Ae Kindergarten FOR TEACHERS AND PARENTS. 66 Come let us with our Children live." VOL. III. JUNE, 1891. 2 a No. 10. THE RELATION OF THE KINDERGARTEN TO THE PRIMARY SCHOOL. Dr. W. T. Harris read a paper before the Kindergarten Department of the National Educational Association, at Nashville, entitled "Kindergarten Methods Contrasted with the Methods of the Primary Schools." In it he said: "I believe that the presence of the Kindergarten in a system of public schools will of itself, work some change in the methods of the primary schools, that will be of great benefit to those methods. But I wish to show that the methods of the primary schools, substantially as they are, have a foundation in reason, and that it is not well for our friends of the Kindergarten to look always in the direction of a revolution in the methods of the primary school, and the adoption of plays and games, gifts and occupations, or some manual training modification of these, in the course of instruction, for children from the ages of seven to twelve years." After telling what the family life and the Kindergarten have been to the child, he said: At the age of seven the average child begins to tire of mere caprice, having gained through play the essential development of his originality. It is now attracted toward work or the exercise of the will along the lines of rational activity as prescribed by established authority. While the Kindergarten should lay stress on the forms of play, and give the child opportunity to develop spontaneity, the primary school must lay stress on the form of work and lay down definite tasks for the pupil to perform by his own industry." Dr. Harris seems to say that at the age of seven a child's nature is entirely changed, that he has no further need of play or spontaneity. All he needs is definite tasks laid down by authority, and those tasks must consist mainly of learning to read and write, and how to record the results of arithmetic. I think it well to let one great philosopher answer another: Has Froebel given us the Kindergarten and left us without a guide as to what shall come after it? Quoting from his "Education of Man," we learn, "It is highly important. for the child's entire cultivation that his development should constantly advance. from one point, and should be constantly recognized in its advance. "It is essentially injurious, hindering, even destructive, when such sharp limits and separating opposition are made to the constantly continuing series of the years of human development. It is therefore essentially injurious when the stages of human development, infant, child, boy and girl are considered as essentially separate, and not as life shows, continually passing into one another without gap. "School is the effort to bring the scholar to the right consciousness of the nature and inner life of things, and of himself; to teach him to know and to make him conscious of the inner relation of things to each other, to the scholar, and to the living cause and clear unity of all things, to God. "The coming out of the child from the house order to the higher world order, makes the boy a scholar, the school a school. . Every school child anticipates, hopes, believes, and requires this from his schoolmaster. This anticipation, this hope, and this belief form the invisible efficacious bond between them. "The faith and trust, the hope and anticipation with which the child enters school, produces gigantic results; for the child enters school with the childlike belief, the quiet hope, the dim anticipation, that here he will be taught something he can not learn outside the school. communication of a multiplicity of facts The principal. . . . aim in the guidance of the boy, in the instruction given him, as well in the school [as in the home], is to raise the activity of will to firmness of will, and so to vivify and form a clear, vigorous, firm and enduring will, to train up . . . . a pure humanity." One of the means to this end is animated play; at first "activity alone was the object, so now its object is a definite conscious aim. "The destiny of man as an earthly being is that body and soul be developed consciously and reasonably in a certain symmetry. What shall the school teach? . . . Only the contemplation of what the development of man at school age is and requires, can lead to the answer to this question. "Man as a boy and as a beginning scholar appears to perceive his spiritual nature, and to anticipate God, and the spiritual nature of all things," everything that exists having its foundation in God. "The child should be made thoroughly intimate with nature. "Nothing so firmly connects teacher and scholar. . . . as the common effort to employ themselves with nature. The tormenting of animal life and insects has its foundation in the child's efforts to obtain an insight into the inner life of the animal. "From nature we derive the study of physics and mathematics. . . . . Mathematics is, therefore, neither something "Never forget that the teaching and foreign to, nor abstract from actual life, Froebel gives language the third place, and asks its relation to nature and religion. "In general, language is the self-active statement of the peculiar interior becoming exterior." Again Froebel says in substance that a child naturally developed becomes conscious of a richly developed, easily vanishing inner life, and a fleeting outer life, and is driven by "irresistible desire, and need, to snatch them from oblivion." Thus writing is developed in each individual as in the race. Letterscript presupposes a plentiful, rich inner or outer life; from and by means of this only is script produced, and the general need of it developed in the child. Reading as well as the learning to read proceeds from the need to again. make audible to one's self or others, what has before been written. By the exercise of these acts man first becomes a person; so the effort to learn to write and read makes the pupil a scholar; makes school for the first time actually possible. . . . The possession of script, conditions and affords to man the possibility of becoming conscious of future consciousness; cause it makes it possible for man to contemplate himself." "Because it clearly and surely connects man as present with the past and future, it connects him on all sides with the nearest and certainly with the farthest. be Now since writing and reading are so highly important to man, the boy must also be strong and intelligent enough for them. "The possibility of attaining to consciousness must be already awakened in him; the need of writing and reading, the urgent desire, even the necessity of being able to do so, must clearly and definitely express themselves ere he learns to write and read. "The boy who is to learn to write and read in a truly advantageous way must necessarily be already something, before he seeks to become conscious of something which he as yet is not; else all his knowledge will be hollow, lifeless, void, extraneous, mechanical. where the foundation is lifeless and mechanical, how is activity of life and true life, the highest prize of all effort, to later develop from it?" For After reading and writing, Froebel places art in its different forms, as other means of representing and making permanent the inner and outer life. Froebel thus sums up the requirements of the child as a beginning scholar "Keeping the mind of man in union with God." With this object-" the appropriation of religious expressions, particularly those concerning nature, man, and the relation of both to God; "Respect for, knowledge and cultivation of the body as the bearer of the spirit ; "Contemplation and consideration of nature, and the outside world, connecting with and proceeding from the near, requiring knowledge of the nearest surroundings before an advance is made to the remote and far; "Appropriation of little poetical representations comprising nature and life, surrounding nature, his own life, this especially in singing; "Exercises in language and speech, |