 
 ruffling its repose." 
 
 The characteristic feature of a negatively self -related 
 activity is that its inhibition is its renewal. It is this 
 negative self-relation which we mean when we speak 
 of the form or law of mind, and it is because we see 
 that this form cannot be denied without affirming 
 it that we claim for it the quality of absolute truth. 
 Having made our own statement, we give ourselves 
 the pleasure of citing the more adequate statement of 
 Professor Royce. "What," he asks, "is thinking?" 
 And replies: "Thinking is simply our activity of will- 
 ing precisely in so far as we are clearly conscious of 
 what we do and why we do it. And thinking is found 
 by us to possess an absolute form precisely in so far 
 as we find that there are certain aspects of our activity 
 which sustain themselves even in and through the very 
 effort to inhibit them. One who says : ' I do not admit 
 that for me there is any difference between saying yes 
 and saying no' says ' No,' and distinguishes negation 
 from affirmation even in the very act of denying this 
 distinction. Well, affirmation and negation are such 
 self-sustaining forms of our will-activity and of our
 
 104 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 thought activity. And such self-sustaining forms of 
 activity determine absolute truths" l 
 
 The question may be raised whether, even granting 
 that mind is a self-related negative, its constitution 
 has any bearing upon the method of education. It 
 remains, therefore, to be suggested that this inherent 
 constitution of mind acts both as an apperceptive 
 agency and as a determiner of the form of all creative 
 activity. It was because of this form that the selective 
 interest of primitive men fastened upon those natural 
 phenomena wherein it was adumbrated. It is in virtue 
 of this form that the sensuous elements of every art 
 are regularity, symmetry, and harmony. It is because 
 of the coercion of this inner law that every great hu- 
 man value breaks its own path towards that concep- 
 tion of the Gliedganzes wherein is clearly revealed 
 the constitution of the positive out of the negative. 
 Finally, it is because of the fact that this mode of be- 
 havior is the most essential feature of mental life in all 
 stages of development, and that from earliest child- 
 hood its constraining influence far surpasses that of 
 any special impulse or tendency, that it may not be 
 ignored in education. 
 
 When we wish to learn most clearly of the way mind 
 loves best to act we turn to the poets. No student of 
 great literature can fail to be aware how all great poets 
 delight in mere sport with the "form or law of mind," 
 and also how, when they turn from sport to the keener 
 joy of self-revelation, the same great law determines 
 the theme and structure of their poems. Readers of 
 
 1 Josiah Royce, The Problem of Truth in the Light of Recent Re- 
 ttarch, p. 86.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 105 
 
 the Odyssey will remember the punning device by 
 which the crafty hero outwitted the Cyclops. Giving 
 his name as Noman, he made it impossible for the 
 blinded giant to declare who had blinded him without 
 affirming that no one had blinded him. Professor 
 Snider has said that the pun of Odysseus is the deepest 
 ever made or that it will ever be possible to make, 
 because it rests on the duplicity inherent in the nega- 
 tive. To the same inherent duplicity we owe the gro- 
 tesque pictures of Dante and Virgil escaping from 
 hell by climbing up the legs of the reversed Devil into 
 the sunlit world. The last world poet had his own 
 little free play with the negative when he dispatched 
 Faust to seek his all in the nothing of Mephistopheles. 
 Eckermann tells us that when asked to explain the 
 mysterious scene Goethe raised his brows, opened his 
 eyes, and assumed a mysterious air. He was enjoying 
 a fun which only those who knew his open secret could 
 share. 
 
 Great poets are not satisfied to sport with the nega- 
 tive, but more or less consciously determine the theme 
 and structure of their song by this constraining form. 
 The Iliad is a concrete portrayal of the moral paradox, 
 "Die to live." The Odyssey transfigures all tales of 
 geographic wandering into the search of the soul for 
 itself. The poet of the church shows the negative will 
 negating its own negativity and becoming holy; the 
 poet of the individual traces the process of the intellect 
 through the same self-refuting, self-reaffirming cycle; 
 and the great poet of society never tires of showing 
 how the social whole by its negative reaction upon 
 negative deeds makes them the instruments of their
 
 106 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 own undoing. Literature would not be a revelation 
 of life did it not reveal the inner law which controls 
 life. Turn where we may, we shall find that life, 
 whether lived or pictured, is a great dialectic process 
 which is perpetually illustrating the creation of the 
 positive by the negation of the negative. 
 
 It is to this universal process that Froebel gives the 
 name Mediation of Opposites, and it is because we 
 recognize it as the absolute form of all mental activity 
 that we cannot agree with those kindergartners who 
 either reject or ignore the so-called Froebelian law. 
 Recognition of the inner law, however, is perfectly dis- 
 tinct from acceptance of the particular devices of in- 
 strument or method which Froebel created under the 
 inspiration of this insight. It is possible to accept the 
 Mediation of Opposites and reject all Froebel's appli- 
 cations of this principle. It is possible to accept some 
 of his applications and reject others. Each particular 
 application should be intelligently tested and ac- 
 cepted or rejected upon its own merits. But the inner 
 law itself is a definition of the structural form of self- 
 activity and any educational method which rejects or 
 ignores it imperils itself by denying an agency pre- 
 potent in its influence both upon creative and apper- 
 ceptive activities. 
 
 The universal law or lorm of mind is the true key 
 to the genetic-developing method. In Froebel's re- 
 current statements of this law we are always apprized 
 that "every individual being, if it would attain its 
 destiny, must manifest itself in and as unity, in and 
 as individuality, and in and as manifoldness in ever 
 increasing diversity." His statements have too often
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 107 
 
 been misunderstood because the word unity has been 
 explained in a static sense. Froebel's own phrase is 
 ejaergetic unity, and his reference is to the universal 
 or self -determining phase in the process of self -activity. 
 The phrase " ever increasing diversity " points to the 
 results of that constant annulment of particularity 
 through which new particulars are posited, and the 
 word individuality defines that concrete union of uni- 
 versality and particularity which is both the eternal 
 antecedent and the ever renewed consequent of the 
 self-determining process. 
 
 In its practical relation to educational method the 
 significance of the Froebelian law is that it makes 
 a further explication of the native developing-process 
 of self-activity. We have already seen that this pro- 
 cess involves the ideas of continuity and integration. 
 We should now see that it involves the ideas of a con- 
 tinuity incited by and maintained through the posit- 
 ing and annulment of antitheses, and hence that it 
 explains the final origin of those clashing deeds whose 
 result is the formation of dissociated complexes. In 
 the light of this revelation of the final source of moral 
 evil and intellectual error, we discern that most im- 
 portant exaction of the genetic-developing method, 
 that upon every plane of experience there shall be a 
 resolute facing of the intellectual aberrations and 
 moral perversions into which children have been ac- 
 tually betrayed and a conscious attempt to help them 
 assimilate and thereby transcend negative deeds and 
 wayward fancies. To this requisition of restraint is 
 added a requisition of incitement, and from insight 
 into the Froebelian law emerges the demand that both
 
 108 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 creative and apperceptive activity shall be heightened 
 by concrete presentation of those terminal contrasts 
 of action, sentiment, and idea which are so much more 
 readily apprehended than nearer and finer distinctions. 
 
 "The key to every man," writes Emerson, "is his 
 thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a 
 helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all 
 his facts are classified." l To the reader who has un- 
 derstood this report it should be evident that the helm 
 which Froebel's mind obeys is the Mediation of Oppo- 
 sites. The conception of the Gliedganzes is attained 
 by developing the theoretic implications of this mas- 
 ter-thought. The kindergarten translates this same 
 master-thought into deed through its attempt to 
 mediate the apparently excluding antitheses of play 
 and work. In view of the fact that the writer of this 
 report has devoted a whole book to the elucidation of 
 this attempt, its further exposition seems superfluous, 
 and the signers of this report restrict themselves to 
 reaffirmation of the following statements from the re- 
 port presented to the Committee of Nineteen by the 
 conservative members of that body. 
 
 We hold that the highest form in which the native 
 activity of childhood expresses itself is play. We ac- 
 cept the Froebelian definition of play "as self -active 
 representation of the inner life from inner necessity 
 and impulse." We believe that mind grows into self- 
 consciousness through self -revelation. We conceive 
 the characteristic mark of the kindergarten to be em- 
 phasis upon the activity of self-expression as prior 
 to the activity of assimilation. We are earnest in our 
 1 "Circles," Essays, First Series.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 109 
 
 conviction that kindergarten exercises must preserve 
 the form of play. We recognize as a distinctive merit 
 of the kindergarten that from the native plays of child- 
 hood it makes a selection determined by their relation 
 to the values of human life. Through his studies of 
 childhood, Froebel became aware of the fact that some 
 plays point toward the practical arts, some toward the 
 fine arts, some toward science and literature, and some 
 toward the ethical life of man as embodied in social 
 institutions. In these creations of the human spirit he 
 found his standards of value. In various forms of play 
 he recognized the tendencies of which these values 
 are the higher expression. Through recognition of this 
 relationship between native manifestations and human 
 values he was enabled to graft upon selected forms of 
 play the higher realization of their own ideal. The 
 value of thus transforming play is that it develops the 
 child through his own free impulsion. It augments the 
 energy of ideals instead of paralyzing them. The values 
 of life must not be conceived as artificial flowers fas- 
 tened by some external hand upon a plant which could 
 never have produced them, but as the perfect blossom 
 in which the plant completes its life and provides for 
 its own renewal. 
 
 We further hold that by accenting plays pointing 
 toward the values of life the kindergarten creates a 
 selective interest which leads children to single out 
 from the complex of experience its valid and necessary 
 as opposed to its contingent elements, and thereby, as 
 Froebel expresses it, "breaks a pathway through the 
 tangles of human life." It is becoming increasingly 
 recognized that the "likenesses and differences we
 
 110 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 observe in facts are not merely thrust upon us without 
 our consent and connivance. They are the objects of 
 our attentive interest and they obviously vary with 
 this interest." l It is also admitted that selective inter- 
 est precedes voluntary attention. Finally, it is granted 
 that the native selective interest of young children 
 often fastens upon non-essential and sometimes upon 
 harmful presentations. It is necessary, therefore, to 
 create a selective interest which will single out in 
 rational proportion the valid elements of experience. 
 The means by which this higher selective interest is 
 aroused is the exercise of selected forms of activity. 
 In succinct summary what a child does has a reaction 
 upon his selective interest, and therefore indirectly 
 determines which among the many influences stream- 
 ing toward him shall be welcomed by his mind and 
 become the material out of which he builds himself and 
 his world. 
 
 KINDERGARTEN SYMBOLISM 
 
 Whoever accepts the idea that kindergarten exer- 
 cises shall preserve the form of play accepts symbolism 
 in its more inclusive sense. The Standard Dictionary 
 defines a symbol "as something (not a portrait) that 
 stands for something else and serves either to represent 
 it or to bring to mind one or more of its qualities." It 
 adds: "A symbol is chosen either arbitrarily or on ac- 
 count of some supposed resemblance between it and 
 the object it symbolizes." In kindergarten terminology 
 the word symbol is restricted to resembling objects and 
 acts, and the word sign is used to denote any object 
 which stands for another, not in virtue of some resem- 
 1 Royce. The World and the Individual, vol. 11, p. 48.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 111 
 
 blance, but in virtue of our social agreement. As illus- 
 trations of such conventional signs may be mentioned 
 the letters of the alphabet, diacritical marks, mathe- 
 matical figures, schematic drawings, telegraphic dots, 
 and all words whose metaphorical meaning has been 
 submerged in their agreed-upon sense. 
 
 This distinction between the symbol and the sign 
 is not a mere distinction of convenience. It rests upon 
 a psychologic discrimination between two marked 
 stages of mental development the stage wherein 
 the individual does his thinking almost exclusively 
 with pictures and the stage wherein to a large extent 
 he thinks with definitions. Only in so far as he thinks 
 by definition can he use conventional signs. For con- 
 ventional signs imply social agreement, and social 
 agreement implies common definition of classes of 
 objects and acts. 
 
 Defining symbolism as the representation of one 
 object or act by another which in some way resembles 
 it, we become aware that in this wider sense all make- 
 believe play is symbolic. The little girl who makes- 
 believe she is her own mother, the boy who makes- 
 believe that his stick is a horse, are both illustrating 
 symbolism in its broader meaning. The kindergarten, 
 therefore, does not impose upon make-believe play an 
 alien law, but merely recognizes its own most salient 
 characteristic when it encourages the little child to 
 make-believe that his ball is a bird when it hops or a 
 pendulum when it swings, or that he himself is a horse 
 when he trots or a soldier when he marches. 
 
 The distinctive feature of symbolism as shown in 
 childish play is its identification of different objects
 
 112 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 through some single striking mark. The same sym- 
 bolic activity is manifested in childish speech. It is 
 characteristic of infantile intelligence to seize its ob- 
 ject under some one striking aspect and to identify 
 with it other objects sharing this selected mark. For 
 example, a ceiling is grasped as something high, and 
 straightway the word ceiling is applied to the sky, 
 or the word "coo-coo," spoken when the mother hides 
 her face behind a handkerchief is understood to mean 
 disappearance and is promptly extended to the sun 
 vanishing below the horizon. 
 
 The reaction of childish symbolism upon mental 
 evolution is a very important one. It leads, on the one 
 hand, towards conscious grasp of the activity or at- 
 tribute through which different objects have been iden- 
 tified, in detachment from all objects, and on the other, 
 first, to an uneasy suspicion, and later to a clear recog- 
 nition of excluding distinctions between the identified 
 objects. Thus symbolic activity is the characteristic 
 feature of that cycle of self-activity through which 
 ascent is made towards the concrete definition of par- 
 ticular objects and towards the clear discrimination 
 between image and idea. 
 
 A careful study of the speech and play of any par- 
 ticular child consciously directed towards discovery of 
 the ties through which he identifies different objects 
 would perhaps throw more light than any other inves- 
 tigation upon that native form of reaction through 
 which each human being builds up his own individu- 
 ality. Between the boy who plays he is a horse by 
 prancing, kicking, bucking, and running away, and 
 the boy who trots steadily in cheerful response to voice
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN US 
 
 and bridle, there is a difference which cannot be wholly 
 explained by the influence of environment; and be- 
 tween two sisters, one of whom plays mother by per- 
 petually spanking her baby while the other as make- 
 believe mother goes through the most varied forms 
 of tender service, there is a contrast which wise edu- 
 cation may not ignore. 
 
 Since it is through his peculiar reactions against the 
 influence of environment that each child builds up his 
 individuality, all children should have plenty of time 
 and opportunity for free play and in free play should 
 be interfered with as little as possible. The process of 
 building individuality may, however, be abetted in 
 several ways. The first of these is improvement of 
 the environment against which the child reacts. "It is 
 inevitable," writes Professor Baldwin, "that the child 
 make up his personality under limitations of heredity 
 by imitation out of the copy set in the actions, temper, 
 emotions, of the persons who build around him the 
 social enclosure of childhood." The prime duties of 
 parents and kindergartners are to protect the child 
 from bad models and supply him with good ones. 
 They should also observe with care what special per- 
 sons, objects, and actions are most frequently imitated, 
 for in such imitations the child reveals the native bias 
 of his temperament, indicates the line of his possibili- 
 ties, and suggests the dangers to which he is prone. 
 They should divert attention from persons or things 
 which monopolize imagination and threaten to derange 
 balance of character by subjecting it to the tyranny of 
 too few ideas. They should procure for the child that 
 variety in the persons and objects of environment
 
 114 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 which is "the soul of originality and the fountain of the 
 ethical life." Finally, by gentle and indirect suggestion 
 they may help children to substitute higher for lower 
 reactions. For example, it may be suggested to the 
 cl.ild-mother who is over-fond of spanking her crying 
 baby that perhaps it cries because it is uncomfortable, 
 and that, if she would hold its cold feet to the fire or 
 find the pin which may be pricking it, its screams and 
 kicks would cease. 
 
 While free play is indispensable to the development 
 of individuality and while it may be influenced by 
 good copy, by variety of copy, by diversion of attention 
 from monopolizing ideas, and by indirect suggestion, it 
 is manifest that, if play is to be made the instrument 
 of any form of corporate education, there must be 
 developed games whose accent is not upon the individ- 
 , ~ uality through which one human being is distinguished 
 from another, but upon that rational human type or 
 generic spirit in which all individuals participate, and 
 whose historic achievement has been the evolution of 
 the great human values. The traditional games of the 
 nursery and the playground point towards these val- 
 ues, and it is in these traditional games and not in 
 the free play of particular children that we must seek 
 for the prototypes of kindergarten activities. The re- 
 lationship of Froebel to the traditional games of child- 
 hood is analogous to the relationship between the poet 
 who interprets and transforms an obscure myth and the 
 collective spirit in whose depths the myth originated. 
 
 The thoughts which have been suggested are in- 
 tended as a bridge from the conception of symbolism, 
 in its more inclusive sense as the representation of one
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 115 
 
 object or act by another which in some way resembles 
 it, to the more specific conception of symbolism, 
 defined in kindergarten terminology as play with typ- 
 ical objects and representation of typical facts, char- 
 acters, relations, and processes. All symbolic play unites 
 the represented with the representing object, action, 
 or person through some selected tie. Symbolic play 
 becomes typical when the tie selected points towards 
 logical as distinguished from psychologic concepts. 
 
 Most adults have learned to think many simple 
 ideas by definition, and are therefore able to use a 
 large number of conventional signs. Many adults, 
 however, are unable to think such ideas as are em- 
 bodied in the institutions of church and state except in 
 symbolic form. The difference between the adult and 
 the child is simply that, while the average adult does 
 much though not all of his thinking through definition, 
 the child does most though not all of his thinking with 
 pictures. Children need to have all ethical ideals pre- 
 sented in the form of concrete examples, and all gen- 
 eral thoughts presented under some image of sense. 
 The kindergarten attempts to bridge the chasm be- 
 tween the mental image and the general idea through 
 play with typical objects, and through representation of 
 typical acts, facts, characters, relations, and processes. ' 
 
 The statement that children think mainly with 
 pictures must not be understood to imply that they 
 have no general ideas. Professor Preyer proved con- 
 clusively that his child had attained one general idea 
 in his eleventh month, and in learning to use language 
 all children acquire the power of seeing objects as 
 individuals belonging to classes. In early childhood,
 
 116 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 however, such general ideas as are expressed by ab* 
 stract nouns are entirely beyond the range of intelli- 
 gent apprehension. Speak to a child of heroism, social 
 interdependence, or patriotism, and you might as well 
 speak to a deaf person. But tell him the story of 
 David, let him play such games as the farmer, miller, 
 baker, carpenter, and wheelwright, encourage him to 
 march like a soldier, and to wave high in air our 
 national flag, and you not only stir the emotional 
 equivalents of these ideals, but prepare the way for 
 their definition to intellect. Most of the symbolism of 
 the kindergarten takes the form of typical representa- 
 tion. The greater number of kindergarten games; the 
 rhymes and stories throwing into relief selected types 
 of character; the careful selection of typical facts as 
 approaches to the different sciences; the use of arche- 
 typal forms as playthings; the use of organically 
 related gifts; the many concrete illustrations of essen- 
 tial relations and evolutionary processes; the develop- 
 ment of forms of beauty and knowledge by the media- 
 tion of antitheses, are one and all illustrations of that 
 form of symbolism defined as representation of typical 
 acts, objects, characters, relations, and processes. As 
 has been said, this form of symbolism differs from spon- 
 taneous play only in the ties selected to bind together 
 the represented and representing act, object, or person. 
 The insight which creates this whole series of symbolic 
 activities is that through play the child determines in 
 large measure the direction of his attention and the 
 trend of his character. 1 
 
 1 For a more complete discussion of this form of symbolism see 
 Educational luuca in the Kindergarten, pp. 37-75.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 117 
 
 While the concrete presentation of types is the pre- 
 dominant form of kindergarten symbolism, it is not 
 the exclusive form. It has already been suggested 
 that the symbolic activity of free play is a potent 
 factor in the building of individuality. All kinder- 
 gartens offer opportunity for such free play. They 
 also encourage a minor form of free play in connection 
 with the typical game. For example, after mother and 
 father have been pictured by all the children under 
 their typical aspects, each child is encouraged to show 
 something mother or father does; or, again, while all 
 the children play in the same way their visit to a toy- 
 shop, each child selects for himself the toy he prefers 
 and invents his own way of representing it. Finally, 
 through the constant free selection by the children of 
 preferred typical games, native tendencies are both 
 revealed and developed. 
 
 In addition to free play and typical representa- 
 tion the Froebelian kindergartner frankly accepts that 
 form of symbolism described as correspondence. Re- 
 verting to the definition of a symbol, we read in the 
 Standard Dictionary that it is "something (not a 
 portrait) that stands for something else and serves 
 either to represent it or to bring to mind one or more 
 of its qualities; especially something so used to repre- 
 sent or suggest that which is not capable of portraiture, 
 as an idea, a quality, state, or action. Thus the oak is a 
 symbol of strength, the sword of slaughter, the trident 
 of Neptune, white of purity." 
 
 It is only necessary to reflect for a single moment 
 upon these several illustrations of a symbol to become 
 aware of differences in the ties by which they are
 
 118 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 related to the objects, persons, or qualities which they 
 are said to symbolize. The oak symbolizes strength 
 and the sword slaughter because the former is very 
 strong and the latter was for many ages the matchless 
 death-dealing weapon; the trident symbolizes Neptune 
 because it was the instrument conferred upon him by 
 mythology as an expression of his dominion over the 
 sea; white symbolizes purity because both imply the 
 idea of stainlessness. Two of these symbols the oak 
 and the sword are what we have called typical 
 objects; 1 one the trident is connected with its 
 object by the tie of an exclusive association; one 
 whiteness is a physical quality connected with a 
 spiritual quality through the analogical tie of stain- 
 lessness. 
 
 With the single exception of the flag, which is 
 rather a sign than a symbol, the kindergarten avoids 
 the tie of conventional association between represent- 
 ing and represented objects. Its types are concrete 
 illustrations of human values, and its activities, there- 
 fore, contribute to the development of those valid 
 objective concepts in which all individuals may partici- 
 pate. To these typical activities it adds representa- 
 tions wherein the tie between the representing .and 
 represented objects is like that between whiteness and 
 purity, and which fall under the more restricted defini- 
 tion of a symbol as a natural object, action, or event 
 which is analogically related to some spiritual fact or 
 process. 
 
 The significance of that form of symbolism which 
 
 1 In such expressions as "heart of oak" the symbolism is of the 
 type to be defined a* correspondence.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 119 
 
 deals with concrete types is that through it mind makes 
 the transition from the mental image to the concept. 
 The significance of that form of symbolism defined as 
 correspondence is that through it mind makes the 
 transition from concepts of material objects, actions, 
 and processes to their spiritual counterparts. 
 
 The researches of comparative philologists prove 
 that all words expressive of immaterial conceptions 
 were originally derived by metaphor from words 
 expressive of sensuous ideas and it is recognized by 
 all students of language that without the analogizing 
 activity of mind speech could never have progressed 
 beyond the merest rudiments. To the same analogiz- 
 ing activity written language owes the hieroglyph. 
 Metaphor and hieroglyph which interpret spirit in 
 terms of nature have their counterpart in animism 
 which interprets nature in terms of spirit. Out of the 
 union of metaphor and animism arose the great myths 
 which embody man's first discovery of his own essen- 
 tial nature. Intuition of the correspondences between 
 nature and the soul still creates the poet and enables 
 him to "call the particular fact to its universal conse- 
 cration." 
 
 Since analogizing activity has played such a promi- 
 nent part in the mental development of the race, it 
 would be passing strange if it played no part in the 
 mental evolution of the individual. If, perchance, it 
 be an important ally in the process of mental develop- 
 ment, it would seem that its influence should not be 
 ignored in education. Recent studies of dreams go far 
 to show that the tie of analogy between mental and 
 physical facts has a preponderating effect in detcrinin-
 
 140 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 ing the character of men's nightly visions. 1 They also 
 suggest that in this as in all forms of symbolism the 
 particular ties selected throw light on individual char- 
 acter and history, and they would seem to indicate 
 that a favorable bias might be given to character by an 
 early direction of attention to those simple and noble 
 analogies between nature and the mind which most 
 '/powerfully affected imagination during the long child- 
 hood of the human race. 
 
 Let us approach this most difficult phase of kinder- 
 garten symbolism by considering some of its wider 
 implications. Few persons will deny that children 
 respond by alterations of mood to alterations of 
 weather and season. Thunder, lightning, and the 
 darkness so strange to day, call forth a mood very 
 different from that which springs responsive to sun- 
 shine and blue sky. The emotional undertone of the 
 springtime is different from that of winter. Something 
 buds in the hearts of children in response to the bud- 
 ding life around them, and nature calls them to the 
 park and field as she calls young lambs to the meadow. 
 To take a narrower but scarcely less important illus- 
 tration, we all know that children react to order with 
 serenity and are ruffled by disorder, and perhaps most 
 of us know both from happy and humiliating experi- 
 ence how immediately children are affected by the 
 spiritual atmosphere created by our own mental 
 states. Complementary to these responses of child- 
 hood to environmental influence is the tendency com- 
 
 1 Prof. Dr. Sigm. Freud, Die Traumdevtung; Dr. Karl Abraham, 
 Traum und Mythe; Otto Rank, Die Mythen von der Getmrt dc* 
 Udden.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 121 
 
 mon to all children to impute to objects around them 
 a life akin to their own. It is only drawing from these 
 familiar facts their further conclusions when Froebel 
 urges that, through light, shadow, star, moon, and 
 wind plays, we may deepen the influence of these great 
 phenomena, and by directing sympathetic attention 
 to then* significant aspects revive in the children of 
 each new generation the great mythic experience of 
 the race. It is only trusting analogizing activity a 
 little further when he claims that the apparently free 
 flight of the bird may stir obscurely the feeling of free- 
 dom. It is only believing a little more consistently in 
 the influence of an orderly environment when he in- 
 sists that by the use of an organically related material 
 children develop in their own minds a sense of essential 
 relations. It is only an attempt to meet that crav- 
 ing of the spirit for self-revelation and self-discovery 
 which created the animistic interpretation of nature 
 when he offers a series of playthings which are an objec- 
 tive counterpart to the process of mental development. 
 Several reasons have conspired to prevent the gen- 
 eral acceptance of this particular form of kindergarten 
 symbolism. Perhaps the reason which has consciously 
 exercised the widest deterrent influence is that the sug- 
 gestion of analogies has been construed to mean the 
 interpretation of analogies. The truth is that the 
 analogy itself is an initial phase in the process of 
 definition. When one savage says of another that he is 
 foxy, he has connected the animal and the man by the 
 characteristic which is later defined as cunning. When 
 primitive man calls his own breath, wind, he has caught 
 his first far-off glimpse of spirit.
 
 122 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 The kindergartner who believes in the use of natural 
 analogies as helps in the evolution of spiritual ideas 
 simply recapitulates this historic process. Her method 
 is, first, to seek a point of contact with experience, 
 then to play a game which throws into relief the salient 
 feature of such experience, and finally to suggest its 
 implicit analogy. For example, on some auspicious 
 morning the children come to the kindergarten ting- 
 ling with excitement over their battle with the wind, 
 and eager to tell how it blew off their hats, made their 
 hair fly, and almost threw them to the ground. This 
 experience gives the wise kindergartner her point of 
 departure for games like the Weather- Vane, the wind- 
 blown trees, and the flying of kites. Following the 
 representation of wind-blown objects a picture is 
 shown which suggests many more things the wind 
 does. A story is told of an invisible giant and his 
 mighty deeds. The minds of the children are stirred 
 to wonder and they question what the wind is and 
 whence it comes. Their question is answered by the 
 suggestion of an analogy whose aim is simply to quicken 
 the feeling of faith in invisible power. "You cannot 
 understand now what the wind is nor where it comes 
 from, but you see what it does. Look your own 
 little hands move, but you cannot see what moves 
 them." 
 
 As an actual encounter with the wind gives the point 
 of departure for the Weather- Vane and its allied games, 
 so a day of brilliant winter sunlight after days of 
 depressing cloud gives the point of departure for the 
 play of the Light-Bird. No kindergartner who has 
 watched little children play this game can doubt the
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 123 
 
 eagerness with which they try to catch the flickering 
 reflection or question their faith that it may be caught. 
 When after vain experiment they give up the impos- 
 sible attempt, they are gladdened by the suggestion 
 that though they cannot catch it with then* hands , ,, 
 they may catch it with then- eyes, and so, too, they 
 may catch the rainbow, the sunset, the beautiful 
 colors of flowers, the blue sky, the dear faces and smiles 
 of father and mother. 
 
 One more illustration must suffice to suggest the 
 way in which the Froebelian kindergartner uses analo- 
 gies. In the early fall the children learn the games 
 of the baker, miller, and farmer, in each one of which 
 is represented a series of activities. During this same 
 period they learn to make different kinds of chains. 
 On some morning when they are patiently adding link 
 to link comes the suggestion, Let us make another 
 kind of chain, and the effort to stimulate relating 
 activity by leading to a more conscious representation 
 of the links in that chain of service at one end of which 
 is the breakfast roll and at the other the farmer sow- 
 ing grain. To dramatic representation follows the 
 drawing of chain pictures. The unmistakable result is 
 the direction of selective interest to relations and 
 processes. 
 
 The signers of this report are convinced by long 
 experience that acts of analogizing like those de- 
 scribed are among the most important of all forms of ' 
 kindergarten symbolism. 
 
 A second reason which has deterred some kinder- 
 gartners from the use of analogies is that recognition 
 of the value of correspondences has been erroneously
 
 124 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 supposed to carry with it acceptance of the Sweden- 
 borgian doctrine of correspondence, according to 
 which each particular object of nature is exclusively 
 related to a particular phenomenon of mind. It seems, 
 therefore, well to state that the Froebelian use of 
 correspondences implies no such exclusive tie, but 
 holds, on the contrary, that the same mental phenome- 
 non may be adumbrated by different natural images, 
 and that the same physical image seized under differ- 
 ent aspects corresponds to different phenomena of 
 mind. The Froebelian procedure implies nothing 
 beyond what is implied in metaphor, trope, simile, 
 personification, myth, fable, allegory, and all poetry. 
 The final source of prejudice against that form of 
 symbolism defined as correspondence is undoubtedly 
 antagonism to the particular correspondences sug- 
 gested by Froebel in the kindergarten gifts. The atti- 
 tude of any kindergartner towards these disputed 
 counterparts will be largely determined by her accept- 
 ance or rejection of the insight to which Froebel gave 
 the name Mediation of Opposites and which has been 
 explained in this report as identical with the insight 
 defined in Hegelian terminology as the self-relation 
 'tof the negative. Since we are anxious to evade no 
 question whose divergent solutions tend to produce 
 contrasting types of kindergartens, our next task shall 
 be to explain the relation of this insight to the organi- 
 zation of the Froebelian gifts. Before attempting this 
 explanation, however, we desire to avow our convic- 
 tion that insight into the form of mind is of far more 
 urgent necessity than acceptance of any specific appli- 
 cation of this insight, and to confess our belief that
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 125 
 
 among the applications made by Froebel the most 
 notable are the mediation of the individual and the 
 social whole in the embryonic community of the kin- 
 dergarten; the mediation of substantial and formal 
 freedom achieved by freighting play with the great 
 human values; the mediation of image and idea 
 through typical facts; and the mediation of material 
 and spiritual concepts through carefully selected 
 analogies. 
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN GIFTS 
 
 It is difficult to describe in detail one value of the 
 kindergarten gifts without seeming to imply an empha- 
 sis which we should deplore. We therefore preface our 
 discussion of the organizing principle of the gifts by a 
 statement of the several values which we accept in 
 common with other kindergartners. 
 
 The kindergarten gifts are first of all playthings. 
 They offer material for building, for plane, linear, and 
 point representation; for various forms of constructive 
 activity and for plastic production of different kinds. 
 Among their values, that which is both primary and 
 greatest is that they incite and develop creative activ- 
 ity. 
 
 The kindergarten gifts are playthings through which 
 approaches are made towards the several industries 
 and fine arts. Of especial value are the approaches 
 towards sewing, embroidery, weaving, basket-making, 
 and pottery among the industries, and towards archi- 
 tecture, sculpture, drawing, and painting among the 
 arts. 
 
 The several values above mentioned are accepted
 
 126 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 by all kindergartners who do not discard the Froe- 
 belian instrumentalities either in whole or in part. The 
 signers of this report hold further that these instru- 
 mentalities open the best path of approach thus far 
 broken towards the great value of mathematics. It 
 will be necessary to consider this approach in and for 
 itself before we can describe intelligibly the symbol- 
 ism of the kindergarten gifts. 
 
 The creative idea of the kindergarten is that what the 
 child does will determine both what he observes and 
 what he becomes. If, therefore, in his play he recur- 
 rently produces geometric forms and recurrently 
 changes one form into another, he will become inter- 
 ested in these forms and their relations and will be 
 quick to recognize similar forms and relations in his 
 environment. 
 
 As planned by Froebel the kindergarten gifts offered 
 a fairly complete introduction to geometric forms and 
 their interrelations. Through playing with these forms, 
 furthermore, children were constantly incited to no- 
 tice their plane and linear boundaries, the intersec- 
 tion of lines, and the several kinds of angles. Atten- 
 tion was also necessarily directed to numerical facts 
 and relations, and finally the very important concept 
 of ratio was illustrated through perceptions of propor- 
 tionate sizes. 
 
 The mathematical basis of the Froebelian gifts needs 
 no justification or defense, for all productive activity 
 demands this basis and so does every effort to increase 
 the power of rapid and exact sense-perception. The 
 world presents itself to sense as a complex of diverse 
 forms. Differences in these forms can be grasped 
 
 V 
 
 / 1, V~ 
 
 4 % J
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 127 
 
 sharply and spontaneously only by a mind furnished 
 with discriminating concepts. "All that the greatest 
 minds of all the ages have done toward the apper- 
 ception of form through concepts we find gathered 
 into a single great science mathematics." 1 
 
 The kindergarten gifts suggest an idea which they 
 do not completely exemplify. The history of the 
 kindergarten movement in the United States has been 
 characterized by two streams of tendency; one towards 
 the entire elimination of this informing idea and the 
 other towards its more adequate embodiment. Kin- 
 dergartners who have been swept into the former 
 stream prove the trend of their thought, first, by elim- 
 inating forms of knowledge and, second, by eliminating 
 a number of the Froebelian gifts. Kindergartners who 
 represent the second tendency make recurrent efforts 
 to develop further implications of the one informing 
 idea by additions to the Froebelian instrumentalities 
 and by a systematic evolution of peas-work, clay and 
 cardboard modeling. 2 
 
 In 1906, Miss M. M. Glidden published a mono- 
 graph which has greatly helped to clarify the idea 
 embodied in the kindergarten gifts. The author had 
 found in Froebel's personal diary a note dated July, 
 1836, describing a series of cuts by means of which 
 the cube was divided into six tetrahedra. The cuts 
 
 1 Herbart's A B C of Sense-Perception (William J. Eckoff), 
 p. 143. 
 
 2 It is impossible to accomplish in the kindergarten all that 
 Froebel desired to accomplish through the use of his gifts and occu- 
 pations. The signers of this report believe that there should be an 
 extension of Froebelian ideals and instrumentalities into the ele- 
 mentary school.
 
