other children may take; and we, believing in the principle of individuality and preaching it to others, must not fail to apply it to ourselves. This means that the child must be released for the elementary school as soon as he is ready for it, but no sooner, so far as we are able to observe and know.

I am inclined to resist the contention that the kindergarten is a course of study. I have no objection to "courses of study," in the sense in which the term is often used; but I object very much to the theory that the child who is able to take the third step must not be allowed to take it because he has not taken the second. I believe the human mind in education should always be put at that task for which it is competent; and it is "pedagogical," not educational, to insist that every step be covered, no matter at what expenditure of time, when the power to advance more rapidly is present. Therefore, it is necessary for the kindergarten to beware of holding children back. We do not want the elementary school to hold back those who are ready for the high school; we do not want the high school to hold back those who are ready for college; or the college, those who are ready for the university. We cannot put the child of three to seven years of age in a strait-jacket and say that there he must stay for a fixed time, regardless of his natural ability or accomplishments.

Because the line of demarkation is so difficult to establish, it has become the duty of the kindergartner to acquaint herself in a general way (it is impossible to do it in detail) with the principles, methods, and ideals of the elementary school. There must be the most absolute sympathy between the kindergarten and the grades above it; and we are in these days rightly calling upon teachers of the lower grades of the elementary school to master the spirit of the followers of Froebel. Sympathy comes from mutual understanding and knowledge. In this way the kindergarten will become attached to the school, and no longer be a separate and distinct part of the educational scheme; it will take its natural place as one of the various stages in the growth of one living and organic human mind.

I know that there is a great demand that those who go into the kindergarten work shall know the principles of elementary-school teaching, and that elementary teachers shall go into the schools with a knowledge of the work and purposes of the kindergarten. This demand is made by the best educational sentiment and opinion. It remains for kindergartners to do their share in satisfying that demand by studying the principles of elementary-school work and by occasionally supplying elementary teachers from their own ranks.

It is sometimes said that the kindergarten is at war with the home; that these children of tender years should be under their mothers' care; that it is unnatural for children of that age to be brought together

in groups for instruction, however needful it may be. I hold the contrary opinion. I think that of all forms of educational work, none has been so successful, as yet, in reaching and uplifting the home, as the kindergarten; and the kindergarten which does not have a mothers' class attached to it is not a kindergarten in the best sense of the word.

Again, we sometimes hear it said that the kindergarten is an admirable thing for the children of the poor; that their children are neglected, dirty, unkempt, uncared for; that the children of the well-to-do need not be found in the kindergarten. In the first place, I resent such a distinction as wholly undemocratic and uneducational. In the second place, looking forward as I do to the next great educational problem of this country, which will be, not the education of the poor, but the education of the rich, I am forced to wonder how the children of the rich can afford to be without the advantages of the kindergarten. It is a serious thing when, in our social and economic efforts, a line of class distinction is drawn. We have only to look at England to see how, with her high ideals, great opportunities, and large expenditures for education, the people find themselves hampered at every turn in striving to effect reforms, by social and economic distinctions. We must not allow these to enter into our educational work.

One more point is important because in that particular the kindergarten is widely misunderstood. You hear the criticism from the elementary-school teacher, made with the best of intentions, but from what I hold to be a wrong point of view, that the kindergarten is disorderly, that it has not the discipline and the definiteness of routine of the elementary school. The kindergarten is, therefore, held to be a disintegrating influence in the development of the child, and to increase the task of discipline later on. My reply to this criticism is that it arises from what seems to me to be a wholly false conception of discipline or order. Suppose an observer passing over this busy city in a balloon were able to look down upon its crowded streets, on which men and women are passing and repassing in every direction, each going to his appointed task without interfering with his fellow; would such a scene be one of disorder, because the human beings within the observer's field of vision were not massed in phalanx and controlled in a mass by a military drill-master? I think not. The scene would be one of a very high type of order indeed, one much higher, in fact, than the order of a marching regiment. Order is not an external form, but an inner habit-the habit of going in a purposeful way, with regard to the purposes and rights of others, about some definite thing, even tho the lines cross and recross. To substitute for this high type of order a single, definite form is to substitute the order which is death for the order which is life; and my response to such criticism is that I should prefer to see more of the

kindergarten order in the lower grades of the elementary school and less of the elementary-school order in the kindergarten.

Let me say in conclusion that it is a striking fact, and one of the most hopeful signs to be found today in all education, that the two extremes of the educational process, the kindergarten and the university, are the two greatest conservators of individualism; and it is only as the individual is being rescued from the routine of the intervening school periods that these periods are rising to perfection and efficiency. The great hope of our school system lies in the fact that the spirit of individualism is working down from the university and up from the kindergarten, and that some day the two lines of development will meet and will hold the whole educational process within their spheres of influence.

