THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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The kindergarten concerns itself more with the development of faculty than with the mere imparting of knowledge. It recognizes the fact that all true education is learning transformed to faculty. It does not ask so much, “What does the child know ? ” as, “ Has the child learned how to learn ? ” It looks less to mere acquirements than to the capacity to acquire. It is teaching the little child to teach himself. It is controlling the little child that he may learn the art of self-control. The senses are sharpened, the hands are trained, and the body is made lithe and active. The gifts and occupations represent every kind of technical activity. The children must work for what they get. They learn through doing. They thus develop patience, persever­ance. skill and will power. They are encouraged by every fresh achievement. What they know they must know thoroughly and accurately. Every element of knowledge is transformed into an element of creation. The mind assimilates what it receives, just as a healthy organism assimilates its food, and is nourished thereby. In his occu­pations in the kindergarten the child is required to handle, reconstruct, combine and create. “ Let the very playthings of your children have a bearing upon the life and work of the coming man,” said Aristotle. It is early training that makes the master. This universal instinct of play in the child means something. It should be turned to good account. It should be made constructive in its income instead of destructive. This restless activity of the child is the foundation of the indefatigable enterprise of the man. This habit of work must be formed early in life, if we would have it a pleasure. Activity is the law of healthful childhood. Turn it to good account! The perceptive faculties in a well-endowed child are far in excess of the reflective faculties. He sees everything. He wants to know about everything. He will find out if he can. Sensi­ble mothers understand this fact, and keep their household goods well out of the way of the young “ heir apparent.” Just as old Dolly Winthrop said, in “Silas Marner”: “ If you can’t bring your mind to frighten the child off touching things, you must do what you can to keep ’em out of the way. That’s what I do wi’ the pups as the lads are allays a-rearing. They will worry and gnaw—worry and gnaw they will, if it was one’s Sunday cap as hung anywhere so as they could drag it. They know no differ­ence, God help ’em; it’s the pushing o’ the teeth as sets ’em on, that’s what it is.” That’s exactly what it is with the restless child. It’s the pushing of the teeth—the intellectual molars and bicuspids, so to speak. They are getting ready to masticate their mental food.

Bodily vigor, mental activity and moral integrity are indispensable to a perfected life. The kindergarten is the best agency for setting in motion the physical, mental and moral machinery of a little child, that it may do its own work in its own way. It is the rain and dew and sun to wake the sleeping germ and bring it into self-activity and growth. The heart as well as the head comes in for its share of training. The kindergarten regards right action to be quite as important as rare scholarship. It works for both, knowing that ignorance and lack of character in the masses will never breed wisdom, so long as ignorance and lack of character in the individual breed folly. What we need to do is to bring more happiness into childhood, and then we shall bring more of virtue, for “ virtue kindles at the touch of joy.” The kindergarten is the “ Paradise of Childhood.” Froebel insisted that education and happiness should be wedded, that there should be as much pleasure in satisfying intellectual hunger as physical hunger. And should not this be so? Is it not more or less the fault of methods that it is not so?

Just here I wish to say that the moral and religious influences of the kindergarten can scarcely be overestimated. The kindergarten does not attribute every mistake of a child to total depravity. To be perpetually telling a little child, even a very naughty child, that, there is no good thing in him,that he is vile and corrupt, is one of the very best ways of making a rascal out of him if he has any spirit in him, and of making a little hypocrite of him, if he is mean-spirited and weak. And this holds equally true of all children, whether they come from the palatial homes of the rich or the wretched homes of the poor. There is more ignorance than depravity when a little