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d social environments may roughly be said to extend to the end of his third year.

From that time onwards the worlds of nature and of society for their own sake become objects of curiosity to the child. Every new object presents him with a variety of fresh sensations. He feels, tastes, and bites everything that comes within his reach, and so acquires a world of new experiences. Hence for "the first six years of his life a child has quite enough to do in learning its place in the universe and the nature of its surroundings, and to compel it during any part of that period to give its attention to mere words and symbols is to stint it of the best part of its education for that which is only of secondary importance, and to weaken the foundations of its whole mental fabric."

If, then, during this period the child is left wholly to gather his experiences as he may, he no doubt acquires by his own self-activity a world of new ideas, but the result of this unregulated process will be that the knowledge gained will be largely unsystematised, and much of the experience acquired may be of a nature which may give a false direction to his whole after-development. Hence arise three needs. In the first place, we must endeavour to see that new experiences are presented to the child in some systematic manner, in order that the knowledge may be so organised that it may serve as means to the attainment of ends, and so render future activity more accurate and more efficient. In the second place, we must endeavour to prevent the acquisition of experiences which if allowed to be organised would give an immoral direction to conduct; and in the third place, we must endeavour to establish early in the mind of the child organised systems of means which may hereafter result in the prevalence of activities socially useful to the community.

Now, these three aims are or should be the aims of the Kindergarten School, and we shall now inquire into the ends which the Kindergarten School sets before it, and for this purpose we shall state the fundamental principles which Froebel himself laid down as the guiding principles of this stage of education.

For if we attempt prematurely to exercise the higher centres before the lower have reached a certain measure of development, if we attempt to form conceptual systems of knowledge, such as all language and number systems are, without first laying a sound perceptual basis, then we may do much to hinder future mental growth, if we do not even inflict a positive injury to the child. For the education of the senses neglected, "all after-education partakes of a drowsiness, a haziness, and an insufficiency which it is impossible to cure."

On its moral and social side the aims of the Kindergarten School are no less important. If left to follow the naive instinctive needs of his nature and to gather experiences where and how he may, the child is likely to make acquisitions which later may issue in wrong conduct. Hence one aim of the Kindergarten is to present experiences which may eventually issue in right conduct, and to prevent the acquisition of experiences of an immoral kind. Hence also its insistence upon the need of carefully selecting the environment of the young child, so that as far as possible its early experiences--its first acquisitions--shall be of a healthy nature. Moreover, by means of the organised activities of the school, and by utilising the play-instinct of the child, it seeks to form and establish certain habits of future social worth to the community and to the individual. For, by means of the games and occupations of the Kindergarten School, the child may first of all learn what it means to co-operate with his fellows for a common end or purpose; may learn to submit to authority which he dimly and imperfectly, it may be, perceives to be reasonable; may be trained to habits of accuracy, of order, and of obedience. Above all, the Kindergarten system may rouse and foster in the mind of the child that sense of a corporate life and of a common social spirit the prevalence of which in after-life is the only secure foundation of society.

In England the extreme importance of the education of the infant mind has been, in recent years, clearly acknowledged. The new regulations of the Board of Education no longer allow children under five years of age to be included as "an integral part of a three-R grant-earning Elementary School." A special curriculum has been set forth for their education. They are to have opportunities provided "for the free development of their bodies and minds and for the formation of habits of obedience and attention." What are known as "Kindergarten Occupations are not merely pleasant pastimes for children: if so regarded, they are not intelligently used by the teacher. Their purpose is to stimulate intelligent individual effort, to furnish training of the senses of sight and touch, to promote accurate co-ordination of hand movements with sense impressions, and, not least important, to implant a habit of obedience."

"Formal teaching, even by means of Kindergarten Occupations, is undesirable for children under five. At this stage it is sufficient to give the child opportunity to use his senses freely. To attempt formal teaching will almost inevitably mean, with some of the children, either restraint or over-stimulation, with constant danger to mental growth and health."