 128 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 are described by Miss Glidden as follows: "Plac- 
 ing the knife upon the diagonal of the square surface 
 of the cube and cutting part way down, so that a line 
 is made connecting diagonally opposite corners of the 
 cube, and treating each surface of the cube in the same 
 way, the cube will be divided into three equal irregular 
 square pyramids. The base of each of these is the 
 square face of the cube. Two faces are right isosceles 
 triangles, two others are obtuse scalene triangles. If 
 each of these parts be split down the center, the cube 
 will be divided into sixths" (tetrahedra). 1 
 
 Convinced by her studies of Froebel that this note 
 suggests the division of the cube which he intended 
 to carry out in his Seventh Gift, Miss Glidden makes 
 the following comment upon her discovery: "At first 
 glance, the Seventh Gift appears uninteresting and of 
 little value. The odd, wedge-shaped pieces suggest 
 little, but when one sees that the solid angles shown 
 in the interior of the Seventh Gift are the same as the 
 exterior angles of such a form as the pentagonal dode- 
 cahedron, one begins to think possibly there is more in 
 it. When one finds that whatever the exterior angles of 
 a mathematical form may be, it may always be found 
 in the interior of a rectilinear form by applying the 
 Seventh Gift cut, one feels that he has discovered a 
 principle. And again, when one finds that the ultimate 
 unit of the Seventh Gift, an irregular tetrahedron, is 
 the form into a certain number of which all mathe- 
 matical solids can be resolved, one could shout with 
 Froebel, 'Eureka! I have it!' It is a universal mathe- 
 
 1 M. M. Glidden, A Mathematical Study, Froebeft Building Gift*, 
 Seventh and Eighth, pp. 14, 15.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 129 
 
 matical element; this is the key which unlocks all 
 mathematical form." l 
 
 The value of the Seventh Gift lies in the method 
 of cutting which it suggests. It is by applying this 
 cut to other rectilinear solids that the variously pro- 
 portioned tetrahedra are found, into certain numbers 
 of which all mathematical solids may be analyzed. 
 These tetrahedra are, therefore, a medium of exchange 
 and comparison between different solids. To quote 
 Miss Glidden once more: 
 
 "The inner diagonal lines shown by the cut of the 
 Seventh Gift become the outer angles of any regular 
 mathematical solid which has axes of approximately 
 equal length. The slant of the outer angle depends 
 upon the proportions of the rectilinear solid to which 
 the Seventh Gift cut is applied. This makes it possible 
 to easily build up complex mathematical forms or with 
 equal ease to analyze them, and secures to the one who 
 makes this study an unusual knowledge of mathemat- 
 ical form, size, relative proportion, and the mental 
 development that goes with it." 
 
 "If a complex solid like a pentagonal dodecahedron 
 can be made easily to take the form of a rectilinear 
 plinth, its cubic contents can be ascertained at a glance; 
 and if this rectilinear prism (analyzed in a similar but 
 not identical manner) can be rebuilt in other forms, 
 for example, an octahedron or isosahedron, then 
 a bridge between these forms has been found and their 
 relation to each other may easily be seen." 
 
 "Every mathematical solid can be resolved into 
 
 1 M. M. Glidden, A Mathematical Study, Seventh and Eighth 
 Gifts, pp. 6-7.
 
 130 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 tetrahedra, similar to those of the Seventh Gift, when 
 it is divided into sixths. The proportions of the sides 
 of the tetrahedra may vary in different forms, but 
 the fundamental shape is the same. These tetrahedra 
 may, therefore, be considered as universal units, ele- 
 ments, the simplest units into which mathematical 
 forms can be analyzed." l 
 
 The Seventh Gift cut does not explain the organiza- 
 tion of the kindergarten gifts, but it tells us that Froebel 
 is trying to find some clew to the genesis and evolution 
 of form and to the relations between different forms. 
 When we have analyzed a number of solids into these 
 little tetrahedra, built up a number of solids from 
 them and used them as a medium of exchange and 
 comparison between different solids, we can never 
 again see these solids either as fixed or as isolated. 
 Each one of them has revealed itself as one phase of a 
 formative process and as an integral member of a re- 
 lated series of forms. 
 
 The series of forms whose genesis, evolution, and 
 interrelation are suggested by the application of the 
 Seventh Gift cut are all bounded by planes. There are, 
 however, a number of geometric solids bounded by 
 curves, and there are others bounded partly by curved 
 and partly by plane faces. Are these solids, therefore, 
 to be considered as belonging to three distinct series 
 or is it possible that all geometric forms are members 
 of a single system? We notice that as we increase the 
 number of sides on a plane figure it approximates in 
 shape to a circle, and that as we increase the number of 
 
 1 M. M. Glidden, A Mathematical Study, Seventh and Eighth 
 Gift*, p. 26.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 131 
 
 faces on a polyhedron it approximates in shape to a 
 sphere. Defining a circle as a polygon having an in- 
 finite number of sides, and a sphere as a polyhedron 
 having an infinite number of faces, we get our first clew 
 to the organization of the kindergarten gifts, which 
 is that they illustrate, in the evolution of geometric 
 forms, the general law of advance from an undifferen- 
 tiated unit to those highly complex wholes wherein 
 the most perfect unity is achieved through infinite dif- 
 ferentiation and integration. For this reason the kin- 
 dergarten gifts move from the sphere conceived as 
 excluding to the sphere conceived as including all pos- 
 sible faces, corners, and edges, and to this movement 
 of solid from sphere to sphere corresponds the evolu- 
 tion of geometric planes wherein the circle is both the 
 terminus ab quo and the terminus ad quern of a genera- 
 tive process, and the movement of lines from the curve 
 with return thereto through the intersection of straight 
 lines of different inclinations. Each solid, plane, and 
 line is, therefore, apprehended not in detached and 
 solitary independence, but as an integral member of 
 a related series. The exact place of each solid in the 
 series is determined by its greater or lesser approxim- 
 ation to the sphere, the exact place of each plane by 
 its greater or lesser approximation to the circle. 
 
 The second clue to the organization of the kinder- 
 garten gifts is suggested by the order of their presen- 
 tation. For while, as has been explained, the organiza- 
 tion of geometric forms into a system is made possible 
 by the conception of the sphere as both their procreant 
 ideal and their final goal, the order in which the differ- 
 ent forms are made known is determined by the insight
 
 132 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 to which Froebel gave the name Mediation of Oppo- 
 sites, and which, as applied in the kindergarten, de- 
 mands the presentation of contrasting extremes of 
 form and the gradual elimination of the antitheses 
 through an intermediate series. Thus the solid gifts 
 posit and annul the antitheses of sphere and cube; 
 the planes posit and annul the antitheses of circle 
 and square; and the linear gifts first accentuate and 
 then cancel the seemingly excluding extremes of 
 curved and straight lines. 
 
 In Froebel's conception all forms are products of 
 indwelling force. If unimpeded in its activity, this 
 force would diffuse itself equally hi all directions, and 
 its most perfect material expression, therefore, is the 
 sphere. In nature's geometry, as written in crystal 
 forms, we behold the progressive attempt of indwelling 
 force to realize its spherical ideal. Since, however, this 
 indwelling force is correlated with other forces which 
 hold it in tensions of varying degree, it must manifest 
 its spherical tendency by giving rise to a series of 
 forms which exhibit an advance from particular- 
 sidedness toward all-sidedness, and hence, departing 
 from rectilinear, strive incessantly to approach curved 
 outlines. The significant feature of this process is that 
 in its effort to make a sphere, force begins by making 
 its opposite, and only by a progressive annulment of 
 rectilinear limitation does it finally achieve its ideal 
 incarnation. This natural evolution of sphericity 
 through the positing and annulment of limitation is 
 precisely repeated in the kindergarten, and since each 
 illustration of a truth is one step toward its adequate 
 apprehension and definition, the gifts undoubtedly
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 133 
 
 build a bridge over which, within the limits of their 
 own petty experience, children may pass from the con- 
 ception of mutually excluding extremes to the con- 
 ception of a single ascending order. 
 
 Acceptance of the organizing idea of the kinder- 
 garten gifts does not necessarily carry with it accept- 
 ance of FroebePs guess with regard to the genesis of 
 crystal forms. That guess was not a scientific hypoth- 
 esis, but an act of poetic analogizing. It is interesting, 
 however, to remind ourselves that from contemporary 
 crystallography we hear of "sterile liquids containing 
 substances in solution that require the presence of a 
 crystalline 'germ ' to bring about the birth of crystals." 
 It is also worthy of mention that the new science of 
 plasmology would seem to be rapidly establishing the 
 fact that form and structure are due to the interplay 
 of different forces. 
 
 The mathematical values of the Froebelian gifts are 
 that they throw into relief the self-relations of detached 
 forms and the interrelations between different forms; 
 that they express all these relations in terms of number; 
 and that they direct attention to formative and trans- 
 forming activities. If science means seeking essential 
 relations and discovering totalities, then Froebel's 
 procedure is truly scientific and the wise use of his in- 
 strumentalities will tend to develop the scientific habit 
 of mind. In connection with the use of the gifts changes 
 of form in natural objects should be noticed, for ex- 
 ample, the rounding of pebbles by the action of water, 
 the manifold alterations of form in bubbles caused by 
 reciprocal pressure, the "flattening of chestnuts in 
 their cases, of peas in their pods, and of sheaves of
 
 134 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 straw in piles; the difference between the round cell of 
 the solitary bee and the cells in a hive where pressure 
 on space has straightened out the sides of the cells 
 until the limiting form the hexagon is reached." 1 
 Finally, mathematical imagination should be stimu- 
 lated by directing attention to "the fluidity and inter- 
 changeableness of natural curves," such as the reflec- 
 tion curves "made by the sunlight falling on moving 
 liquids or the light-curves at the bottom of a clear 
 stream caused by the ripples on the top." 2 
 
 When we understand the organizing idea of the 
 kindergarten gifts, it is very easy to interpret their 
 symbolism. Since they furnish a concrete example 
 of that evolutionary process which exhibits a change 
 from an "indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a 
 definite, coherent heterogeneity," they belong among 
 the symbols defined in kindergarten terminology as 
 typical acts, facts, characters, relations, and processes. 
 Since the process exemplified recapitulates that mode 
 of behavior which is the form of mind, and since the 
 child participates in this form, the organized totality 
 of the gifts is also symbolic in the sense that it offers 
 a series of correspondences to his own self -developing 
 activity. It is not asserted that the child is aware of 
 these correspondences. The claim is simply that he 
 enjoys and readily apprehends what agrees with his 
 own inherent form. In the kindergarten gifts as in a 
 mirror he beholds himself, and like the primal self- 
 activity rejoices in his own image. 
 
 It has been claimed as one of the great discoveries 
 
 1 M. S. Boole, Preparation of the Child for Science, p. 126. 
 Ibid., p. 113.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 135 
 
 of our age that "Mathematics is Symbolic Logic and 
 Symbolic Logic is Mathematics." 1 If this twain be, 
 indeed, one, and if recognition of then" identity be 
 among the most remarkable of contemporary mental 
 feats, then why did not Froebel make a valuable con- 
 tribution to education when he made it possible for 
 little children to illustrate, in the evolution of arche- 
 typal forms, the relations, processes, and structure of 
 thought? 
 
 The structure of mind is the most potent of all agencies 
 in determining creative activity. It is also the most potent 
 of all apperceiving agencies. Until these insights have 
 become wide awake in our own minds, we do not know 
 how to abet the self-developing activity of childhood. We 
 thwart the strongest of all native tendencies, and by forcing 
 self-expression into artificial paths arrest development. 
 
 The contentions of the Froebelian kindergartner are 
 that play with organized material organizes the mind and 
 that the most efficient principle of organization is the form 
 or law of mind itself. 
 
 Several reasons have conspired to bring the kinder- 
 garten gifts into disrepute and to create antagonism 
 to their mathematical basis, their organizing principle, 
 and their traditional method of use. The first of these 
 reasons is that, while the mathematical basis of the 
 gifts is recognized, it is not clearly conceived; the sec- 
 ond, that, while the plan of Froebel for the true use of 
 his gifts demands at least four years for its realization, 
 the kindergarten rarely holds its children for more 
 than a year; the third, that the organizing principle 
 of the gifts has been so narrowly conceived as to lose 
 1 Cassius Jackson Keyser, Mathematics.
 
 136 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 all its significance; and the fourth and final reason, 
 confusion between the idea of projecting in images the 
 natural logic of mind and the very different idea of 
 making children logical by a forced and unnatural 
 method. 
 
 With this discussion of the Mediation of Opposites, 
 as illustrated in the organization of the kindergarten 
 gifts, we complete our survey of the genetic-developing 
 method. It has been shown that the presupposition of 
 the method is life, conceived as immediate presentation 
 and immediate response to this presentation, and that 
 its goal is life renewed, transfigured, and unified. It 
 has been stated that its point of departure is the deed 
 and that it demands those introspective and retro- 
 spective activities through which the deed learns to 
 see into and through itself. It has been claimed that 
 during the period of early childhood the highest form 
 of the deed is play and the kindergarten has been 
 defined as that mode of education which freights the 
 form of play with the values of human life. It has been 
 further shown that the native make-believe play of 
 childhood is symbolic in its form, and therefore that 
 in the use of symbolism the kindergarten does not 
 impose upon play something foreign to its spirit, but 
 borrows its own characteristic mode of expression. 
 Finally, the attempt has been made to suggest that the 
 genetic-developing method is simply a conscious effort 
 to abet the native movement of self-activity, which, 
 proceeding from the deed, advances to awareness of 
 its results and its process. 
 
 If the kindergarten is ever to realize its own ideal,
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 137 
 
 its representatives must have a clear conception of the 
 Gliedganzes; must appraise educational values by this 
 criterion; and must comprehend that genetic-develop- 
 ing method whose aim is to evolve values instead of 
 imposing them. Practice must shape itself differently 
 as values, their criterion, and their method of devel- 
 opment are differently conceived. The need of the 
 present, therefore, is the discussion of these several 
 questions. Any external uniformity of practice not 
 based upon a common vision would only impede the 
 historic development of the kindergarten. 
 
 It is because we crave to share a vision which has 
 brought inspiration and joy to us that we have given 
 so much space to discussion of the several forms of 
 symbolism in their relation to the genetic-developing 
 method. It is for the same reason that we refrain from 
 any attempt to justify the particular symbols preferred 
 by Froebel. Our present effort is to win so far as may 
 be recognition of principles which seem to us funda- 
 mental. When these principles are recognized, we shall 
 heartily cooperate with all persons who may be striv- 
 ing to create conforming practice. 
 
 The aim of the first section of this report was to 
 describe the ideal of the Gliedganzes and to present it 
 as the realized form of self-activity. The aim of the 
 second section was to suggest that each great human 
 value is an approximate definition of this universal 
 form. The aim of the present section has been to call 
 attention to the fact that self -activity is not only its 
 own goal and its own standard, but also its own method. 
 The aim of the final section will be to describe the 
 kindergarten practice which seems to us most nearly
 
 138 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 in conformity with its one great principle. While, 
 however, we are sure of our principle, we are equally 
 sure that in reducing it to practice we must have done 
 many things we should not do and left undone many 
 things we should do. We are ourselves in process of 
 development, and the blindness which darkens our 
 minds and the obduracy which clings to our wills must 
 react upon our practical achievement. Truth is final 
 and we can abate no jot or tittle of the claim we make 
 for the principle of self-activity. Life, on the contrary, 
 is a dialectic process wherein the one thing permanent 
 should be self-outgrowing. Not in the program we 
 shall present, nor in the program towards which we 
 struggle from afar, will our ideal be realized. Yet that 
 ideal will forever inspire fresh effort, and each more 
 approximate realization will bring clearer vision to the 
 kindergartner and purer and more joyous life to the 
 little child.
 
 PART IV 
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN PROGRAM 
 
 THE larger sanction of the kindergarten is to be 
 sought in its contribution to the building of character. 
 During the period of early childhood mental and moral 
 habits are being formed and emotional attitudes are es- 
 tablishing themselves. If, in these early years, children 
 are not trained to be careful, they will be forming 
 habits of carelessness; if they are not learning to govern 
 temper, they are forming a habit of being governed by 
 temper. If they are not learning to be industrious, 
 punctual, orderly, clean, kind, and courteous, then 
 they are confirming disastrous tendencies towards 
 idleness, procrastination, disorder, uncleanliness, self- 
 ishness, and rudeness. In these early years, moreover, 
 they are forming intellectual as well as moral habits. 
 If they are not being taught to "stop and think," they 
 will be arrested in the habit of heedlessness. If they 
 are not cultivating a healthy selective interest, they 
 are becoming victims of whim and random suggestion. 
 If they are not filling imagination with concrete pictures 
 of purity, beauty, and nobility, then they are sullying 
 it with base or belittling it with petty images. If they 
 are not learning to see essential relations, they are 
 forming the habit of arbitrary classification. If they 
 are not learning to think consecutively, to test infer- 
 ences, and to suspend judgment, then they are drift-
 
 140 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 ing into mental habits of superficiality, precipitancy, 
 and reckless analogizing, and preparing themselves 
 for all the misery attendant upon vibration between 
 the extremes of intellectual slavishness and intellectual 
 anarchy. Last but not least, all little children are 
 either developing an emotional undertone correspond- 
 ent to ethical ideals or sinking into slavery to the unre- 
 generate impulses which antagonize those ideals. 
 
 The aim of the kindergarten program is develop- 
 ment of the mental and moral habits, the emotional 
 undertone, and the imaginative vision which are im- 
 plied in the conception of man as Gliedganzes. The 
 object of all education is to help the pupil to find him- 
 self as a whole and also as a single member of the great 
 living whole God, nature, and humanity. As an 
 integral phase of the general educational process the 
 kindergarten accepts this common aim and moves 
 towards its realization in ways determined by the 
 psychologic order of development. 
 
 The ideal of the Gliedganzes must be clearly dis- 
 tinguished from the ideal of social efficiency. The 
 words social efficiency imply a giver but not a receiver 
 a man equipped for leadership but not himself in 
 need of help. The kindergarten ideal may be more 
 nearly stated as social reciprocity. But all statements 
 which fail to throw into clear relief relationship to God 
 and to nature, as well as relationship to man, fall short 
 of the ideal of education as determined by the concep- 
 tion of the Gliedganzes. 
 
 In the first section of this report an effort was made 
 to show that all great educational values are approxi- 
 mate revelations of the Gliedganzes. Three attitudes
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 141 
 
 may be taken towards these values. They may be 
 denied or ignored; they may be imposed; or, finally, 
 their native process of self-unfolding may be abetted. 
 The kindergarten chooses the third attitude. It helps 
 children to do better what they themselves are blindly 
 trying to do. Therefore, it quickens within them both 
 a faint awareness of their own inner life and trust in 
 those who are responding to this craving. 1 
 
 As the aim of the kindergarten is determined by the 
 conception of the Gliedganzes, so its practical attempts 
 to carry out this aim are determined by the genetic- 
 developing method. The first emphasis of this method 
 
 1 "First of all," writes Froebel, "and before any other reflection 
 from without comes to the child, the following observation as the 
 sun of his whole future life must shine upon him and warm him 
 the reflection that the fostering care, the development and formation, 
 the realization of my inmost life as a whole in itself, and as a member 
 of a great living whole, is the object of all which is done for me from 
 without; of all which is done for me by older people, and especially 
 of all which is done for me by my parents. If now the lively appreci- 
 ation of what has been done to cultivate his inner world by parents 
 and other people fill the soul of the child so that he may feel and find 
 himself at the same time as a whole and also a single member of a higher 
 life unity, then will true love and gratitude toward his parents, re- 
 spect and veneration for age, germinate in the mind of the child. 
 Then will the vivifying anticipation of the lovingly pervading unity 
 and fount of all life blossom in his soul, and bear imperishable fruits 
 in his character, and be an abiding quality of his action. 
 
 "To assist parents and children to obtain these highest gifts and 
 blessings of life is the single and innermost aim of these plays and 
 means of employment." (Pedagogics of the Kindergarten, pp. 114, 
 115.) 
 
 The most important statement in this passage is that the child 
 is to be so treated that he will feel that what is being done for him 
 corresponds with his own inmost nature and needs. This demand and 
 the effort to meet it constitutes one of the most distinctive peculiari- 
 ties of the Froebelian method.
 
 142 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 is upon self-expression in the form of typical deeds. 
 Its second emphasis is upon those introspective and 
 retrospective activities through which children gain 
 their first awareness of the results and process of self- 
 expression. It cannot be too often repeated that, con- 
 ceived in its entirety as "the deed which sees into and 
 through itself," the Froebelian method is the most 
 effective yet discovered for preventing that accumu- 
 lation of blind, tempestuous, and colliding impulses 
 which so constantly wrecks life and disintegrates 
 personality. 
 
 Defining the aim of the kindergarten as the germinal 
 development of those mental and moral habits and 
 that emotional undertone which are implied in the 
 conception of man as Gliedganzes, and defining its 
 method as the incitement of typical deeds through 
 which children shall be helped to see into and through 
 themselves, let us next remind ourselves that the pre- 
 supposition of our method is life conceived, on the one 
 hand, as immediate presentation, and on the other, 
 as immediate response to this presentation. In other 
 words, the actual experience of children is to supply 
 our point of departure for the development of the 
 Gliedganzes by the incitement of typical deeds and the 
 stimulation of that gentle and indirect introspection 
 and retrospection through which the deed gets eyes to 
 see into and through itself. 
 
 For many years there was divergence of opinion 
 among the representatives of the kindergarten as to 
 whether it were either possible or desirable to find a 
 basis of common experience and whether it were either 
 possible or desirable to incite typical deeds. Happily
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 143 
 
 this divergence of opinion is now so far overcome as to 
 be practically negligible and this report assumes that 
 the common experience and the typical deed need no 
 further defense. 
 
 Accepting the idea that the program shall find its 
 point of departure in the common experiences of chil- 
 dren, we next set ourselves the task of inventorying 
 the elements of this experience. So soon as we con- 
 sciously begin this task we become aware that the first 
 great common experience of the children is life in the 
 kindergarten itself. Let us try to realize what this 
 experience means by entering into the mind of a new 
 pupil admitted to an already organized kindergarten. 
 Up to this time the little boy, now four years old, has 
 spent his life with the members of his own family. 
 Most of them are his elders and make allowances for 
 him. In the kindergarten the very first things he learns 
 are what he must do and what he must not do hi order 
 to become an acceptable member of the little commun- 
 ity to which he now belongs. He must not knock over 
 his neighbor's blocks or scatter his sticks or snatch the 
 mat he is weaving. He must open his box at the right 
 moment in order not to keep the children who are 
 prompt from beginning their building. He must have 
 his weaving or folding in his portfolio at the end of an 
 exercise in order not to detain his comrades who are 
 eager to march to the circle. He must not jerk, push, 
 slap, or pinch his companions. Again, these little com- 
 panions are clean and will not like him unless he is 
 clean. He notices that they listen to what the kinder- 
 gartner says and obey her words. They water the 
 plants, put away the gifts, set the chairs in order.
 
 144 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 Insensibly he conforms to the general spirit, and 
 through the contagion of a prompt, industrious, or- 
 derly, cheerful, obedient, and kindly community he 
 begins to form the habits necessary to all corporate 
 life. After a while the kindergartner begins indirectly 
 to present these habits as ideals. There are stories of 
 children who were active, useful, polite, and kind. 
 There are fairy stories whose heroes won fan* princesses 
 and became great kings through the exercise of these 
 elementary virtues. There are games wherein the chil- 
 dren represent typical forms of the service of men and 
 animals, of plants, and even of the elements. The pic- 
 ture of a life in which each serves all and is served by all 
 begins to hover in dimmest outline before his imagina- 
 tion and reacts to make the little boy more ready to do 
 his own small part. In short, fundamental habits are 
 being formed, fundamental sympathies cherished, and 
 fundamental ideals defined, first, through actual life 
 in an embryonic community, and second, by a repre- 
 sentation in play and story of the services of the larger 
 community and the natural world. 
 
 We have tried to suggest briefly the reaction of an 
 organized kindergarten upon an individual child. Let 
 us now attempt to follow the self-organizing and self- 
 defining activity of the kindergarten itself. We will 
 assume that it is the first week of the school year and 
 that a new kindergarten is being opened. The kinder- 
 gartner who understands and appreciates the influence 
 of environment will have spared no pains to make the 
 first impression of the kindergarten room both pleasant 
 and suggestive. It is, therefore, bright with sunshine 
 and flowers. A single picture the Madonna and
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 145 
 
 Child hangs on the wall. Suspended from the ceil- 
 ing are several groups of balls of different colors, and 
 boxes containing similar balls stand on an accessible 
 shelf. A sand table invites to immediate delights, and 
 perhaps upon the tables at which the children are to 
 sit are temptingly displayed boxes of bright-colored 
 beads, and large needles conveniently threaded. 
 
 To this new environment in early September come 
 forty or fifty little children four and five years old, no 
 one of whom has ever attended a kindergarten. For 
 the nonce let us eliminate the kindergartner; suppose 
 the children alone and ask ourselves what they will do. 
 We may be sure that they will make more or less shy 
 advances towards acquaintanceship, will soon learn 
 each others' names, will measure themselves against 
 each other in running games, and after a while will 
 unite in playing some simple traditional ring game. 
 They will spy the sand table and will soon be sifting 
 sand through their open fingers, burying their hands 
 in the sand, poking holes, hollowing wells, and piling 
 hills. The bright-colored beads and threaded needles 
 will tempt them to string necklaces. The balls will 
 suggest rolling, tossing, whirling, and hiding games. 
 The hiding of balls will be followed by the hiding of 
 children. Finally, the flowers will assuredly be noticed, 
 and the picture of Mother and Child will attract 
 sympathetic attention. 
 
 Let us now restore the eliminated kindergartner and 
 ask ourselves what she should do. The answer is a 
 very simple one. She should watch the children and 
 from then* spontaneous deeds open paths of approach 
 towards the several great human values. She may lead
 
 146 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 from the mere covering of hands in the sand to the 
 making of huts. She may bring twigs which the chil- 
 dren will be delighted to plant around these huts in 
 holes of their own poking. She may suggest that each 
 child draw a boundary line around his own cave. She 
 may lead the children to make paths from cave to cave 
 and thus create a rude village. She may turn away 
 from constructive activity to rhythmic arrangement, 
 and suggest that the holes poked in the sand be poked 
 at equal distances. After a while she may substitute 
 shells for holes and incite the children to original 
 creation of rhythmic and symmetric designs. 
 
 Like the sand table the bead-stringing offers a point 
 of departure for the development of creative activity 
 and for approach to constructive values, art values, 
 and mathematical values. The children may string 
 necklaces, bracelets, wreaths, and decorations for the 
 kindergarten room. It is fair to assume that left to 
 themselves they will string in somewhat disorderly 
 fashion. The kindergartner intervenes with the sug- 
 gestion that they alternate one white and one red bead, 
 thereby introducing a practical exercise in number and 
 color. Later the most varied and beautiful arrange- 
 ments of beads may be made by more complicated 
 alternations of number and color and by the addition 
 of alternative forms and sizes. 1 
 
 Turning our attention from sand and beads to balls, 
 we are almost bewildered by the number and variety 
 of educational exercises for which they supply the point 
 of departure. Rolling balls is a fine arm exercise. 
 
 1 It is to be understood that these arrangements arc to be dis- 
 covered by the children.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 147 
 
 Rolling first to some particular child and later to hit 
 a box or cube is an excellent eye exercise. Attention 
 to the path taken by a ball impelled with force begins 
 the acquaintanceship with the straight line. Atten- 
 tion to the several movements described by whirling 
 balls begins the acquaintanceship with circular, spiral, 
 and vortical lines. The sinking and rising balls intro- 
 duce the children to the vertical line. The fruit and 
 bird games call attention to color and number. The 
 spinning games (especially when the spinning sphere 
 is contrasted with the spinning cube) suggest the un- 
 changeableness of the sphere under all varieties of 
 position and all accelerations of movement. The 
 search for objects like the sphere begins the classi- 
 fication of objects under geometric archetypes. The 
 method followed hi developing all these exercises is to 
 give the children opportunity for free experiment; to 
 observe what they do and towards what human val- 
 ues this deed points; to suggest new exercises develop- 
 ing the implications of their free deed, and to incite the 
 children not only to do something, but to notice what 
 they have done. 
 
 We have dwelt at some length upon the first gift and 
 occupation exercises because the application of the 
 genetic method to gifts and occupations seems to be 
 far less generally understood than its application to 
 games. It has long been recognized that the first thing 
 which must be done in a new kindergarten is to over- 
 come the feelings of shyness and strangeness, and help 
 the children to feel at home in then* unaccustomed 
 environment. These little strangers must get ac- 
 quainted with the kindergartner, her assistants, and
 
 148 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 each other. They must also get acquainted with the 
 kindergarten room. This primary demand of ac- 
 quaintanceship determines the games played during 
 the first few weeks, and all kindergartners know the 
 goodly series of naming games, greeting games, wander- 
 ing games, hiding games, recognition games, and visit- 
 ing games which have been evolved to meet it. It is 
 worthy of mention that these games call only for the 
 simplest physical activities and that they involve none 
 of the quick transitions of movement characteristic 
 of games played towards the end of the year. 1 
 
 It has been already said that the first great common 
 experience of kindergarten children is life in the kin- 
 dergarten itself. The program may perhaps be most 
 briefly defined as an attempt to reinforce, influence, 
 and interpret this self-evolving life. Let us, therefore, 
 ask ourselves what lines of development have been 
 started by the experiences already described. 
 
 The children are now acquainted with the kinder- 
 gartner and with each other. They have enjoyed many 
 things in common. They have dug wells, piled hills, 
 and hollowed caves in the sand. Long chains of beads 
 of their own stringing, and paper chains which they 
 have interlinked hang in gay festoons before their eyes. 
 The balls have rolled and wandered from child to child. 
 Other rolling games have developed in which the ball 
 has been aimed at some chosen object and the stead- 
 
 1 The first demand of the genetic method in its application to 
 panics is emphasis in the early part of the year upon pure movement 
 games, such as walking, running, skipping, hopping, swinging of 
 arms and legs, sinking and rising. Its second demand is advance to 
 simple imitative games involving these movements, for example, 
 hopping birds, running horses, swinging pendulums.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 149 
 
 fast cube has proved itself a satisfactory target. The 
 flowers have been given fresh water every day, and as 
 they faded, new and different flowers have taken their 
 places. The kindergartner has suggested how pleasant 
 it would be to go some day all together to a park or 
 field where many beautiful flowers might be seen and 
 gathered. The single wandering game has developed 
 into the flying bird; the collective wandering game into 
 the streamlet; and the words of both have rehearsed 
 the wonders of the great out-of-doors. A story has been 
 told of little Thumbelina who wandered far and wide 
 and the marvels of her experience. Finally, the game 
 of "Little Travelers" has been played and imagination 
 stimulated hi each little child who tells of the land from 
 which he came. Are not the children ready for a new 
 experience, and shall not our next attempt to abet the 
 self -unfolding life of our little community be made by 
 taking them on an excursion? 
 
 Only those kindergartners who have for years made 
 excursions with their children can realize how greatly 
 they enrich the self-unfolding life of the little commun- 
 ity and how many points of departure they yield for 
 approach towards the several great educational values. 
 Some slight sense of their importance will, however, 
 be suggested by considering even the four excursions 
 now often made during the weeks intervening between 
 the opening of the kindergarten in September and 
 the first climax of the program in the Thanksgiving 
 festival. The first excursion is made during the fourth 
 week after the opening of the kindergarten and is usu- 
 ally to some park or field. On this excursion the chil- 
 dren see horses, dogs, squirrels, pigeons and pigeon
 
 150 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 houses, different kinds of birds and butterflies. Often 
 they find snails and cocoons. Generally they see ant- 
 hills. Sometimes they come across different strange 
 insects. They dig tiny pebbles out of the ground. 
 They gather many kinds of wild flowers. They blow 
 the feathery tufts of the dandelion and snap the cap- 
 sules of the jewel weed. Burdocks cling to their 
 clothes, and sometimes they are pricked by thorns and 
 stung by nettles. In a second excursion several weeks 
 later, they see birds flying southward, trees shaking 
 their leaves, and squirrels gathering nuts; they find 
 nests which have fallen to the ground, gather fall 
 leaves of different colors, pick up nuts, and discover 
 many kinds of seeds. Their third excursion is to a 
 bakery, and the fourth, and last before Thanksgiving, 
 is to a market where they see sheaves of wheat, stalks 
 of corn, and a wonderful variety of fruits and vegeta- 
 bles. 
 
 We have been trying to analyze the common ex- 
 perience of children during the first few weeks of life 
 in the kindergarten. Not yet, however, is our analysis 
 complete. For every day all these children have been 
 coming from and returning to homes. Their total ex- 
 perience is an alternation of life between two communi- 
 ties and a gradually self-establishing connection be- 
 tween them. Is it not inevitable that as the children 
 domesticate themselves in their new environment and 
 begin to feel in sympathy with the kindergartner and 
 with each other that they should wish to tell about 
 the homes in which hitherto their lives have been lived. 
 There is a baby brother in one home, a baby sister in 
 another, and in a third a grandmother who tells won-
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 151 
 
 derful stories. Willy's mother took him on Saturday 
 to a circus. Gretchen has had a birthday party and a 
 cake with candles. Peter's father goes with the whole 
 family to the park every Sunday. Connections with 
 the home are establishing themselves in other ways. 
 Dora's mother brings her to the kindergarten every 
 day and often lingers through the opening exercises. 
 Harry's sister comes with him, and tiny Margaret has 
 as daily escort her proud young father. Joe's brother 
 brings a message that he is ill and the kindergartner 
 hastens to cheer him with a visit. It is needless to go 
 into more detail. The chain which binds the kinder- 
 garten to the home is forging itself. 
 
