Few schools do better work in general subjects, and certainly not in art and literature, than the Forestville School Chicago. There the seventh and eighth grade programme of studies is as follows:

Dayton schools introduce problem work in geometry in the sixth grade. Some of the Cincinnati schools are, like some Chicago schools, endeavouring to bridge over the gulf between intermediate or grammar and high schools by putting back certain of the subjects into the graded school, Latin (two years), algebra (one year); in 1900-01 geometry is to be taken also.

In many quarters the opinion is entertained that the right thing to do would be, instead of having four primary and four grammar grades followed by a four years' high school or secondary course, to divide the period into two, with six years of elementary work and six years of high school work. This was spoken of by more than one high school principal as one way of avoiding the benumbing loss of interest with which many pupils now leave the elementary and enter the high schools. As a practical illustration of how something of this kind might be done, the Horace Mann School, New York, has adopted a scheme of special subjects for the sixth grade upwards; these occupy about one-fourth of the time in the sixth grade, the other three-fourths of the time being given to ordinary class subjects; the same proportion of time in the seventh grade when high school subjects are really commenced, four or five hours weekly being given to French; and about one-half of the time in the eighth grade is given to high school subjects.

Other ways of overcoming the difficulty have been tried. For example, the superintendent of Providence, Rhode Island,

wrote: We have in Providence two courses of study for pupils of the grammar grades, a pass course and an honour course The pass course is not materially different from the usual course in American schools. The honour course includes the pass course and adds one subject each quarter. The time for the additional subject is gained by doing the pass work in arithmetic, language, geography, and reading in three quarters of the year instead of four quarters. Hence, some one of the abovenamed subjects can be omitted each quarter, and its programme time and study period be devoted to some other subject.

"In this way, besides the pass work, the more capable pupils do work in elocution, mental arithmetic (as distinct from and additional to the pass or regular work), civics, book-keeping, literature, algebra, geometry, botany, and physics.'

Speaking of the organic relations of studies in human development, Dr. Hailmann, of Dayton, says that we may profitably distinguish between two great periods of instruction, which we may designate respectively the elementary and the scientific period of instruction. The first of these embrace the kindergarten and, approximately, the first six years of school life; the second embraces the last two years of the grammar school, the high school and the college.

There is, therefore, a considerable consensus of opinion in favour of strengthening the work of the grammar grades, so that it shall more nearly correspond to the mental power and moral need of children in the last two years of the elementary school. Brookline and Peoria add to the mass of favourable testimony. The committee of ten and the committee of fifteen reported in the same strain. All these different witnesses testify to their belief in the intellectual value of a completer course than yet obtains in most places. The reason for referring to the matter here is that where intellectual stimulus fails moral earnestness will also flag. The point is sufficiently obvious. The consciousness of progress is part of our moral making. Rob a child of it, and he cannot but suffer in character. Or, looking once again towards the high school, the power to make progress is a strength akin to virtue. Replace it by a battled feeling, and in place of the strength there will be hurtful discouragement.

There is a question of a similar kind which one is driven to ask even with regard to the lower grades, though, considering the age of the children, in a much less emphatic way. It is whether the doing by the children of what they are perfectly desirous to do, because it is made pleasing to them, is in any complete sense a training of character. Eighty per cent. of the children are said to leave school at the end of the fourth grade.* Will the education given in these grades be found to stand them in perfectly good stead in the tests of practical citizenship, which are probably as severe in America as in any country? Learning

* This is quoted from a paper reprinted in the reports of the Commissioner of Education, and goes to show that the estimate in an earlier part of the chapter that three-fourths of all attending school are in the first five grades is under rather than over the mark.

may err even on the side of its pleasantness. Glad as one may be to see the bright and tempting side of lessons made much of, there should also be the ingredients which tend to the stiffening of the will. American education seems to be in some slight danger of being too sentimental, and (to quote an American opinion) of lacking thoroughness. Right and good as most of the points dealt with in the preceding chapters are in themselves, they do not seem to add up to a complete moral training. The emotions appealed to are elevating in kind; and it is not by any means in a sterner discipline that one would think to supply what seems to be lacking. It is rather in subtracting somewhat from a tendency to sentimentalism, and in adding somewhat to the intellectual drill as distinguished from intellectual pleasure. There are many Americans who say this or something like it. Some plead for direct moral teaching as a means to greater "moral robustness." But the remedy would seem to be in a more conscious grappling with difficulties, and in a more definite accomplishment of tasks. There seems to be too much of the child's doing what he pleases under the name of respecting his individuality; which almost amounts to forgetting in some measure that there are years of real immaturity, during which the child is not capable of wisely choosing and cannot know what is best for him. It goes without saying that the strongest men and women in education in America are far removed from any advocacy of the sentimental note in primary or any other grades. But certain things in the history of American education have tended to turn the current of thought and practice rather decidedly in this direction. To single out one or two of these. (1) In the hands of the right teacher the kindergarten is not only excellent but unimpeachable for little children; applications and extensions of it may be with great advantage carried upwards into the graded schools; but the "little child" treatment must stop somewhere.* The Froebelian philosophy, so far as it is applicable, requires to be translated into new meanings before it is carried forward from the infant to the upper school. Even the great principle of self-activity needs to be more broadly interpreted so as to mean sometimes a constrained, in the sense of a prescribed, activity; the activity, that is, of a self in the long run sturdier and more enduring than the self which throws the reins to its own free instincts. The child, especially if his education is to be cut short at the end of the fourth year of school advancement, needs to learn in good time the meaning of work. (2) Then, child study in its earlier phases was accountable for much of the relaxing of the grip of the school work upon the child. There was a talkiness of a sentimental kind which grew out of the child study of the earliest days, of which practical American educators have grown tired. There still remains a sensitiveness and a Rousseauian tendency to give

In England it is more generally the opposite mistake that is made, by drawing too rigid a line between the infant school, with its often more highly educative methods, and the lowest standards of the elementary school.