But while much has been done in England to recognise the importance of the early education of the child for the after moral and social good both of the individual and of the community, and to place the instruction of the infant classes in the Public Elementary Schools upon a rational basis, little attention has been paid in Scotland to this subject. As a rule, children in that country do not enter school before the age of five, and there is no separate provision made for the teaching of children under that age; in fact, all scholars under seven years of age are classified together and form the Junior Division of the school.

Such a state of matters reflects but little credit on the educational leaders of Scotland, and indicates an imperfect conception of the real nature of the educative process. For if education is the process of acquiring and organising experiences in order to render future action more efficient, it is surely the height of folly to allow the young child to gather his early experiences as he may. Moreover, in the case of the children of the slums, to allow them during their early years to gather into their brain without any correcting agency "all the sights and scenes of a slum is sheer social madness." "The child must be removed, or partially removed, from such an atmosphere, since it has reached the imitative stage, and is nearing the selective stage of life. For the moment he imitates anything; presently he will imitate what pleases him, what gives him momentary pleasure. Before the unmoral selective stage is reached, the stage which inevitably precedes the moral and immoral selective stage, it is essential that children should receive definite and deliberate guidance, that the imitative faculty should be controlled." In the case of the children of the poorer districts this can be done only through the agency of the Infant School. Much may be done by making the instruction of the school attractive, to counteract the evil influences of the home and social environment, and to lead the child to acquire and organise experiences which will issue in moral and not in immoral conduct.

Hence what we need in the poorer districts of our large towns is Free Kindergarten Schools from which all formal teaching of the three R's is abolished, where for several hours in each day the child may be trained to use his senses in the accurate discrimination and accurate systematisation of sense knowledge; where he may have his constructive activities evoked by the expression in concrete form of what he has been led to perceive through the medium of the senses; where he may be trained to habits of order, of cleanliness, of submission to authority; and where for a time, at least, he may be accustomed to live in a purer and healthier atmosphere than he can find at home or in the street, and where for a brief space he may have that feeling of home which he cannot find at home.

The establishment in the poorer districts of our great towns of schools whose education follows the method of the Kindergarten if accompanied by some system of feeding the child would do much to secure the after social efficiency of the rising generation, and would by its reaction on the home-life tend gradually to raise the ideals of the very poor.

FOOTNOTES:

THE AIM OF THE PRIMARY SCHOOL

But in spite of the great advances which have been made, there is a deep-seated feeling now beginning to find expression, that somehow or other the Elementary School has not realised all the expectations that were once thought likely to result from the universal education of the children of the nation, and that in particular the Primary School has failed to foster and to establish the moral and social qualities necessary for the welfare of a State whose government is founded on the representative principle.

This, it seems to me, is largely due to the wrong conception of the aims which the Primary School is intended to realise--a conception which prevailed for many years after the introduction of compulsory elementary education. For some time now, and especially during the past few years, a counter-reaction has set in against the narrowness of the aims of the preceding period, and like all reactions it tends to go to the opposite extreme, and so to broaden the aims of the Primary School as to be in danger of failing to realise efficiently any one of the ends which it sets before it.

The state of things immediately preceding 1870 not unnaturally gave rise to the idea that the acquisition of the arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic was the one indispensable object to be attained in the elementary education of the child. This conviction was strengthened by the system of Government grants introduced into both English and Scotch schools, payments to school managers being largely based upon the successes obtained in passes in the three elementary subjects.