 At the meeting of the International Kindergarten 
 Union, hi St. Louis, Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer, so 
 well known through her wise philanthropic work, said 
 that of all the agencies now working towards the solu- 
 tion of that most imperative problem, the assimila- 
 tion of our immigrant population, the one which in 
 her judgment was working in the sanest way was 
 the kindergarten. Other agencies, she explained, were 
 dismissing the adult immigrant from consideration; 
 solacing themselves with the assurance that these 
 foreign-born men and women would soon be dead, and 
 concentrating efforts upon the single task of making 
 American citizens of their children. The result was a 
 severance of the family tie, and development in chil- 
 dren of a contemptuous attitude towards fathers and 
 mothers. 
 
 The least reflection should assure any intelligent per- 
 son that attack upon primal relationships is attack 
 upon the roots of virtue. It is by filial faith, love, and
 
 152 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 obedience; by fraternal kindness; by consideration and 
 tenderness for grandparents, and by the stimulation 
 of nurturing impulses through small services to help- 
 less infancy that each new generation nourishes in its 
 heart those primal affections from which are precipi- 
 tated our moral ideals. Teaching a child to scorn his 
 parents and to despise his home is not educating him 
 for citizenship, but for contempt of law and order. We 
 must educate for a national, nay, rather for a cosmo- 
 politan, manhood, but the child five years old cannot 
 be a citizen of the world. 
 
 " Man is made of social earth, 
 Child and brother from his birth. 
 Near to his heart the household band, 
 Father, mother, sister stand: 
 
 Virtue to love, to hate them vice." 
 
 One incidental feature of the interaction between the 
 two communities the occasional visit of a baby 
 brother or sister to the kindergarten has proved itself 
 singularly prolific of educational results. Its influence 
 may, perhaps, be most briefly described as a point of 
 departure for the development of the nurturing spirit. 
 Nearly all children love babies and are pleased to hold 
 them, if only for a minute, to look at their tiny fists 
 and pink toes, to see them wave bye-bye, and to win 
 from them a coo or a smile. After such a visit they 
 are ready for doll plays, eager to wash, dress, and feed 
 baby, trundle it gently in its carriage, warm its cold 
 feet, put it to sleep, speak and move gently while it is 
 sleeping, play with it when it wakes. Having them- 
 selves played these acts of nurture, they look with 
 awakened interest at the pictures in the Mother Play.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 153 
 
 On one page they see baby striking out vigorously 
 with his little legs and mother playing some game like 
 "Shoe the Horse." On another, they see mother giv- 
 ing baby his supper. In a third picture, she has taken 
 him out of doors and is teaching him to beckon the 
 pigeons. In a fourth, she is teaching him to play " Pat- 
 a-cake"; in a fifth, to gather flowers; in a sixth, she 
 is showing him the moon. Enough the concrete pic- 
 ture of all mother does for the baby all she once 
 did for him begins to shape itself in the child's imagi- 
 nation, and interpreted by the doll plays stirs his heart 
 with faith and love. He has begun to know himself as 
 a nurtured being. He has begun to develop in himself 
 nurturing impulse. "Answer me," says Froebel, ad- 
 dressing the mother, "answer me but one question. 
 What is the supreme gift you would bestow on the chil- 
 dren who are the life of your life, the soul of your soul? 
 Would you not above all other things render them cap- 
 able of giving nurture? Would you not endow them 
 with the courage and constancy which the ability to give 
 nurture implies? Mother, father, has not our common 
 effort been directed towards just this end? Have we not 
 been trying to break a path towards this blessed life? " 
 It will be remembered that the presupposition of the 
 genetic method was life conceived as immediate pre- 
 sentation and reaction and its goal life transfigured and 
 illuminated. We have been trying to show one small 
 cycle of this process, the sweep from simple pleasure 
 in seeing and holding baby to a dim awareness of self 
 as a nurtured being and a faint stirring within the 
 heart of nurturing impulse. The total sweep of the 
 kindergarten program should be a vortical ascent
 
 154 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 towards clearer consciousness of the self as nurtured, 
 more vigorous stirrings within the self of nurturing 
 impulses, and higher attainment by the self of the 
 courage, constancy, patience, watchfulness, and fidel- 
 ity necessary to nurturing activity. Doll plays must 
 therefore be followed by actual care for animals and 
 plants, and the kindergarten cannot realize its own 
 ideal until these phases of its life are more generally 
 embodied. There are many indications which suggest 
 that their importance is being increasingly recognized. 
 In practically all kindergartens there are plants which 
 the children care for, in a very large number there are 
 gold fish, in a smaller number aquariums with several 
 kinds of water animals, and in a few kindergartens the 
 experiment has been made of providing a very large 
 cage which is occupied successively by visiting ani- 
 mals that is, pigeons, squirrels, guinea pigs, fam- 
 ilies of rabbits, mother hens with their broods of little 
 chickens. No one who has attentively considered the 
 reaction of this direct and sympathetic contact with 
 animal life both upon intellect and character will be 
 willing to lose its influence. 
 
 In what has thus far been written an effort has been 
 made to describe the common experiences which give 
 direction to the self -evolving life of a new kindergarten 
 community during the first few weeks of its existence. 
 Two features of that life remain to be considered; the 
 daily luncheon of bread and milk and the little prayer 
 and hymn with which each morning the kindergarten 
 opens. 1 
 
 1 It is not claimed that these features are universal. It is believed 
 they should be.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 155 
 
 Considered as an educational influence the values 
 of the luncheon are that it affords occasion for develop- 
 ing cleanliness, neatness, and courtesy, that it supplies 
 a point of departure for representation and assimila- 
 tion of the series of activities through which bread and 
 milk are provided, and that through the simple grace 
 by which it is preceded it reinforces the influence of the 
 opening prayer and hymn. The common purpose of 
 grace, hymn, and prayer is the cultivation of a devout 
 spirit. 
 
 One of the more valuable contributions of contem- 
 porary pyschology to education is its insistence upon 
 the reaction of motor-expression upon feeling and 
 thought. Froebel calls attention to this reaction in the 
 Mother Play and bases upon it his argument for the 
 development of the religious spirit through the culti- 
 vation of reverent attitudes and gestures. Faithful, 
 however, to his own genetic method, he likewise insists 
 that the devout attitude shall not be formally im- 
 posed, but evoked as the natural expression of a dawn- 
 ing feeling. The ways and means of meeting this 
 double requirement were considered in detail in the 
 third section of this report. It suffices, therefore, in the 
 present connection to repeat that only a devout kin- 
 dergartner can really quicken the reverential spirit and 
 that nothing could be more antithetic to the Froebelian 
 ideal than a parrot-like repetition of devout words and 
 a monkey-like simulation of the prayerful attitude. 
 
 The connection between mental states and bodily 
 attitudes is not an arbitrary one. Between the Orien- 
 tal who prostrates himself before a heavenly and earthly 
 potentate and the Puritan who, erect and open-eyed,
 
 156 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 faces God and his fellow man, there is a contrast which 
 suggests the greatest line of scission in human history. 
 Between the Puritan himself and his descendant, who 
 with wandering mind sits in indolent relaxation in his 
 cushioned pew, there is another contrast it were well 
 to consider. It may, nay, rather, it must be granted 
 that reverent attitudes should be the outer and visible 
 sign of reverent minds, but it must also be insisted 
 that reverent minds are created by reverent deeds and 
 that unless in childhood the dawning feeling of rever- 
 ence is strengthened and confirmed by habitual expres- 
 sion it cannot maintain itself against the besieging 
 temptations which tend to make life superficial, arro- 
 gant, and empty. 
 
 The primary purpose of the foregoing pages has 
 been to describe the self-evolving life of a new kinder- 
 garten community. During their first weeks in the 
 kindergarten the children have had the several great 
 experiences of estrangement from a familiar life; mem- 
 bership in a new community; and a series of self -estab- 
 lishing connections between the two. They have re- 
 peated the typical aspects of this threefold experience 
 in play and by this reproduction have begun its-assimi- 
 lation. The reader who has grasped this relation be- 
 tween life and play will already have divined the fact 
 that throughout the kindergarten year the children will 
 be expanding experience and projecting this expanded 
 experience in their games. Running like squirrels, gal- 
 loping and trotting like horses, flying like birds, swim- 
 ming like fishes, flowing like streams, tending babies 
 like mother, sowing and reaping like the farmer, ham- 
 mering like the blacksmith, marching like the soldier, in
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 157 
 
 short, becoming themselves different persons, animals, 
 and objects, children create within themselves a micro- 
 scopic copy of life, and therefore begin to know life. 
 Do we ever know anything save as we make it a part of 
 ourselves, and how shall the little child make external 
 objects, persons, and events parts of himself unless, by 
 doing as they do, he makes himself their copy. The 
 essential thing is that his copy or portrait of life shall 
 not caricature life, but shall sympathetically reproduce 
 its defining features and its ideal expression. George 
 Eliot has remarked that even Milton, looking for his 
 portrait in a spoon, must submit to have the facial 
 angle of a bumpkin. Like portraits of individuals, 
 portraits of life may diminish and distort the original 
 portrayed. 
 
 The play world which the child creates constitutes 
 the spiritual environment, in which he lives and moves 
 and has his being. Having created it, he comprehends 
 it, and it becomes the key through which he interprets 
 the larger world in which he finds himself. The world 
 mind knows is always primarily a world it has made. 
 The creator is not the mere predecessor of the knower. 
 He is the knower's ancestor. 
 
 Hitherto, exercising his own unaided might, the 
 child has created a play world which caricatures the 
 greater world into which he is born. Hence his inter- 
 pretation of the latter is a false and distorted one. 
 The primary aim of the kindergarten is to help him 
 create a miniature world which shall be a faithful por- 
 trait of the greater world in its ideal aspects. 1 
 
 1 For a definition of what is meant by the ideal, see Educational 
 Issues in the Kindergarten, pp. 63, 64.
 
 158 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 The question may arise, How can games having a 
 fixed -form be considered creations of children? The 
 answer to this question is that the game assumes 
 fixed form as the result of a process of social creation. 
 In the Pedagogics of the Kindergarten, Froebel has illus- 
 trated in great detail the application of the genetic- 
 developing method to the evolution of games, and one 
 of the most cheering evidences of growth in the kinder- 
 garten is the increasing ability of kindergartners to 
 follow his procedure. It should be added that excur- 
 sions have proved themselves of great help in the orig- 
 inal development of games. The children who have act- 
 ually seen carpenters and blacksmiths at work, who 
 have gone to a toy-shop, who have visited a barn- 
 yard, who have seen men making, planting, hoeing, and 
 raking gardens, are full of ideas with regard to the ways 
 in which these activities may be represented in play. 1 
 
 The reproduction of experience in the circle game 
 is reinforced by its reproduction in and interpretation 
 through the gifts and occupations. The increasing ten- 
 dency in all good kindergartens is to make every gift 
 and occupation exercise creative, and the spontaneous 
 reproduction of common and typical experiences by 
 the children is another witness to the fact that the 
 kindergarten is really coming to understand itself. 
 
 In describing the plays of the kindergarten as repro- 
 ductions of experience we have expressed one of those 
 half-truths which become the worst kind of falsehoods 
 when they are taken for the whole truth. We must, 
 therefore, urgently call attention to the fact that play 
 
 1 These illustrations do not imply that an actual experience must 
 precede every single game. See Symbolic Education, note to p. 171.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 159 
 
 is not merely a copy of life, but during the period of 
 childhood is life itself at its highest potency. Hence 
 play is a large contributor to experience, and in its 
 original contributions we find our points of departure 
 for many great human values. In our judgment it is 
 because the contribution of play to experience is not 
 appreciated that gift exercises are often limited to 
 copy of life and that in occupation exercises undue 
 stress is placed upon applied design. 
 
 To the conception of the kindergarten as a place 
 where children reproduce experience, accompanied by 
 blindness to the fact that it is a place where children 
 are having experience, we owe many of the worst 
 perversions of kindergarten practice. Children are 
 having experience when they play circle games, when 
 they build, model, sew, draw, or paint; when they look 
 at a picture; when they listen to a story. Any one of 
 these or of many other experiences may become the 
 point of departure for a process of development. 
 
 Casting a backward glance upon the thoughts thus 
 far considered, we may repeat once more that the pre- 
 supposition of the genetic method is life conceived 
 as immediate presentation and response, and that its 
 goal is life clarified, interpreted, and renewing itself on 
 a higher plane. This sublimation of life is begun in and 
 through play, which is itself an initial expression of that 
 loftier activity and more transparent consciousness in 
 which it should issue. 
 
 Looking at his immediate life in a mirror of play 
 which he has created, the child exercises that delicate, 
 indirect, and semi-conscious introspective activity 
 upon which Froebel insists in his description of the
 
 160 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 genetic method. The word introspection carries to 
 many minds the exclusive meaning of a conscious 
 analysis of mental states. No one who limits intro- 
 spection to conscious self-scrutiny can understand 
 Froebel or the genetic method. Froebel is simply 
 thinking the double thought that through imitation 
 the child fans to clearer flame the tiny spark of con- 
 sciousness, and that this flame of consciousness by a 
 kind of return dialectic illuminates the objects of the 
 external world. 
 
 The introspective activity aroused by representa- 
 tion in play of different objects, persons, events, and 
 processes is heightened by looking at pictures having a 
 similar content. It is primarily because the pictures in 
 the Mother Play book correspond most nearly to the 
 series of typical representations made by children in 
 play that Froebelian kindergartners consider their use 
 so important. Their function is to give additional 
 concreteness to the portrait of life sketched in the 
 kindergarten games and to contribute to its ideal 
 interpretation. For example, children who have 
 played the "Family Game" are stirred to deeper intui- 
 tions of its meaning by the picture of a home interior 
 showing father, mother, brother, sister, and baby, and 
 surrounded by marginal pictures of family life in 
 nature. Again, in the illustrations of the Mother Play 
 book the children see not only the objects, persons, and 
 acts they have represented, but a picture of them- 
 selves representing them, or, in other words, the inner 
 relationship of their play to life is suggested to them and 
 thereby a new degree of introspective activity is quick- 
 ened. Their play mirrored actual experience; the pic-
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 161 
 
 tures mirror not only experience, but the mirroring of 
 experience. That this naive process of double reflection 
 is in accord with the method by which genius has always 
 attempted to stimulate the prescient imagination, no 
 student of literature will need to be reminded. 
 
 It should be added that while we find in the illus- 
 trations of the Mother Play our most valuable pictorial 
 aids in the interpretation of experience, we do not 
 exclude other pictures. Large collections of pictures 
 have been made in different cities which combine 
 artistic merit with the illustration of those ranges of 
 experience accessible to childish imagination. Their in- 
 fluence upon the development of an appreciative feel- 
 ing for art has been as marked as their power to quicken 
 a sympathetic intuition of primal relationships and 
 elementary ideals. 
 
 The interpretation of experience begun in play and 
 continued by picture is clarified through the use of 
 natural analogues. In the first weeks of their life in 
 the kindergarten the children, who are beginning to feel 
 themselves members of a little community, are helped 
 to precipitate their feeling into an idea by looking at 
 such floral communities as sunflowers and daisies and 
 hearing a little about their cooperative life. When 
 they have played putting baby to sleep and taking him 
 up when he waked, they are interested in the sleeping 
 four-o'clock and love to hear how different flowers 
 wake and greet the rising sun. As the premonition of 
 mother-love dawns in their minds, they delight in 
 playing the "Bird's Nest"; as they begin to be dimly 
 aware of the interrelations of industrial life, they grow 
 interested in insect communities; and with awareness
 
 162 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 of the vibration of their own lives between outgoing and 
 homecoming, they seem never to tire of the image of 
 themselves in the forth-flying and home-returning 
 pigeons. The fact that the Mother Play pictures include 
 so many of the analogues which are helpful in inter- 
 preting experience is another reason why no other pic- 
 tures can wholly take their place. 
 
 The sublimation of experience begun in play and 
 continued through pictures and natural analogues is 
 completed in stories. Of these stories there are two 
 distinct kinds, the realistic story whose details 
 correspond with the actual experience of children, and 
 the wonder tale which incites mind to reaches beyond 
 its immediate grasp. For children of kindergarten age 
 the best stories of realistic type are to be found in the 
 Mother Play. This book is indeed the biography of 
 childhood, and therefore the best interpretation of the 
 everyday life of all children. In many kindergartens 
 one period of twenty minutes each week is given to a 
 story in the Mother Play and to looking at the picture 
 which illustrates it. In addition to this mirror of actual 
 life other stories of realistic type are told, and occasion- 
 ally simple poems are learned which are rehearsals of 
 actual experience. 
 
 Even more important than the stories which are 
 a mirror of everyday life are those whose distinctive 
 merit is that, instead of reproducing the details of 
 an actual experience, they illuminate its principle. To 
 illustrate: During the first ten weeks of the kindergar- 
 ten year many kindergartners tell the stories of "Thum- 
 bclina," "The Lion and the Mouse," "Baby Ray," 
 "The Three Bears," "In the Mountain," "Susie's
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 163 
 
 Dream," "Hans and the Four Giants," "The Shoe- 
 maker and the Elves," and "Billy Bobtail." Three 
 of these stories ("Thumbelina," "The Three Bears," 
 and "In the Mountain") are tales of children who 
 wandered far from home, had wonderful adventures 
 and joyous returns. "The Lion and the Mouse "con- 
 cretely pictures the service which the least may render 
 to the greatest. The two stories of "Baby Ray" re- 
 late how all things served a helpless child. "Susie's 
 Dream" is a story of mother love. "Hans and the 
 Four Giants" and "The Shoemaker and the Elves" 
 project the ideal of social service, and "Billy Bobtail" 
 is a story of the domestication and service of ani- 
 mals. It should be superfluous to say that these 
 particular tales are mentioned only as illustrations 
 of the content which in our judgment should deter- 
 mine the selection of stories during the early part of 
 the kindergarten year. The general thoughts govern- 
 ing the selection are that stories of this type should 
 differ from experience in then* detail, correspond with 
 experience in their principle, and by extending the 
 range of this common principle expand the bounda- 
 ries of the child's life. In short, we aspire to have our 
 stories for children do something of what world litera- 
 ture does for us, and we recognize as its greatest boon 
 that it helps us to scale heights, descend into depths, 
 and explore breadths of life which without it we had 
 never known, and which nevertheless are connected 
 with our own infinitesimal experience by the inter- 
 preting tie of a common principle. 
 
 In concluding our survey of the kindergarten as an 
 embryonic community which is evolving and assimi-
 
 164 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 lating a common life, it is only needful to add that this 
 life is framed in music and set to song. It is through 
 this musical setting that one of the strongest influences 
 is exerted upon the "emotional undertone" of the 
 common life. 1 
 
 It will be remembered that when our little children 
 first entered the kindergarten they were welcomed by 
 a room flooded with sunshine and gay with flowers; 
 were invited to activity by plastic sand, dangling balls, 
 and brightly colored beads, and that the tender ideal 
 of the kindergarten itself was suggested through the 
 single picture of the Madonna and Child. As the year 
 progresses the kindergarten room becomes a kind of 
 history of the life of the happy community. As each 
 new experience is assimilated and interpreted, pictures 
 embodying its typical aspects are hung on the walls, 
 and to these are added other pictures different in de- 
 tail but correspondent in idea. On the blackboard are 
 drawn chain pictures of the series of acts involved in 
 different industrial processes. The cabinet preserves 
 treasures collected on excursions or brought by differ- 
 ent members of the community. In another cabinet 
 are treasured creations of the children themselves. The 
 plants so carefully tended are growing and blossoming. 
 The visiting animals are a never-failing source of in- 
 
 1 The phrase "emotional undertone" is borrowed from Professor 
 Royce, who defines it as "the permanent common quality at the 
 basis of any man's normal emotions " and considers it as the accom- 
 paniment of a permanent physical organization. In extending the 
 phrase to cover the common life of the kindergarten we eliminate 
 its physical connotation and use it to suggest how education may 
 help to make life habitually brave and glad. See Royce, Outlines of 
 Ptychology, pp. 341. 34*.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 165 
 
 terest and delightful reminiscence. A walk around the 
 kindergarten room is a retrospect of experience, and 
 no one who has observed the reaction of this silent 
 environmental influence can doubt its value. 
 
 The theme of this section of our report up to the 
 present point has been the self-evolving circle of ex- 
 perience in a kindergarten community; its projection 
 in play; its interpretation through play, picture, natu- 
 ral analogue, and story; its framework of music and 
 its record in the kindergarten room. Summarizing the 
 thoughts presented, we become aware that we have 
 been considering the subject-matter of a kindergarten 
 program, the genetic-developing method by which it 
 is assimilated, and its immediate goal in the child's 
 dawning feeling of himself as an individual member of 
 a social whole. Were it possible to consider in similar 
 detail the life of the kindergarten throughout the year, 
 it would be easy to show that, by steps as short, easy, 
 and natural as those already taken, the kindergarten 
 becomes a primary revelation of the ethical ideals em- 
 bodied hi the institutions of family, civil society, state 
 and church. Should there seem anything forced and un- 
 natural in the brief description we shall now attempt 
 to give of this revealing process, it is hoped that our 
 readers will generously recognize that the reason may 
 lie, not in the procedure of the kindergarten, but in 
 the defect necessarily attaching to condensed state- 
 ment. 
 
 With this appeal for a sympathetic judgment we 
 venture to present a cinematographic picture of kinder- 
 garten experience after the three weeks which have al- 
 ready been considered. During the twelfth week of the
 
 168 THE KINDERGABTEN 
 
 kindergarten year the first climax of the program is 
 reached in the Thanksgiving festival, and with this 
 climax present in her own mind from the beginning, 
 the kindergartner selects from the offerings of life those 
 which will develop hi children some faint presentiment 
 of the beauty of universal service, some responsive 
 feeling of gratitude, and some desire to share the work 
 which all are doing. The point of departure for this 
 vision of service is baby's visit and pictures of what 
 mother does for baby. Responsive feeling is expressed 
 in and developed through doll plays. There follow 
 sympathetic representations, pictures, and stories of 
 the home and the family with their interpretation 
 through the natural analogues of the Bird's Nest and 
 the Pigeon-House. From the home and the family 
 there is a simple and natural expansion to industrial 
 service. The child's glass of milk is traced backward, 
 through milkman and farmer, to the cow; his bread, 
 through baker and miller, to the farmer. The de- 
 pendence of the farmer upon sunshine and shower is 
 suggested. The children themselves plant wheat and 
 corn. They also pound wheat, make bread, churn 
 butter. They make an excursion to the bakery and 
 another to the market, where there is unrolled before 
 them a panorama of service. Vegetables and fruits of 
 different lands are brought to the kindergarten, named, 
 examined, modeled, cut, drawn, painted, and used as 
 elements in rhythmic design. Animal service of vari- 
 ous kinds is suggested, represented in play, and de- 
 scribed in story. The accent of life is placed upon 
 harvesting as the climax of the autumn season. 
 Finally, as Thanksgiving approaches there are stories
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 167 
 
 about going to grandmother's and cheery conversations 
 about seeing uncles, aunts, and little cousins. 
 
 The last day of the kindergarten before the children 
 disperse for the holiday season arrives. When they 
 enter the kindergarten there bursts upon them a pic- 
 ture they will never forget. The room has become a 
 bower decorated with flowers, fruits, vegetables, masses 
 of wheat sheaves and corn stalks and great bunches of 
 hay. The object of this decoration of the kindergarten 
 room is to make a pictorial summary of the children's 
 experience and to embody in a visual image the beauty 
 of universal service. There follows the representation 
 of this service in the games which now evolve into a 
 simple drama with its dances and choruses. In the 
 center of the circle sit grandfather and grandmother 
 waiting for their grown-up children and their little 
 grandchildren. A family consisting of father, mother, 
 and children enter the circle. The family song is sung. 
 Glad greetings are interchanged, after which a tiny 
 circle is formed around grandfather and grandmother, 
 and the family enjoys a gay dance. Enter, a second 
 family, and greetings are interchanged not only with 
 grandparents but with uncles, aunts, and cousins. 
 A larger circle is formed, and music and dance repeated. 
 After this second dance the circle of the two families 
 stands still while the concentric circle, including all the 
 rest of the kindergarten children, begins the representa- 
 tion of industrial service. Pat-a-cake is played; the 
 family circle sings a chorus of thanks to the circle of 
 bakers. Then to the accompaniment of gay music the 
 inner circle dances to the right the outer to the left. 
 Millers and farmers follow the bakers with intervening
 
 168 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 thanks and dances. To the pictured service of man suc- 
 ceeds the liveliest portion of the little drama as animal 
 helpers of different kinds announce their presence by 
 galloping, trotting, flying, creeping, mooing, barking, 
 baa-ing, clucking, quacking, and shouting cock-a- 
 doodle-doo. Last of all, the pattering rain softens the 
 ground, there is a simple song of the sunshine, and with 
 hearts attuned to thanks the happy little members of 
 the kindergarten community close their drama of 
 life with a quiet hymn. 
 
 When the children return to the kindergarten after 
 Thanksgiving, they always have much to tell about 
 what they did on that great day, and the kindergartner 
 should assure to each little child the opportunity of 
 narrating his happy experience. To the recall and in- 
 terchange of individual experience succeeds the recall 
 of collective experience through rehearsal of all the 
 games thus far developed and through looking at 
 pictures illustrating their themes. A final review and 
 survey of experience is made by an excursion to a toy- 
 shop, where the children see dolls and doll houses, tiny 
 furniture for bedrooms, dining-rooms, parlors, laun- 
 dries, and kitchens, toy animals of all kinds, vehicles 
 of every description; ships, locomotives and cars, 
 mills, bakeries, and farmyards. A visit to a toy-shop 
 does for a child what a visit to a great World's Fair 
 does for the adult. It is a reproduction on a Lilliputian 
 scale of the world as he is beginning to know it, and 
 therefore a final concrete summary of his experience. 
 After this visit the game of the Toyman is evolved, 
 each child so far as possible contributing his selected
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 169 
 
 item to the dramatized retrospect of a delightful ex- 
 perience. 
 
 We have now arrived at the middle of December, and 
 it should therefore be evident that the toy-shop will 
 offer not only a retrospect but also an anticipation 
 of experience. It will point forwards to Christmas as 
 well as backwards to Thanksgiving, and upon the can- 
 vas of childish imagination will be painted pictures 
 of Santa Claus, Christmas trees, Christmas stockings, 
 and Christmas presents. 
 
 To the little child Christmas is first of all a time 
 when from mysterious sources shall come to him trea- 
 sures secretly desired. The knife he has wanted so long 
 may hide in the toe of his Christmas stocking. A paint- 
 box like that he saw in the toy-shop may hang from 
 some branch of the Christmas tree. Father may give 
 him a box of tools which will make him a carpenter 
 indeed. The familiar poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas " 
 projects the secret hopes and far surmises stirring in 
 every little mind, and as the children listen to it again 
 and again during the two weeks preceding the Christ- 
 mas celebration it clarifies the experience through which 
 they are living. 
 
 The kindergartner must share the secret hopes and 
 anticipated surprises of her children and lead from them 
 to the thought of surprising father, mother, sister, 
 brother, and baby with something they want. She 
 should interest the children in attempts to find out 
 what these wants may be, and finally concentrate the 
 life of the entire little community in making Christ- 
 mas presents and beginning to know in a small way 
 how much more blessed it is to give than to receive.
 
 170 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 But why should all this giving and receiving of pre- 
 sents come every year on Christmas day? Why, in- 
 deed, unless on that day we celebrate our own recep- 
 tion of the great gifts through which we have learned 
 to know the heart of the Divine Giver? History tells 
 us that into the Christmas festival humanity has 
 poured the ever accumulating riches of its spiritual 
 experience. In it are reverberations of yule-tide and 
 sacred trees; of the worship of the ever victorious, ever 
 beneficent sun; of that ancient feast, the Vigil of the 
 Mothers, palpitating with a nascent feeling of the con- 
 tinuity of mankind; of that great struggle within the 
 Christian Church whose outcome was the assurance 
 that the divine and the human are not mutually ex- 
 cluding, but mutually interpenetrating. We celebrate 
 Christmas most truly when we gather into it all these 
 strands of spiritual experience. We rejoice as did our 
 forefathers in that mysterious life enshrined within the 
 sacred tree. Our hearts are glad within us because once 
 again the earth shall receive from the sun richer stores 
 of light and heat. We express our sense of human 
 continuity by giving our little presents to the children 
 who are so soon to fill the places we must leave vacant. 
 We stir in the souls of the children some presentiment 
 of a divine humanity by telling them the story of the 
 one divine human life. 1 
 
 The tiniest child in a kindergarten knows the mean- 
 ing of a birthday. We tell him Christmas is the birth- 
 day of the little child whose picture hangs on the wall 
 of the kindergarten; that this little child was given 
 
 1 The writer of this report desires to acknowledge her obligation 
 to a Christmas sermon of the Rev. Percy Stickney Grant.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 171 
 
 o the world by the Heavenly Father, and that when 
 he grew to be a man he was so strong and brave, so 
 wise, so gentle, and so loving that every one who knew 
 him felt as if he had seen God. Then we repeat as nearly 
 as possible in the matchless Bible words the story of 
 the Nativity and show pictures of the Christ-Child in 
 the manger; the mother watching over him; the won- 
 dering cattle, the shepherds listening to the angels' 
 song, and the wise men following the Star. 
 
 As the first climax of the program was the Thanks- 
 giving festival, so the second is the Christmas cele- 
 bration. The contrast between the two climaxes is as 
 suggestive as their connection. The Thanksgiving fes- 
 tival concentrates attention on all that the children 
 have received from nature, man, and God, and strives 
 to kindle the spark of gratitude. The Christmas cele- 
 bration concentrates interest on the higher joy of giv- 
 ing. Marching together into the kindergarten, the 
 children behold the Christmas tree resplendent with 
 light and color and laden with the gifts they have 
 worked so hard to finish. Fathers and mothers greet 
 them with loving eyes and smiles. Little hearts flutter 
 in anticipation of joyful surprises they have prepared 
 for others. Christmas carols are sung, parents and 
 friends welcomed, presents joyfully distributed and 
 thoughts of self banished by the expulsive power of 
 thoughts for others. "All giving," says Froebel, "is 
 linked with receiving, or rather let me say all giving 
 blossoms out of receiving." In the kindergarten Christ- 
 mas is the blossom of Thanksgiving. The little recipient 
 of universal gifts becomes himself a giver. In its deep- 
 est aspect Christmas is a perpetual revelation of the
 
 172 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 self-imparting life of God a perpetual appeal to 
 God's children to share the blessedness of their Hea- 
 venly Father. 
 
 Four months of the kindergarten year have elapsed. 
 Out of the feeling of community have been developing 
 the habits of industry, order, punctuality, cleanliness, 
 courtesy, and kindness. Through doll plays and care 
 for animals and plants there has been a quickening 
 of nurturing impulses. A dramatic, literary, and pic- 
 torial representation has been made of two of the 
 great human institutions the family and civil so- 
 ciety. Excursions have led out into the life of nature, 
 and natural analogies have clarified the pictures of 
 life beginning to form themselves in the children's 
 minds. The frame of the picture of life was the autumn 
 season. The high lights of the picture were upon the 
 two great festivals Thanksgiving and Christmas. 
 Finally, a beginning was made in the religious inter- 
 pretation of life by the revelation of God as a loving 
 Giver and by stirring the desire of responsive giving. 
 
 During the four months now past one thing was 
 done which as yet has not been mentioned. There 
 were constant glances forward from what was, toward 
 what was to be. Falling leaves, abandoned nests, 
 south-flying birds, squirrels storing nuts, children don- 
 ning warmer coats, animals covering themselves with 
 thicker fur were all noticed as heralds of the approach- 
 ing winter. The spirit which was in the air during the 
 fall elections reverberated in the kindergarten children 
 and was seized upon as a point of departure for experi- 
 ences which are to reach their climax in Washington's
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 173 
 
 Birthday. If soldiers have marched by the kindergar- 
 ten, exercises have been stopped that the children 
 might see them. If there has been a parade of soldiers 
 anywhere within walking distance our embryo patriots 
 have been among its delighted witnesses. 
 
 What now are the new experiences which shall 
 determine the order of life in our little community 
 when children return to the kindergarten after Christ- 
 mas holidays? The question need only be asked to 
 answer itself. They will wish to tell their holiday 
 experiences and to show each other their Christmas 
 presents. They will have heard of the New Year and 
 perhaps of making good resolutions. Snow is falling 
 and snow crystals may be caught. Snow is on the 
 ground and it is time for the delights of sleighing and 
 coasting. There is ice for skating and sliding. There 
 are wonderful frost pictures on the windows. Other pic- 
 tures no less wonderful may be seen in the glowing em- 
 bers of winter fires. Best of all, around these fires in 
 the gathering twilight children in happy homes sit lis- 
 tening to wonder tales. Days are short; the dark de- 
 scends before children are tucked away to sleep, and 
 night after night they may see the moon sailing high 
 in the sky and gaze with wonder at the twinkling stars. 
 The brilliant sunlight brings greatest rejoicing because 
 of its contrast with ashen skies. And climax of all 
 the winter as Thanksgiving is climax of the autumn 
 there is our national festival of Washington's Birthday 
 which in the kindergarten is seized upon as its greatest 
 opportunity for fanning the spark of patriotism. 
 
 Having summoned before us the typical experiences 
 which await our little community, let us now attempt
 
 174 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 to indicate as briefly as possible the reaction of the kin- 
 dergarten upon them. It will be remembered that, in 
 our retrospect of the four months during which this 
 little community has already shared a common life, 
 attention was called to the habits which had been 
 gradually establishing themselves. It is now time that 
 these habits should begin to define themselves as con- 
 scious ideals, and one aim of the kindergarten during 
 the remainder of the year will be to abet this self -defin- 
 ing process. 1 The limits of a report forbid more than a 
 single illustration of the method of definition, but it is 
 hoped our readers will understand that the process now 
 to be shown in the concrete example of evolving the 
 ideal of punctuality is repeated in the evolution of all 
 elementary ideals of conduct. 
 
