From the " Play with the Limbs," we pass easily to that of the "Weather-vane." The child turns his hand in imitation of the cock on the tower blown here and there by the wind. It is perhaps his first definite reproduction of an external fact previously observed; and hence. there must have entered into his consciousness a distinction between himself and the things about him, a feeling of the world without and the world within. This imitation of external life and objects illustrates a principle in education significant not for the child alone, but for us as well. To imitate is the most external but yet the undoubted first step in reproduction -re-creation. "What the child imitates," says Froebel, "he tries to understand." Therefore to help him to understand things, it is necessary that you permit him to imitate them. This fact, so common to child-life, is familiar to us all. How proud we are when the baby has reached the point where he can show how the cock crows, the dog barks, and the bird flies! The little girl plays that she is mamma, and her dolls are her family. Her cares are as numerous as those of many mothers combined. Every joy and every sorrow, every illness and every wrong of childlife and home life, is rehearsed by her in her play; and the boy is, in turn, soldier and sailor, doctor and preacher, servant and master, to say nothing of the fact that he at will takes on the form of every living and moving object in the universe. We ask ourselves what it all means, as we look with untiring interest upon the endless variety of the child's play. What is the power in him which enables him to assume at will this semblance of each thing? Why does he delight thus to change himself into objects not himself? The answer is simple. The world about and outside of the child can not forever be alien to him. The spirit there calls to the same spirit in himself, and the spirit in the child seeks for and needs to know itself in the things that are external to him. He wants to understand, to enter into the life around him; there is but one way in which he can do this; namely, to take that world beyond into himself-to re-live that life--to be it, and then he will know it. So it is with all things, only as we make them inward to ourselves do we enter into them. Is there a sorrow, a joy, a struggle or a triumph I would understand? then I must first find it in some kindred form within my own soul. In the reproduction of the things he sees, there develops in the child a sense of their life. By carrying his stick and marching in line the boy learns how the soldier feels; in his obedience to orders given he learns how the soldier acts and lives. He forgets all about himself, loses himself in that other individuality he has taken on, and so adds to his consciousness that of the life before unknown. In man lies the power, the life which can include all life. His spirit knows no limit except that which he puts upon it. He can and must reach out towards all things and hold within, the image of the life about and around. It is his destiny to develop those infinite possibilities which realized make him truly man; it is his privilege to possess a nature which by sympathy can enter into all life and so make it his own. The power of the child to imitate finds its parallel in the man who comprehends and participates. Except as we re-live and re-think them, another's experiences and thoughts must remain forever unknown to us. If it is true that the child imitates what he sees and by this imitation becomes that thing, takes on its life and spirit, it should be our task and care to surround him with the life and objects we would have him be and know. Here is a warning to the mother in regard to the spiritual as well as the physical environment she creates for her child. He will intimate not only the horse and the dog, not merely things, but persons. He will do as you do, think as you think, live and speak as he hears and sees those who are nearest and dearest. Manners, language, thoughts, principles, conduct, all these the child will catch from his living, human surroundings, and will reflect them in his own little person. Therefore again, we are responsible not only for ourselves, but for the influence we are to him when he has not yet developed the power to resist, but only the power to follow. Froebel's commentary to the weathervane is full of interesting suggestion and detail. He states in the beginning that the child is more interested in the cause of motion than in the moving object; that he looks behind things for their "Why" and "How," and seeks always the hidden source in the visible fact. The child, as we know, is an untiring questioner; a seeker after ultimate truths. When the baby turns to see where a sound comes from, and the older child breaks his drum or picks out the doll's eyes to discover what gives them each their peculiar power, both alike are proclaiming the fact that the mind brings to its experiences of effects the deeper idea of cause; and the creative spirit within, which possesses the power to recall these effects looks for a creative cause behind the world of things and sense. Without this inborn activity of thought, man could never arrive at those explanations which constitute science and philosophy; would never even seek them. On a somewhat windy day, says Froebel, the mother and her child go out for a walk. There they see many things moved by the wind. The vane is turning, kites are flying, clothes swinging on the line, the cock's feathers are blown about, the flag floats, the windmill claps, etc. The child readily observes that it is a mighty power which thus exercises itself upon many objects, a great force making itself known through varied manifestations. He can also learn that each thing lends itself to the influence of another or resists it according to power within itself, and furthermore, that while its effects are visible the wind itself is invisible. One of the profoundest as well as one of the most touching and interesting of the lessons Froebel would teach the child is given to us at the close of this commentary. The child naturally asks, "Where does the wind come from?" and the mother wisely tells him that he could not understand if she tried to explain to him about the condition of the atmosphere yet, leads him to a spir itual insight which must satisfy his soul see with the outward eye. To his guid- LAURA FISHER. FROEBEL'S KINDERGARTEN. IV. THE NATIONAL IMPORTANCE OF KINDERGARTENS. No one with any sense of human dignity, with any spiritual life of his own, is satisfied with social conditions as they are, or as they ever have been. No one with any conception of the law underlying all phenomena, uniting the present, past, and future into one organic whole, can look for any beneficent change in the external conditions of society which is not the necessary result and expression of an internal change, determined by existing conditions and proceeding therefrom, according to the law of development. For if by any possibility the most perfect form of external organization could be immediately given to society, the same discordant motives and aims which have caused the conditions now existing, would by ne cessity pervert and falsify the new precisely as the old were perverted and falsified. Any external change which did not arrive as the