Certain results naturally followed. In the first place, no provision was made for the special education of the infant classes. Since the after-success of the child was measured by his attainments in the three R's, the sooner the infant mind was introduced to these subjects the better the after-result might be expected to be. Thus the grant-earning capacity of the child became the teacher's chief consideration. In the second place, the energies of the teacher were directed to secure a certain mechanical accuracy in the use of the three elementary arts rather than their intelligent apprehension. As a consequence, these subjects came in time to be thought of as subjects worthy of attainment for their own sake and their acquisition as an end in itself. Hence it was forgotten that the acquisition and organisation of these systems of elementary knowledge are only valuable because they are the indispensable means of all intercourse, of all commerce, and of all culture. Hence also their use as instruments for the after-realisation of many purposes in life tended to be neglected, or at least to fall into the background. Individual teachers, no doubt, in many cases realised the partial error in this conception of the aims of the Primary School, but the demands of Government inspectors and of school authorities, with their rule-of-thumb methods of testing the success of the teacher's work by the percentage of passes gained, tended often to make the teacher, in spite of his better judgment, look upon the child mainly as a three-R grant-earning subject and to consider the chief aim of primary education to be the securing of a certain mechanical proficiency in the use of the three elementary arts.

Under such a method of examination it was certainly necessary for the teacher to pay some attention to the individuality of the child. If his efforts were to be at all successful it was incumbent upon him to discover as early as possible the range of the child's previous knowledge in the three grant-earning subjects and to find out in which of the three the power of acquisition of the child was naturally weak or naturally strong. Where the number of children in a class was large, little individual attention could, of course, be paid to the child, and in such cases the acquisition of the subject was aided by the mechanical drilling of sections of the class and by recourse to all manner of devices for ensuring the accurate acquisition of the essential subjects.

In a similar manner, the overcoming of the mechanical difficulties of language construction occupied the major portion of the attention of the child during the school period, and the function of language in conveying a knowledge of things and persons and events received but a small share of his attention. Meanings of words were indeed tabulated and learnt by heart, and as a rule the child on examination-day could make a fair show in deluding the inspector that the passage read was intelligently apprehended. In very much the same way, the overcoming of the mechanical difficulties of writing and the drilling of the child to form his letters in a uniform style received the chief share of the school-time devoted to the subject.

The interest and attention of the child having been thus mainly occupied in the overcoming of the mechanical difficulties involved in the learning of the three grant-earning subjects, and little attention having been paid to the use of these arts, it followed that upon the conclusion of the school period the child left the school without any real interests having been established as the result of the educative process.

Moreover, except in so far as by their teaching we may establish habits of order and of accuracy, the three elementary subjects in themselves possess no moral or social intent; hence unless we can make the child realise their value as instruments for the attainment of ends of social worth they in themselves fail to play any important part in the building up of character.

Let me put this in another way. We have defined education as the process of acquiring and systematising experiences that will render future action more efficient, or alternatively it is the process by which we organise and establish in the mind systems of ideas for the attainment of ends. But if we make the acquisition of these elementary arts ends in themselves, then it follows that the more efficient action we seek to realise is the more efficient manipulation of a number system or a language system. If, however, we realise that these arts are but means to the realisation of other ends, then we shall understand that it is the character of the latter which mainly determines the resulting character of the education given.

Partly to this erroneous conception of the real function of the elementary arts, and partly to another cause which we shall mention later, may be attributed the poor results which our Elementary School system has attained in the establishment of interests of moral and social worth. If, moreover, we realise how large a proportion of the children left and still do leave school at an early age, before such interests can be permanently established, and in some cases with anything but an adequate knowledge of the elementary arts necessary for all further progress, we may rather be astonished that so much has been done than so little.

But in the reaction against the narrowness and formalism of our early aims in elementary education, there is a tendency--a strong tendency--at the present time to go to the opposite extreme, and to make the elementary instrumental arts the vehicles for the fostering of real interests at too early a stage. This manifests itself on the one hand in the desire to make all instruction interesting to the child, and on the other to introduce the child prematurely to a knowledge of the real conditions of life, before he can have any intelligent understanding of these conditions. From the barrenness and formalism of the earlier period, we now have the demand made that the school should throughout take into account the real and practical necessities of life.

The former tendency--the tendency to make everything interesting to the child by lessening or minimising the mechanical difficulties and by endeavouring in every way to incite the child to become interested in the content of the lesson--is best exemplified by the character of the school books which we now place in the hands of our children. The latter tendency--the tendency to the premature use of the elementary arts--is exemplified by the craving to make our teaching of arithmetic practical and real from the very beginning.