 The point of departure for the evolution of a conscious 
 ideal of punctuality is the game of the clock which 
 is created by the children. Making themselves into 
 clocks by imitating the rhythmic swing of the pendu- 
 lum, showing the movement of the hand and reiterat- 
 ing the monotonous tick-tack-tick, they develop in 
 themselves a kind of clock consciousness. Having been 
 clocks they are more ready to listen to what the clock 
 says. They look at the Mother Play picture illustrating 
 the clock game, and find out what the mother is doing, 
 what the baby is doing, what the older children are 
 doing, and what connection there is between these sev- 
 eral deeds and the hours struck by the clock. Having 
 played the clock game and scrutinized the clock pic- 
 ture, they arc ready to listen with some divining sense 
 
 1 The reader will observe that this self-definition of habits illus- 
 trates the second demand of the genetic method.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 175 
 
 of its meaning to a wonder story like the Enchanted 
 Watch. At last the conscious question forms itself in 
 their minds, What does the clock say to us ? and 
 with the joy of discoverers they answer to themselves: 
 Time to get up; time for breakfast; time to go to kin- 
 dergarten; time to sing; work; play games; listen to 
 stories; time to go home; time for dinner; time to play 
 out of doors; time for supper; time to go to bed. Their 
 next discovery, incited by guileful suggestions from the 
 alert kindergartner, adds to their sense of the clock's 
 importance. It tells grown people as well as children 
 what to do and when. It tells father when to go to his 
 business. It tells the teacher when to go to school. It 
 tells the cook when breakfast, dinner, supper must be 
 ready. It tells the milkman when to bring milk, the 
 butcher when to send meat, the baker when to deliver 
 bread. Within little minds stirs faint suspicion of what 
 would be the chaos of life without the order which 
 measure of time makes possible, and from responsive 
 wills comes the conscious resolution to listen to the 
 clock and obey its mandates. 
 
 It has seemed important to describe in detail the 
 uplifting of a single forming habit into a conscious 
 jdeal through whose reaction the habit itself is forti- 
 fied, because with this development of conscious ideals 
 we enter upon a new phase in the self-evolving life of 
 the kindergarten. 1 It will not be necessary to describe 
 in similar detail all the new activities developed in 
 response to seasonal incitement, as the general method 
 of the program has been sufficiently illustrated. So 
 
 1 It is to be understood that other forming habits are similarly 
 uplifted into ideals notably the habit of attention.
 
 170 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 we pass over snowflake and snowball games, sleighing, 
 coasting, sliding, and skating games, in order to devote 
 more time to consideration of the most far-reaching 
 influences exerted upon kindergarten children during 
 the winter months, which are undoubtedly those be- 
 ginning with the direction of attention to the moon 
 and stars and ending with the celebration of Washing- 
 ton's Birthday. The connection between the terminus 
 ab quo and the terminus ad quern of this process of 
 development is far from obvious yet very real. We 
 must approach its consideration by a somewhat circui- 
 tous path. 
 
 Max Miiller has said that "the fact, which if fully 
 appreciated will be felt to be pregnant with the most 
 startling and instructive lessons of antiquity, is that 
 Zeus, the most sacred name in Greek mythology, is the 
 same word as Dyaus in Sanskrit, Jems, or Ju in Jupi- 
 ter, in Latin, Tiw in Anglo-Saxon, preserved in Tiws- 
 daeg, Tuesday, the day of the Eddie god Tyr; Zio in 
 Old High-German." This venerable word, he adds, 
 " was framed once and once only; it reveals the earliest 
 religious thought of our Aryan race and it means 
 Sky." > 
 
 The clew to this most startling lesson of antiquity is 
 suggested by a thoughtful writer who says that "one of 
 the first elements in education is the sense of space, of 
 which sense the star-dwelt heaven is probably the first 
 awakener." 2 The meaning of this suggestion dawns 
 upon us as we dwell upon the thought of how different 
 it would be with all of us were we prisoners in a world 
 
 1 Science of Language, vol. n, pp. 337, 576. 
 
 * George Macdooald, What '* Mine's Mine, p. 176.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 177 
 
 whose low-hanging skies were only a few miles above 
 our heads. In such a world there could be no sense of 
 majesty, no longing for liberty, no feeling of heights 
 above and depths beneath, no divination by the pre- 
 scient spirit of an infinitely transcendent God. For 
 "Space is the body to the idea of liberty," * and liberty 
 alone is majesty and transcendence. It is outer space 
 which awakens the spacious soul. It is the visible sym- 
 bol of infinitude which stirs and summons the infinitude 
 of the spirit. 
 
 The infinitude of space is suggested by its sphericity. 
 If when we lifted our gaze skyward the apparent form 
 which met our eyes was a cube, we should know that 
 space extended farther in some directions than in 
 others and should quickly suspect that in all directions 
 it was limited. The spherical form of space is "a fore- 
 shortening of infinitude that it may enter our sight; 
 there is no imagining of a limit to it; it is a sphere only 
 in this that in no one direction can we come nearer to 
 its circumference than in another. This infinite sphere 
 or spheric infinitude is the only figure, image, emblem, 
 symbol fit to begin to make us know God. Over and 
 around us we have the one perfect shape. It is not put 
 there for the purpose of representing God. It is there 
 of necessity because of its nature and its nature is its 
 relation to God. It is God's thinking, and that half- 
 sphere above men's heads with influence endlessly 
 beyond the reach of their consciousness is the begin- 
 ning of all revelation of Him to men." 2 
 
 1 George Macdonald, What's Mine's Mine, p. 296. 
 1 George Macdonald, What's Mine's Mine, pp. 296, 299. I have 
 taken the liberty of making some omissions and transpositions.
 
 178 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 The first suggestion of the sky is infinitude. Its 
 second and no less pregnant suggestion is that of a 
 spheric totality peopled with spheres. Within infinite 
 or self-limited space revolve the heavenly spheres, and 
 through this including yet relating environment each 
 world receives the guarantee of individuality. The 
 star-sown sky is a visible analogue of the inclusion of 
 all spirits in God and a symbolic adumbration of the 
 emancipating truth that through this very inclusion is 
 assured "the eternal form which shall still divide the 
 eternal soul from all beside." 
 
 The discernible suggestion of the overarching sky, 
 coupled with the historic response to this suggestion, 
 impels us to strange surmises when we consider that 
 the most startling discovery of contemporary psycho- 
 logy is the immeasurable power of suggestion. Rever- 
 ent minds are seeking to fathom its mystery. Number- 
 less experiments are being made to test its effects. 
 May it be that the mysterious power man is just learn- 
 ing to wield consciously is the power through which 
 from the beginning God has touched to fairer issues the 
 souls of his human children? Is it folly to suspect that 
 the incitements of nature are suggestions from God; 
 that her particular objects are images of divine 
 thoughts; that her relations adumbrate connections 
 between divine thoughts; that her laws reveal processes 
 of divine thinking and that her frame of infinite space 
 is the blank form of the Divine Mind? 
 
 It was from no accident, but by the constraint of 
 divine suggestion, that in the overarching sky men 
 began to know a sky-father. It is no chance connec- 
 tion which binds the dome of our National Capitol
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 179 
 
 to the dome of heaven. Without that heavenly dome 
 the limit-transcending power to which we give the 
 holy name of freedom might never have wakened in the 
 human soul, and without the awakening consciousness 
 of freedom men would never have known the correla- 
 tive idea of justice. The foreshortening of infinitude 
 in the spherical form of space is God's primal sugges- 
 tion of his own infinite being. The star-sown sky is his 
 primal revelation of that cosmic community wherein is 
 realized the ideal of the Gliedganzes. 
 
 Science is the answer of man to the suggestions of 
 nature. The two great deeds of science have been the 
 expansion of the universe and its integration. Astron- 
 omy has extended the universe in space; geology in 
 time; and biology has made us spectators of that long 
 and painful travail of nature through which humanity 
 was born. While extending the universe, science ha* 
 also unified it, and her consummate revelation is that of 
 a great interrelated whole wherein "each clod vibrates 
 with pulsations from the farthest star," and wherein 
 all that is is inextricably linked with all that has been. 
 
 It is necessary to know our distant educational goal 
 in order to take even the first short steps on the path 
 which winds slowly upward towards that goal. In this 
 seventy-second year since the kindergarten was born, 
 it should be superfluous to say that we do not hold 
 that any of the thoughts we have been suggesting 
 should be suggested to babies. It is far from superflu- 
 ous to add that only as we ourselves have intimately 
 pondered them shall we be able to respond with wisdom 
 to the astonishment of children in presence of sky, 
 moon, and stars.
 
 180 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 It is a grave error to suppose that because animism 
 is native to childhood we should meet it on a prehis- 
 toric level. The fact that children often say the moon 
 has a nose and eyes does not justify us in telling them 
 of a man in the moon. It may be native animism when 
 children describe thunder as God rolling barrels, but 
 if we acquiesce in such a description we arrest intelli- 
 gence. Still worse is it when, deserting animism, we 
 tell children that the moon is made of green cheese or 
 that stars are holes in the sky. 
 
 In one of the most illuminating commentaries of the 
 Mother Play, Froebel tells us that, "by loyal attention 
 and response to the hints thrown out by childhood and 
 by an education consonant with the needs of childhood, 
 we may revive the mythic period of human history, 
 with its dross cleansed, its darkness illumined, its aims 
 and ideals purified." What hints thrown out by chil- 
 dren will teach us to respond wisely to their astonish- 
 ment in presence of the moon and stars? What myths 
 of primitive men help us to interpret these hints? 
 
 The common saying that we must not be like chil- 
 dren who try to grasp the moon apprizes us of the most 
 universal hint childhood has given with regard to its 
 response to the moon's incitement. The story of Babel 
 and the many myths of sky-climbing heroes 1 apprise 
 us that, though men learned after a while that heaven 
 was not near, they were long in suspecting its infinite 
 recession. Other primitive myths recount the disasters 
 which befell men or giants who tried to seize for them- 
 selves the lights of heaven. All little children re-live 
 these primitive experiences. The baby cries for the 
 
 1 See John Fiske, Myths and Myth Makers, pp. 23, 151, 162, 16a
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 181 
 
 moon and reaches forth his hand to seize it. The little 
 lad has learned that it is not within reach of his arm, 
 but believes that by the help of a high ladder he might 
 attain it. 
 
 If the hints of childhood convey any educational 
 suggestion; if this suggestion is reinforced by primi- 
 tive myths; if science has truly interpreted the intima- 
 tions of nature; and if, above all, an ever-greatening 
 universe means an ever-greatening God and an ever- 
 greatening manhood, then should not the very first 
 thing we do for little children, when they begin to 
 wonder about the sun, moon, and stars, be to call forth 
 in imagination some prescience of their distance and 
 their size? If as the cosmos has expanded in men's 
 minds it has been integrated by their thought, should 
 not our next effort be to stir some faint premonition of 
 the ties between the earth and the heavenly spheres 
 and especially to help children to realize that without 
 the sun there could be no water, no fire, no grass, trees, 
 flowers, animals, men; ocean and rivers would be ice 
 and the whole earth cold, dark, barren, and dead? If 
 "throughout the world of sense, even as an object is 
 sublime or fair," it is given not to one, but to all, should 
 we not help children to learn from this parable of 
 nature that all best gifts are sharable gifts, and that 
 "so much the more as one says our, so much the more 
 each one possesseth"? Finally, if there be a spiritual 
 as well as a physical astronomy and if the higher value 
 of the latter be to suggest the former, should we not do 
 well to heed the words of Froebel, who in the Mother 
 Play writes as follows : 
 
 "Confronted by objects which he does not under-
 
 182 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 stand, the child accepts with simple faith the explana- 
 tion of his elders. Whether such explanations be true 
 or false, he accepts them with equal ease. Hence by 
 false explanations the child may be led to conceive 
 the moon as a man and the stars as gold pins or burn- 
 ing lamps. On the other hand, by means of true though 
 necessarily partial explanations, he may recognize in 
 the former a beautiful shining, swimming ball, and in 
 the latter great blazing suns which only look so tiny 
 because they are so far off. 
 
 "The one way of looking at moon and stars despite 
 its apparent life is barren and lifeless. The other bears 
 within it a seed of thought which may later develop 
 into rational insight. Why should we withhold from 
 children a living and life-giving explanation and weigh 
 them down with a dead one?" 
 
 In a recent novel, which is a remarkable study of the 
 influence of both social and physical environment, 
 there is an illuminating description of the reaction of 
 the homes of the Middle Ages upon the little children 
 who were born in them. " The mental and moral gloom 
 of these homes," we read, "hung destructively, ap- 
 pallingly over children. The very architecture taught 
 them their first bad lessons. Lifted in their nurses' or 
 mothers' arms, they peered from parapet down upon 
 drawbridge and moat at danger. At the entrance 
 they saw massive doors built to shut out death, per- 
 haps battle-hacked, blood-stained. From these they 
 learned violence and the habit of killing. Trap-doors 
 taught them treachery. Sliding panels in walls taught 
 them cunning, flight, cowardice, and eavesdropping. 
 Underground dungeons taught them revenge, cruelty,
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 183 
 
 persecution to the death. They might look down into 
 one and see lying there some victim of slow starvation 
 or slow torture. Nearly every leading vicious trait 
 born in them seized upon the house itself for develop- 
 ment and began to clamber up its way as naturally as 
 castle-ivy." l 
 
 If we really believe in the influence of environment, 
 we must often be troubled in spirit as we ponder the 
 suggestions to sloth, gluttony, and covetousness made 
 by too many of our contemporary homes of wealth, 
 and must be filled with heavy forebodings of danger to 
 our national ideal as we consider the suggestion of 
 slums and tenement houses, of narrow streets crowded 
 with wares easy to snatch and hide, of the commercial 
 advertisements which everywhere attack the eye, of 
 the countless sights, sounds, odors, and motions whose 
 incitement must belittle and debase imagination. We 
 hope for a time when these debasing influences shall 
 have disappeared and when a noble humanity shall 
 have created an environment appealing to all that is 
 noble in the spirit of childhood. But we know that 
 even in that distant day flowers shall discover to 
 the heart its own tender meanings ; the nurturing bird 
 shall quicken the nurturing impulse and the soaring 
 bird rejoice the soaring spirit; mountain peaks shall 
 call forth spiritual climbers ; the storm-tossed sea 
 shall interpret the storm- tossed soul ; and the human 
 mind adapted to infinitude shall receive its high- 
 est incitements from moon and stars, sun and sky. 
 For language and myth, poetry and religion assure 
 us that these are the perpetual suggestions through 
 1 James Lane Allen, The Doctor's Christmas Eve.
 
 184 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 which the Divine Mind stimulates impulses akin to 
 divinity. 
 
 In interpreting to children the rich influences which 
 stream towards them from the sky, we have found in- 
 valuable aid in Froebel's great book, the Mother Play, 
 and particularly in the songs and pictures of the Child 
 and Moon, the Boy and Moon, the Little Maiden and 
 the Stars, the Light-Bird, and the Window Songs. Our 
 little children in the kindergarten love these songs bet- 
 ter than all others, and never tire of searching out the 
 details of the pictures. When they have taken these 
 songs and pictures into their hearts, they are ready to 
 listen to wonder tales of baffled attempts to scale the 
 sky, of disasters following selfish attempts to seize the 
 moon, of ruin which followed the desire to own or be 
 the sun. Two great ideas wake up in their minds, 
 the idea of how far, far away are the heavenly spheres 
 and the thought how wrong it is to want for themselves 
 alone blessings which belong to all. To hear kinder- 
 garten children in whom these ideas are dreaming, stir- 
 ring, waking, sing "Good Morning, Merry Sunshine," 
 or to watch them play the game of the Light-Bird is to 
 receive a revelation of what wise education may do in 
 expanding and ennobling imagination. 
 
 Casting a retrospective glance over the life of our 
 little community during the first weeks of the New 
 Year, we become aware that what has been going on 
 has been an approach towards liberty by two different 
 paths. The children have been freeing themselves from 
 merely reflex action by beginning to define and obey 
 ideals of attention, industry, order, punctuality, clean- 
 liness, courtesy, and kindness, and their minds have
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 185 
 
 been liberated and expanded through the absorption 
 of imagination in those suggestions of nature which 
 waken the ideas of immensity and unity. The struggle 
 for liberty of life through formation of the mental and 
 moral habits which liberty implies, and the liberation 
 of imagination through presentiments of the immen- 
 sity of space and the universality of light are next to 
 be followed naturally and beautifully by a hint of the 
 meaning of freedom as incarnated in the state and 
 typified in the hero and the national flag. For now 
 Washington's Birthday is approaching; schools will 
 give holidays; soldiers will march; flags will wave; 
 newspapers will celebrate the father of our country; 
 and for a few brief days the social atmosphere will be 
 electric with patriotic emotion. 
 
 There is no romance of fiction equal to the romance 
 of our American ideal of government. With sublime 
 faith in humanity, we have dared to claim that every 
 man is capable of freedom; therefore it is not sufficient 
 for him to be well governed; he must himself partici- 
 pate in the governing power. This emancipating con- 
 ception of self-government demands self-governing 
 men and women. Hence, if we really believe it, or even 
 if we accept it as a working hypothesis, it forces us to 
 assume the great duty of nurture. We have dared to 
 declare all men free. So doing, we have created the 
 necessity and responsibility of educating them for 
 freedom. 
 
 The state is the institution through which freedom 
 is defined, protected, and developed. It asks the ques- 
 tion how shall men act that they may not destroy but 
 increase liberty, and it answers this question by enu-
 
 186 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 meration of the deeds which the experience of the 
 world has shown to be productive of freedom. It makes 
 laws in which the deeds of freedom are enjoined; it de- 
 vises penalties for their infringement; it discovers that 
 the criterion for determining free action is the princi- 
 ple of social solidarity and that actions make for free- 
 dom in so far as they help each single will to cooperate 
 with all other wills. 
 
 It is not sufficient that the great principles of liberty 
 should be written in Magna Chartas, or national con- 
 stitutions. They can only be perpetuated as they be- 
 come the inspiration of individual lives. " Millions of 
 individuals make the people; in millions of souls the 
 life of the people is pulsating; but the conscious and 
 unconscious working together of the millions produces 
 a spiritual content in which the soul of the whole people 
 appears as a living, self-creating unity." This living, 
 self-creative unity is the state or nation. It is greater 
 than any or all of the individuals it includes, yet it is 
 identical with what is deepest in each individual. It is 
 man's generic self, enfolding, protecting, developing, 
 emancipating, his private and particular self. It is 
 a clarion call away from the prison cell of individual 
 limitation to the infinite space of rational selfhood. 
 It is the spiritual sky of freedom, and as the dome of the 
 physical heaven is studded with stars which are blazing 
 suns, so the spiritual firmament is studded with souls 
 aflame with the ideals of liberty. Such souls of flame 
 were the creators of our republic. Such above all 
 others was the father of our country. 
 
 The kindergartner whose heart thrills with our na- 
 tional impulse; who feels the sublimity of our national
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 187 
 
 ideal that the nation shall be not only over but in each 
 individual, so that America shall live in each American ; 
 who knows that "a nation is a living, striving, passion- 
 ate soul with many members but with one life," 
 such a kindergartner will crave to waken that sleeping 
 soul in the little child, or, if she may not waken it, to 
 stir in it the beautiful dreams which prophesy its 
 awakening. A little child cannot understand the nature 
 of the family, but he can honor his father, love his 
 mother, be kindly affectioned to brothers and sisters. 
 He cannot understand that complex organization of 
 industry through which each serves all and is served 
 by all, but he can comprehend his dependence upon 
 baker and miller, farmer and carpenter, blacksmith and 
 miner, and can realize that one day he, too, must be 
 able to do some useful work. He cannot understand 
 the great truths of religion, but his heart is touched by 
 devout gesture and devout music, by the sight of wor- 
 shiping congregations; by the religion wrought into 
 architecture, sculpture, and painting, by the joy of 
 Christmas, the triumph of Palm Sunday, the mystery 
 of Good Friday, the elation of Easter. He can have no 
 suspicion that the nation "merges millions of individ- 
 uals into one august personality," but he feels the con- 
 tagion of patriotic emotion; he may be stirred by na- 
 tional anniversaries; he may strengthen the power of 
 discipline anci kindle the spark of devotion by playing 
 
 i "-^^ * *%C 
 
 soldier games; his imagination may be captured by our 
 national flag, and he may begin to gaze with reverence 
 and wonder at the great souls shining like stars in the 
 heaven of freedom. Let us never fall into the fatal 
 error of supposing that, because only little things can
 
 188 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 be done with the little child, these little things are un- 
 important. The great insights which are embodied 
 in human institutions will never be the beacon lights 
 of mature intelligence unless the impulses which are the 
 emotional equivalents of these insights are quickened 
 in childhood. Filial impiety is the ancestor of marital 
 infidelity, parental indifference, and egoistic attack 
 upon the institution of the family. Selfish disregard of 
 the property rights of playmates breeds the spirit of 
 monopoly and prevents comprehension of the imma- 
 nent ideal of the industrial organization. If the heart 
 of childhood be not fertilized with Christian ideals, 
 we must expect a pagan manhood; and if we allow the 
 period of childhood to pass without kindling love for 
 our national flag, elation of spirit through national 
 songs, reverence for national heroes, pride and joy in 
 national anniversaries, then we have conspired to bring 
 forth the man without a country; the dead soul which 
 never to itself has said, "This is my own my native 
 land"; perhaps even the anarchist with his blind 
 and bigoted faith in government destruction and his 
 fatuous attempt to "save humanity by blood and 
 steel, poison and dynamite." 
 
 It will be remembered that the kindergarten has had 
 Washington's Birthday in mind from the beginning of 
 the year, and in anticipation of this climacteric experi- 
 ence has missed no parade of soldiers, no suggestion 
 of elections, no happening of the passing days which 
 pointed towards the patriotic ideal. Marching exer- 
 cises have been developed, and by early February the 
 children move in rhythmic accord and are prompt to 
 obey the word of command. The soldier game is now
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 189 
 
 developed and the ideal of the soldier suggested in the 
 words, "I go where my duty, my country is calling." l 
 The kindergarten room adds to its incitements a large 
 flag, a picture of our National Capitol, and a portrait 
 of Washington. The children receive smaller flags 
 which they bear proudly aloft when they play soldier 
 games. There is daily singing of national songs, and 
 daily cheering of the red, white, and blue. There are 
 stories of heroes; there are simple talks which stir some 
 faint sense of how our country protects each one of us. 
 Pictures are drawn of soldiers on the march. Tents are 
 made and soldiers encamped on the sand table. Chains 
 of red, white, and blue are linked to decorate the room, 
 and red, white, and blue rosettes are fashioned for and 
 by the children. A picture of the great national monu- 
 ment to Washington is shown, and the children are told 
 it was reared to him because he was the father of our 
 country. They themselves build monuments to him 
 with their blocks. A fathers' and mothers' meeting is, 
 or should be, held, and the influence of the home 
 solicited in reinforcement of the effort of the kinder- 
 garten. As the twenty-second of February approaches, 
 the best pictures portraying crises in Washington's life 
 are shown. They are allowed to speak for themselves, 
 and there is no attempt to make children understand 
 suggestions which are only intended to incite the ac- 
 
 1 In order to play soldier games aright, we must take into our 
 hearts "the newer and more aggressive" ideals of peace. For the 
 soldier will not die when war dies, or rather, war itself will not die 
 when men cease to slay men. There is a knightly warfare to be 
 waged against ignorance, disease, vice, and crime. Annies of soldiers 
 ready to be armies of martyrs are needed for these nobler and more 
 generous battles. 2 
 
 f
 
 190 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 tivity of imagination. Looking at these pictures and 
 helped by a few tactful words which illuminate their 
 details, the children begin to know a hero who dared, 
 suffered, endured, prevailed. At last they are shown 
 a picture of Washington as President. They feel the 
 majesty of his presence and the benignity of his face, 
 and once again he takes his rightful place, "first in 
 peace, first in war, and first in the hearts of a new gene- 
 ration of his countrymen." Must we add that when 
 his birthday finally dawns, the kindergarten community 
 celebrates the third great climax of its experience ? 
 
 It is by staying our minds on selected ideas that we 
 invest them with power to form apperceptive masses 
 and thereby determine the trend of character. Little 
 children can hold their attention to any idea for only 
 a very brief period. If we would endow any idea with 
 prevailing influence, we must recur to it frequently 
 and suggest it through many different concrete illus- 
 trations. Therefore, during the weeks which immedi- 
 ately follow Washington's Birthday the interest of the 
 kindergarten is centered in heroes of different kinds. 
 The game of the Knights is developed. Pictures like 
 the beautiful English print of St. George and the 
 Dragon are shown; the stories of David, of St. George, 
 and of King Arthur are told ; heroes of lowly service are 
 celebrated and the children taught to "honor each 
 toil-worn craftsman, however humble his calling, who 
 braves danger in doing labor which furthers the general 
 welfare." Finally, through true stories like the "Little 
 Hero of Harlem," or " Dora and the Light-House," and 
 imaginative stories, like "Dorilla," and "The Line of
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 191 
 
 Golden Light," are suggested the possibilities of a heroic 
 childhood. TJiere is no moralizing and no generalizing. 
 Children are not admonished to be brave like David 
 or conjured to imitate the example of Dora. The word 
 heroism is probably never used. But the great ideal of 
 heroism presented in a series of inspiring and appealing 
 pictures captivates imagination and inspires emulative 
 impulses. For it is literally true that 
 
 "We live by admiration, hope, and love, 
 And even as these are well and wisely placed 
 In dignity of being we ascend." 
 
 While the ideals of heroism and freedom have been 
 slowly dawning in the minds of our little children, the 
 weeks have been hastening towards the great festival 
 wherein the Christian church celebrates every year its 
 faith in that immortal life which freedom implies, and 
 the time is approaching when this beautiful faith must 
 be presented in a form appealing to childish imagina- 
 tion. Nature is showing us what we should do and how 
 we should do it. For seeds are opening; through the 
 earth, tiny plants are pushing upward towards the 
 light; bulbs are bursting into glorious blossom; trees 
 are covering themselves with fresh leaves; and from 
 apparently lifeless cocoons are emerging the joyous 
 butterflies. The seeds and the bulbs say, there was life 
 in us that was asleep, but now it is waking up. The 
 trees say, we too went to sleep last fall, but we are 
 waking up now more beautiful than ever. The butter- 
 flies say, we went to sleep creeping things and are wak- 
 ing up flying things. All things are saying, life sleeps 
 and wakes from sleep; and when it wakes from sleep, it
 
 192 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 is more beautiful than when it went to sleep. And the 
 kindergartner tells her children that, though life 
 sometimes sleeps, it always wakes up again and wakes 
 up more beautiful than before, and that soon Easter 
 Sunday will be here, and they will go to church to thank 
 the Heavenly Father for a life that goes on forever, and 
 forever becomes more beautiful. 
 
 It is hoped that our readers will not need to be 
 assured that the thoughts compacted into the fore- 
 going brief sentences are very slowly and gradually 
 suggested to our little children. Preparation of the 
 mind to receive their suggestion was begun in the early 
 fall when, during excursions into nature, the children 
 collected cocoons, and if possible caterpillars spinning 
 cocoons, and were helped to feel how life was going to 
 sleep. During the fall they also put away in a safe 
 place the bulbs which they were told would burst and 
 blossom in the spring. From time to time during the 
 winter they have looked at the cocoons, held them, felt 
 their stillness, and wondered if butterflies would ever 
 wake up in them. It often happens that one or more 
 butterflies do come out precisely during Easter week. 
 During this same week the bulbs burst into life; seeds 
 planted by the children begin to germinate; and pussy 
 willows bring a message that spring has really begun, 
 not only in the kindergarten, but in the great out-of- 
 doors. Finally, on the last school day before Easter 
 Sunday the kindergarten should be gay with crocuses 
 and daffodils, hyacinths and tulips. 
 
 Thus far we have considered chiefly the suggestions 
 of the springtime. The secret of the kindergarten,
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 193 
 
 however, is its method of inciting response to selected 
 suggestions, and as our readers should now know, this 
 open secret is, Let the child himself become the ob- 
 ject to whose suggestion you wish him to respond. If 
 therefore seeds and flowers, chrysalids and butterflies 
 are to speak to the hearts of our children, then children 
 must themselves be seed planted in the ground, plants 
 springing into life, and butterflies joyously emerging 
 from the chrysalis state. 
 
 The following extract from Pierre Loti's Story of a 
 Child is a perfect description of the most thrilling 
 experience of kindergarten children during the weeks 
 immediately preceding Easter. 
 
 "I will now describe a game that gave Antoinette 
 and me the greatest pleasure during those two delicious 
 summers. 
 
 "We pretended to be two caterpillars, and we would 
 creep along the ground upon our stomachs and our 
 knees and hunt for leaves to eat. After having done 
 that for some time, we played that we were very, very 
 sleepy, and we would lie down in a corner under the 
 trees and cover our heads with our white aprons we 
 had become cocoons. We remained in this condition 
 for some time, and so thoroughly did we enter into the 
 role of insects in a state of metamorphosis, that anyone 
 listening would have heard pass between us, in a tone 
 of the utmost seriousness, conversations of this nature: 
 
 " * Do you think that you will soon be able to fly? ' 
 
 '"Oh, yes! I'll be flying very soon. I feel them 
 growing in my shoulders now . . . they'll soon un- 
 fold.' (They naturally referred to wings.) 
 
 "Finally we would wake up, stretch ourselves, and
 
 194 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 without saying anything, we conveyed by our manner 
 our astonishment at the great transformation in our 
 condition. 
 
 "Then suddenly we began to run lightly and very 
 nimbly in our tiny shoes; in our hands we held the 
 corners of our pinafores which we waved as if they 
 were wings; we ran and ran, and chased each other, 
 and flew about making sharp and fantastic curves as 
 we went. We hastened from flower to flower and 
 smelled all of them." l 
 
 "Butterflies, the poor butterflies that are old-fash- 
 ioned nowadays played a grand r61e in my childhood." 
 So comments the genial Frenchman as he reviews the 
 romance of his infant days. We wish he might have 
 seen thousands of little children in American kindergar- 
 tens yearly re-creating the game he loved so well and 
 re-creating in their own hearts the premonition out of 
 which springs its imperishable joy. 
 
 When through making themselves into seeds and 
 plants, chrysalids and butterflies, children have begun 
 to be stirred by the mystery and joy of life, their dawn- 
 ing feeling is clarified by song and story. They sing of 
 the sleeping caterpillars and of the wondrous change 
 that comes to them; they sing of the butterflies lightly 
 flitting from flower to flower; they sing of the little 
 
 plant that 
 
 ... rose to see 
 
 What the wonderful ! wonderful 
 Outside world must be." 
 
 They listen to the stories of Rhrecus, Picciola, and 
 the beautiful parable of the "Caterpillar and Butter- 
 
 1 The Story of a Child, translated from the French of Pierre Loti, 
 by Caroline F. Smith, pp. 62-63.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 195 
 
 fly." Last of all, through simple and intimate talks 
 and with the help of poems like the "Mountain and 
 the Squirrel," and "Great, round, wonderful, beautiful 
 World," there begins to quiver in prescient hearts a 
 feeling that the least living thing is greater than the 
 greatest lifeless object. 1 Then we show the Mother 
 Play picture of the Church. The children see the 
 people crowding towards the church door; other people 
 already within the church; the minister in the pulpit; 
 the organ and the choir. We tell them that when the 
 minister talks to the people he tells them about the 
 life that goes on forever; that then the organ plays and 
 all the people sing praises to God for giving them this 
 wonderful life, and that when they have finished sing- 
 ing they pray for help to make life braver, better, and 
 more beautiful. 2 
 
 The importance of early wakening in children rever- 
 ence for the great institution that reveals an altruistic 
 God and an immortal humanity can scarcely be over- 
 estimated. The religion of any people is the final 
 determiner of its national life. If America has a free 
 government; an industrial organization which is in- 
 creasingly seeking to endow each individual with the 
 results of collective endeavor; a type of family life 
 which respects the rights of all its members; and a 
 
 1 It has been impossible to make a brief presentation without 
 somewhat confusing the order of poems and stories. So I desire to 
 explain that some of the stories mentioned are told not before but 
 after Easter. 
 
 1 Parents' meetings should be held at this time; the thoughts 
 we have been considering should be talked over and fathers and 
 mothers urged not to permit their children to miss the rich experi- 
 ence of Easter Sunday,
 
 196 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 system of education which, from its beginning in the 
 kindergarten to its climax in the university, aims to 
 capacitate free souls for freedom, it is because still 
 in her deepest heart America cherishes faith in a 
 liberty-loving God. This is the truth that makes us 
 free, and without that perpetual reaffirmation by which 
 the church keeps it alive in our souls, those specific 
 forms of national, industrial, and domestic life which 
 are its approximate secular embodiments would soon 
 vanish from the earth. 1 
 
 From the convictions which inspire our Easter pro- 
 gram, let us now return to the self -evolving life of our 
 little kindergarten community. Experience has shown 
 that on their return to the kindergarten, children who 
 have been prepared for sympathetic appreciation of 
 the great religious festival have much to tell of beauti- 
 ful churches, beautiful flowers, beautiful music, and 
 solemn prayers. They have not understood all the 
 words of these prayers, but they have realized that a 
 great common feeling was throbbing in many hearts 
 and a great common thought stirring in many minds. 
 We give up the first week after Easter to a retrospect 
 of this inspiring experience and we deepen and clarify 
 its influence by singing Easter hymns; looking again 
 
 1 The careful reader will have observed that there has been no 
 attempt to connect the Easter service with the Christian belief in 
 the resurrection of Jesu.s. Indeed, there has been no mention of 
 death, but rather an attempt to quicken the joy of immortal life. 
 We 6nd it hard to believe that anyone would debar childhood from 
 this joy, but we repeat what has already been said that we are 
 merely presenting what we conceive to be typical experiences and 
 their interpretation, and that we fully recognize that, in kinder- 
 gartens connected with public schools, modifications demanded by 
 the public mind must be made promptly and cheerfully.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 197 
 
 at the Mother Play picture of the Church; hanging 
 upon the walls of the kindergarten a fine photograph 
 of some great Gothic cathedral; noticing once more 
 nature's manifold suggestions of reviving life; repeat- 
 ing the play of the Butterfly, and telling the story of 
 the "Sleeping Beauty." 
 
 At the beginning of the second week after Easter, 
 we go with our children on a walk, and we so direct 
 our steps that we shall see carpenters building houses, 
 birds gathering materials to build nests, and men pre- 
 paring garden beds. The suggestion which comes from 
 this threefold experience is preparation for the protec- 
 tion and nurture of life. 
 
 The mother of a happy little family who often took 
 her children for a drive was for quite a while perplexed 
 by their constantly repeated question Who lives in 
 this house? At last it occurred to her to answer that 
 in each house lived a father and mother with their 
 children. Her own little ones never tired of hearing 
 this answer over and over again. It seemed to give 
 them great joy to think that the whole city was full 
 of homes and that in each home lived a happy family. 
 It is a feeling akin to this which we aim to develop 
 in the kindergarten children during this spring walk. 
 Fathers have been to the carpenter and said, Build me 
 a home. Birds are building homes. Men are spading, 
 hoeing, and raking the ground to make homes for the 
 flowers. 
 
