ence, common circles of friends and acquaintances. One of the happy privileges of parenthood, if only parents would realize it, is to reinhabit with their children the literary world of childhood: to follow with them once more Alice's tracks through Wonderland, and the world behind the Looking Glass; to set sail with Jason, and coast with Ulysses; to strive with fleet Atalanta; to quail before the genii with Aladdin; to soar on the roc's back with Sinbad; to fare forth on heroic errand with brave Jack or peerless King Arthur. These imaginative presences exert their greatest influence, not in the discounting formality of the schoolroom reading or discussion, but in the home circle. Cut them out of the real life of the home, and they will seldom gain fulness of being in the schoolroom; and without them as household presences, the real world can never be for the child the rich world of wonder, surprise, and sweet mystery, the world of heroic possibility and beckoning romance, that it might have been.

We have dwelt at the outset upon the importance of recognizing—by the parent and public, as well as by the teacher-the necessity of an intimate relation between the school and the home in achieving the best results in English training; and have indicated the kind of influences which the home may exert, because we are convinced that here is the beginning of wisdom. Like all good things, good manners, and especially good speaking manners, begin at home.

CHAPTER III

SOME FIRST PRINCIPLES OF EDUCATION IN THEIR LITERARY APPLICATION

"Now, you know," says Socrates, when discussing the problem of education with Adeimantus in the "Republic," "now you know that in every enterprise the beginning is the main thing, especially in dealing with a young and tender nature. For at that time it is most plastic, and into it the stamp which it is desired to impress sinks deepest." This principle is gaining way among us; but we do not apply it vigorously in attempting to reform our English studies. Under the pressure of the College, reform in this instance is being wrought out slowly from the top downward, which is not the true method. The point of attack in the recent war upon illiteracy has been the High School; but we are beginning to see that it is absurd to place the emphasis there. Much more vital, as making or marring the child's literary tastes and aptitudes, are the sensitive years spent in the Primary and Grammar Grades. In time, perhaps, heeding at last old Mulcaster's advice, we shall select our most gifted teachers for this early work.

The tendency to give effect alike to Plato's view and Mulcaster's counsel, has received its main impetus from the Kindergarten. But the Kindergarten has not affected the linguistic and literary interests with which we are now concerned so much as those of handicraft and nature study. Rather has it, with its insistence upon "things before words" and its banishment of reading and writing, confronted the old "literary" type of education with a new motor type of learning through doing—through play, the gifts, and the occupations. True, it has made much of story-telling and of songs, but mainly from the ethical point of view, and sometimes with a woful neglect of literary considerations-a neglect that in turn has discounted ethical values. However, this indifference is not a consequence of the theories of Froebel, although his literary and artistic insensitiveness may have had something to answer for. These theories support the contention which we shall try to make good, that the linguistic and literary education of the child begins in infancy, and is well under way before the child reaches the Kindergarten. The office of the Kindergarten is to take stock of the child's varied powers and acquisitions, and to continue wisely the development of them. It is readily admitted by the Froebelians that among these powers and acquisitions none is more important and significant, and none will more powerfully control the child's destiny, than that

of speech. Seeing, then, that systematic English training and literary culture, the methodical education of ear and tongue, has its beginnings in the Kindergarten, we must start out by considering, from the specialist's point of view, what these first steps should be: how they stand related both to the pre-scholastic education received through the mother and the home, and to the subsequent stages of the Primary, Grammar, and High Schools.

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Our basic conception, be it remembered, is that the process of learning to use one's mother-tongue to good effect in speaking and writing it, and to appreciate and catch inspiration from its master-products, ought to be regarded as a single organic process, each stage of which must be seen in relation to those that precede and follow. The Kindergarten teacher, therefore, must take account of the considerable progress already made by the child of four or five in its 'mother-tongue," must know the extent and kind of its accomplishments, must understand the ways in which it has come by them, and so continue with greater skill and economy the methods by which these remarkable results have been achieved. This survey of the years preceding the Kindergarten has not been neglected in Kindergarten training; but the forward look into what is to come after assuredly has, — in fact, this neglect, we venture to interpolate, has been the bane of modern child-study generally. The work

of the beginning, to be done well, must be done in the light of the end, and of the stages of advance toward it; must be controlled, not merely by a knowledge of what the child has become, but of what we want to make of it, and how we intend to proceed with our business. We will note briefly, therefore, the few facts we need as a foreground for our sketch of the work to be done in the Kindergarten and the first stages of the Primary Grades.

We recall at this point a professor of literature who professes, among other things, to be able to discriminate by certain delicate superiorities those students of his who have been brought up on Mother Goose from those who have not. At least he is pedagogically plausible. If literary education, as part of the "encyclopædic" education of childhood which Comenius outlined, begins with infancy, then its first agencies are the cradle-song and the Mother Goose melody; and we must believe, in the spirit of our clever professor's remark, that it will make a difference whether or no the infant ear has been attuned to the rhythms and rhymes of these ditties, and the groping infant imagination filled with the dim figures of their heroes and rogues. The darky "mammy' mammy" who croons her delightfully quaint "Hush-a-by, baby, by," the Indian mother or the white mother who chants her "Husha-by, baby, on the tree-top," any mother who either lulls her babe with the beautiful "Sleep, baby, sleep,"