disagreeable in the doing. His education must not unfit him to do this or make it more difficult for him to do it. Heaven help the child who has always followed his own inclinations!

In applying kindergarten principles, then, to education, to secure their innumerable benefits, let us remember that man must be persistent and self dependent, ready to meet and overcome obstacles in order to reach his best development. Let us beware of smoothing the child's road, helping him over all the rough places, or of following his lead so that he becomes desultory, dependent upon others, and ready to turn aside at any obstacle because too weak to surmount or remove it.

The poor or bad kindergarten may do infinite harm to mind and character. The good kindergarten is invaluable.

F. LOUIS SOLDAN, superintendent of public schools, St. Louis, Mo.—The appliances of the kindergarten-the occupations, games, plays, building blocks, and toys—appertain to the earliest stage of the child's education, and cannot wisely be carried beyond. But there are principles involved in kindergarten training which are generally valid and apply to general education as well as to the kindergarten.

One of these principles is that which lays stress on the self-activity of the child. There is a twofold process in education. Froebel describes it by saying that education must make the external internal and the internal external. The one process is that the child should learn the facts of life. Information is conveyed to him from without, thru parent, teacher, and school. The facts of life, history, geography, etc., become part of his store of information. External facts are converted, as it were, into ideas of the mind. This was largely the old idea of education, in which the pupil was made the recipient of knowledge conveyed from without. There is another and still more important process in education. To be a scholar is not man's highest destiny. He must be a worker. He learns in order that he may use his knowledge in life. The work which his mind conceives and plans his hand must be able to execute; that is to say, he must learn how to translate thought into deeds. The ideas of the mind create the external fact. These two processes in education, that of learning and that of doing, are the important principles which the kindergarten emphasizes; they admit of general application to the education of every age.

Education is but too often looked upon as the activity of teachers and schools. Its proper purpose is the reaction which the educator, thru his influence, calls forth in the child. It is the child's action, rather than the teacher's, which is the vital point in education, and it is this feature of education on which the kindergarten lays stress.

THE KINDERGARTEN: AN UPLIFTING SOCIAL INFLUENCE IN THE HOME AND THE DISTRICT

66

RICHARD WATSON GILDER, EDITOR OF THE CENTURY" MAGAZINE,

NEW YORK, N. Y.

The attempt to support the above proposition with detailed and exact evidence seems to us in New York somewhat like going about to prove circumstantially that light and air, sunshine and happiness, are wholesome elements in the life of the people.

In 1889 an associated effort was begun by men and women who desired to extend the kindergarten system in the metropolis. The kindergarten established in 1877 in connection with the Normal College, and that established in 1878 in connection with the Society of Ethical Cul

ture, and two or three other, either charitable or private, institutions, represented the movement at the beginning of the last decade of the nineteenth century in the then city of New York. The idea of the founders of the new association was to establish some model kindergartens under charge of the association and to prevail upon the city to establish kindergartens in connection with the public-school system. The things accomplished within the past fourteen years have been extraordinary. The association has now twenty-three kindergartens; twenty-two have been established in the borough of Brooklyn by the Free Kindergarten Society there; and the public-school kindergartens number in Greater New York about 362. In addition, there are about 55 public kindergar tens of a charitable character, and some 51 private, making in all about 513 kindergartens.

Our population in New York is rushing up toward the four million. line (Board of Health estimate for 1902: 3,640,693). We are trying to Americanize this great mass in the best sense of the word. As an example of the obstacles in the way, look at a single element of our population. One of our best Hebrew authorities estimates that there are not less than half a million Jews among us - he is inclined to think that the number approaches 600,000—a number which is said to be greater than that of any other Jewish community that has ever existed. Then again you know how the Italians are pouring in upon us; we have more than one Little Italy in New York. Dante's and Michelangelo's countrymen ought to be worth working over into Americans, no matter how troublesome the fresh material offered. Over one million two hundred and seventy thousand of us (1,270,080) were actually born in other countries, of whom less than one-third are from English-speaking countries. Furthermore, there are two millions three hundred and forty thousand (2,339,895) of us both of whose parents are foreign born.