 The reaction of this experience upon the children is 
 shown at once in their building exercises. They are 
 eager to build homes themselves, and as they are now 
 using the Fifth and Sixth Gifts, they can make very
 
 198 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 satisfactory houses. Their efforts to plan good houses 
 are made more conscious by the play and picture of 
 the Carpenter, and by little talks through which they 
 are incited to think what a house needs in order to be 
 a comfortable home. Finally, as the climax of their 
 home-creating experience, they make and furnish a 
 doll house. 
 
 From interest in human homes it is easy to lead to 
 interest in animal homes and thus develop the second 
 suggestion of our spring walk. We recall the birds 
 busily gathering materials to build their little homes. 
 We bring out our collection of nests and study all the 
 different ways through which the parent birds have 
 tried to make them safe, cozy, and comfortable. We 
 look again at the Mother Play picture of the Bird's 
 Nest, notice where different birds have made their 
 homes, and ask ourselves why they chose these particu- 
 lar localities. Then we study once again the Pigeon- 
 House picture and find the homes of the serpent and 
 .the snail, the homes of the sparrow, the pigeon and 
 the titmouse, the home of the child, and the church 
 which our little children are now ready to describe 
 as the home men build for God. Finally, remembering 
 the little children eagerly questioning who lives here, 
 and here, and here, we turn from the home to the 
 family and again search out in Froebel's suggestive 
 picture air families and water families, marsh families 
 and field families, forest families and hive families. Is 
 it too much to believe that, as the result of all these 
 concrete experiences, the world begins to seem to our 
 little children like one great home sheltering many 
 small homes, and that in tender and susceptible souls
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 199 
 
 is quickened the first far-off surmise of the Father's 
 house of many mansions? l 
 
 The third incitement which came to our children 
 on their memorable spring walk was that of garden- 
 making. No reader who has learned the secret which 
 our entire report has been trying to tell will need to 
 be assured that in response to this incitement garden 
 games are developed, actual gardens made, beautiful 
 flowers of all kinds brought to the kindergarten, the 
 brightly colored picture of a garden hung upon the 
 kindergarten wall, glad songs of growing and blossom- 
 ing plants learned, pictures of flowers drawn and 
 painted, and stories told which suggest different aspects 
 of man's relationship to the floral world. 2 
 
 The great values of the garden as one of the educa- 
 tional instrumentalities of the kindergarten are that it 
 affords occasion for the exercise of nurturing activity 
 and responds to nurture with quick and rich reward. 
 Children learn that unless they give their gardens 
 constant care the plants wither and die. The earth 
 must not be allowed to grow hard; the plants must be 
 regularly watered; they must be protected from undue 
 heat and cold, from destructive insects, and from 
 crowding weeds. When carefully watered and lovingly 
 tended, they reward the little gardener with ever fresh 
 revelations of the mystery of development and the 
 beauty of life. The springtime calls to the child, 
 
 1 It is to be understood that all this time the games of the Car- 
 penter, the Pigeon-House, the Bird's Nest, and the Family are being 
 actually played. 
 
 2 Actual gardens are not yet as common as we wish they were. 
 But garden games, sand-table gardens, and the planting of seed in 
 flower pots are very general.
 
 200 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 Rejoice in an abiding and beautiful life. The great 
 religious festival inclines his heart to love the great 
 Giver and Sustainer of life. His own little garden says 
 to him : Be like your Heavenly Father and care for one 
 tiny corner of the world as he cares for the whole 
 world and for all the worlds. 
 
 The end of the kindergarten year is approaching, 
 and the time has come for the children to make their 
 great excursion to a farmyard. This excursion is a 
 climax of the many experiences through which ever 
 since the beginning of the year the kindergarten has 
 striven to awaken in its children some sense of them- 
 selves as nurtured beings and some impulse to share 
 the high privilege of nurture. The following account 
 of one such excursion comes from a Pittsburgh kinder- 
 garten. 1 
 
 "Our excursion to a farm was one of the most de- 
 lightful we have ever made. 
 
 " We went forty strong, with two of the mothers to 
 help us get on and off the street-cars. Two other 
 kindergartens met us at the farm, so there were alto- 
 gether about a hundred children. 
 
 "The farm stood on a very high hill overlooking the 
 river, which was spanned by many bridges. I felt the 
 sense of freedom that comes to one on the heights, 
 and I was glad to notice that the children felt it as I 
 did. Said one child: 'See the butterflies, how much 
 room they have to fly.' 'Yes,' said another, 'lots of 
 
 1 This account was sent me by Miss Jessica Childs, director of the 
 kindergarten in the Pittsburgh College for Kindergartners. I have 
 omitted an occasional phrase or sentence.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 201 
 
 room and lots of flowers.' Then came a chorus 
 'Lots of trees; lots of chickens; lots of children; lots 
 of wind.' 
 
 "Our approach to the farm lay through a lane; the 
 pasture lots on either side. The children greeted with 
 delight a mare with her young colt. * Where is the father 
 horse,' cried they, and soon discovered him in a 
 neighboring field. 
 
 "A turn in the lane brought the farmhouse into 
 view. A barking dog heralded our approach. 
 
 "'The farmer's dog! he's watching the farmer's 
 house,' cried one of the children. 
 
 "The stable held greater revelations, for here we saw 
 two cows, each with her baby, as the children said. 
 
 "The ' babies ' were very gentle and playful, reaching 
 out inquisitive noses for the children to pat. 
 
 "There was a trough in the barnyard, and on the 
 top of the barn a pigeon house. 
 
 "While we were looking for the pigeons, one of the 
 children ran to me, saying: 'I saw a little bird fly in 
 that hole right under the roof. He must have a nest 
 there.' Just then the bird flew out, 'to get some worms' 
 the children said. 
 
 "The chicken-house was the home of two thousand 
 small chickens, and the children's delight knew no 
 bounds when the farmer allowed them to feed the 
 chicks. In the chicken-yard outside were roosters, 
 hens, and geese. 
 
 "In the garden were beds of pansies and phlox. 
 'Come, see the bumblebee,' called one of the children, 
 while the others were content in noticing the colors 
 of the flowers and burying their faces in them.
 
 202 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 "Noontime came all too soon, and regretfully we 
 turned our faces homeward. The sun was very bright 
 and the children noticed the shadows. 'Now we can 
 make some shadow-rabbits,' said one child; while an- 
 other cried : ' Yes, and mine is going all the way home 
 with me; he can go as fast as I can.' 
 
 "Seeing some mules hitched to a wagon which was 
 being filled with bricks, one of the children said: 'See 
 how still they stand; they have to be patient and wait 
 just as we do.' 'Yes,' answered another, 'but they can 
 run and so can we.' There followed a series of remarks 
 in which the children noted similarities and dissimilari- 
 ties, between themselves and the animals. 
 
 ' ' We can jump and the rabbit can jump.' ' A cater- 
 pillar can only crawl, but a butterfly has wings to fly. 
 Why can't we fly? we're bigger than butterflies.' 
 
 "We reached the kindergarten tired, hungry, and 
 happy, and sat down to rest for a few minutes while 
 the piano played softly. 
 
 "After we had sung good-bye, I said, 'Tell me what 
 you are going to do the minute you get home?' 
 
 "'Tell mother all about it,' said every one of the 
 children." 
 
 For many days after this thrilling experience its 
 influence was clearly discernible in the free creations 
 of the children. 1 "Clay, paper, paints, and crayon," 
 
 1 On the third day after this excursion the director told the chil- 
 dren that any one who had a pet animal might bring it to the kinder- 
 garten the next morning. I give her own account of the response. 
 " When my ears were greeted with ' maa-maa' as I neared the kinder- 
 garten I knew the pets had come. I began to wonder whether I had 
 been rash in inviting them all at once. We bad two doves; three
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 203 
 
 writes the director, "seemed to hold animals waiting 
 to be released. In the free cutting were reproduced 
 the farmer's house, the pigeon-house, the dog-house, 
 then the dog himself and many little chickens. When 
 paints and paint brushes were distributed, the children 
 cried with one voice: 'Let's paint a barnyard.' Then 
 they all made fences with gates and afterwards painted 
 animals inside. 1 
 
 kittens; a rabbit, a parrot, and a goat. The latter we thought it 
 best to tie in the yard and we spent our recess admiring him. He 
 was very tame and sat up and begged for food. The children shared 
 their lunch with him. The kittens slept in their basket after they 
 had been given some milk; the doves cooed in their cage, while the 
 parrot enlivened the morning with shouts of 'Polly wants a cracker.' 
 The rabbit has been presented to the kindergarten." 
 
 1 Miss Child's account of a conversation on the Mother Play 
 picture of the Two Gates will explain why the children began by 
 painting fences with gates : 
 
 We looked at the picture of the Garden Gate and the following 
 points were brought out in the discussion of its details: The gate was 
 closed to keep out chickens and dogs. The garden belonged to the 
 two children and they had taken good care of it. The little girl was 
 putting the flower inside the fence so that it would n't get broken. 
 It was a beautiful garden. The fountain helped to make it beautiful 
 and cool. 
 
 "I know what the fountain says," cried one child: 'Drip drop, 
 drip drop.' " 
 
 "There must be fishes in it," said another. 
 
 "The birds fly into the garden to get a drink." 
 
 "The butterflies and the bees come in right over the fence." 
 
 Next we looked at the picture of the Farmyard. Here is & gate, 
 too, but it is open. 
 
 "Johnny will get it shut in time." 
 
 "There are no flowers here, but there are animals here." 
 
 "Should they be here?" 
 
 "Yes: this is the place for them." 
 
 "Were the flowers where they belonged?" 
 
 "Are the animals where they belong?" 
 
 "Do they each need to be taken care of?"
 
 204 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 "A modeling exercise contributed to the reactions 
 from the barnyard, horses, pigs, cows, chickens, a 
 pond with ducks swimming, a trough, a pump, and 
 finally a small boy who the children said was 'Johnny 
 shut the gate.' In free drawing many barnyard ani- 
 mals were reproduced. The drawings of one child 
 were especially interesting because they showed how 
 greatly he had been impressed with the characteristic 
 peculiarity of each animal. The ram drawn by this 
 little boy had very large spiral horns worked out in 
 detail, while the rest of the body was merely an indefi- 
 nite mass with four lines for legs. The sheep was 
 drawn with a greatly exaggerated covering of wool; 
 while the cow was an almost exact duplicate of the 
 sheep hi general contour, but was differentiated by the 
 absence of wool and the addition of a very large udder." 
 
 Then followed these comments: 
 
 "The mother cow takes care of the baby calf." 
 
 "The mother horse takes care of the baby colt." 
 
 "The mother hen takes care of the chickens." 
 
 "The farmer takes care of them all." 
 
 "Do mother plants have anything to take care of?" said I. 
 
 "The seed babies," said one child. 
 
 "How does she do it?" 
 
 Then the children told me over again what we had discovered 
 when we were studying seeds how they were wrapped up to keep 
 them dry and warm, etc., etc. 
 
 'Mother takes care of our baby," said one child. 
 
 'What have we to take care of?" I asked. 
 
 'Our gardens," said one. 
 
 'Our bunny," cried another. 
 
 'Ourselves," said Elizabeth, who is possessed of a restive spirit 
 and to whom self-control has meant a struggle. 
 
 Thus ended our discussion, and I felt that the little nurtured 
 beings who came to us in the fall had felt the quickening touch of the 
 year's experiences and were themselves becoming nurturers.
 
 THE KINDERGAKTEN 205 
 
 "The influence of the farmyard upon the minds of 
 the kindergarten children was shown not only in their 
 free creations, but in the stories they asked to have 
 retold and the plays and songs selected for repetition. 
 The stories of "Ludwig and Marleen" and "Thum- 
 belina" were called for, the former being described as 
 the story of the boy who bound up the foot of the fox, 
 and the latter, the story of the little girl who took a 
 thorn out of the bird's foot. Another story chosen was 
 "Peter, Paul, and Espen," which pictures Nature re- 
 vealing herself as ally to the man whose ear is open to 
 her call. Finally, the children wanted to hear again 
 about the little Christ-Baby cradled in the hay. On 
 the circle the games of the Farmer and Grass-mowing, 
 learned in the fall, were revived and the games of the 
 Barnyard and Garden played daily with increasing 
 zest. The Light-Songs and the song of the Church 
 were called for, as was also the song of the Christ- 
 Baby, which had not been sung since February. After 
 singing this last song, one of the children ran across 
 the room to the Madonna picture, saying: 'See the 
 Christ-Baby in his mother's arms! ' " 1 
 
 No kindergartner who follows with discerning sym- 
 pathy the unfolding life of her little community can 
 doubt that towards the end of the year a total series 
 of experiences converges in the dawning ideal of nur- 
 ture. The children do really begin to know themselves 
 as nurtured beings. They do really begin to have 
 prescient faith in a nurturing God and joy hi the con- 
 sciousness of an abiding and progressive life. It has 
 been with the hope that this convergence of experience 
 1 Miss Child's Report.
 
 206 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 might suggest itself through the reactions of the chil- 
 dren in an actual kindergarten upon their last excur- 
 sion that we have permitted ourselves to relate what 
 may seem trivial and uninteresting details. Will our 
 readers kindly remember that little children can do 
 only little things and give slight intimations of the 
 trend of their feeling and thought. 
 
 The kindergarten has been defined as an institution 
 which from the plays of childhood breaks a path 
 of approach toward all human values. The aim of our 
 discussion of the program up to its present point has 
 been to suggest the approaches toward religion, ethics, 
 language, literature, music, the dance, and the drama. 
 It is believed that the approaches toward religion and 
 ethics have been indicated in sufficient detail to make 
 comment unnecessary and that a brief statement will 
 suffice to clarify the evolution of the remaining values. 
 
 It is quite generally recognized by intelligent pri- 
 mary teachers that children promoted from the kinder- 
 garten have both larger and more precise vocabularies 
 than children entering school directly from the home. 
 It would be strange, indeed, were this not so, because 
 in the kindergarten words are learned in connection 
 with the acts, objects, qualities, and relations to which 
 they refer. Every representative game defines a num- 
 ber of verbs by acting them and a number of ob- 
 jects by showing their use. In good kindergartens the 
 actual objects whose use is represented are shown 
 to the children and many of them later made by the 
 children. When it is impossible to show the actual 
 object, a picture takes its place. Seeing, using, and 
 making objects, children become familiar with their
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 207 
 
 qualities, and therefore learn readily the adjectives 
 which name these qualities. 
 
 For many years kindergarten children enriched and 
 clarified their vocabularies, but did not learn to ex- 
 press themselves in complete sentences. Even to-day 
 their speech is defective in this respect. But kinder- 
 gartners are becoming alive to the importance of being 
 precise and concise in their own speech, and as they 
 learn to use words few and fit, children learn to form 
 complete sentences. It is because the speech of adults 
 is prolix, ambiguous, and circumlocutory that children 
 are arrested in the use of single words. In the tumult of 
 sound that assails their ears they can distinguish only 
 a few clear meanings. 
 
 In addition to the development of language through 
 representative and creative exercises must be men- 
 tioned the influence upon speech of the stories to 
 which the children listen and the poems they learn. 
 Stories are carefully selected with reference both to 
 their content and their literary form. The vexation of 
 spirit shown by children, when changes are made either 
 in the words of a story or in the order of its events, is 
 teaching kindergartners to follow the example of the 
 great story-tellers of primitive ages. The constant 
 repetition of stories in the same fitly chosen words 
 amplifies and clarifies the speech of eager auditors. 
 Poems committed to memory enhance still further 
 the power of linguistic expression. It is true that we do 
 not as yet possess many of the poems which the life of 
 the kindergarten demands for its self-expression. We 
 cannot say to ourselves, Go to: we will make a book 
 of songs and sonnets. We cannot at will make ourselves
 
 208 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 poets, and we await the genius who shall adequately 
 translate the heart of things to the heart of childhood. 
 There has, however, been a cheering advance in the 
 simplicity and beauty of our songs, and when we con- 
 trast the present poetic wealth of the kindergarten 
 with the dearth of pioneer days we are filled with hope 
 for the future. 
 
 For many years large numbers of kindergartners 
 have given much time to the study of Homer, Dante, 
 Shakespeare, and Goethe, the Bible, and the Greek 
 Tragedians. Through this study they have learned to 
 feel the charm of literary expression and to see with 
 their own eyes how literature interprets the meanings 
 of nature and of human life. They have also learned 
 to distinguish between local and temporal literature 
 and world literature. They have come to realize that 
 there is a world literature for childhood as well as for 
 maturity and have been incited to study fairy tales, 
 primitive myths, and national and religious legends. 
 The practical result has been a greatly increased abil- 
 ity to recognize what types of character and situ- 
 ation should be presented to little children and an 
 approximate attainment of that distinction of speech 
 which proceeds from distinction of thought. There- 
 fore, the stories now told in large numbers of kin- 
 dergartens do really perform the several functions of 
 literature by helping to create forcible, delicate, and 
 discriminating speech; by defining those ranges of 
 thought and feeling which are accessible to childish 
 imagination; by suggesting the evolution of action out 
 of feeling and thought, and by illustrating the deeds 
 which may and may not be done.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 209 
 
 Passing from the values of language and literature 
 to that of music, it must be regretfully confessed that 
 the kindergarten is very far from realizing its own 
 musical ideal. As Froebel conceived the kindergarten 
 game it was a motor expression translating itself into 
 thought by words and into feeling by music. In the 
 actual kindergarten, words, melodies, and motor expres- 
 sion often attack each other instead of supporting each 
 other. Furthermore, much of our music is poor; much 
 of it is not adapted to children. In too many kinder- 
 gartens this defective music is badly played and 
 badly sung. We confess our faults and our sins are ever 
 before us. But once again we cannot at will make our- 
 selves musicians and musical composers. We can only 
 continue to announce our ideal until the announce- 
 ment shall call forth a musical genius who will make it 
 possible for us to do that which we desire. The neces- 
 sity of the moment is that graduate kindergartners 
 should study music, as many of them have already 
 studied literature, and should learn to select from the 
 constantly accumulating store of songs and games 
 those having musical value. The elimination of music 
 which is tinged with mawkish emotion is greatly to be 
 desired. In telling stories we have learned to tell what 
 heroes do and to avoid dissertations on how they feel 
 and what they think. Our poems of nature and human 
 life portray deeds and events. Our hymns are elimi- 
 nating exhortations to love God, and inspiring love 
 by suggesting his character through appealing images. 
 When children look at the sun they do not need to be 
 told that it is bright, and when they feel its genial rays 
 they do not need to be told that it is warm. Still less
 
 210 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 do they require to be told that they ought to like light 
 and warmth. So whether we wish to call forth in chil- 
 dren response to nature, man, or God, our one princi- 
 ple is to portray deeds and let feelings take care of 
 themselves. The music interpretive of such songs and 
 games should be as joyous as childhood, as noble as 
 the ideal, as simple as the images under which childhood 
 apprehends the ideal. Above all it should be inspired 
 by ethical purity and should avoid both sensuous tick' 
 ling of the nerves and "the railroad gallop style which 
 makes the nerves vibrate with undue excitement." 
 
 The ideal of Froebel with regard to the evolution of 
 values will not be realized in music until, in addition to 
 supplying good melodies, we help children to discrimi- 
 nate rhythms and tones and to use them creatively. 
 In the discrimination and creative use of rhythms a 
 fair beginning has been made, but practically nothing 
 has as yet been achieved in the discrimination and 
 creative use of tones. 
 
 The attentive reader of this report will have ob- 
 served that the heart-centre of all the activities thus 
 far described is the kindergarten game, and will also 
 have recognized that this game approaches the value 
 of art as embodied in the forms of the dance and the 
 drama. The characteristic feature of the kindergarten 
 game is that it translates into symbolic motor expres- 
 sion the valid and typical experiences of childhood in 
 all countries and in all ages, and therefore tends to 
 develop normal and joyous emotions. 
 
 Recent studies of folk-dances have indirectly illumi- 
 nated kindergarten games. "In these dances," writes 
 Dr. Gulick, "any or all of the chief events of human
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 211 
 
 experience were told not merely in words, but were 
 accompanied by gesture and bodily expression." 1 They 
 were acted stories of sowing and reaping, of war and 
 the chase, of love and marriage, of worship and sacri- 
 fice. Through this motor rehearsal of typical experience 
 the experience itself was assimilated and intensified. 
 Rhythmic representation of sowing, reaping, and 
 weaving liberated the livelier emotions incidental to 
 these economic activities; hunters and warriors grew 
 acquainted with themselves through dramatizing their 
 deeds; the dance portraying pursuit of the maid, and 
 symbolically suggesting her coy retreats and veiled 
 advances, was the first recital of the old love story told 
 anew in the novel of yesterday; and finally, genuflec- 
 tion and bodily prostration quickened the sentiment 
 of worship, and religious legend translated into act 
 reacted to enliven the faith of the actors. So, for the 
 kindergarten child to fly is to begin to feel free; to 
 march is to begin to feel self -restraining; to cuddle a 
 doll is to get ready to cuddle a baby; and to bend the 
 knees and fold the hands is to quicken the spirit of 
 reverence and devotion. The kindergarten game agrees 
 with the folk-dance in developing thinking and feeling 
 out of motor activity. It differs from the folk-dance 
 by declining to rehearse adult experience in adult 
 form. It is a story acted, told, and sung of the typical 
 experiences of childhood itself and of adult experience 
 as reflected in the child mind. 2 
 
 It cannot be too often repeated that the final aim 
 
 1 Dr. Luther Halsey Gulick, Folk and National Dances, p. 10. 
 1 The value of the folk-dance for the youth of the country can 
 scarcely be overstated.
 
 212 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 of the kindergarten is to help children to create a 
 miniature world and through this creation to interpret 
 the larger world in which they find themselves. We 
 have seen that the kindergarten games create in imag- 
 ination a picture of institutional ideals, call forth an 
 emotional response to these ideals, and portray those 
 phenomena of nature which analogically interpret 
 human affections and aspirations. We are now to see 
 that the plays with the kindergarten gifts correspond 
 with those forms of human activity whose aims are 
 the transformation of nature through the industries, 
 the transfiguration of nature through the fine arts, 
 and the theoretic interpretation of nature through 
 mathematics and science. 
 
 The traditional method of using the kindergarten 
 gifts calls for the three kinds of exercises formerly 
 described as making forms of life, beauty, and know- 
 ledge. Translating these obsolescent names into con- 
 temporary terminology, we may say that the tradi- 
 tional method calls for construction, representation, 
 design, and the discovery of mathematical relations 
 and implications. Under the term constructive activi- 
 ties we include exercises with the building gifts, to- 
 gether with peas-work and paper, clay, and sand 
 modeling in so far as their products are objects of 
 utility. 1 Under the term representation we include 
 all exercises wherein one object stands for another in 
 virtue of an analogical tie, and all picture-making, 
 whether with masses, lines, or points. 
 
 1 As technical activities, sewing and weaving may also be included 
 under this head. In the kindergarten, however, the emphasis of these 
 occupations is upon representation and design.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN S13 
 
 CONSTRUCTIVE EXERCISES 
 
 The nearer agreements among kindergartners relate 
 to exercises with the building gifts; hence no extended 
 description of our play with these gifts is necessary. 
 In common with other kindergartners we encourage 
 the making and grouping of furniture for bedchambers, 
 dining-rooms, kitchens, laundries, schoolrooms, and 
 kindergartens; the construction of objects belonging 
 to the yard or farm; the building of dwelling-houses, 
 stores, factories, libraries, art galleries, churches, and 
 public edifices of all kinds; the erection of bridges and 
 the grouping of buildings into villages and cities. We 
 incite the children to discover for themselves how to 
 make all these objects. With the Third and Fourth 
 Gifts we encourage the transformation of one object 
 into another. With the Fifth and Sixth Gifts, while not 
 excluding transformation, we place our emphasis upon 
 the improvement of the single object. We avoid dicta- 
 tion, and use chiefly the methods of imitation and sug- 
 gestion. We incite children to pile blocks in order that 
 their various possibilities may be discovered and their 
 architectural values discerned. Finally, we encourage 
 the discovery and repetition of architectural units of 
 design. 
 
 It is superfluous to do more than suggest the fact 
 that building exercises offer many connections with 
 games, stories, and pictures, and that we avail our- 
 selves of these natural connections in the organization 
 of our program. 
 
 With regard to other forms of constructive activity, 
 it is sufficient to say that peas-work is almost exclu- 
 sively restricted to the development of simple objects
 
 214 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 from the linear outlines of plane and solid geometric 
 forms; that exercises with sand and clay conform to 
 the general practice; that in paper modeling we place 
 our emphasis upon processes, rather than products, 
 and that our aim is to encourage original invention and 
 transformation. For older children we approve of the 
 exercises suggested by Froebel, which, in addition to 
 their constructive value, are concrete applications of 
 mathematics. 
 
 REPRESENTATION 
 
 Symbolic representation is adapted only to the 
 younger children in the kindergarten, and we deplore 
 that extension of the analogizing act which so often 
 produces arrest of development. In picture-making 
 our effort is to avoid monotonous repetition of the 
 same forms with different media of expression, and in 
 the use of any particular medium to encourage repre- 
 sentation of the objects to which it is best adapted. 
 For example, we limit our tablet pictures almost 
 entirely to houses, furniture, bridges, boats, engines, 
 and different kinds of vehicles; we confine stick exer- 
 cises to the representation of direction and to the out- 
 lines of rectilinear objects; and our ring pictures are 
 chiefly waves, vines, leaves, flowers, and fruits. We 
 recognize that the richest media of representation are 
 paper, crayons, and paint, but we believe that the very 
 limitations of such materials as tablets, slats, sticks, 
 rings, and lentils, concentrate attention upon facts 
 which are ignored in the use of more plastic instru- 
 mentalities and tend to develop that conscious power 
 which is always achieved through restraint. 
 
 It is manifest that both constructive and representa-
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 215 
 
 tive exercises point towards the great value of industry, 
 and it is interesting to remind ourselves that the 
 obvious contribution of the kindergarten to this par- 
 ticular value was one of the chief arguments urged 
 for its introduction into the public school system. In 
 his monograph entitled Early History of the Kinder- 
 garten in St. Louis, Dr. Harris writes as follows : 
 
 "If the school is to prepare especially for the arts 
 and trades, it is the kindergarten which is to accom- 
 plish 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 dex- 
 terity. 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 in Froebel's gifts and occupations 
 will acquire a skillful use of his hand and the habit of 
 accurate measurement of the eye, which will be his 
 possession for life. 
 
 "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 potency which is emancipating the human 
 race from drudgery by the aid of machinery. Inven- 
 tions 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
 
 216 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 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 muscle 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 unconscious 
 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." 
 As pointed out in the passage cited, the kindergarten 
 gives a general training for industrial pursuits rather 
 than a specific training for particular industries. It 
 does, indeed, introduce children to the primitive arts 
 of agriculture, pottery, sewing, and weaving, but its 
 direct contributions to the development of industry 
 are an aroused interest in constructive activity and "a 
 skilful use of the hand and the habit of accurate meas- 
 urement of the eye." In addition to this technical 
 training the kindergarten creates through its industrial 
 games a genuine reverence for the ideal immanent in 
 the great institution of civil society, which, as pointed 
 out in the secpnd section of this report, is "a more or
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 217 
 
 Jess conscious effort to complete the desire for devel- 
 opment in nature by helping nature to fulfill its mis- 
 sion as servitor of man." 
 
 DESIGN 
 
 There is no divergence of opinion among kinder- 
 gartners as to the importance of approaching the great 
 value of industry through wisely directed play, but 
 there is marked divergence of opinion as to the relative 
 stress to be placed upon exercises pointing respectively 
 towards the practical and the fine arts. The most inter- 
 esting fact of contemporary kindergarten history, 
 however, is the very general awakening of kindergart- 
 ners to an appreciation of the fine arts; and the conse- 
 quent fading away of one line of scission between 
 representatives of the Froebelian institution. As a 
 result of this awakening appreciation, exercises in 
 rhythmic and symmetric arrangement have become 
 universal in kindergartens, and very intelligent activ- 
 ity is displayed in the creation of methods whose aim 
 is to help children to discover architectural, plastic, 
 graphic, and pictorial possibilities. Stimuli of various 
 kinds are provided, experiment is encouraged; social 
 cooperation is invoked in aid of individual effort; units 
 of design are discovered and combined; the conscious- 
 ness of space-relations is developed; children are 
 encouraged to scrutinize and improve the forms they 
 have made, and mirabile dictu it is granted that 
 the kindergartner herself may take a place among the 
 incitements of environment. With regard to the use of 
 geometric elements in the development of art values, 
 no general consensus of opinion has been reached. The
 
 218 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 signers of this report, however, are unanimous in the 
 conviction that since proportion inheres in and is 
 most simply created with geometric elements, practice 
 in the grouping and spacing of different lines and in 
 the symmetric cutting of the various polygons is an 
 indispensable phase of the method of initiation into 
 the arts of space. We approve of the grouping and 
 spacing of concrete objects when children have devel- 
 oped sufficient skill to draw or cut these objects them- 
 selves, but we think that allowing children to arrange 
 objects cut or drawn by the kindergartner betrays 
 them into expecting too large results from too little 
 effort, and we are furthermore convinced that in 
 arrangements of concrete objects, proportion is less 
 easily discernible than in the arrangement of geometric 
 elements. 
 
 In general, our chief points of difference from some 
 representatives of the kindergarten with regard to 
 design are a more pronounced evolutionary accent 
 and the conviction that children should be made 
 aware of certain normative standards. 
 
 THE APPROACH TOWARDS MATHEMATICS 
 
 Kindergarten gifts are not only playthings through 
 whose intelligent use an approach may be made 
 towards the practical and fine arts. They are most evi- 
 dently intended by their creator to make also an 
 approach towards mathematics. This fact is too patent 
 to have escaped even the most superficial observation. 
 No child can play constantly with spheres, cubes, 
 cylinders, circles, squares, oblongs, and other geometric 
 solids and planes without creating in himself a ten-
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 219 
 
 dency to classify presented objects under these arche- 
 typal forms; neither can he constantly apply numerical 
 relations without creating in himself a tendency to 
 observe them. His play with the kindergarten gifts, 
 therefore, weaves in his mind a series of "apperceptive 
 nets" with which he catches and holds presented 
 objects. 
 
 The history of the kindergarten makes evident the 
 fact that there has often been a deplorably exagger- 
 ated emphasis upon form and number. When a child 
 describes a dog as a large cylinder in a lying position 
 and supported by four upright cylinders; when looking 
 at a beautiful picture he notices only that its frame is 
 oblong; or when, instead of listening to an interesting 
 story, he counts the buttons on the narrator's dress, 
 it is manifest that a distinct arrest in mental develop- 
 ment has been made by some exponent of the "devel- 
 oping method " of education. It was only natural that 
 such arresting work should call forth both a theoretic 
 and practical protest, and that large numbers of present- 
 day kindergartners should insist that the stimulus of 
 the material itself is the only mathematical incitement 
 needed and that it is an educational error to direct 
 attention either to geometric archetypes or numerical 
 relations. Stated in the terminology of the kinder- 
 garten, this point of view demands the elimination of 
 that type of exercise described by Froebel as making 
 forms of knowledge. 
 
 The French have a proverb to the effect that it is 
 foolish to throw out the child with the water in which 
 it has been washed. Were we to throw out of the kin- 
 dergarten all the forms of activity which have been
 
 220 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 perverted by exaggeration, we should leave ourselves 
 nothing to do. Were we to refuse appeal to all the 
 native tendencies of childhood to which some kinder- 
 gartners have appealed in ridiculous ways, we should 
 cut ourselves off from every path by which a child's 
 interests may be reached and his activity aroused. 
 We do not reject animism because some ignorant kin- 
 dergartner describes a pea as having cheeks and then 
 tells her children to run a stick through them. We do 
 not discard symbolism because of such absurd per- 
 versions as drawing an apple and telling children it 
 stands for all the fruits of the Thanksgiving season. 
 We do not give up the ideal of inner connectedness 
 because numbers of kindergartners make arbitrary 
 connections. Neither shall we give up forms of know- 
 ledge because numbers of kindergartners have unduly 
 emphasized geometric forms and numerical relations. 
 The true way of escape from arresting methods is to 
 create kindergartners consciously aware of the differ- 
 ent educational values and their relative importance. 
 It is because many essential things are left undone 
 that there is time for less important things to be over- 
 done. In any good kindergarten time should be con- 
 sciously divided between eleven forms of activity 
 graded in the order of their value. These exercises are 
 Pure Movement and Dance Games, Representative 
 Games, Learning of Songs and Poems, Looking at 
 Pictures, Listening to Stories, Excursions, Garden 
 Work, Care of Animals, Representation of three kinds 
 with solid material, with planes and with lines. Is 
 it not self-evident that an intelligent division of time 
 between these several forms of activity will not only
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 221 
 
 preclude undue emphasis upon form and number, but 
 will tend to eliminate all the other one-sided extremes 
 into which the kindergarten has been betrayed by the 
 defects of its representatives ? 
 
 Since the Froebelian approach toward the value of 
 mathematics is less generally understood than the 
 approaches toward the practical and fine arts, it may 
 be well to mention some of the typical exercises through 
 which this approach is made. In the kindergarten 
 little children spin the sphere, cube, and cylinder of 
 the Second Gift so as to exhibit a panoramic procession 
 and metamorphosis of forms. They blow soap-bubbles 
 and by the help of circular wires change iridescent 
 spheres into cylinders. They pound clay spheres on 
 opposite sides and produce cubes. They divide spheres, 
 cubes, and cylinders of correspondent diameters by 
 the same principal axial cuts. They make with clay, 
 cardboard, and sticks connected by softened peas, the 
 series of forms from the triangular pyramid to the cone 
 and from the triangular prism to the cylinder. They 
 connect the square with the circle through play with 
 sticks and with the jointed slats. They reproduce in 
 clay the series of the solid gifts, and by cutting them 
 become aware of the relations of their component 
 parts. With the Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and 
 Seventh Gifts they illustrate fractional relations, 
 square root and cube root. They learn to recognize the 
 same square and cubic contents in different forms. 
 They make many significant perceptible ratios between 
 forms. They derive planes, lines, and points from the 
 solid and build up the solid from points, lines, and 
 planes. Could we keep our children longer, they would
 
 222 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 evolve not only the circle, but a number of different 
 curves from their tangents. They would make analyses 
 of clay spheres, cylinders, and cones correspondent to 
 the analyses of the cube offered in our existent building 
 gifts. They would receive Froebel's completed Second 
 Gift and derive the tetrahedron, octohedron, rhombic 
 dodecahedron, and three transitional forms from the 
 cube. Finally, they would make the Seventh Gift cut, 
 and, after learning through experience how the tetra- 
 hedra it yields are produced, would be given numbers 
 of these tetrahedra to combine into different forms 
 and to use in making metamorphoses of form. For, as 
 Froebel himself writes: "The keystone of kindergarten 
 employment is the transformation of solid bodies and 
 consequently the knowledge of the relations of the 
 different geometric solids to one another as well as 
 their development from one another." l 
 
 No kindergartner who has ever helped her children 
 to make a genetic evolution of geometric forms, who 
 has noticed the zest with which they discover relations 
 between these forms, who has become aware of their 
 value in illustrating relations of number, and who has 
 understood the necessity of furnishing a perceptible 
 basis for the idea of ratio, will doubt that Froebel has 
 broken a better path of approach towards mathematics 
 than has been made by any later educator. On the 
 other hand, it must be granted that comparatively 
 little of the work he planned should be carried out with 
 children under the age of six. This minimum work, 
 
 1 It U hoped that our readers will observe that in all the exercises 
 referred to, children either use things, make things, cut things, or 
 combine things. Every exercise is a deed or series of deeds.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 223 
 
 however, is important, because without it a nascent 
 interest in mathematical relations may be atrophied 
 by disuse. 
 