necessary consequence and expression of an internal change, as it affected only the form of society, could only alter the form of the problem, and make not one step towards its solution. Such a change would be empty of any spiritual meaning; would be no more than a false pretense of righteousness, and being false would necessarily result in evil. Social reform must have truth at its foundations: the outer form which does not truly represent the inner life, is a mask, a deception, a lie. What is true of the child is true of society; social reform must proceed by the law of development to a conscious harmony between the inner and outer life, upon a higher plane than at present. To him who sees the inner in the outer and through the outer, and benolds the outer proceeding by logical necessity from the essence of the inner," it is evident that all true social reform must begin with the spiritual, inner life of man. That is, it must be founded upon the education of all citizens; but an education totally and uncompromisingly different from what has been commonly called education. The education which shall enable man to fulfill his destiny upon earth, must be such as Pestalozzi sought for, and Froebel discovered -an education which "in all its requirements is based upon considerations of the innermost.” The importance of Kindergartens lies in this that they are the necessary beginning of any true social regeneration. But development is not arrested until the child enters the Kindergarten ; the education of man must begin at birth, in the family. Why, then, it ought to be asked, is the Kindergarten to be considered the beginning of social reform ? The Kindergarten surely is this, and the reason is to be found in the law of development by which the new must always spring from and be determined by the preceding conditions. The family is the source and well-spring of social life. If the family life be not complete and self-conscious, the social life will necessarily be false and perverted. Now in society as it exists, the family life is disintegrated and incomplete. There is no inner bond which unites it into one, and this is shown by the very fact that the little children are falsely educated from birth, and that even the truest parents are not conscious of the duties which they would so gladly fulfill for the education of their children in the family. Therefore all social reform must make a pure and completely self-conscious family life its end and aim. If the source is pure the life will be pure : we must return to the orginally good source." But the family life can become conscious only when it is outwardly as well as inwardly complete; consciousness only arrives by giving forth in outward action that which is within. The family life therefore can only become complete and self-conscious through the neighborhood life where, in the interchange between many families, each gives forth its inner life as a whole. The bond which shall unite the families of a neighborhood into one, is the little children in the Kindergarten who, growing to manhood and womanhood, link the past with the future. And this neighborhood life which is made one through the Kindergarten, is the only means of arriving by development from existing conditions, at a pure, united and completely self-conscious family life, by which parents may be able to see and fulfill their loving yearnings towards their little children from the beginning. It is natural to compare the Kindergar ten to the seed; planted in existing conditions it must strike its roots downward into the family, that its stalk may reach ever upwards, developing through its inherent life, the foliage, and finally the fruit of true manhood and womanhood. Education, as Froebel saw its demands to be, must give man a firm grasp upon life on all its sides, and in all its relations as a spiritual whole; it must lead him to comprehend the unity of life, as based upon, and governed in all places and at all times by undeviating law, to which he must conform in all respects; it must bring him the confidence, readiness and skill necessary to deal with the most complex phenomena of life, according to this indwelling and uniting law; finally, it must reveal to his full consciousness the inner necessity of his reproducing in every action the unity based on law, between his own individual life and all that has been, is, and shall be, a part of human life: That is, it must develop in him the will to live a true life. We have tried to show that Froebel did not merely dream of such an education, but discovered its principles. It is true that he worked out their application only for the first few years of man's life, and even in that, failed of completeness. Yet he grasped the education of man as a whole, and there remains for those who succeed him only the working out of these principles in all their bearings, and the application of them to the complete education of the human being. Following these principles, such an education must observe the law of development in larger inclusive unities of life, just as faithfully as in the earlier stages. Seeing life first from the inside as undifferentiated and identical with himself, the child then becomes separated from it and sees it from the outside as dependent and centered upon himself. And there are few men of to-day who have risen above the consciousness of that first stage of development. But if man's education be true, he will in turn become separated from this self-centered life, and see himself from the outside, as dependent in all things upon the family, whose higher unity includes himself and becomes the center of his life. Having mastered the life within the family, his development proceeds inevitably to separation from the family, which he now sees from the outside, as dependent upon a higher unity- that of many families in the neighborhood. The life of the neighborhood, he must master thoroughly before he is really capable of grasping any higher unity. But, having fully mastered the neighborhood life on all its sides and in all its relations, he necessarily becomes separated in turn from that, and entering into the life of the nation which is made up of many neighborhoods-he sees the neighborhood life as dependent upon that which is outside itself, and now, but not until now, he is capable of having any adequate conception of the National life, and of mastering it as a whole and in its parts. In like manner, without break, but by continuing development, he must become separated from the inner life of the nation, and see it from the outside, as dependent upon humanity-made up of all nations; and at last, proceeding to separation even from this, he will see all life to be dependent upon God, with whom, in very truth and in his whole being, he finds himself at one. This is the course of that education whose principles Froebel discovered. Therefore Kindergartens have national importance in that they stand at the basis of all true self-conscious life, and of all social reform which shall place national life upon a basis of truth. Only from Kindergartens and through an education transformed by the vital principles of the Kindergarten, can come men who have any conception of what the nation, with all its vast interdependent interests, is; only such men can grasp and comprehend all this mighty complex |