As to the individual condition of the children, take one or two illustrations. I had heard of the custom of sewing up, but it was hard to believe except on the personal testimony of the superintendent of one of our public schools which is full of enchanting Raphael faces, who told me that he had made it his duty himself to rip open at times the sewed-on clothes of his pupils. The kindergartner in this school has also come into contact with the custom more than once. The mothers sometimes actually sew the little creatures up for the whole winter. A boy of eleven had everything sewed on him but his trousers. Sometimes the garment is a sort of unremovable "altogether;" sometimes it consists of six-inch strips of cloth wound around the child and sewed. A kindergartner in the same school, which I visited in a recent warm spell, said that one of the children came every day in a nice, clean skirt-put on over the two, three, four, five, or more other skirts! As the heat of the weather increased, so increased the clothing.

As to the manners with which the little ones are often familiar at home, Jacob Riis, when I asked him for a hint, said that the remark of the boy to Miss Addams at the Chicago Hull House was typical. There was a picture of a harvest scene - the woman reclining, the man standing by quietly mopping his brow. After looking at it attentively the boy said: "Well, he knocked her down, didn't he?"

You cannot catch your citizen too early in order to make him a good citizen. The kindergarten age marks our earliest opportunity to catch the little Russian, the little Italian, the little German, Pole, Syrian, and the rest and begin to make good American citizens of them. And your little American-born citizen is often in quite as much need of early catching and training.

The direct effect of the kindergarten upon the children it is easy to grasp. The teachers will tell you that not only surly young ones soon succumb to the amiable environment, but that the difference in the average child is quickly perceived. The children are brought into a new social order; they are taught to have regard for one another, and they do acquire such regard-along with a new and highly valuable respect for law and order.

No one can speak of the kindergarten without including the work of the mothers' meeting and club, with library annex; the teaching there of games and of handiwork, along with practical discussions on food, cooking, sleep, play, open air, cleanliness, health; on manners, housework, overstimulating of young children, and the like; sometimes with talks by physicians of incalculable benefit to uninstructed parents. A vital element of the kindergarten, too, is the visitation by the teachers in the homes of the children. Then there are the mothers' and fathers' visits to the kindergartens, and occasionally there are fathers' meetings also. Perhaps hitherto the father has been regarded too much as a negligible quantity in kindergarten work.

Home visitation, mothers' meetings, and social work are an integral. part of the system, and with us are being constantly pressed farther and farther. Special efforts are made, too, to bring the children more into touch with nature; seeds are distributed and flowers raised; there are indoor gardens and outdoor gardens, visits to the parks, and play festivals in the parks. There is a loan collection of animals, and a movement is on foot to have a few animals kept for kindergarten purposes in some, at least, of the small parks of the city; this is, in fact, already done in one of our minor parks. The kindergarten work is by no means limited to the daily routine of exercises.

There is a very close bond between the kindergarten and the home; and the closest of all is, of course, the child itself. The first thing learned, perhaps, is cleanliness. Both the child and the mother soon learn that. In the case of the mother lack of hygiene means lack of knowledge; she is quick to learn and to profit by her new knowledge.

Again, the success of the kindergarten method in the management of the child is a revelation to the parents. They naturally come to acquire new parental manners. One philosophical observer of the good effects of the kindergarten said lately: "I used to hit my Josie something awful, and now I don't."