 The first merit of the Froebelian approach to mathe- 
 matics is that through it children are incited to discover 
 mathematical relations. The second is that it creates 
 a dynamic and evolutionary conception of mathe- 
 matics. The third is that the several concepts of form, 
 number, and ratio are conceived and treated in their 
 organic unity. The fourth is that since the discoveries 
 made are typical facts, they are ancestral thoughts 
 and constantly beget a progeny of new discoveries. 
 
 The prejudice which so many persons feel against 
 giving kindergarten children concrete mathematical 
 experiences arises from failure to distinguish between 
 the very different ideas of giving elementary lessons 
 in mathematics and quickening interest in mathe- 
 matical relations. It cannot be too strongly insisted 
 that these two ideas are not only different but antago- 
 nistic. There can scarcely be a more effective check 
 upon mathematical interest than lessons in arithmetic " * 
 or object lessons on geometric forms. The kindergarten 
 stands for the conviction that early attitude is far 
 more important than early teaching, and its play with 
 type forms as an approach to mathematics is precisely 
 analogous to the care of pet animals as an approach to 
 zoology, or garden work and gathering wild flowers as 
 approaches to botany. 
 
 The following narrative of an accidental experience 
 of childhood and its results illustrates precisely the 
 aim and method of the kindergarten: 
 
 "The majority of professional teachers, at present,
 
 224 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 f : ;on their own confession, have no idea on what depends 
 the receptivity of the child when the teaching age for a 
 subject has begun. Parents also are still so unawake 
 to this that they confuse preparation for a subject with 
 premature teaching of a subject; and do great harm 
 by such premature teaching. Many teachers strongly 
 deprecate amateurish attempts to instruct children 
 before the proper time and in this I entirely agree with 
 them. A concrete instance may help to make clear 
 in what preparation for a subject consists. In my 
 young days cards of different shapes were sold in pairs 
 in fancy shops for making needle-books and pin- 
 cushions. The cards were intended to be painted on; 
 and there was a row of holes round the edge by which 
 twin cards were to be sewn together. As I could not 
 paint, it got itself somehow suggested to me that I 
 might decorate the cards by lacing silk threads across 
 the blank spaces by means of the holes. When I was 
 tired of so lacing that the threads crossed in the centre 
 and covered the whole card, it occurred to me to vary 
 the amusement by passing the thread from each hole 
 to one not exactly opposite to it, thus leaving a space 
 in the middle. I can feel now the delight with which 
 I discovered that the little blank space so left in the 
 middle of the cards was bounded by a symmetrical 
 curve made up of a tiny bit of each of my straight silk 
 lines; that its shape depended upon without being the 
 same as the outline of the card and that I could modify 
 it by altering the distance of the down-stitch from the 
 up-stitch immediately preceding. As the practical art 
 of sewing perforated cards was already quite familiar 
 to me, my brain was free to receive as a seed the dis-
 
 THE KINDERGAKTEN 225 
 
 covery I had made and to let it grow naturally, all the 
 more because no one spoke to me then of tangents or 
 tried to teach me any algebraic geometry until some 
 years had elapsed. Therefore, when I did begin to learn 
 artificially about tangents, the teacher was not obliged 
 to put cuttings into raw soil; he found ready a good 
 strong wild stock of living interest in the relation between 
 a curve and the straight lines which generate it on to 
 which he was able to graft the new knowledge. The 
 teacher came, not as an outsider thrusting on me the 
 knowledge of something unfamiliar and strange, but 
 as a brother-seer, more advanced than myself, who 
 could show me how to make further progress on a path 
 which I had already entered with delight. On such 
 accidents as this of my card sewing depends I think much 
 of those special receptivities for certain subjects quite 
 distinct from great power which puzzle psychologists. 
 When we understand better how they originate they will 
 no longer depend upon accident and we shall more often 
 be able to produce them at will" l 
 
 "In a concrete experience," writes Froebel, "three 
 things are always present: the particular fact, its 
 universal application, and the relationship of both to 
 the person who has the experience." 2 
 
 The kindergartner who understands these words will 
 never teach mathematics, but neither will she desist 
 from the attempt to quicken interest in mathematical 
 relations and awaken mathematical imagination. 3 
 
 1 M. E. Boole, Preparation of the Child for Science, pp. 91-93. 
 (Italics mine.) 
 
 1 Mottoes and Commentaries, p. 122. 
 
 1 Some contemporary writers describe concrete experiences of 
 typical facts as "material for unconscious cerebration." as "fertili-
 
 226 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 THE APPROACH TOWARD SCIENCE 
 
 The main purpose of our discussion of the kinder- 
 garten program has been to suggest the approach it 
 makes from the concrete experiences of childhood 
 toward the values of life. (Dne great value the value 
 of science remains to be considered, and the point 
 we desire to stress is that kindergarten children ap- 
 proach this value most directly through the mathe- 
 matical stimulus of the Froebelian gifts. As a single 
 illustration of such approach, let us consider the ques- 
 tions a child may be incited to ask and answer through 
 his play with the Third and Fourth Gifts. Why can 
 the bricks stand, sit, and lie, while the cubes can take 
 only one position? Why is it so much easier to knock 
 over a brick than a cube? Why, when bricks are set 
 in a row and one is struck, do all tumble, while eight 
 cubes in a row stand solid against the most vigorous 
 attack? Why do the bricks of the Fourth Gift make 
 so much better walls and floors than the cubes of the 
 Third Gift? Why can the child build with them so 
 much better steps? Why can he inclose such large 
 yards and windows, and yards and windows of so 
 many shapes? Why can he pile his cubes only in five 
 ways, while he can pile his bricks in forty ways? Why 
 is it possible with his bricks to make so many delight- 
 ful experiments in balance and equilibrium, and why 
 do they yield such a variety of symmetric forms? 
 Great is the joy of the embryo experimenter when he 
 
 zation of the unconscious mind," as a "crystallizing thread around 
 which later experiences may group themselves." The process is the 
 same, however described, but Froebel's description, which implies a 
 minimum degree of consciousness, is the most accurate.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 227 
 
 discovers that one fact answers all these questions. 
 His cubes stand firmly and do so little, because their 
 length, breadth, and thickness are equal; his bricks 
 are so easily overturned and do so much, because they 
 are twice as long as they are broad and twice as broad*. 
 as they are thick. 
 
 We do not ignore the path of approach towards 
 science opened through constructive exercises, neither 
 do we undervalue the reaction upon the mind of the 
 simpler relations to which attention may be called 
 during excursions into nature and in connection with 
 garden work and the care of pet animals. It is well for 
 a child to know that his kitten has large pupils because 
 it is a night-prowler; that the Christmas tree is ever- 
 green because it has a resinous sap; that the thorn of 
 the rose and the prickles of the gooseberry are weapons 
 of defense against animal attack; that the dandelion 
 tufts he loves to blow and the burdocks which stick 
 to his clothes are devices adopted by plants for the 
 dissemination of their seeds. The suggestion of these 
 and similar relations will do something to kindle 
 interest in seeking relations. Nevertheless the fact 
 remains that science means the classification of facts ^J? 
 and the discovery of their relations and sequences, and 
 that no interest in explained relations, however lively, 
 implies development of the scientific attitude of mind. 
 
 (7&4^ **_/ fa***4cJ 
 
 In brief epitome of the final section of our report we 
 repeat that the kindergarten program arises as a spon- I 
 taneous evolution out of the life of the kindergarten 
 community. The object of life in this embryo com- 
 munity is the social creation of a play-world. The reao- 
 
 (r*
 
 E28 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 lion of this play-world upon its creators helps them to 
 make an ideal interpretation of the larger world into 
 which they are born. 1 
 
 All great human values are approximate definitions 
 of the human spirit. Since children participate in this 
 spirit they tend to re-create human values. The kinder- 
 garten aims to abet this process of creation and to help 
 children to do better what they themselves are trying 
 to do. 
 
 It is as native to mind to scrutinize its deeds as to 
 create these deeds. Therefore, the genetic-developing 
 method calls upon children not only to act, but to 
 observe the result and process of activity. Through 
 such scrutiny, mind takes possession of itself. It 
 would be a parody of the Froebelian method should 
 there be any attempt to anticipate in consciousness an 
 unattained level of experience. It is an omission of one 
 of the most distinctive features of the method when 
 actual experience is not observed, interpreted, and 
 assimilated. It would seem, indeed, that only through 
 such observation is life transmuted into experience. 
 
 If Froebel is wrong in holding that upon every level 
 of experience human beings should act, should notice 
 their action and its result, and through such scrutiny 
 take possession of themselves and incite themselves 
 to mount to a higher plane of life, then the kindergarten 
 as he conceived it is an educational blunder. If, on the 
 other hand, it may be that Froebel is right, then, 
 verily, there is "a new thing under the sun," the ex- 
 cluding extremes of educational absolutism and educa- 
 
 1 For a definition of what is meant by an ideal interpretation of 
 the world, see Educational Issue* in the Kindergarten, p. 63.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 229 
 
 tional anarchy have been mediated, and the little child 
 made a happy copartner in the process of his own nor- 
 mal development. 
 
 We accept the genetic method as our working 
 hypothesis for education. The world has not succeeded 
 so well with the plans previously tried as to discourage 
 us from experiment. We cannot shut our eyes to the 
 fact that all around us are men and women who are 
 slaves to the moral evils they were not taught in child- 
 hood to face and also slaves to the intellectual preju- 
 dices which have accumulated in their minds through 
 the subconscious convergence and coalescence of unin- 
 terpreted experiences. Froebel at least dreamed of an 
 education which from the beginning should aim at 
 conscious insight and free self-direction. We are will- 
 
 - . Jii.i ^^^|^p*^ < M A 
 
 ing to give our lives to the effort to prove this dream 
 
 *t if*^ 
 true. 
 
 The kindergarten is the educational phase of a great ^kt* 
 "time movement" whose character is defining itself 
 through many different expressions. Humanity is 
 stirred in its inmost depths by a new divination of its 
 own freedom. The great mass of men obscurely feel 
 that they should have larger opportunity to grow into 
 freedom, and threaten society by an inarticulate de- 
 mand for their birthright. The favored minority 
 tremble with the suspicion that they can no longer 
 keep their own manhood if they deny their brethren 
 the privilege of becoming men. The church announces 
 that nothing but a fierier flame of religious life can 
 make possible clearer vision of Eternal Reality. Lit- 
 erature and art are once more enthroning and crowning 
 the human will. Great statesmen descry from afar the
 
 230 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 vision of maternal governments which shall nurture 
 in their citizens the ideals of freedom. The one great 
 message of the Time-Spirit is, Become, O man, the 
 truth you would see, and thereby achieve the freedom 
 which is your dower from God. Echoing this message 
 the kindergarten whispers, Educate your little children 
 through the deed which sees into and through itself, 
 and thereby help them to mount over stepping-stones 
 of ever-dying selves to living selfhood. 
 
 SUSAN E. BLOW. CAROLINE M. C. HART. 
 
 MARIA KRAus-BoELTE. 1 LAURA FISHER. 
 
 ADA MAREAN HucHEs. 1 MARIAN B. B. LANGZETTEL. 
 
 ALICE E. FITTS.* HARRIET NIEL. 
 
 MART C. McCuLLocn. FANNIEBELLE CURTIS. 
 
 1 While agreeing in the main with Miss Blow's report, I find a dif- 
 ference in point of view with regard to a detailed program planned 
 for the year, and also with regard to the general arrangement and 
 decoration and opening of the kindergarten. 
 
 1 The contents of this report I endorse as Froebelian theory. This 
 method of application of these theories in the kindergarten, I differ 
 from. I believe that each kindergartner should make her own pro- 
 gram, and that this program should be adapted to individual condi- 
 tions. 
 
 IT tt_ d Cr M _ . ;. ff^-z
 
 SECOND REPORT 
 PATTY SMITH HILL
 
 PART I 
 
 THE PRINCIPLES UNDERLYING THE SELEC- 
 TION AND ORGANIZATION OF THE SUBJECT- 
 MATTER OF THE KINDERGARTEN PROGRAM 
 
 ANY conception of the kindergarten as an organic 
 part of education presupposes a faith, more or less 
 conscious, in the universality and validity of the laws 
 which underlie both the higher and the lower educa- 
 tion. 
 
 When teachers of all grades shall accept the univer- 
 sal validity of so fundamental a law as self-activity, 
 the differences found in the curricula of kindergarten, 
 primary, and elementary education will not be due, as 
 formerly, to the acceptance of Froebelian theories of 
 development in the lower grades and to Herbartian 
 theories in the higher grades. The day has passed 
 when kindergartners can afford to offer as an argument 
 against a theory its Herbartian origin. On the other 
 hand, the fact that primary and elementary teachers 
 have so largely accepted the fundamental principles of 
 Froebel, is sufficient guarantee of their breadth of 
 view. 
 
 Now that self-activity is so universally recognized 
 as the basic law of growth in all education, we have as 
 a result an intelligent effort to study each stage of 
 development in order to discover those aspects of a 
 common subject-matter which will stimulate normal 
 self -effort.
 
 234 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 The group of kindergartners who unite in presenting 
 this report conceive of the kindergarten program as a 
 flexible plan of action, which plan affords the teacher 
 the opportunity of selecting and organizing those 
 native activities, interests, and experiences common to 
 all children together with the subject-matter which 
 feeds them. This flexible plan should admit those aims 
 and purposes of the child which have educational 
 significance, as well as those which have been con- 
 tributed by the wider experience of the teacher. 
 
 The problems of primary importance in the kinder- 
 garten are the same as those in all education; namely, 
 what shall we teach and how shall we teach it? The 
 former problem gives rise to the need of selecting 
 the right materials or subject-matter; the latter, to 
 the importance of right method in presentation and 
 execution. 
 
 Since Dr. Dewey wrote his Pedagogical Creed, and 
 The Child and the Curriculum, it is well-nigh common- 
 place in modern educational theory to state that the 
 process of education to which the kindergarten pro- 
 gram and curricula of education correspond has two 
 distinctive aspects which may be differentiated 
 the psychological and the sociological. The psycho- 
 logical aspect presents the claim of the individual 
 the right of the child to be studied in order that the 
 teacher may discover the methods which must be pur- 
 sued in putting at the child's disposal opportunities 
 for the fullest development of all his native powers 
 in and through social situations. The sociological as- 
 pect presents the rightful claim of society to an educa- 
 tion which will develop in the members social con-
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 235 
 
 sciousness and readiness for social service. This is but 
 a legitimate return demanded by society for its be- 
 quests tested and tried values, and richest experi- 
 ences, to each new generation. The mutual rights of 
 the individual and of society demand that society real- 
 ize its obligation to educate every child ; hence our 
 recognition of the necessity for compulsory education. 
 The protection and development of society, however, 
 demand that the process by which the child is educated 
 bring to his consciousness an ever-deepening sense of 
 his obligation to social service. 
 
 While these distinctive aspects are recognized, they 
 cannot be separated, inasmuch as they are part of one 
 process, and are related as "what" and "how," as 
 ends and means, or as aim and instrumentality. 
 
 When this theory is applied to the study of the cur- 
 riculum and to the methods of education, we have 
 two interrelated factors; on the one hand, we have 
 as motive power those early manifestations of self- 
 activity contributed by the child in the form of in- 
 stincts and impulses or native tendencies ; on the 
 other hand, we have the subject-matter or materials 
 of the course of study contributed by the experience 
 of past and of present civilization, which serves as 
 stimulus to the self-activity of the child. 
 
 When self-activity comes into contact with the ma- 
 terial of civilization, a process of interaction is set 
 up in which the child may be led to appreciate and re- 
 create, in his own immature, crude way, the so-called 
 achievements of civilization. In this process of action 
 and reaction between self-activity and materials, 
 carried on under the guidance of a teacher who has
 
 38 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 a knowledge of both, Froebel hoped to harmonize his 
 twofold ideal of education as a process by which the 
 self both achieves and inherits the experience of the 
 race. If it is granted that education is a self-active 
 process in which the individual must on a small scale 
 re-win as well as inherit the experience achieved by 
 the race, then materials become an actual necessity. 
 In this way they become an organic part of education, 
 serving as stimulus to the powers resident in the child, 
 and also as the stuff out of which the self realizes or 
 actualizes its aims and purposes. Thus materials be- 
 come what Froebel calls a "counterpart" to the child, 
 activity and materials being inseparable aspects of 
 one and the same process, each being incomplete and 
 inconceivable without the other. 
 
 This conception of the relation between the self- 
 activity of the child and the materials of the curricu- 
 lum would seem to define the teacher as one who stands 
 
 ttween, serving as mediator, interpreter, or guide. 
 e, with her knowledge of the creative impulses of 
 the child, and with her insight into the educational 
 values embodied in the materials, selects and presents 
 to him that subject-matter for which he is ready. By 
 her insight into the reaction of each of these upon the 
 other, she brings to the consciousness of the child those 
 values which adult guidance alone can adequately 
 reveal to him. 
 
 In this sense the teacher becomes a guardian of the 
 child and of the experience of the race, a trustee of 
 society. The teacher, then, is the social agent selected 
 by society to transmit its noblest traditions, and to 
 train immature members to appreciate, respect, and 

 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 287 
 
 preserve the permanent bequests from the past, with 
 the hope that the child will in time contribute his 
 share in creating an ever-new and nobler civilization. 
 
 This view of the course of study grows out of the 
 acceptance of three fundamental theories regarding 
 the nature of mind, and the relation of the child-mind 
 and subject-matter to the civilization of the past and 
 of the future: first, mind must be defined in terms of 
 activity an activity involving all the varied im- 
 pulses which make it possible for the self to appreciate, 
 know, and control; second, subject-matter must be 
 interpreted as human achievement as the tested 
 and tried results of past struggles in man's adaptation 
 to, and control over, an environment natural and 
 social; third, it must be recognized that the same crea- 
 tive spirit which has achieved the great arts, sciences, 
 religions, and institutions of the highest civilization of 
 the past and of the present, has its dim beginnings in 
 the work and play of the child. The subject-matter 
 of the curriculum, or the achievements of civilization 
 in which it has its origin, makes its own appeal to 
 these immature but native tendencies in the child 
 which are, however unconsciously and inadequately, 
 reaching out for and aiming toward similar achieve- 
 ments. Could we know just what aspects of subject- 
 matter the child is ready for, the discipline of the school ^Us v 
 would be reduced to a minimum, because the child 
 would be held by the materials and by the problems ; Ar 
 presented by the teacher rather than by the teacher 
 herself. 
 
 The simplest and sanest basis of organization for the 
 subject-matter of a course of study seems to grow out
 
 238 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 of the theory that it originates in, and grows out of, 
 social life. Here each study is treated as one differen- 
 tiated aspect of social experience, which has emerged 
 out of an original unity in social life to which the cur- 
 riculum itself corresponds. 
 
 The most fundamental problems hi the planning of 
 a kindergarten program, or course of study, may be 
 stated as follows : 
 
 I. The selection of the impulses, instincts, and in- 
 terests which are developing at this period of the 
 child's growth, and which make for the highest good 
 of the child and society when provided with educative 
 stimuli or material. 
 
 II. The selection of the best subject-matter or 
 materials for the creative impulses of the child to act 
 upon hi the self -active process through which he conies 
 to appreciate and re-create the achievements of civili- 
 zation. 
 
 III. The organization, correlation, or arrangement 
 of the subject-matter or materials in a unity such as 
 makes for the economy and simplification of the whole. 
 This unity must be secured without sacrificing the 
 individual nature or achievement of any one of the 
 impulses entering into the organization. 
 
 Before we can progress further it is necessary to 
 treat each of these problems more fully. 
 
 I 
 
 The first problem presents the need of two studies. 
 In the first place, it demands a study of the child him- 
 self in order to discover which instincts or impulses are 
 growing most rapidly at any stage of development and
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 230 
 
 making the most insistent demand for food and exer- 
 cise. The necessity for this study grows out of what 
 Dr. James terms the "law of transitoriness in in- 
 stincts." l "Many instincts ripen at a certain age and 
 then fade away. A consequence of this law is that if 
 during the time of such an instinct's vivacity objects 
 adequate to arouse it are met with, a habit of acting 
 on them is formed, which remains when the original 
 instinct has passed away. In all pedagogy the great 
 thing is to strike the iron while it is hot." Or, again, 
 "In children we observe a ripening of impulses and 
 interests in a certain determinate order. Later, the 
 interest in any one of these things may wholly fade 
 away. The hour may not last long, and while it con- 
 tinues you may safely let all the child's other occupa- 
 tions take a second place." 2 
 
 The second aspect of this problem demands keen 
 discrimination in studying the relation of the lower 
 stages in the development of an instinct in relation 
 to its higher manifestation. While the philosophy of 
 idealism which Froebel represents, acknowledges the 
 evolutionary process as a fundamental factor in edu- 
 cation, it continually asserts its belief that the true 
 nature of any impulse on its lower levels of develop- 
 ment can be evaluated only in terms of its highest 
 realization. 
 
 Many instincts of recognized importance in their 
 maturer stages give little promise of this significance 
 in the crudity of their early expression. Because of 
 this, instincts which later are of great value to society 
 
 1 James, Psychology, pp. 402-404. 
 * James. Talks to Teachers, p. 61.
 
 
 240 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 are often overlooked in their crude forms of expression 
 in child life. An ability to discern promise in these 
 transitory instincts, which often fade for want of food 
 and exercise, would insure their preservation for the 
 present development of the child and the future wel- 
 fare of society. 
 
 Any attempt to solve the second problem in the 
 construction of a course of study demands not only a 
 consideration of the materials of civilization, but in- 
 volves the still more subtle question what aspect 
 of these materials will meet the needs of children at 
 different stages of development. One must know not 
 only materials in general, but, also, what in particular 
 should be selected to present to children at a given 
 age or grade. 
 
 Those materials must be presented which best stim- 
 ulate the impulses developing at the time. The process 
 by which the child comes to assimilate the educational 
 values embodied in materials is a self-active one in 
 which, in a small way, he comes to reinvent or redis- 
 cover these values won by past civilizations. The 
 dynamic or experimental method must be preserved 
 throughout. Even though the mode of expression may 
 be crude, it must represent the high-water mark of the 
 child's ability at any given stage. 
 
 The subject-matter presented should grow out of the 
 child's personal experience, or in some way function 
 in it, if he is to gain that insight which is necessary 
 for the reconstruction of the experiences of the past. 
 
 If it is granted that the subject-matter of the kin-
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 241 
 
 dergarten should grow out of, and interpret, the ex- 
 periences of the children, this would seem to suggest 
 the necessity for variation of both subject-matter and 
 method in meeting the needs of children living in 
 different natural and social situations. 
 
 The function of environment in the process of build- 
 ing up experience would demand a scientific and philo- 
 sophical treatment far beyond the scope of a report of 
 this nature; but as many of the differences in both 
 theory and practice of the kindergarten arise from 
 conscious, or unconscious, differences regarding this 
 particular aspect of philosophy, it must at least be 
 touched upon. Few are conscious of the theory of 
 knowledge which underlies their practice, though all 
 are consciously, or unconsciously, acting upon the 
 method suggested by a philosophy of mysticism, ra- 
 tionalism, empiricism, or pragmatism as a knowledge 
 process. 
 
 It must be admitted that the function of environ- 
 ment has been ignored by some educators and over- 
 emphasized by others. Few have seen that, while 
 environment is an important factor in the making of 
 experience, it is neither independent of nor identical 
 with it. 
 
 From one point of view, environment may be studied 
 as a stimulus to mind, stirring the creative impulses 
 to act upon it in a process of adaptation to and control 
 over it. In this process of interaction both the self and 
 the situation undergo a change; the environment not 
 only serving to stimulate the mind by setting up an 
 obstruction or problem which demands adaptation as 
 solution, but serving also as the means of realization.
 
 242 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 Thus environment provides the very stuff which stim- 
 ulates the self to reconstruct its own thought, and to 
 alter the face of the external world. 
 
 If it is acknowledged that environment is at least 
 a factor of importance in the experience process, and 
 that not only the self but environment changes, one 
 would seem to have an argument in favor of a careful 
 study of the r61e played by these varying environments 
 in the experience of different children. 
 
 While the majority of kindergartners agree in the 
 theoretical statement that the program is based upon 
 the experiences of children, that it is these experi- 
 ences which are to be selected, interpreted, and organ- 
 ized, few seem to act consistently upon the possi- 
 bilities and limitations of environment in illuminating, 
 modifying, and rectifying these experiences. 
 
 Out of the different attitudes of kindergartners 
 regarding the function of environment in broadening, 
 deepening, completing, or reconstructing the experi- 
 ences of children living under varied conditions, grow 
 the much-discussed problems as to the uses of some- 
 what fixed or uniform programs. 
 
 The varied individualities, temperaments, training, 
 and experience of the teachers as well as those of the 
 children would seem to require the opportunity to vary 
 programs and courses of study, if the teachers are to do 
 living, vital work in the classroom. 
 
 Common sense would seem to demand that any 
 course of study which is supposed to meet the actual, 
 as well as the theoretical, needs of particular groups 
 of children should embody the convictions of both the 
 supervisor and the classroom teacher.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 243 
 
 School administration under a democratic govern- 
 ment seems to demand a study of those conditions 
 which make freedom go hand in hand with guidance. 
 Democratic control in schools should provide for a 
 cooperation between supervisors and classroom teach- 
 ers, sufficiently flexible to leave ample opportunity 
 for the individual initiative, conviction, and sense of 
 responsibility on the part of each, without endangering 
 the welfare of the children or of society. 
 
 In democratic administration the straight and nar- 
 row path between uniform and individual programs 
 and courses of study must be solved in relation to 
 the protection of the mutual rights and privileges of 
 (1) the classroom teacher and her children; (2) the su- 
 pervising officers and the teachers under supervision; 
 (3) the boards of education or superintendents, and 
 the parents and the community to which they are 
 responsible. 
 
 With the teachers and children the problem seems 
 to present questions such as these: How may the indi- 
 viduality, personality, originality, and initiative of the 
 children be preserved in the teacher's attempt to or- 
 ganize the whole through the contributions of both 
 children and teachers? How can she use the initiative 
 of each individual so as to enrich the group, and stimu- 
 late in each a desire to contribute his best to the 
 making of the course of study for the whole? 
 
 In the case of the supervising officers and teachers 
 the problem seems to be the preservation of the indi- 
 viduality, personality, freedom, and development of 
 the classroom teachers through their attempt to pro- 
 vide programs and courses of study for the protection
 
 44 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 of the children. How may courses of study be 
 planned in which both the rank-and-file teacher and 
 the supervising officers have contributed their common 
 and peculiar experiences, their individual initiative, 
 their personal convictions, and their sense of respon- 
 sibility to the boards of education, to the parents, and 
 to the community? 
 
 Some of these problems will be considered : 
 1. The principles of democracy as applied to the relations 
 of teachers and children. 
 
 If, as is generally conceded, the early manifestations 
 of self-activity take the form of native impulses or 
 instincts, we can readily see that the application of 
 democratic principles to early education demands 
 that these contributions of the child be utilized by the 
 teacher in the course of study. Until these impulses 
 begin to react upon the materials of the environment 
 in the process of building up ideas and knowledge of 
 the meaning of life, they are blind tendencies to do, or, 
 as Professor James puts it, " Instinct is usually defined 
 as the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce 
 certain ends without foresight of the ends." 1 At first 
 the child contributes the activities only, the mother or 
 the teacher contributes the foresight of the ends these 
 are destined to attain. Although some extreme adher- 
 ents to a sort of "overwrought idealism" may regard 
 these impulsive activities of too humble origin to be 
 considered, nevertheless, they seem to many the only 
 points of departure in any democratic conception of a 
 self-active process of education. 
 
 However blind the child may be to the ends which 
 1 Psychology, Briefer Course, p. 391.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 245 
 
 these instinctive activities are destined to attain, the 
 teacher who is conversant with the fundamental prin- 
 ciples underlying modern psychology and pedagogy 
 knows that these activities are indications of awaken- 
 ing powers and interests of great value in the building 
 of a curriculum. 
 
 Though instinctive activities may serve as the 
 starting-point and motive power in early education, 
 yet the child, as he comes to realize through experience 
 the ends toward which he is working, and learns to 
 adapt means to the attainment of these ends, is gradu- 
 ally freed from the domination of instinct. This eman- 
 cipation from instinct is due to the fact that the know- 
 ledge gained through the early performance of these 
 
 instinctive activities awakens reason and reflection. 
 
 When the child is able to reflect upon his past activi- 
 ties, and through reason and reflection experiments in 
 order to find better ways and means to reconstruct, * 
 these instinctive activities are giving place to the con- 
 trol of ideas and thought. Thus while originating in 
 the blind impulses to act, they attain their real signifi- 
 cance only when dominated by reason and reflection. 
 As differences of opinion on this point affect the prac- 
 tical procedure of the kindergarten materially, the 
 point seems worthy of illustration. The dissimilarity 
 in practice is the result of the theories regarding the 
 psychological distinction between work and play, and 
 the function of each in the kindergarten. Those who 
 look upon play as activity which is pursued with no 
 interest in nor vision of ends, believe that kindergarten 
 children are necessarily robbed of their native spon- 
 taneity and freedom when they participate in activi-
 
 246 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 ties directed toward an end. Those holding to this 
 conviction would prescribe more of the traditional 
 occupations which have been handed down from the 
 days of Froebel, such as sewing lines in cardboard, 
 weaving paper mats, or the folding and cutting of 
 paper in sequences. It is held by some advocates of this 
 theory and practice that the child at this age has no 
 desire to sew, weave, or fold as a means of accomplish- 
 ing an end. The processes of sewing, weaving, and 
 folding are supposed to be sufficiently absorbing in 
 and of themselves, so that the result attained is of 
 slight moment. 
 
 An opposing view is held by those cooperating in 
 presenting this report. While the younger children 
 may be absorbed in activity for its own sake, we are 
 firmly convinced that the older ones are not only inter- 
 ested in these processes, but are capable of using some 
 of them as a means to a more real end to which they 
 apply themselves with spontaneity and freedom. This 
 is not only true when the technique is partially under 
 control, but we hold that the end may serve in this 
 process as a motive or stimulus in gaining mastery of 
 the processes involved. 
 
 If the problem or end presented by the teacher is 
 one which the child can readily grasp, and if its solu- 
 tion in any way furthers his play and social life, he is 
 not only interested in the activity involved, but is 
 absorbed in discovering ways and means to realize the 
 end toward which he is working. For example, with 
 sufficiently large and durable material he may weave a 
 simple doll's hat or rug, or fold and cut a crude kite, 
 both of which will function in his play life, instead
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 247 
 
 of weaving paper mats and folding and cutting a 
 form resembling a kite to paste in an occupation 
 book to be taken home at the end of] the term or 
 year. 
 
 In a study of the traditional occupations of the early 
 kindergartens, and those introduced later under the 
 rather misleading name "constructive occupations," 
 Dr. Dewey draws this conclusion: "Upon the whole, 
 constructive or 'built-up' work (with, of course, the 
 proper alternative of song, story, and game which may 
 be connected, so far as is desirable, with the ideas 
 involved in the construction) seems better fitted than 
 anything else to secure these two factors initiation 
 in the child's own impulse and termination upon a 
 higher plane. It brings the child in contact with a great 
 variety of material; it supplies a motive for using these 
 materials in real ways instead of going through exer- 
 cises having no meaning except a remote symbolic 
 one; it calls into play alertness of the senses, and acute- 
 ness of observation; it demands clear-cut imagery of the 
 ends to be accomplished, and requires ingenuity and 
 invention in planning; it makes necessary concentrated 
 attention and personal responsibility in execution. 
 Unless the child can get away from it (that is, the 
 model) to his own imagery when it comes to execution, 
 he is rendered servile and dependent, not devel- 
 oped. . . . From the psychological standpoint it may 
 safely be said that when a teacher has to rely upon a 
 series of dictated directions, it is just because the child 
 has no image of his own of what is to be done or why it 
 is to be done. Instead, therefore, of gaining power of 
 control, by conforming to directions, he is really losing
 
 248 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 it, made dependent upon an external source." 1 Or 
 again, "No one seriously questions that, with an adult, 
 power and control are obtained through the realization 
 of personal ends and problems, through personal selec- 
 tion of means and materials which are relevant, and 
 through personal adaptation and application of what 
 is thus selected, together with whatever of experimen- 
 tation and of testing is involved in the effort. Practi- 
 cally every one of these conditions of increase of power 
 for the adult is denied for the child. For him problems 
 and aims are determined by another mind. For him 
 material which is relevant and irrelevant is selected in 
 advance by another mind, and, upon the whole, there 
 is such an attempt made to teach him a ready-made 
 method for applying his material to the solution of his 
 problems, or the reaching of his ends, that the factor 
 of experimentation is at the minimum. With the adult 
 we unquestioningly assume that an attitude of per- 
 sonal inquiry, based on the possession of a problem 
 which interests and absorbs, is a necessary precondi- 
 tion of mental growth. With the child we assume that 
 the precondition is rather the willing condition to sub- 
 mit to any problem and material presented from with- 
 out. Alertness is our ideal in one case, docility in the 
 other." 2 Often the end, aim, or problem which is in 
 the teacher's mind only, might be easily and profitably 
 shared with the child, though not initiated by him, if 
 the teacher realized the attitude of inquiry and eager- 
 ness to find means of solution which the child's posses- 
 sion of the aim or end would stimulate in him. 
 