"nature" in the sense of individual aptness and preference too much play. (3) Then there is the child himself, with his not altogether negligible inborn depravity, sometimes encouraged by his family training to think himself the best worth pleasing. (4) Add to these elements the too great preponderance of women teachers-freely admitted by this excellent body of teachers themselves-especially in cities where the danger is greatest, and from these causes taken together there grows a very possible danger that the education even of the primary grades may do too little to develop the fibre and sinew which only come by wrestling.

This latter point is mentioned tentatively rather than judicially, and the writer would rather erase it entirely than appear to doubt the rightness in the main of the life and spirit of the primary grades. His feeling of disappointment with regard to the grammar grades, where he looked for a continuance of this excellence, speaks in itself of his sense of their naturalness and charm. The point is further worked out in the chapter on Individuality and School Discipline; Individuality, etc. pp.

114-116.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE KINDERGARTEN AND ITS INFLUENCE.

There is one factor in American education which really calls for much fuller treatment than can be given to it in a general report, namely, the kindergarten and its influence in moral education. The kindergarten has already had a history in America such as probably no single educational system has had anywhere amongst Western people, if exception be made of the Renascence standards as set up by Sturm and the Jesuits. It was the writer's very great privilege to meet many of the makers of this history and to enter into the spirit of their work. Madame Kraus-Boelte, Miss Blow, Dr. W. T. Harris, Miss Harrison, of Chicago, Superintendent and Mrs. Hughes, of Toronto, and the leaders of the work at the Pratt and Armour Institutes were amongst this number. These are not all of one school, and part of the present section must be given to stating the different ethical ideas pursued by the two leading schools of interpreters and adapters of Froebel's thought. As is well-known, the only infant school in America is the kindergarten, innocent of all intrusion on the part of the three R's in however simple a guise, and yet containing a preparation of thought and capacity which is of great ultimate value wherever the primary grade teachers are sympathetic towards the kindergarten work. This is almost always the case; indeed, many intending teachers take a year of kindergarten training as part of their preparation for primary work.

Two points must be referred to, however briefly. (1) The American adoption of the kindergarten and its influence upon education generally. (2) The two schools of interpretation of the kindergarten.

(1) The American adoption of the kindergarten. An excellent condensed statement of the present position and influence of the kindergarten in America is contained in the report of the Massachusetts Board of Education for 1899, which describes the kindergarten in its best state, as a school of superb commonsense, based on a philosophy which is really " for all ages and all sexes, for the child in its mother's arms, for the student in the university, for the workman at his bench, for the citizen in the State." Accordingly, what one finds is that one of the kindergarten mottoes, "learning by doing," is widely adopted. It is the key-word to the organisation and management of the large coloured schools and training institutes at Hampton, Virginia, and Tuskegee, Alabama. The late eminently successful director of education in Indian schools also is one of the ablest interpreters of Frobelian principles amongst American educationists. "There is no bookishness," the Massachusetts report goes on to say, "in the true kindergarten. It holds the reins of the child's irrepressible activity. There is the tide of suggestions rolling in upon the child from without; there is the child's wonderful responsiveness to those suggestions; there is the never-ceasing interaction between the little world within and the boundless one without-feelings, emotions, ideas for ever impelling the child. . . . Out of it all the human will, in its mysterious way, emerges, grows strong and shapes the character.... Indeed, the kindergarten is society and the State in miniature. Here are possible the finest beginnings in social and in civic life. . . . . It is important that the young teacher shall early grasp this philosophy, and this is why the State Board of Education has authorised the normal schools to include the kindergarten in their model and practice schools. The primary purpose is that every normal student shall catch from it something of the spirit of Froebel.

"The work of the kindergarten is done in that most effective of all ways, if not in the only effective way there is that of having the child persistently and personally do the things that are fitted to promote his development along the desired lines. It is no wonder that a philosophy like this should overflow from the kindergarten to the primary school, and at length so work its way throughout the entire school system as to leave almost everywhere the impression, if not the conviction, that education for every child should take on a more personal and active character."

The social aspect of the kindergarten is commonly regarded by American educators as the fundamental one. It is, with the University, the "greatest conservator of individualism," but it is an individualism which looks out upon the larger social whole between which and the individual action and reaction, imparting and receiving, are ever taking place. The Froebelian games or "Mother-play" are thus the very heart of the kindergarten; from these its life flows and radiates; gifts and occupations exercise brain and finger, but the Kindergarten has been established, and is being established over a wider area year by year, princi