In the former case, instead of endeavouring to make the process of language construction interesting in itself, we divert the child's attention from the acquiring and organising of the system of language forms to the premature acquirement of the content of language. What results is obvious: the main interest being in the content, the interest in the mechanical construction of the form suffers, and as a consequence the child never attains a full mastery over the instrumental art.

In the latter case we attempt to do two things at the same time in our teaching of arithmetic. In every concrete application of arithmetic there are two interests involved: in the first place, there is the number interest--the interest in the analysing and recombining of a group, undertaken for the sake of the reconstruction itself; in the second place, there is the business or real interest, which the number interest indeed subserves, but the two interests are in no case identical. If we attempt to teach the two together, we as a rule teach both badly. The pupil will have but a hazy idea of the business relation, and will run the risk of imperfectly organising the pure number system. Hence all kinds of impossible problems may be given to the child without raising any suspicion of error in his mind, and such cases furnish certain evidence that the business relation does not really concern him, but that his whole attention is engaged with the purely constructive aspect of number. Another example of the same error of confounding two separate things is the "blind mixture we make of arithmetic and measuring." Because arithmetic is involved in all measuring we assume that when the child can add together feet and inches, therefore he has a complete knowledge of these spatial magnitudes. But manifestly, if spatial magnitude is to be taught intelligently, it must at first be taught independently of the number relation, which is a general system instrumental in the realisation of many concrete interests.

Once the elementary and subsidiary systems have been fairly well organised and established, their function as means for the furtherance of real interests should occupy a larger share of the child's attention and of the time of the school. These real interests, however, must in every case and at every stage be taught at first for their own sake, and thereafter their relation to the instrumental art explained and applied. Gradually, as they become better organised and more firmly established, the elementary arts occupy a smaller and smaller share of attention, until finally they function automatically, and the whole attention can be directed to the furtherance of the real interests to which the elementary arts are the indispensable means.

Hence we note three stages in the elementary education of the child--the stage preceding the formal instruction in the elementary arts; the stage in which the formal instruction should predominate and receive the greater share of the child's attention; the stage in which the elementary systems having been in great measure organised and established, they may be utilised as means to the furtherance of the real interests. The first stage corresponds to the Infant or Kindergarten age: here the main object is to build up in the mind of the child systems of ideas about the things of his environment; to extend, by conversation and by reading to the child, the vocabulary of his own language; to give him practice in the combining and recombining of concrete groups of things, and to introduce him to a knowledge of the various language forms in a concrete shape.

In the second stage, and here the work of the Primary School begins, the main emphasis at the beginning must be laid on the acquirement and establishment of the language and number systems for their own sake. If right methods are followed, the child can be interested in these processes of construction without the need of calling into use at every point some real interest. In the concluding stage the use of these instruments as means to the realisation of the simpler practical ends of life should receive more attention.