 1 Dpwey, The Schoolmaster and the Child, pp. 58-fll. 
 * Dewey, Psychology and Social Practice, pp. 13-14.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 249 
 
 Thus if the occupations described above involve a 
 simple technique, and the end is childlike and not too 
 remote, they stimulate interest and effort so that, 
 though initiated in the play impulse, they develop 
 into the beginnings of creative work, art, and industry 
 on a higher level. 
 
 Dr. Cole, in his study of Herbart and Froebel, states 
 clearly this principle of initiation through impulse and 
 emergence in values of the curriculum in these words : 
 "Freedom in education seems to mean that instincts 
 and impulses are to be utilized, not eliminated. For 
 these are the obvious contributions of the self to the 
 educative process. If they be not respected, or in some 
 way maintained, it is difficult to see how there should 
 be talk of freedom. Yet it is one thing to respect in- 
 stincts and impulses, and another to admire them as 
 they blindly perform an unassorted work. Then in- 
 stincts and impulses may be thought of, not as opposed 
 to ends, ideals, or values so much as the possibilities 
 and cravings for these very realizations and satisfac- 
 tions. The educational situation ought then to be not 
 impulses vs. the curriculum, but impulses for it." l 
 
 The inability of the child to start from any point 
 other than where he is, makes the use of his experience 
 with all its narrow limitations not only advisable but 
 inevitable. What else can we start with in any true 
 process of development? Where the child is, is the only 
 point of departure for the development of the ideal 
 experience which should be. Children do not enter the 
 kindergarten as "idealess," "purposeless," or "ex- 
 perienceless" as some would have us believe. Pre- 
 1 Cole, Herbart and Froebel, p. 83.
 
 250 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 kindergarten experience has, through the child's 
 activities pouring out upon his environment, built up 
 desires, ideas, and purposes, however incorrect or par- 
 tial these may be. 
 
 Any attempt to disregard "His little Past" as a 
 starting-point because of the poverty and narrowness 
 of its range, in order to substitute some remote, vicari- 
 ous experience selected for its supposed ideality, is un- 
 consciously autocratic, for the following reasons : In any 
 educational institution laying claim to democracy the 
 child would seem to have four inalienable rights: (a) 
 The right to express his own ideas and experiences in 
 order to have them rectified, interpreted, or utilized 
 for the development of himself and for the social group; 
 (6) the right to have his own limited, narrow, and per- 
 sonal experience extended through those contributed 
 by other children in the group; (c) the right to partici- 
 pate in the wider experience and vision of the teacher; 
 (d) the right to come into direct contact with the ex- 
 perience of the race as embodied or preserved in its 
 literature, arts, songs, games, industries, laws, and in- 
 stitutions. 
 
 Any teacher who is not willing to use the broken bits 
 of experience contributed by individual children, and 
 her own experience as a means of clearing, rectifying, 
 completing, interpreting, and relating the whole, has 
 failed to grasp Froebel's great social law of "Glied- 
 ganzes," in which each child is related as member, and 
 as whole, to a larger whole. 
 
 The difficulty seems to be due to the tendency to 
 treat both environment and experience as static; a 
 deeper study of the needs of the child would seem to
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 251 
 
 indicate the necessity for deepening and extending 
 these. A good part of kindergarten education should 
 be devoted to the gaining of new experience through 
 first-hand contact with nature, and with human acti- 
 vities domestic, industrial, aesthetic, and religious. 
 We are often guilty of singing about these, dramatiz- 
 ing them, relating stories of them, or expressing them 
 through hand work, when what is needed is not the 
 expression of these but the actual experience itself. 
 More excursions and gardens, more experiments in 
 using, seeing, and participation in the use of tools of 
 human activity would lay the basis for spontaneous 
 songs, dramatizations, and expressions of these, to- 
 gether with a finer appreciation of the vicarious experi- 
 ence brought to the child through stories, song, and 
 verse. 
 
 Granted that the warp of the program must be the 
 nearest approach to the common experiences of the 
 children drawn from the significant factors in their 
 common environment, yet the woof must be furnished 
 by the introduction of new experiences which will 
 fashion the new and the old into an organized whole. 
 A discriminating study of the experiences already in 
 the possession of the children would seem to point to 
 the necessity of introducing new elements in order to 
 relate or extend the old ones. Nor does this introduc- 
 tion of the new imply any necessity of presenting the 
 remote, chosen on the basis of its supposed superiority 
 in stirring the imagination. On the contrary, the un- 
 known or unfamiliar should be chosen only upon condi- 
 tion that it furnish the missing link in completing and 
 giving new meaning to the known and familiar. A lack
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 such as this often exists within the most familiar exper- 
 iences of childhood; these are frequently neither appre- 
 ciated nor understood because they are unrelated; the 
 skillful use of some unfamiliar factor may become the 
 means of linking together, interpreting, and unifying 
 the whole process. Even here the unknown is not the 
 end sought; it is only a means to a higher end to be 
 found in the illumination and unification it brings to 
 bear upon the disconnected experiences of the child's 
 past. 
 
 On the other hand, when we have wrung from the 
 child's past all the problems it offers in meaning and 
 control, the new function of the known and realized 
 will be to serve as leverage for gaining some deeper 
 insight into, and control over, the new, the untried, the 
 unknown. 
 
 We grown people forget that subject-matter which 
 seems dull and commonplace to us, because it repre- 
 sents processes familiar to us and under our control, 
 may be full of significance to the child, stirring a deep 
 sense of wonder when it offers new opportunities for 
 experiment in discovering meanings and solutions. 
 For this reason, we are astonished to find that a round 
 of action, monotonous to the adult, may offer a whole 
 unexplored world of romance and adventure to the 
 child. 
 
 As the actual experiences of no two children can 
 possibly be the same, even in one home or in one kinder- 
 garten, the skillful teacher not only weaves the un- 
 known as an interpretative factor into the discon- 
 nected elements of the familiar, but also uses the 
 known as a point of departure toward the unknown,
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 53 
 
 the unfamiliar, and the uumastered. She also guides 
 the children in all their associations so that the partic- 
 ular experience of any member of the group, whether 
 child or adult, may be contributed to link together 
 and make more complete the experience of all the 
 others, until a certain degree of unity is attained. In 
 this way the experience of yesterday may be recon- 
 structed in the light of that of to-day, and this new 
 illumination makes it possible not only to interpret 
 the old by the new, but the new by means of the old. 
 It is interesting to recall the fact that this problem 
 presented itself to Froebel many times. A few quota- 
 tions here may illustrate this point and serve in mak- 
 ing clear his position on this subject. He says: "The 
 second remark is that objects are here brought before 
 the child, which indeed the playing adult has seen, but 
 which as yet the playing child has not seen at all. 
 Though this is not to be scrupulously avoided, as little 
 is it to be thoughtlessly carried too far; kept within 
 limits, it justifies itself to any simple, straightforward 
 mind. Man has a peculiar presaging power of imagin- 
 ation. [Therefore] objects not yet seen in life by the 
 child may be introduced to him through word and 
 plaything that represent this object, but with the 
 following restrictions." 1 Again he writes, "This is 
 quite natural, for the child's world, from the remem- 
 brance of which come his formations and his concep- 
 tions, is at first principally confined to house and 
 room, table, bench, and bed. The child moves from 
 the house and its living rooms, through kitchen and 
 cellar, through yard and garden, to the wider space 
 1 Froebel, Pedagogics of the Kindergarten, p. 49.
 
 254 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 and activity of the street and market, and this expan- 
 sion of life is clearly reflected in the development of 
 his productions. His representations proceed from his 
 nearest experiences, and are intimately connected with 
 them. The child is not to be forcibly torn away from 
 his inner world and his environment. But the mother 
 or kindergartner has many opportunities of correcting 
 the child's perceptions by his representations; and the 
 amendment will be gladly accepted by the child, if only 
 they lie within the circle of his experiences and ideas. 
 As these building gifts afford a means of clearing the 
 perceptions of the child, they give occasion for extend- 
 ing these perceptions, and for representing in their 
 essential parts, objects of which the child has only 
 heard." 1 
 
 Froebel's belief that the spontaneous expressions 
 and productions of the child grow mainly out of his 
 immediate experiences in and about the home and 
 neighborhood is evident in the following quotation: 
 "Now, in the family, the child sees the parents and 
 other members of the family at work producing, doing 
 something; the same he notices with adults generally 
 in life and in those active interests with which his 
 family is concerned. Consequently the child at this 
 stage would like himself to represent what he sees. He 
 would like to represent and tries to do so all he 
 sees his parents and other adults do and represent in 
 work, all of which he sees represented by human power 
 and human skill." 2 
 
 1 Froebel, Pedagogics of the Kindergarten, pp. 221, 222. (Italics 
 not author's.) 
 1 Froebel, Education of Man, p. 98. (Italics not author's.)
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 255 
 
 While home and neighborhood activities and life are 
 rapidly changing from this ideal simplicity in process 
 and product to the mechanical devices of modern 
 industry, which obscure and complicate the ma- 
 chinery of the simpler and more obvious domestic and 
 industrial processes of an earlier day, the psycho- 
 logical principle underlying this description of the 
 activities of the child in relation to those in the home 
 life of Froebel's day still holds good. The principle 
 involved is indicated in these words, " The child would 
 like to represent what he sees" This is true yesterday, 
 to-day, and forever. 
 
 This principle represents a problem increasingly 
 difficult to apply with intelligence and wisdom because 
 the surroundings of little children grow more and more 
 complex and obscure in both meaning and technique 
 as civilization advances. Now that the simple candle 
 and lamp have given place to the hidden mysteries of 
 gas and electricity, the broom of straw to the carpet 
 sweeper and vacuum cleaner, the knocker to the elec- 
 tric bell, the open fire to the radiator, one can but 
 wonder how this problem is to be solved in days to 
 come. How may the teacher preserve a sane balance 
 in making use of the tendency of the child to reproduce 
 the complex forms of civilization by which he is sur- 
 rounded without any understanding of their hidden 
 processes, and the possible necessity of introducing 
 into the school the simpler processes of an earlier, more 
 primitive, and remote civilization to illumine them? 
 
 The subject-matter of the kindergarten program 
 must represent the dual value of child and race experi- 
 ence. With the younger children a form of unity,
 
 256 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 omitting processes or involving exceedingly simple 
 ones, seems to be all that is required; but with older 
 children, in either kindergarten or in primary, the 
 processes lying back of the product seem to have a 
 fascination which should be met by experiment in 
 securing them. Professor Sully says, regarding chil- 
 dren's questions, " From the first, however, the ' why ' 
 and its congeners have reference to the causal idea, to 
 something which has brought the new and strange into 
 existence and made it what it is. In truth, this refer- 
 ence to origin, to bringing about or making, is exceed- 
 ingly prominent in children's questionings. Nothing is 
 more interesting to a child than the production of 
 things. This inquiry into origin and mode of produc- 
 tion starts with the amiable presupposition that all 
 things have been hand-produced after the manner of 
 household possessions. The world is a sort of big 
 house where everything has been made by somebody, 
 or at least fetched from somewhere." 1 
 2. The principles of democracy as applied to the Dela- 
 tions between the supervising officer and the teachers 
 under supervision. 
 
 If we expect teachers to regard the individuality, 
 personality, and initiative of children as one of the 
 chief factors in the enrichment of the social groups in 
 their care, it would seem that the same attitude should 
 be manifested in the relations of the supervisor to the 
 teachers themselves. The classroom teachers have a 
 right to expect the supervising officers to manifest the 
 same respect for the teachers' freedom, the same zeal 
 in providing conditions which offer development, 
 1 Sully, Studiet of Childhood, pp. 78, 79.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 257 
 
 health, and happiness for all under their supervision, 
 that they expect these teachers to exemplify in their 
 relations with the children in their care. If the class- 
 room teachers have no part to play in the making of 
 programs and courses of study, how can they be ex- 
 pected to encourage children to think with freedom, to 
 offer their initiative, their solutions to group problems? 
 How can they allow children freedom when a prescribed 
 result is demanded of them? How can any deep sense 
 of responsibility for either the course of study itself 
 or for the method of carrying it out be developed if 
 classroom teachers have no voice, no choice, no respon- 
 sibility in the creation of the course of study? How- 
 ever, while there seems to be such difference of opinion 
 regarding the use of somewhat uniform courses of study 
 for the protection of the children, even with deep con- 
 viction one cannot afford to be dogmatic until experi- 
 ments have been tried with both methods, and the 
 results compared. Quotations for and against a some- 
 what uniform program or course of study will be given 
 to illustrate the wide differences of opinion held by 
 able authorities. 
 
 The most noted kindergarten authority in favor of 
 using a somewhat uniform kindergarten program is 
 Miss Blow. When Courthope Bowen, of England, 
 criticized the kindergartens of other countries for using 
 the identical experiences, plays, and games of Froebel's 
 Mother-Play book, his criticism was answered in these 
 words: "In opposition to this view, I hold that 
 Froebel's games dramatize ideal experiences which all 
 children may and ought to have, and that conse- 
 quently they should be played by children of all
 
 258 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 nations, and all conditions of life." 1 An opposing point 
 of view is well expressed by Mr. James L. Hughes 
 in these words: "What kindergartners need is not a 
 unified program, but specific outlines of the work that 
 should be accomplished in the kindergarten, and direc- 
 tive laws for making programs." 
 
 That the same problem is under discussion in ele- 
 mentary supervision is confirmed by the following 
 quotation: Dr. Frank McMurry says: "One of the 
 leading duties of higher officers is to establish a feeling 
 of great freedom among teachers. Superintendents, 
 supervisors, and principals bear the same relation to 
 classroom teachers, touching the development of the 
 personality and individuality of the latter, as these 
 bear to their pupils. A somewhat elaborate plan for 
 the preservation of the teacher's freedom must be 
 formed, corresponding to the elaborate theory that 
 guides the teacher in her development of the individ- 
 uality of pupils. In regard to the curriculum, the sub- 
 ject-matter should be outlined for large units of time, 
 or by terms, rather than by days, or weeks, or even 
 months. It should be outlined by large topics with com- 
 paratively little detail, accompanied with a very clear 
 statement as to the degree of freedom the teacher is to 
 enjoy in eliminating and supplementing, and choosing 
 equivalents and substitutes. The higher officers of the 
 school should show the freedom that is to be enjoyed 
 in this field at least as forcibly as they show the re- 
 striction." 
 
 While the members of this group would unanimously 
 agree that to leave programs to the unguided initiative 
 1 Blow, Symbolic Education, p. 109.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 259 
 
 and judgment of the individual kindergartner would 
 be an equally serious error, they do believe that there 
 is here again a via media which avoids the grave con- 
 sequences resulting from holding extreme views in 
 favor of either theory. 
 
 m 
 
 The third problem in the construction of a course of 
 study demands a thorough consideration of the prin- 
 ciples involved in the coordination or correlation of 
 the impulses and materials entering into its organiza- 
 tion. 
 
 The variety of impulses and materials involved in 
 the construction of a modern course of study demands 
 an organization which makes for economy of effort 
 and the elimination of waste. In some way the experi- 
 ence and knowledge, won through the activity of one 
 impulse, should be related to that achieved by another. 
 
 Correlation grew into a conscious problem in the 
 elementary school when the course of study became 
 enriched through the rapid introduction of a variety 
 of subjects, such as nature study, manual training, 
 art, etc. The relation of the three Rs was a simple mat- 
 ter compared with the complexity and overcrowding ^ 
 which resulted when the so-called "fads and frills of 
 the new education" were introduced. 
 
 As each new subject which was admitted into the 
 curriculum was evaluated according to its ability to 
 meet the needs of the developing individual and social 
 life, it was felt that simplicity could not be secured 
 through the elimination of any of the subjects them- 
 selves. A proposal to eliminate any one of these in-
 
 260 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 variably met with a storm of protest from enthusi- 
 asts. 
 
 If no one of the subjects could be withdrawn without 
 individual and social loss, there was but one remaining 
 method by which simplification could be accomplished 
 and this was soon discovered. It was observed that 
 when any two subjects were related in an organic way 
 there was immediate gam in the reduction of friction 
 and complexity. The more the studies reinforced each 
 other, while still preserving their individuality, the 
 greater the simplification of the whole. Many serious 
 blunders were made in trying to treat the course of 
 study as an organic unity. 
 
 If the course of study may be compared to an 
 organism of which the different subjects are the organs, 
 one might carry the comparison further by saying 
 that correlation grew out of the necessity of treating 
 the subjects from the physiological rather than from 
 the anatomical point of view. 
 
 This organization or correlation of impulses with 
 their corresponding materials has two aspects. First, 
 each impulse must be seen as a developing activity, 
 as a process beginning with crude results in its first 
 efforts to respond to the stimulus of materials especially 
 adapted to its development in early life. More and 
 more we are coming to realize that a wide knowledge 
 of materials themselves materials in matured forms 
 - is necessary to guide wisely and economically the 
 first attempts of the child to express his impulses 
 through the medium of materials. 
 
 These more ideal goals or higher levels of achieve- 
 ment serve as standards toward which impulses must
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 261 
 
 be guided even in their crudest beginnings. An aim 
 like this demands of the teacher not only a knowledge 
 of beginnings, and standards or ideal ends, but that 
 knowledge of the developing child which will make it 
 possible for the teacher to know just what kind of 
 material and what mode of expression represents the 
 maximum efficiency of the child at any given stage of 
 growth. 
 
 The second aspect of the problem of correlation 
 requires a diligent search for a natural basis of unity 
 to be found in and among the varied native impulses 
 and the materials which they require for growth. In 
 other words, there is not only a natural tendency for 
 the impulses in their lower stages to reach upward or 
 toward their more ideal ends, but for one impulse to 
 reinforce or function in the achievements of another. 
 
 The problem, then, is to find some natural basis of 
 unity in and among the native tendencies with their 
 corresponding materials or subjects, which, while leav- 
 ing ample room for the predisposition of one impulse 
 to reinforce another, shall be so elastic and flexible as 
 to provide the fullest and freest development possible 
 to all the individual impulses entering into the organ- 
 ization. If the attainments of any one impulse are 
 unduly sacrificed to any other, or to the whole, the 
 true principle of correlation, or organization, is vio- 
 lated. 
 
 If the unripe fruits of creativity in the early life of 
 the child are not cultivated in the light of the promise 
 of full-grown possibilities in later life, there is neces- 
 sarily wasted energy, dissipated effort, and arrested 
 development. If, on the other hand, the creative
 
 262 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 impulses are not studied in the psychological relation 
 (the physiological versus the anatomical), that is, in 
 their normal interaction, we have as a result an iso- 
 lated sequence of achievements. 
 
 Here we have a sequence in technique secured at 
 the cost of the content or meaning which the experience 
 won by one impulse expresses through the activities 
 of another. For instance, the experience a child gains 
 from an excursion to the garden, park, or blacksmith 
 shop tends to pour itself out through the medium of 
 language, drawing, or dramatization. In this expres- 
 sion the logical technique or grammar of expression is 
 subordinated to the mode of telling. This principle 
 seems to be violated in the use of the sequences in the 
 technique and logical development of material exem- 
 plified in the so-called "schools of work" or "occupa- 
 tions" passed on by tradition from the days of Froebel. 
 For example, no child would spontaneously isolate the 
 technique of drawing from social meaning in any 
 fashion such as the Froebelian school of drawing would 
 seem to prescribe. The impulse to draw is used by the 
 child, in the main, as a medium for telling the social 
 experience gained in life. This is not peculiar to this 
 mode of expression, but rather seems to be a principle 
 controlling development through all modes of expres- 
 sion. While the child has a native love of arrangement, 
 to separate content from form, as is frequently done 
 in the use of the gifts and occupations of the kinder- 
 garten, seems to be a violation not only of Froebel's 
 law of organic unity, but of the normal relation between 
 idea and technique. 
 
 This separation of content and technique has arisen
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 263 
 
 through what appears to be a dualistic interpretation 
 of the place and function of the sciences and humani- 
 ties in the development of the individual and of society. 
 While it is granted that, as certain subjects in the 
 curriculum ally themselves more easily and naturally 
 with one group of subjects than with others, this must 
 be respected, it must also be remembered that they are 
 one in their common origin and aim. In other words, 
 they arose in social life, and differentiated in obedience 
 to the law of division of labor in meeting varying as- 
 pects of social experiences. While all subjects must 
 be studied in the light of their common social origin 
 and aim, it is equally important that they be carefully 
 examined in the light of their individual differences in 
 meeting human need through obedience to the law of 
 division of labor. In this sense one fails to secure the 
 finest results from either the sciences or humanities if 
 these are treated as identical in their contribution to 
 social necessity. While it is accepted that all studies 
 are one in their social origin and aim, the contribution 
 to social life differs with each, if it is to meet the special 
 human need which gave rise to it. While we must avoid 
 the pitfalls which inevitably beset the pathway when 
 one pursues the dangerous method of arguing from 
 social origins and racial modes of thinking to those fol- 
 lowed by the individual child of to-day in an alto- 
 gether different social and natural situation, there still 
 seems to be an element of danger in the theory that 
 the subjects of the curriculum are " mutually repellent. " 
 When Miss Blow draws our attention to the fact that 
 Herbart saw the subjects of the course of study fall 
 "into two main lines, the one for understanding, the
 
 2C4 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 other for feeling and imagination," she says, "In this 
 division he clearly recognizes an important difference 
 between scientific and humane subjects. Defining this 
 difference more closely, we become aware of a momen- 
 tous contrast between physical nature and human 
 nature, and realize that science and the humanities 
 must differ in their aim and method, in the forms of 
 mental activity to which they appeal, in the convic- 
 tions to which they give birth, in the practical solutions 
 of social problems which they suggest, and in the 
 'emotional undertones which they create.' " l 
 
 Any mode of correlation which fails to discover the 
 peculiar contribution of each subject to social life will 
 result in an attempt to force some or all of the different 
 creative activities to achieve the same end. This would 
 sacrifice the individuality and development of the 
 varied impulses, and distort the products they are des- 
 tined to achieve and contribute to the school and 
 society. The kindergarten has made many mistakes in 
 its efforts to correlate the subject-matter of the pro- 
 gram. One group of kindergartners, treating the gifts 
 and occupations as one aspect of science (science being 
 interpreted as the medium through which man has 
 gained control over physical nature), has isolated 
 these from the songs, games, and stories which are 
 related to a "pattern experience" selected from Froe- 
 bel's Mother-Play Book. 
 
 It is difficult to say where the most serious blunders 
 
 have been made, by conservatives or progressives in 
 
 the kindergarten, or the elementary school. In the early 
 
 attempts to correlate the gifts and occupations, the 
 
 1 Blow, Educational Issues in the Kindergarten, p. 20.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 65 
 
 form produced in the gifts was reproduced in the 
 occupation in a more "permanent" form, the only 
 difference in result being due to the characteristics of 
 the two materials. In this way the correlation was 
 made through the common medium of form. For ex- 
 ample, if the tablets were used at the gift period, 
 parquetry repeated the geometric form for an occupa- 
 tion. Later in kindergarten history, kindergartners 
 endeavored to correct this external conception of cor- 
 relation, and as usual the reform movement fell into an 
 error, as evident from another point of view as the one 
 it sought to rectify. In the attempt to reform a correl- 
 ation based on geometrical relationships between the 
 gifts and occupations, the reformers sought correlation 
 through the repetition of the same " subject," " idea," or 
 " topic." This was made central and repeated through 
 as many channels of expression as possible. For exam- 
 ple, if one made a house with the blocks, it must be 
 followed by a drawing, a parquetry or cardboard 
 house. This mistaken notion of correlation resulted in 
 a dreary round of activities in which the teacher 
 endeavored to repeat through morning talk, games, 
 stories, songs, gifts, and occupations, the same "idea," 
 "subject," "topic," or "thought" for the day. Miss 
 Blow in the following passage ably criticizes this 
 method, which really used materials to illustrate ideas 
 in the teacher's mind, rather than as a means of express- 
 ing and clarifying the ideas in the child's mind, which 
 he is spontaneously endeavoring to bring to conscious- 
 ness through play. "What becomes of that cardinal 
 principle of progressive pedagogy that 'in the begin- 
 ning is the act,' if children may not act until their
 
 266 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 minds have been filled by the kindergartner with a 
 thought content?" l 
 
 A criticism which might be added is that this is not 
 an expression of experience which the children have 
 gained from their social environment and are attempt- 
 ing to clarify and make their own through play, but an 
 illustration of a vicarious experience or idea in the mind 
 of the teacher, or secured from literature, which is 
 forced into as many modes of expression as possible. 
 These offenses against the true principle of organiza- 
 tion were common to both the kindergarten and the 
 school at this period, though it must be acknowledged 
 that the elementary school has solved the problem more 
 successfully than the kindergarten has. 
 
 One cause of the difficulty grew out of an inability to 
 trace the materials back to a past common origin in 
 social necessity, and to their present need in the social 
 life of the child and adult society. The subjects were 
 viewed as separate entities, and instead of studying the 
 actual relations existing between them in past and pres- 
 ent civilization and that of the social experience of the 
 child of to-day, they were placed in artificial connec- 
 tions and "tied together" by some ingenious, unnatu- 
 ral device discovered by the teacher. This artificial 
 unity often made use of the most extraneous, far- 
 fetched, and even ludicrous relationships. As soon as 
 we see the instincts of the child and the race in subject- 
 matter, viewing it as the record of these at work upon 
 an environment natural and social, these mistakes 
 disappear. 
 
 The trend of thought in modern elementary educa- 
 1 Blow, Educational Issues in the Kindergarten, p. 8.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 2G7 
 
 tion is to treat the different studies and materials of 
 the course of study as parts of an original unity to be 
 found in the social life in which they not only came 
 into existence, but in which they came to differentiate 
 because of some function which they fulfilled in society. 
 
 This earlier problem of correlation falls into the 
 background, or rather seems to take care of itself, when 
 the unity of the curriculum is found in the unity of 
 human experience, or the unity of social life which 
 the curriculum represents. As Dr. Dewey expresses it, 
 "Each study stands for one differentiated phase of 
 social life, and the problem of correlation is to make 
 studies act and react upon each other in the same way 
 in school that the processes for which they stand do in 
 actual life. . . . Conceive it [the curriculum] as im- 
 bedded in social life taken out of its social setting for 
 the sake of going back into it by making life richer, 
 more sympathetic, and more comprehensive." Thus, 
 one might add, the problem seems largely reversed 
 by modern educational thought. The old problem of 
 correlation how can we unify or correlate studies 
 which originally exist as separate entities has given 
 place to the new problem how do the separate 
 studies differentiate out of an original unity in social 
 life, and how may we preserve, in the curriculum and 
 the school, both the mode of differentiation and the unifi- 
 cation found in the social life which they represent? 
 
 The mistakes made by the kindergarten, in treating 
 the impulses and materials as unrelated both to each 
 other and to the social life out of which they have 
 emerged, resulted in isolated, meaningless sequences of 
 form, without social content or function each step
 
 268 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 bearing a relation inform and process, or technique, to 
 that which preceded and that which followed, but hold- 
 ing no relationship to the achievements and interpre- 
 tations of the other impulses, or to the function of each 
 in social life; while in the equally unfortunate mistake 
 made in attempting to find the relation between the 
 impulses themselves and their function in achieving 
 and interpreting human experience, we have such evi- 
 dences of correlation carried to the extreme, as is so 
 well criticized by Miss Blow in her chapter on the 
 "Concentric Program." l 
 
 While it is acknowledged, however, that the "Con- 
 centric Program" had faults as serious as the isolation 
 of subject-matter which it made an attempt to remedy, 
 it was a most effective stepping-stone in bringing 
 meaning and thought into the technique and instru- 
 mentalities of the kindergarten and the primary school. 
 
 If the kindergarten program may be compared to an 
 organism where the life of the whole depends upon the 
 contribution of each member and the interaction be- 
 tween the individual members, we have a complex or- 
 ganization which would make it impossible to withdraw 
 the contribution of any one of the parts without serious 
 loss to all the others and the organism as a whole. When 
 this principle of organization is applied to the kinder- 
 garten, it would seem to indicate that all the constitu- 
 ent impulses, with their corresponding materials which 
 enter into its organization, should in turn receive their 
 emphasis and their fullest development, being at the 
 same time enriched and reinforced by experience 
 gained through all of the others. The necessity for 
 1 Blow, Educational Issues in the Kindergarten.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 269 
 
 continuity for increasing complexity in content, 
 technique, and form is the sequence which we should 
 strive to preserve. 
 
 All early attempts to secure a steady progress in 
 technique, whether in reading, writing, mathematics, 
 manual training, gifts, or occupations, substituted the 
 logical for the psychological. Professor Leonard Wahl- 
 strom thus describes the mistake made when introduc- 
 ing manual training into the schools: "When manual 
 training first found a place in the school, it was the 
 physical side which predominated, in definite courses 
 of models and exercises." W. A. Baldwin classifies the 
 use of materials and manual training in the schools 
 under three types. The first he describes as, "schools 
 where an elaborate, well-defined course of study is 
 marked out in a perfectly logical fashion with its regular 
 set objects to be made. The place of each piece of work 
 in such a course of study is determined by its relation 
 to what follows, so that the difficulties of technique 
 may be gradually approached. The followers of Froebel 
 have gotten manual training of this type. To my mind 
 nothing can be further from the real spirit of Froebel." 
 
 Is not that progress or continuity, in both apprecia- 
 tion and control, for which sequence in its best sense 
 stands, equally important in the use of songs, games, 
 and stories as in .the gifts and occupations? While the 
 necessity for sequence or progress in these materials 
 is much less apparent, is it any the less important, 
 because more difficult to discover and realize? It is 
 readily conceded that it is far easier to correlate songs, 
 stories, and games without any apparent sacrifice in the 
 progress and development of each, to the others, and
 
 270 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 to the whole; but would not a deeper insight into the 
 problem of true organization or correlation reveal the 
 same, though more subtle and hidden necessity for 
 sequence or continuity of development in technique 
 in these? The time has passed when we can hope to 
 have slovenly thinking solve so delicate a problem. 
 
 Thoughtful kindergartners must discriminate be- 
 tween the external correlation of impulses and mater- 
 ials based upon ingenious relations revolving around 
 some center arbitrarily selected by the teacher, and the 
 true unity existing among the impulses and their cor- 
 responding materials as found in child nature and in 
 life. In such an organization of materials as the latter, 
 the unity is true to life because each impulse is con- 
 tributing to the whole through preserving its own indi- 
 viduality and development. These are related in a 
 larger unity, which is made up of a variety of impulses 
 and materials, in which no one attempts to repeat the 
 achievements of the other, but accomplishes for the 
 whole what no other could contribute. Thus nature 
 work may naturally reinforce or function in the art- 
 work or occupations, while contributing something 
 essentially different; or, the occupation may contri- 
 bute to the game or the pageant in which it finds its 
 motive or function ; for example, kites for experiment 
 with the wind in nature study, flags for marching, May 
 baskets for the celebration of May Day, etc. 
 
 We have in all courses of study an attempt to stim- 
 ulate some form of related thinking, though the type 
 of correlation varies according to the theory of the 
 thinker who plans it. In a study of this problem, made 
 by Dr. Judd, he points out two typical methods. He
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 271 
 
 describes at length the logical relationships of facts and 
 principles as they exist within the subject itself, and 
 contrasts with these the examples found in the applica- 
 tions of these in social life. Both, he claims, are the 
 results of related thinking and correlation, though 
 adherents of the latter method, he tells us, fail to see it 
 as such. "The interesting fact about many discussions 
 of correlation is that the obvious lines of correlation 
 just described are ignored. To many thinkers correla- 
 tion of number facts means the taking of these facts 
 out of their arithmetical connection and the placing of 
 them in some other connection. Thus the fraction \ is 
 part of a number scheme. It may be also a part of a 
 cooking lesson, as when one wishes to divide a cupful 
 or a quart into equal parts. Many thinkers would 
 regard it as a true example of correlation to bring the 
 fraction \ into the cooking lesson, but would fail to 
 recognize that there is just as much correlation in 
 relating \ to \ or \. . . . For the purpose of defining 
 the two types of connection which have been under 
 discussion in the foregoing examples, let us speak of 
 longitudinal correlations and transverse correlations. 
 The following diagram will illustrate what is meant by 
 the terms longitudinal and transverse. 
 
 Longitudinal Whole numbers Fractions (\, \, J) Decimals 
 
 t? ' . I I 
 
 D Counting children Use of rulers Coins 
 
 Counting chairs Use of quarts, pints 
 
 With the distinction between longitudinal correlations 
 and transverse correlations clearly in mind, it will
 
 272 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 readily be seen that the longitudinal connections are 
 much more systematic and orderly while the trans- 
 verse connections are illustrative and concrete." l 
 
 While the kindergartners cooperating in this report 
 recognize the value of both modes of correlation, we 
 would emphasize our faith in the fact that with the 
 younger children we believe that the social associa- 
 tions predominate. The child lives in an environment 
 in which the relations are largely social. He sees and 
 feels personally regarding these facts, and he comes to 
 see them abstractly and logically after he has become 
 somewhat familiar with them in their social connections. 
 
 The straight and narrow path which excludes neither 
 of these modes of relating experience, while throwing 
 the emphasis upon that which offers the best key to 
 child thought, is difficult, indeed, to find. Serious con- 
 sequences follow the total exclusion of either. For 
 example, if programs and courses of study are based 
 upon the longitudinal type of correlation exclusively, 
 we have as a result an accumulation of knowledge 
 based upon more or less abstract qualities and logical 
 relations within the subject itself, plus a technique 
 acquired by a method absolutely contrary to the more 
 normal process which life offers for the acquisition of 
 these. Here the child has secured both knowledge and 
 technique, not only without social meaning, but if the 
 experiments in modern psychology along the line of the 
 doctrine of "formal discipline" be at all trustworthy, 
 we have slight basis for any faith in his ability to apply 
 these in the solution of social problems. 
 
 1 Judd, "Types of Correlation," Elementary School Teacher, Sep- 
 tember, 1911.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 273 
 
 On the other hand, if the transverse mode of correla- 
 tion is used at the cost of the longitudinal, some of 
 the following errors seem inevitable. In the first place, 
 either a poor selection of materials may be presented, 
 in songs, games, stories, et cetera, chosen because they 
 illustrate or correlate with the thought or topic chosen 
 for the day; or, if good materials are selected, their ex- 
 cuse for use is found in some far-fetched, extraneous, or 
 ridiculous relation to the subject, which is invented by 
 the ingenious teacher because of her blindness to the 
 true relations existing in human experience. 
 