CHARACTER STUDY IN THE KINDERGARTEN

BY PROFESSOR THOMAS P. BAILEY, JR., UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Now that child study is no longer new and strange and "epochmaking," but rather an ordinary and inevitable part of all educational work, we ought to begin to see some of its results in our school practice, and particularly in the kindergarten, which has always claimed to be based upon the results of an intimate knowledge of child nature. The somewhat hysterical claim that we have totally misunderstood the child in the past is being softened into the admission that men have always understood children just about as well as they have understood adults. Child nature is no longer regarded as something essentially different from what thoughtful people thought it to be. We are beginning to realize that our knowledge of the children is very largely dependent on our study of ourselves. Socrates was a student of children, and Dr. G. Stanley Hall is most delightful when he is most Socratic. Jesus told us once for all that the childlike is the heavenly. Pestalozzi and Froebel found a divine law of development in the child, and Herbart saw in him the drama of the history of culture. Child study is good because it is both old and new, scientific and philosophical, particular aud universal. The present status of child study is in large measure a triumph of the kindergarten, for its sanest theory and practice have always taken child nature into account, even when its theory was vague and its practice merely traditional. I confess to some sympathy with those kindergartners who resent being told. that the kindergarten is a good thing, but that its methods must be entirely revolutionized and reformed in accordance with the results of child study. Very often it has happened that trivial criticisms have taken the place of careful inquiry and catholic sympathy. Kindergartners are themselves

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in part responsible for such treatment. They too often oppose sentimental vaporings to pseudo-scientific vagaries. Moreover, they sometimes give the impression of a quarrel between rival patent-medicine vendors or spiritualistic mediums - at least of those "mediums" not believed in by eminent psychologists and kindergartners. "Envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness," ought to be far from the mental attitude of the disciples of Froebel. All such expressions as "behind the times," "doesn't understand the real Froebel," "not properly trained," etc., are not apt to advance the cause of the kindergarten, especially when it is a well-known fact that there is no way of deciding who is right in these contentions. In this paper I want it understood that I am not criticising any particular kindergartens; nor am I standing sponsor for anyone's theory or practice. While I have been so fortunate as to be able to work with a kindergartner so level-headed and intelligent as Mrs. Frances Bracken Gould, we are not to be held responsible for each other's sins of omission or commission in kindergarten matters. I shall use data from her kindergarten, because I know most about it and can vouch for the facts I have collected.

At least three kinds of mental attitude, based upon three theories, are to be found among those kindergarten theorists and practitioners whom I have met. It is perfectly permissible for anyone interested to claim that I have not met the true exponents of the true kindergarten. But if I am allowed to classify my no doubt sadly inadequate knowledge on the subject, I should name the aforementioned kinds of attitude the angelic, the neuromuscular, and the recapitulatory. These are not intended as nicknames, but as terms descriptive of theories or hypotheses. Let us briefly review each.

1. The angelic theory. The child is regarded as a dreamer about infinity and eternity. It comes perfect from the hands of the Creator and is corrupted only in the hands of man. Wonderful spiritual insight has this child, and it is thereby enabled to divine the inner significance of things mundane with the aid of the prophetic and priestly guidance of the kindergartner. There is great truth in this view, when it is divested of sentimentalism and some other isms; but I cannot see that any progress in understanding child nature is likely to come from people who know so very much about the ultimate realities that philosophers have such a hard time trying to understand. The "angelic" class always expresses scornful sympathy for persons like myself who do not enter into the fullness of the divinity that doth hedge about a child. I have a pious faith that the children's angels do always behold the face of the Father, but I am not so sure about the children themselves—at least in the rough. Nor am I so sure that the kindergarten angelicizing process improves the raw material very much. Perhaps I lack the right kind of imagination, or perhaps my tastes in such matters are unrefined. It does

seem a pity to try to eliminate the natural egoism of childhood too soon. One misses the gamy flavor of the wild animal. The angelic child is tame. It is like some rejected manuscripts in being "meritorious, but not available for our purposes."

2. The neuromuscular theory.-The child, according to this theory, is a bundle of reflex arcs, waiting to be joined together into more complex reflex arcs. Properly graded stimuli will do the work.

If the "fundamental" comes before the "accessory," all will be well. Childish eccentricities are due to ancestral experience. As we know very definitely what that was, we are able to educate the children very definitely on account of this knowledge. This theory is a full and sufficient antidote for the angelic theory. That is one of its chief uses. Persons holding to it need, however, a good dose of that for which their own theory is an antidote. It is possible to hold to both theories. It is easy to form "higher syntheses" in kindergarten theories.

3. The recapitulation theory.-The child is supposed to recapitulate the history of the racial development. The instincts of the race appear in a more or less generalized form in the development of the individual. In this theory the culture-epoch idea has taken on a biological form. It is often forgotten that recapitulation is only one of many factors in development, and that the civilized child is to be compared, not with the adult savage, but rather with the savage child. The adult savage is childish rather than childlike. He is often degenerate, and at best his life is onesided rather than typically human. One of our main efforts ought to be to save the child from recapitulating too much of the race's history. The eternal childlike is not to be found in past or present savagery. Before this view can be of much use to the kindergarten it must undergo much criticism and much restatement in the light of a more comprehensive study of the manifold phases of character life. Such study is now being carried on in several quarters.

The above classification of views is not intended to be exhaustive. The various ideas are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The theories are not adequately stated. I am perfectly willing, however, to have anyone so disposed prove the futility of such classifications, and to see in them nothing but an attack of persons differing from me in methods and results. Perhaps I can best show the relation of my own thought to the above-mentioned attitudes by pointing out their mutual complementariness, rather than by attempting to unite them in a higher synthesis.

Everyone is supposed to be able to state the object of education in several different ways. Let me exercise my privilege by using a few pet phrases. The object of education is to train for habitude, nurture for generic instinct, and develop for individual aptitude. The neuromuscular theory lays emphasis on the training of habits. We must put the principal of our experience at interest. Habit (including custom and law) is