One reason, then, for the poor moral and social results effected in the past by our Elementary School system has been the undue emphasis placed upon the acquisition of the merely formal arts to the neglect of the real interests to which the former are but the means. Another cause, however, has been operative in producing this negative result. In the Elementary Schools, in the past, little attention has been paid to the individuality of the child, and little heed given to the differences between children as regards their different rates of intellectual growth and their differing aptitudes for various branches of study. Under a system of classification which compelled each individual, whether intellectually well or moderately or poorly equipped, to advance at an equal rate, attention to the individual with any other aim than to raise the weak to the standard of the average child in acquiring the three R's was impossible. Again, our huge city schools, partly on account of their vast size, partly on the ground that they are unable to organise school games, partly on account of their lack of any common school interests, do not and cannot foster any sense of a corporate life, any feeling of a common social spirit. Where our English Public School system is strong, our Elementary and sometimes even our Day Secondary School systems are weak. If the home fails to foster these qualities, and the school does not or cannot fill the gap, then as a rule we turn out our boys and girls poorly equipped to fulfil their duties in after-life as members of a corporate community and as citizens of a State. Mere teaching of history or of civics in our schools will do little to attain this end, unless by some method or other we can foster by means of the school-life the real civic spirit. It is, of course, easy to point out the nature of the disease; it is more difficult to prescribe a remedy. But much might be done to strengthen and increase the moral influence of the school by a better system of classification, which took into account the differences in intellectual capacity and in natural aptitude, and which as a consequence, in the education of the child, paid more attention to each child's individuality. This would involve much smaller classes than exist at present, and would further involve that the children should be under the care of one teacher for a longer time than is now the rule. At the present time, in many cases, the teacher is employed in teaching the same subjects, at the same stage, year after year, to a yearly fresh batch of sixty or seventy children. Consequently he learns to look upon his pupils as mere subjects to whom must be imparted the required measure of instruction. Of the children in themselves, of their home-life, of their interests outside school, he knows nothing, and as a rule cares less.

If in addition to this we ceased erecting barracks for the instruction of children and erected schools for their education, we should make even a further advance in this direction. If it is impossible for other reasons to lessen the size of our city Elementary Schools, then the remedy lies in the division of the schools into departments in which the Head should be entrusted with the supervision of the education of the children during several years. In this way it would be possible for the teacher to get to know each child individually, to direct his education in accordance with his aptitudes, and to exert an influence over him. Thus, by giving more attention to the organised games of the school and by the creation of school interests, much might be done to remedy the defects of the school on the side of moral and social education. At best, however, when the home fails, the Elementary School can do little, and we must put our trust in the ethical agencies of society to assist and promote the efforts of the school in the furthering of a right social spirit and in the creation of a common corporate feeling.

FOOTNOTES:

THE AIM OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL

We have seen that on its intellectual side the Primary School has two main functions to perform in the education of the child. In the first place, the school must endeavour to secure that the elementary arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic are well organised and well established in the mind of the child. The more effectively the language and number systems are organised and established the more efficiently will they function in the performance of future action. Moreover, it is only when they have become so organised as to function automatically that they reach their highest efficiency as instruments for the further extension of knowledge or of practice.

If the child is destined to go no farther than the Elementary School stage, then at least the concluding year of the school should be mainly devoted to training him to the use of the primary instrumental arts in the establishment of systems of knowledge necessary for the realisation of the simpler practical ends of life.

Hence the question as regards secondary education resolves itself into the question as to the nature of the systems of knowledge which we should endeavour to establish systematically in the mind of the child, and before we can answer this question we must know the length of time which the child can afford to spend at the Higher School and his possible vocation in after-life. For if education is the process by which the child is led to acquire and organise experiences so as to render future action more efficient, we must know something of the nature of this action, something of the nature of the future social services for which his education is to train him, and the school period must be of sufficient length to enable the required systems to be established permanently and thoroughly.

Let us consider this for a moment: in the reconstruction of, say, the Latin language, the pupil is being trained in the reconstruction and re-establishment of a language system whose methods and rules of construction are much more complex and intricate than those of any living language, and whose forms are so designed as to bring out exactly varied shades of meaning. Hence, in its acquisition the pupil receives practice in the exact discrimination of the meaning of words, and in their accurate placing and reconstruction within the sentence--the unit of expression--in order to bring out the exact interpretation of the thought or statement of fact intended by the writer.

Further, we may train the pupil during the school period to self-apply the language system in the further interpretation of relatively unknown passages. In short, we can train him in the processes of language construction and of language application. Moreover, in considering this question, we must take into account that during the school period the main interest must necessarily be directed to the acquisition and establishment of the system itself, that little attention can be directed towards the content for its own sake, and that the establishment of the system so that it shall function automatically in the interpretation of the content is a stage which is attained in comparatively few cases, and then only after many years of study.