 Another consequence of the exclusive use of trans- 
 verse connections is found in the tendency to ignore 
 the problem of how to secure a gradual growth in ex- 
 pression, or a steady progress in mastery of technique. 
 The so-called "sequences" in all of the earlier uses of 
 the gifts and occupations were efforts to solve this prob- 
 lem of growth in skill. Unfortunate as these isolated, 
 meaningless exercises in skill were, they were no more 
 unfortunate than some of the efforts made by the 
 reformers who frequently ignored the problem alto- 
 gether. In these attempts at reform the problems pre- 
 sented were, in the majority of cases, suggested by 
 some thought associated with the "topic" for the day. 
 The technique or control of materials involved in 
 solving the problem often presented a difficulty too 
 arduous and complex for mastery to-day, or too easily 
 mastered to-morrow to call forth the child's best effort. 
 
 In the mistakes made by both types of correlation, 
 the free, spontaneous expression of the child may be *^ 
 inhibited. Both impose adult modes of thinking upon 
 him. In one case it is the imposition of an abstract
 
 274 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 logical technique which kills the spontaneous expres- 
 sion; in the other, it is the imposition of an idea or 
 subject which the teacher has forced upon the child 
 through some artificial mode of expression. 
 
 'The golden mean, the via media, which seeks to find 
 the degree to which both of these types of thinking are 
 characteristic of the child mind, is not only the test of 
 a good course of study, but of the highest of all arts 
 the art of teaching. 
 
 In conclusion, it may be said that neither transverse 
 nor longitudinal connections, neither isolation nor uni- 
 fication, should serve as a single aim in the construc- 
 tion of a program or course of study, but rather both 
 differentiation and unification when seen as two stages 
 in the one process of development through which the 
 mind passes, first, in an attempt to break up the 
 naive and unconscious unity in which the child finds 
 the materials of social life; and second, the desire to 
 consciously rebuild or reconstruct the original unity in 
 which the constituent materials of the course of study 
 exist in social experience. 
 
 Just as the mind plies between the processes of 
 analysis and synthesis, deduction and induction, so it 
 finds the necessity for both differentiation and unifica- 
 tion in its efforts to define and control human experi- 
 ence. 
 
 The kindergarten program will grow in value as 
 our vision of life and our insight into the meaning of 
 education deepen and broaden. It will be altered from 
 year to year by reflection upon what we have at- 
 tempted, and what we have accomplished. Out of this 
 will come a new vision, a higher standard which will
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 275 
 
 enable us to reconstruct and create newer and more 
 ideal courses of study for the children of the future. 
 
 If the school, the college, and the university are 
 still pursuing their quest for more ideal curricula from 
 year to year, the kindergarten, too, must endeavor 
 to "better its best" if it is to survive and to contribute 
 its quota to the whole.
 
 PART II 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS IN PRACTICE 
 
 IN this section an attempt will be made to illumi- 
 nate the preceding section on theory with a non- 
 technical statement of the practice of which it is an 
 application. 
 
 In the preceding section three fundamental problems 
 are given as of prime importance in the planning of 
 a kindergarten program, or a course of study. I. The 
 selection of the native tendencies of childhood which 
 make for the development of the individual and the 
 advancement of civilization. II. The selection of the 
 best subject-matter or materials for the creative im- 
 pulses to act upon and react toward. III. The organi- 
 zation, arrangement, or correlation of subject-matter 
 or materials in such a unity as makes for economy and 
 simplicity, while leaving ample opportunity for the 
 fullest development and richest achievements of all 
 the impulses entering into the organization. 
 
 As the last problem was more fully illustrated than 
 were the first and second, an attempt will be made to 
 present some of the most evident native tendencies or 
 impulses which should be selected in the organization 
 of a program or course of study, together with the sub- 
 ject-matter or materials which the kindergarten, the 
 school, and social life offer for their development. 
 
 This is not intended to serve as an exhaustive list of
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 277 
 
 instincts, social needs, and materials, but rather as a 
 suggestive one which may stimulate study and criti- 
 cism. 
 
 Native tendencies, impulses or 
 social need of children to be met 
 in planning a course of study. 
 
 To make, construct, or control. 
 
 To nurture, protect, and control. 
 
 To investigate, explore, and 6nd 
 out. (This also a motive and 
 method which enters into the 
 exercise of all impulses.) 
 
 To tell or communicate. 
 
 To adorn, decorate, arrange, or 
 beautify. 
 
 To transmit, record, interpret, 
 and make permanent valuable 
 experiences. 
 
 To cooperate and compete with 
 other selves. 
 
 Materials or subject-matter, pro- 
 vided by the kindergarten, the 
 school, and society to meet these. 
 
 Gifts, occupations, manual train- 
 ing, and industry. 
 
 Care of plants, animals, dolls, 
 younger children, and room. 
 
 Nature study, science, excursion, 
 commerce, and industry. 
 
 Conversation, gesture, dramati- 
 zation, song, writing. 
 
 Art, design, dance. 
 Literature, song, art, history. 
 
 Dramatic games and dances, 
 games of skill, work, festivals 
 and ceremonials. 
 
 To measure, calculate, compute, Mathematics, standards of 
 and make accurate. weight, measurement, counting, 
 
 etc. 
 
 To wonder, aspire, worship, or Religion or worship, 
 commune. 
 
 To cooperate, formulate, and Laws and institutions, 
 preserve social experience. 
 
 While all these are but different aspects of self- 
 activity, creating its own ways and means of satisfy- 
 ing human need, those which seem to be central are
 
 S78 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 the relation of man to nature, to his fellow man, and 
 to God. These are the three great elemental experi- 
 ences of man the central factors in human life 
 all the so-called subjects in the course of study or 
 program, being ways and means by which these are 
 investigated, elucidated, computed, communicated, 
 interpreted, recorded, regulated, controlled, and pre- 
 served. If this is accepted, it follows that the function 
 of each subject in the program or curriculum must be 
 studied in the light of its individual or peculiar contri- 
 bution to human experience through some one of these 
 channels. 
 
 The relation of man to man is the one in which the 
 child is first interested the one which may most 
 easily be brought to his consciousness. As civilization 
 advances, the child's adaptations to nature are more 
 and more made for him by adult society. It is adult 
 society which looks in advance of the actual need for 
 food, clothing, shelter, fuel, etcetera, and provides these 
 for its helpless, immature members. While it is be- 
 lieved that the child is in close relation to God from 
 the first, he is unconscious of this, and gradually 
 grows into a realization of the unseen tie through the 
 more tangible relation with man and nature. 
 
 NATURE STUDY 
 
 The child makes many, if not most, of his adapta- 
 tions to humanity for himself, and learns in the first 
 few months of his baby existence whether he is to con- 
 trol or to be controlled by adult society. He adapts 
 himself accordingly. Nature is in the background of 
 his consciousness, and it soon becomes a setting for
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 279 
 
 human activity which is for him the matter of supreme 
 moment. To primitive man it was the source of supply 
 for food, clothing, fuel, shelter, tools, and weapons, 
 but to win these he early learned that in order to gain 
 control over nature he must first adapt himself to 
 nature. It aroused curiosity and provoked the investi- 
 gation and research of science, commerce, and indus- 
 try; it inspired the wonder, awe, aspiration, and 
 reverence of religion; it stimulated the fancy, and the 
 imagination of literature, and the love of beauty in 
 art. But the child of to-day has few opportunities to 
 adapt himself to nature, as civilization steps in and 
 makes this adaptation for him. 
 
 As the race came to nature consciousness through 
 first-hand contact with nature in its relation to hu- 
 man needs, whether domestic, industrial, aesthetic, or 
 religious, so the child must come to consciousness of 
 needs in his life which nature alone can supply. 
 
 Nature-subjects must be selected in relation to hu- 
 man needs, through direct contact with it, through 
 the method of experiment. Little children need nature 
 experience and nature wonder and nature play as a 
 basis for later nature study, and nature work. 
 
 If this principle is applied in practice, it rules out of 
 the program and course of study much of the unrelated 
 nature work now being used in the kindergarten and 
 primary school. The central interest in child life is not 
 what nature is doing, but what man is doing. 
 
 The sun, moon, and stars, the wind, rain, and snow 
 are very personal matters to the young child, and this 
 personal relation should be respected and utilized as 
 the basis for the more impersonal approach to science
 
 280 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 pure and simple in later education. If the kindergart- 
 ner would see to it that children are given every op- 
 portunity possible to come into contact with natural 
 objects and forces indoors, in garden-work, and excur- 
 sions, and through nature-play or experiment, nature 
 study and nature-work would follow more naturally 
 in the grades. 
 
 Those aspects of nature which, while stirring the 
 child's imagination, are yet beyond his ability to ap- 
 proach through the experimental method, should be 
 left to the realm of wonder and fancy. Wonder and 
 fancy may be as important as the method of experi- 
 ment in the beginnings of nature experiences. 
 
 LITERATURE 
 
 As literature arose in the desire to interpret, com- 
 municate, and record some actual or fanciful experi- 
 ence which was considered too important for the race 
 to lose, it would seem that with little children it must 
 interpret some experience of their own, or furnish some 
 desirable experience calculated to supplement group 
 life in an ideal way. 
 
 " Literature is born when it becomes possible for men 
 to see that their experiences have a value which goes 
 beyond their momentary occurrence, and the moment- 
 ary practical fruits resulting from them. It is the 
 expression of man's consciousness of the more perma- 
 nent and enduring values of his experience. Litera- 
 ture is to be regarded as a means of interpreting one's 
 own experience through the reflection back into it of 
 the best expressions of such experience proceeding from 
 others, but it is not o be treated as a substitute for
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 281 
 
 this experience." If this statement of the origin and 
 function of literature is accepted, the .storSLsbould on 
 the whole follow and interpret the experience rather 
 than precede and foreshadow it. 
 
 While this principle seems to limit the use of litera- 
 ture, it is large enough to include some realistic stories, 
 some wonder and fairy tales, some poems and rhymes; 
 but it would tend to reduce the multiplicity of stories , 
 told in the kindergarten and primary school, because 
 of their supposed value in stirring the imagination. 
 
 We would suggest fewer stories, more closely related 
 to, and interpretative of, child life and child problems, 
 well told, and so frequently told that the child comes 
 to possess them, not only in the content but in the 
 literary form. 
 
 GAMES 
 
 Games offer the very best opportunities for social 
 cooperation and wholesome social competition. 
 
 The two main divisions into which they seem natu- 
 rally to fall are the games of skill, and dramatic games, 
 including the simple and ideal forms of the folk-game 
 and the folk-dance. 
 
 The games of skill include such spontaneous activ- 
 ities as running, jumping, skipping, leaping, throwing, 
 and tossing, and often require some tool or toy as the 
 means of building up technique; for example, balls, 
 rings, tops, marbles, ropes, etcetera. Such games are 
 especially valuable from the standpoint of health, 
 physical vigor, and dexterity. 
 
 The dramatic games in the main rehearse or portray 
 human activities. They interpret human relationships 
 and culminate in the drama. There are some exceptions
 
 282 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 to this, such as the spontaneous dramatizations of 
 birds, horses, and engines. 
 
 The formulated games should be evolved from, and 
 organized out of, the spontaneous expressions of human 
 activities in somewhat unorganized play, and, as far 
 as possible, should be preceded by the actual experi- 
 ence of which they are dramatizations. Again we 
 would prescribe fewer and simpler games, played more 
 frequently, and with increasing control over the tech- 
 nique involved, rather than the multiplicity now in use 
 in many kindergartens. 
 
 MUSIC AND SONGS 
 
 There is an increasing demand for shorter and 
 simpler songs for the kindergarten. A child's song 
 should be a musical embodiment of a desirable mood, 
 which poetically interprets and colors the child's view 
 of some ideal experience. In instrumental music, we 
 would urge a higher standard of selection, greater 
 simplicity, and a reduction of the amount. 
 
 There is undoubtedly much over-stimulation of chil- 
 dren in the kindergartens through the almost incessant 
 use of song and piano to accompany every activity. 
 When this stimulation is withdrawn, as it necessarily 
 will be when the child enters the primary school, he 
 must suffer as one inevitably does when suddenly 
 deprived of a stimulus which has been used to excess. 
 
 We would again suggest simpler songs, fewer, 
 shorter, better selected, and better sung, as the founda- 
 tion for later musical education. The song is another 
 mode of interpreting experience, and should, on the 
 whole, follow or accompany the experience, helping
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 283 
 
 the child to a new and more ideal vision of that which 
 he has experienced in life. The function of art here as 
 elsewhere might be expressed in the words of Brown- 
 ing, 
 
 "We're made so that we love 
 First when we see them painted 
 Things we have passed perhaps a hundred times 
 Nor cared to see." 
 
 GIFTS AND OCCUPATIONS 
 
 These are looked upon as selected educative materi- 
 als with which the children are to play and work. They 
 have great social as well as scientific and mathematical 
 values, and are to be used not merely as a means of 
 gaining a conquest over materials through a knowledge 
 of their qualities and relations, but as a means of 
 stimulating social comparison and social cooperation 
 in work and play. They are closely related to human 
 experience, and, from our point of view, are no more 
 to be isolated from this than the songs, games, or 
 stories. Just as industry and art grew out of social 
 experience and were ways and means of satisfying 
 human needs, so the gifts and occupations to which 
 they correspond are to be kept in close relation to the 
 social needs of which children are or may become 
 conscious. 
 
 While we believe that on the whole Froebel selected 
 wisely and well, we do not stand for any closed circle 
 of materials such as that represented by the Froebelian 
 gifts and occupations alone. 
 
 While we agree in the main with Miss Blow in her 
 denunciation of the so-called "Concentric Program," 
 we cannot accept this statement :
 
 284 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 "Wherever traditional school aims and concentric 
 methods have prevailed, it has been found necessary 
 to eliminate many of Froebel's gifts and occupations, 
 exclude numbers of his games, and discard some of his 
 most characteristic types of exercises. The result of 
 such eliminations, exclusions, and rejections is that 
 the kindergarten loses its distinctive merit and the 
 Froebelian instrumentalities cease to be an organic 
 whole through the active use of whose related elements 
 the child organizes his own thought, feeling, and will." 1 
 Nor do we believe the exact mathematical relations in 
 these materials, as a whole, of such importance that 
 the elimination of one or more would rob the child of 
 the value of the whole, because the "charmed circle" 
 of relationships was broken. 
 
 A combination of wisely selected materials from any 
 worthy source, which meets the different needs of the 
 child at this stage of his development, would be ap- 
 proved by this group of kindergartners. For example, 
 some of the Montessori materials seem admirably 
 adapted to the needs of the youngest children. When 
 the child is at that stage of development where manipu- 
 lation of materials is more important than adaptation 
 of materials to embody and clarify the meanings found 
 in social life, the larger Montessori materials might 
 prove more developing than some of the Froebelian 
 gifts. The fact that their possibilities are so limited 
 that with many of them there is only one thing to be 
 done makes them fascinating to children of pre- 
 kindergarten age and to the very youngest children 
 in the kindergarten. The one problem set is a very 
 
 1 Blow, Educational Issues in the Kindergarten, p. 9.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 285 
 
 concrete one, and the child can discover his own error 
 without the aid of the teacher; but as children develop 
 into the ideational stage, where materials are subordi- 
 nated to social meanings and uses, they need the freer 
 and more imaginative materials provided by Froebel, 
 with their many possibilities and endless variations. 
 It would be an addition to every kindergarten to be 
 equipped with the stair, swing, and rope ladder sug- 
 gested by Dr. Montessori. The methods she suggests 
 for ^providing freedom in selection of materials, and 
 greater opportunity for the individuality of children 
 to manifest itself, is worthy of our most serious study. 
 There has undoubtedly been too great emphasis 
 placed upon uniform results in the kindergarten, and 
 the kindergarten has an opportunity to learn the 
 danger lurking in uniformity from the study of this 
 Montessori method. 
 
 A significant experiment would be to select the best 
 material from both Montessori and Froebel, in a com- 
 bination which would include the larger and more 
 simple though limited materials of Montessori for the 
 younger children, with the freer, more imaginative, 
 and more artistic materials of Froebel for the older 
 ones. 
 
 We value the mathematical basis of Froebel's 
 materials as a substratum of experience leaving a sedi- 
 ment of great value for later consciousness; but we 
 would make little effort to bring this to the conscious- 
 ness of the child except in so far as he spontaneously 
 reaches out for it, or as it furthers his construction, or 
 fills some function in his work and play. As mathe- 
 matical values are consciously or unconsciously em-
 
 S86 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 bodied in all good building materials and constructions, 
 so the child's play materials and constructions must, 
 if true to the requirements of life, have these inherent 
 values; but he must come to consciousness of these 
 through their organic relation to function, or in so far 
 as the recognition of this relation enables him to pro- 
 duce the form desired. The correct geometric terms 
 may be used as naturally as the name of other familiar 
 objects and of people, and will in time be used by the 
 children. 
 
 Our emphasis would be placed on the building gifts 
 and such occupations as drawing, painting, modeling, 
 crayoning, cutting and folding, weaving with coarse 
 and durable materials, and some sewing, if sufficiently 
 large and creative. In fact, all those gifts and occupa- 
 tions which point to the typical and valuable arts and 
 industries would be selected and emphasized. 
 
 We believe that the technique of control should 
 be kept in close relationship to the thought, idea, or 
 experience being realized through the materials. Due 
 attention should be given to continuity or the gradual 
 development of skill involved in the problems met in 
 play and work; but the logic of the materials, or the 
 grammar of technique and control (the old idea of 
 sequence), should not be isolated from the content 
 and meaning involved in the social experience being 
 realized by the children in their constructions. Through 
 the so-called life form, the child is trying to bring to 
 consciousness social problems and meanings, and for 
 this reason our emphasis would fall on these, though 
 not to the exclusion of the beauty forms. Adequate 
 opportunity must be left for the child's native interest
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 287 
 
 in decoration, arrangement, and symmetry, to which 
 the beauty forms are supposed to correspond. These, 
 however, would be kept in close relation to life forms, 
 being used in the main to decorate objects of social ser- 
 vice, or as units of decoration themselves embodying 
 social meaning or content. We would endeavor to pre- 
 serve the close relation between art and social life so 
 characteristic of primitive and child art. 
 
 CONVERSATION 
 
 As conversation is such a valuable medium of ex- 
 pression, we deplore the tendency of kindergartens to 
 become so large that the interchange between child 
 and children, and children and teachers, character- 
 istic of real conversation, is becoming more and more 
 impossible. 
 
 As conversation is not only a medium of expression 
 for ideas, but a most important factor in the process of 
 their formation, therefore it is most unfortunate for 
 the development of children that the kindergartens 
 in our public schools tend to offer decreasing oppor- 
 tunities for conversation of this intimate character. 
 As children at the kindergarten period are "talkers" 
 rather than listeners, and as conversation is a neces- 
 sity in the formulation of thought through linguistic 
 activity, we urge young kindergartners to practice the 
 art of developing thought through this mode for the 
 interchange of ideas and experience. 
 
 We also urge school boards to reduce the number of 
 children in the kindergartens, so that conversation, 
 which corresponds to the ideal form of recitation in 
 higher grades, may be made possible.
 
 288 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 CULTURE AND INDUSTRY 
 
 We would plead for a deeper study of the cultural 
 values in domestic and industrial activities. In the 
 trade, vocational, technical, and industrial education, 
 so necessary in a democratic nation where large pro- 
 portions of the citizens must participate in trade and 
 manufacture, children need to be equipped not only 
 with technical skill, but with a scientific, aesthetic, and 
 social vision of the part they are to contribute through 
 these avenues to social welfare. For this reason in the 
 trade and industrial education of the higher grades we 
 would urge the accompanying studies of science and 
 art. While working toward industrial ends, the method 
 of experiment must be preserved, together with the 
 spirit of art and play, which make for the freedom of 
 the self and that joy in doing which alone will prevent 
 the introduction of the evils of child labor into the 
 school. 
 
 The child must participate in the plan, must be an 
 inventor as well as one who executes plans made by 
 others. We must avoid the unfortunate division now 
 existing in industiy which regards those who plan, 
 who create and invent, as necessarily separated in kind 
 and grade from the "hands" who execute only. In a 
 democracy we must come more and more to Brown- 
 ing's view, "All service ranks the same with God v " 
 
 We would make a plea for the ideal interpretation of 
 the domestic and industrial activities in conversation 
 or in the songs, games, and materials in the kinder- 
 garten. Froebel has set the example in his little play 
 "The Target," and in his high appreciation of work 
 and art.
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 289 
 
 HYGIENE 
 
 As the health of the child is of supreme importance 
 at the kindergarten period, every precaution should 
 be taken not only to prevent disease, but to contrib- 
 ute to the growth and general development of this 
 period. 
 
 The responsibility of educating the child at the 
 kindergarten age is borne in upon us when we have 
 words of such serious import as these from ,pne of the 
 great hygiene experts of our day : Dr. Burnham says, 
 "The young child is specially liable to infection. No- 
 thing offers great resistance, neither the epithelial bar- 
 riers nor the blood nor the tissues; hence we should 
 expect that germ diseases would be especially preva- 
 lent and especially fatal in the early years. This is 
 precisely what happens. To quote a few of the old 
 statistics; in Munich, between the years 1888 and 
 1895, 28,988 cases of measles occurred, and of these 
 1077 proved fatal. Of cases that occurred in the first 
 year of life, in round numbers 21 per cent proved 
 fatal; of those between the years two to five, 5 per 
 cent, and of those between the years six and ten, 0.4 
 per cent. That is, if an epidemic of measles occurs in 
 the kindergarten the chances are that four or five chil- 
 dren in a hundred cases will die. If you can postpone 
 the epidemic until the age of the primary school, the 
 chances are that only four out of a thousand cases will 
 die." 1 
 
 While children of all grades have a right to the best 
 hygienic conditions possible to provide, according to 
 
 1 Burnham "Hygiene of the Kindergarten," Proceedings of the 
 N. E. A., 1904.
 
 290 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 this authority we are under peculiar obligation to 
 procure the best for the child at the kindergarten and 
 primary period. Unclean floors with their dust, pro- 
 viding a deadly means of distributing germs, affect the 
 child most disastrously at this age, not only because 
 at this period of his development he comes into more 
 frequent contact with the floor, but because his low 
 stature forces him to live hi and breathe this dust- 
 laden atmosphere. Provided the floor is clean and 
 free from drafts, the child doubles the exercise he 
 ordinarily secures by working at the table, if he can 
 do his work on the floor. However, the ordinary 
 cleaning of the average kindergarten makes such 
 use of the floor a positive menace to the child's 
 health. 
 
 The child's legitimate demands for opportunities to 
 run, jump, climb, throw, and play vigorously, due to 
 the development of the fundamental muscles, would 
 seem to be sufficient argument for school boards to 
 provide large rooms in order to give the proper amount 
 of exercise and air. 
 
 We would urge right seating of the kindergarten 
 children with regard to light, height of table and chairs; 
 separate drinking cups, tissue paper towels, and sani- 
 tary toilet arrangements. The importance of frequent 
 medical inspection cannot be too strongly emphasized, 
 especially during periods of contagion, when so much 
 is at issue. 
 
 We would make a plea for the large materials. The 
 fact that "children love little blocks" and materials 
 sufficiently small to throw the strain upon the small 
 muscles of eye and hand is no excuse, when such an
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 291 
 
 expert as Dr. Judd gives us this warning: "One of the 
 most noticeable facts about the child's diffuse move- 
 ments is the fact that these movements are excessive, 
 especially the movement of the finer muscles. ome- 
 ; where or other the false notion has entered into our 
 pedagogy that the child's fine muscles do not develop 
 until later than the large muscles. How can we believe 
 such a false statement when we see a young infant 
 clutching with its little fingers and exhibiting in this 
 grip one of its strongest movements? How can one 
 believe this dogma when he sees the boys and girls 
 in the first grade doing all the work that they do with 
 the fine muscles literally overdoing this work in a 
 very noticeable degree? The fact is, the finer muscles 
 are in full operation very early in life. Indeed, they 
 are the muscles which in diffuse movements are most 
 apt to be called into action. It requires a less powerful 
 excitation from the nervous centers to set the fine 
 muscles into action. They contract at the slightest 
 stimulation. These are the muscles which always grow 
 tense first in later life when the brain becomes over- 
 excited. In emotional excitement, for example, it is 
 the fine muscles of the face and hand that are first 
 affected. This limitation in nature's provision for free 
 movement is the first point at which the teacher's rational 
 mode of developing the child must come in to supplement 
 nature's provisions. The teacher should see to it that if 
 diffusion tends to emphasize the small muscles, teaching 
 should emphasize in due measure the large muscles. It is 
 well to devise some other method of supplementing nature 
 and calling the large muscles into play. Large arm 
 exercises are the most available devices for attaining
 
 292 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 this end." 1 One of the best qualities of the Montessori 
 material is that some of them are large. Dr. Burnham, 
 in describing the ideal kindergarten of the future says, 
 "The kindergarten material is all large; fine work is 
 not done." 
 
 In so far as is possible the use of playgrounds, parks, 
 and yards should be encouraged for a part of each 
 day's work, or for thejvhole of it during certain periods 
 of the year. Garden-work, so strongly emphasized by 
 Froebel, has often been overlooked by teachers who 
 have ample opportunities for securing it. 
 
 Open-air schools, and frequent excursions in climates 
 which make these possible and advisable should be 
 fostered and supported. 
 
 More attention should be given to the study of the 
 fatigue and over-stimulation heightened by an unwise 
 arrangement and alternation of periods of activity and 
 rest in the time schedule. Children are frequently 
 permitted to select one exciting game after another, 
 because there is a tradition to the effect that the chil- 
 dren must always choose their own games. 
 
 METHOD OF CONDUCTING TRAINING CLASSES 
 
 At this period when there is such diversity of opin- 
 ion regarding the principles and methods underlying 
 infant education in Germany, Switzerland, England, 
 France, Italy, and America, it would seem advisable 
 to consider the question of conducting our training 
 classes on the basis of inquiry and investigation. It 
 must be conceded that it is an open question as to how 
 far the young women in our normal classes shall be 
 
 1 Judd, Genetic Psychology, pp. 222-225. (Italics not the author's.)
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 293 
 
 trained to consider the differing viewpoints which 
 confront them as practical problems when they leave 
 the training classes. 
 
 It seems advisable to members of this group to pre- 
 sent some of these opposing views in the training school, 
 leaving the student free to think for herself and come 
 to some conclusions which possibly may not agree in 
 detail with those of her training teacher. 
 
 The method of authority has been used to such an 
 extent in the past that to agree with Froebel and with 
 the teachings of one's Alma Mater have been the test 
 of loyalty. As a result, in many cases students go out 
 from training classes utterly unprepared for the de- 
 cided differences of opinion which they are more than 
 likely to meet; or, if they are prepared in advance for 
 this, it not unfrequently happens that they have been 
 so prejudiced against opposing views, that their minds 
 are closed to any opportunity to learn from a co- 
 worker or supervisor who presents a new, or conflict- 
 ing conception. 
 
 The practical situation with which students are 
 confronted immediately upon graduation would seem 
 to warrant an attempt to develop in students while 
 undergoing training an attitude of respect toward 
 difference of opinion, which would help them to meet 
 gracefully and graciously a supervisor or co-worker 
 holding a different point of view. 
 
 The morality of inquiry, t]je wider horizon made 
 possible by intellectual hospitality, would seem to 
 leave ample scope for grounding students in what the 
 training teacher considers fundamental, while guaran- 
 teeing a freedom from prejudice. This method gives
 
 294 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 principles by which the young kindergartner may test 
 any new ideas presented. It frees her from the test of 
 tradition and mere personal opinion, and leads to true 
 freedom and progress. 
 
 Thus the pathway of the supervisor, the supervised, 
 and the co-worker would be made not only easier, but 
 happier, and the opportunities for growth and service 
 would be greatly enhanced. 
 
 PATTY SMITH HILL, Chairman. 
 CAROLINE T. HAVENS 
 MABY BOOMER PAGE. 
 JENNIE B. MERRILL. 
 ALICE H. PUTNAM. 
 NINA VANDERWALKER. 
 
 1 Deceased.
 
 THIRD REPORT 
 
 ELIZABETH HARRISON
 
 I. TYPE OF PROGRAM PREFERRED 
 
 "THE details of the program should be based on the 
 best that civilization of the past and present have to 
 bestow." 
 
 This would include the activities which have aided 
 in the development of the spiritual life of man; such 
 as his establishment of the institutions of the family, 
 society, and church; his mastery over the material 
 world which has provided him with food, clothing, and 
 shelter; his discovery of the laws of nature and their 
 uniformity of processes which have developed science; 
 and his creation of the world of art which has enabled 
 him to express his highest nature in forms of beauty 
 as seen in sculpture, architecture, and paintings; in 
 dancing, music, and poetry. This is the "reservoir" 
 from which the kindergartner should draw her supplies. 
 
 H. PRINCIPLES UNDERLYING PROGRAM- 
 MAKING 
 
 (a) Man, being a child of God, has an infinite nature. 
 We aim in education for the realization of this nature. 
 
 (6) Comprehending man's finite limitations we re- 
 cognize that his endowment must be " self -creation," 
 that only through progressive self-expression can he 
 come to a realization of himself. 
 
 Therefore, the important part of program-making is 
 the recognition of this by the teacher and the making
 
 298 THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 of opportunities for the child in self-expression, or 
 creative work. 
 
 (c) The discovery of the law of human development 
 has been the endeavor of all thoughtful men, in all 
 ages, and in every advancing stage of human activity 
 it has come nearer being understood and made use of. 
 
 The application of this law to education was first 
 made distinctly and definitely to be applied by Froe- 
 bel, as is shown by his creation of the kindergarten 
 gifts, occupations, and games, all of which were 
 planned by him to be used according to this law. 
 
 His explanation of the same is seen in his pedagogical 
 writings. He has, also, shown in the Education of Man, 
 how this same law of development may be applied to 
 all stages of education. This law, in its essence or 
 immediate thought-perception, is shown as "The Law 
 of Opposites and their Connection." In its pedagogical 
 or sense-perceived process it is known as "Evolution 
 or Sequence." Both of these processes, the mediate 
 and the mediated, should be given to the child as the 
 law by which he is to use his material, for the reason 
 that through them is first foreshadowed the "Unity 
 that Lives and Reigns in All Things," a gradual com- 
 prehension of which is the aim of the kindergarten. 
 
 We believe in the kindergarten not alone as it was 
 first evolved and planned by Frederich Froebel, but 
 as it has since developed, and as it promises to develop, 
 whenever the change or expansion is in conformity 
 with this law of development and not merely capricious 
 change or experimental work.
 
 1. Kind of Child, < 
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 299 
 
 III. PROCESS OF PROGRAM-MAKING 
 
 WITH REFERENCE, FIRST, TO THE CHILD 
 
 a. Nationality. 
 6. Class. 
 
 c. Age. 
 
 d. Approximation to Normal. 
 
 e. Accidental Handicap. 
 /. Environment. 
 
 g. Degree of Development both 
 Material and Social. 
 
 All of these considerations will necessarily have to 
 modify the program made. 
 
 2. The materials must be simple enough for the 
 child to master, yet be difficult enough to demand an 
 effort on his part. They must also have increasing 
 possibilities. 
 
 3. There should be sufficient material for each child 
 to use individually, and also in cooperation with a 
 group of children, but no waste of materials. 
 
 4. Each kind of material presented to the child r' 
 should represent a whole in itself, yet be related to a 
 larger whole. 
 
 5. All exercises must take the form of play, yet con- 
 tain that which will stimulate educative effort on the 
 part of the child. 
 
 6. The child's work must be an expression of his own, 
 yet he is best led to free self-expression through (1) 
 experimental or "undirected" use of the material; and 
 (2) through guided or "directed" use of it in order 
 that he may use it in the best way and learn both its 
 
 ZAs^ 
 
 / 
 
 (J
 
 SOO THE KINDERGARTEN 
 
 limit and its possibilities; then (3) his creative or 
 "self -directed" use of it. 
 
 7. Incidental materials may be used, but should 
 always be subordinated to the higher aim so as not to 
 interrupt the educational aim of the program. 
 
 8. Each child must be regarded in relation to the 
 length of the periods of work and of play, and, while 
 not allowed too great length to a period, he should 
 have sufficient time given to him for the comprehen- 
 sion and completion of his task. Frequent repetition 
 of one activity should be given, and repetition of one 
 material, enough to insure a mastery of materials and 
 an understanding of the principles or process involved. 
 
 tJiht+AJf [ ) 
 WITH REFERENCE, SECOND, TO THE TEACHER 
 
 The teacher should know the ideals of human insti- 
 tutions, as upon them is based all ethical advancement 
 of the human race. 
 
 She should have gained the insight given in Froebel's 
 Mother Play book, in order that she may understand 
 Froebel's educational aim. 
 
 \ She should know why Froebel altered the folk- 
 games when he made the kindergarten games. 
 
 She should understand the typical process and form 
 of the organization of the work which Froebel has 
 given to the child in the gift and occupation, in order 
 that she may use new materials in the same way. 
 
 She should comprehend that what she brings to the 
 child is important, as this awakens and guides his 
 power so that he will relate himself aright to humanity 
 and to nature. 
 
 She should realize that the material selected by
 
 THE KINDERGARTEN 301 
 
 Froebel and the use of the same frees the child in such 
 a way that he may use his creative power as it is based 
 on the recorded development of the race, not on 
 capricious choice. 
 
 She should learn to distinguish between the use of 
 the material which helps and that which hinders the 
 child in the mastery of nature and self-expression. 
 
 She should have sufficient understanding of the 
 various forms of art to appreciate what is art in the 
 child's work, and what part it plays in his development. 
 
 She should have such a knowledge of literature as 
 will enable her to distinguish between temporary and 
 permanent values of the same in her use of it in the 
 kindergarten, in stories, poems, and songs. 
 
 She should be interested in the general welfare of 
 the educational institution with which the kindergarten 
 is connected and respect its laws. 
 
 She should be able to see the child's standpoint. 
 
 She should understand the nature of play and its 
 purpose in kindergarten, and should know how to 
 play. 
 
 She should have a time schedule for regular work, 
 in order that time may be well used and changes be 
 rightly calculated, but this time schedule should not 
 be inflexible if the needs of her children demand a 
 change or variation. 
 
 ELIZABETH HARRISON. 
 MARIA KRAUs-BoELTE. 1 
 LUCY WHEELOCK. 
 
 
 
 1 I endorse Miss Harrison's report as truly Froebelian and pro- 
 gressive, particularly in what is said of the schedule, to which I 
 especially agree.
 
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