The whole family comes under the influence of what I may call the kindergarten charm. A change comes over the little children. The kindergarten songs and games are introduced into the home. The father often is deeply interested, learns the songs, supplements the handiwork of the children. One father said to the mother: "Be sure and go to the meeting; when you get home you always act lively, as you did before we were married." Two mothers said to the same teacher, lately, that they dreaded promotion for their children, as they would "rather they would be trained than taught." "Many mothers laughingly informed me," one of the teachers says, "that no one of the various members of the family was exempt from the criticism of the table manners." This reversal as to the usual source of home instruction is, in the circumstances, necessary and helpful, and tends powerfully to social improvement. It often leads also, to be sure, to the inevitable tragedy, later in life, that comes from separation in sentiment, such as is depicted in Tourguéneff's Fathers and Sons; but in the case of a new national environment this cannot be helped; it is, in fact, wholesomely evolutionary. Kindergarten children are more willing and better assistants to their mothers than the older children who have not been in kindergarten. Tidiness in the home with regard to the children's playthings is the direct effect of the "putting away" in the kindergarten. Personal cleanliness, as intimated, is the first note struck by the kindergarten-and it reverberates promptly in the home.

The influence of the kindergarten upon the child's home is unescapable. And if the individual child and the child's family are influenced, there is the beginning, at least, of an influence upon the district. We find that parents become so deeply interested in the kindergarten that they send. one child there after another; and that, when the child grows up, the second generation is sure to be sent also. The growing-up and grown-up kindergarten children are apt to revisit the kindergarten, and keep up an intelligent interest in its work and sympathy with its spirit. The spell of the kindergarten remains upon them.

The social uplift is felt-first, by the child; second, by the family; and, third, by the neighborhood. This is the contemporaneous influence; but if the direct influence upon the child is good, if certain social principles are deeply implanted in it at a highly susceptible age, surely the social uplift will not be confined to the few years that the child remains in the kindergarten; the training will naturally tend to good manners, good morals, and good citizenship in the years to come.

In the matter of immediate social benefits must be counted the awakened

spirit of helpfulness and neighborliness among mothers.

It is no little

thing to find a strong common interest that binds together socially many antipathetic nationalities.

Along with this spirit of friendliness and co-operation among the mothers is the aroused sentiment of independence and self-respect and self-help. One factor in the social uplift is the great advantage to the mother, as one of the mothers herself puts it, "of contact with the trained mind of the teacher." The mothers do not always drop out of the meetings when their children leave the kindergarten. The relation between the kindergarten teacher and the mother is decidedly to be reckoned with in this question of social uplift. Courtesy is of the essence of the kindergarten, and the home and neighborhood are uplifted, among other things, by the respect and regard of the mothers and the fathers for the teachers. When one thinks what the streets of a crowded city are as schools for unsocial manners and morals, the influence there of the kindergarten is something hard to overvalue. Kindergarten children are constantly playing their games in the streets. In the cramped space between front and rear tenements you might at one time have seen a dozen children playing every afternoon. Says a teacher: "I have never seen one of my big boys going to fight with a younger child or tormenting hin."

Another of my witnesses gives me this pretty picture: "During this last winter one of the mothers came to me and said: 'You know that five of my children have been in your kindergarten these last seven years. My neighbors in the tenement houses want to know why my older children are so nice to the little ones; they play and sing together every day and make the whole house happy with their laughter. Not alone that; they take other children, who cannot find room in the few kindergartens of the East Side, and teach them their songs and their games. The younger ones teach the older ones the new songs, too, and so the entire neighborhood is one happy kindergarten.'"

Occasionally, in our own and other cities, the kindergarten has been credited with being the means of spreading a decenter sentiment thruout a limited district, more respect for ownership, less noisy quarreling. A correspondent in Boston sends word about the way that, in some cases, the older boys have guarded from depredation the gardens of the little ones, "because they were the kids;" constituting themselves "a police force where they were once a part of the robber band."

It is significant that more and more have our social settlements and churches found the kindergarten a necessary means of access to the darkened home and neighborhood. The kindergarten and the kindergarten idea have been actively useful in the relief of crippled and variously defective children. To the inspiration of the kindergarten the summer. playground may be largely credited; and kindergartners are sought after as directors in these playgrounds and on the recreation piers. To the