If we then take into account, and we must take into account, the fact that the chief value of the ancient languages as Secondary School subjects lies in their use as training and disciplinary instruments--that in after-life they function directly in the attainment of no practical end, and only indirectly in so far as the habits acquired of the exact weighing of the meaning of words and of the accurate placing of words are carried over for the attainment of practical ends in which these qualities of exact interpretation and exact expression of language are the chief requisites--we shall understand that while they may be of value in securing the efficient after-performance of certain social services, they play but a small part in the furthering of any service which requires an exact knowledge of the qualities of things and an accurate knowledge of the laws governing the operations of nature.

Moreover, in a national system of education we shall need not one system of advancing means but several; not merely an educational ladder that may carry the boy to the University, but also educational steps by which the individual may mount to the Technical or the Commercial or the Art College.

Hence our aims in the higher education of the youth, and as a consequence the nature of the systems of knowledge which we should endeavour to organise and to establish in their minds, will vary in accordance with the nature of the service which in adult life the boy is likely to perform. Now, these services may be divided into four main classes.

In the first place, every nation requires an army of efficient industrial workers. Partly, in some cases, owing to the decline of the apprenticeship system, partly owing to the fact that where apprentices are still employed no systematic measures are taken to instruct the youth in the principles underlying his particular art, it is becoming increasingly necessary that the school should supply and supplement the knowledge required for the efficient after-performance of the industrial and technical arts. Hence one kind of Higher School urgently required is the Trade or Technical School. In a large number of cases this need could be supplied by Evening Continuation Schools. At present, however, our Evening Schools are too predominantly commercial and literary, and do not make adequate provision for the trade and technical needs of the community. Further, we must endeavour to secure that the boy or girl enters the Evening Continuation School as soon after he leaves the Elementary School as possible. For in many cases at the present time the boy after leaving the Primary School loafs at night about the streets, and in a short time through disuse forgets much of what he learned at school, and often in addition acquires habits which tend to unfit him for any future strenuous effort. When, therefore, he feels the need for more knowledge in order to advance in his trade, the Evening School has too frequently to begin by doing over again the work of the Elementary School before it can enter upon the work of establishing the higher system of knowledge.

In the second place, a nation such as ours requires a trained body of servants for the efficient carrying on of her commerce. Preparation for the simpler forms of service could be furnished by the commercial classes of the Evening Continuation Schools. For preparation for the higher services, we require a type of school which beginning after the Elementary School stage has been completed, carries on the boy's education until the fifteenth or sixteenth year, whose chief aim should be to lay a sound basis in the acquisition and organisation of one or two modern languages and in the acquirement of the arts instrumental for the carrying on of commercial transactions. Further means of advance in these studies should be provided by the day or evening Commercial College.

In the third place, every modern nation requires a trained body of scientific workers for the after carrying on of her industrial and technical arts. Hence we need a type of school which by making the physical sciences their chief object of study prepare the way for the future training of the student in the application of scientific knowledge to the furtherance of the industrial and technical arts.

Lastly, we require a type of secondary education which shall prepare the boy for the efficient discharge of the duties which the State requires at the hands of her physicians, her theologians, her jurists.

Thus, since all education is the acquisition of experiences that will render future action more efficient, the nature of the secondary education given must depend on the nature of the services to which the systems of knowledge are the means. A classical education may be a good preparation for the after-discharge of the duties of the theologian or the jurist; it certainly will not do much for the efficient discharge of the duties of the mechanical engineer and the practical chemist.

But one error must be avoided. Whilst the various types of Secondary School must fashion their curricula according to the nature of the services for which they prepare, we must not forget that the school has other duties to perform than the mere preparation for the social services by which a man hereafter earns his living. It must in every case endeavour to organise and establish those systems of means necessary for the after-discharge of the civic duties of life and instrumental for the right use of leisure.

Practically we need three types of Higher School--one in which modern languages form the basal subjects of the curriculum; one in which the physical sciences are the main systems organised and established; one in which the classical languages form the main staple of education.

THE AIM OF THE UNIVERSITY

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