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boy because I have done this one bad act." And I believe now that the boy was right. Children do many naughty deeds which have only an imperfect, embryonic connection with the rest of their embryonic natures. Do not classify them in the light of such isolated deeds. The time has not come to separate the sheep from the goats, and you are not charged with making such division. Above all, in what you say to a child, and in what you say to others about him, distinguish sharply between condemning his naughty acts and calling him a naughty child.

These few suggestions fall far short of going to the root of the matter; but that, certainly, is not expected of me today. I merely offer a few notes, on a question of deep significance. One thing more I should like to say before closing. I have had occasion elsewhere to hint that the man should not utterly outgrow the things of his childhood; that the child should have to do with some things of lasting significance, in order that there may not be that break of continuity between childhood and manhood which makes it so easy for some to leave behind their childhood's nobility as well as their childhood's puerility. With this in mind, it appears especially important that the standards of goodness and badness set before children shall not be petty, external, and artificial, but that they shall point unmistakably to the standards of the highest living. If a child is taught to believe that naughtiness consists in the transgression of minute and arbitrary rules, he must either break violently with his past in the process of growing up, or grow up into a narrow and artificial manhood; and either of these results is by all possible means to be avoided.

The teacher, then, must have real human sympathy with little children, on their way from babyhood to manhood, if he is to deal justly with their naughtiness. We have, all of us, much to learn in the domain of morals. Our own ignorance and moral immaturity should teach us to be very patient with these little ones. There are some lines of Coventry Patmore's which often come to me to reinforce this lesson:

My little son, who looks from thoughtful eyes,
And moves and speaks in serious, grown up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobeyed,

I struck him and dismissed,

With harsh words and unkissed;

His mother, who was patient, being dead.

Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,

I visited his bed,

And found his lashes yet,

With his late sobbing wet.

Then I with moan,

Kissing away his tears, left others of my own.
For on a table drawn

Beside his bed he had placed within his reach
A box of counters, and a red-veined stone,

A piece of glass abraded by the beach,

And six or seven shells,

A bottle of bluebells,

And four French coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.

So when that night I prayed

To God, I wept and said:

"Ah, when we lie at last with tranced breath,

Not vexing Thee in death,

And Thou rememberest

The toys

That made our joys,

Then, fatherly not less than I,

Who am moided out of clay,

Thou'lt leave Thy wrath and say:
'I will be sorry for their childishness.""

THE KINDERGARTEN CHILD PHYSICALLY

BY FREDERIC L. BURK, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, SANTA

BARBARA, CAL.

The child at six years of age, the end of the kindergarten period, has reached almost two-thirds of his adult height and from one-fourth to onethird of his adult weight. This does not mean, by any means, that the kindergarten child stands in the same numerical relation to the developed adult, for height and weight are gross standards and give us no accurate information upon essential problems in the details of growth. The body is made up of parts and organs, each in a certain measure independent of other parts, each with its separate nascent or growing periods and resting periods. Consequently height and weight give us merely the composite or algebraic sum of growth of these various parts. One part may be growing while its neighbor is resting, or certain parts may not have entered upon that period when the important increments of growth are added. For example, the neck does not make any growth of consequence until after the seventh or eighth year, while the length of the face is practically completed by this age. The increase in lung dimensions is merely nominal until pubescence, when, in the course of a short growing period of two years or less, the diameter of the chest is nearly doubled. The heart and the regulation of the blood supply undergo material modifica tions years after the kindergarten period is passed. The brain reaches its maximum weight, practically, as early as eight or nine years of age, and over 85 per cent. of this growth is obtained previous to four years; the addition in brain weight during the first four years is about nine times as much as during the second four years. The fact that the

kindergarten takes the child just at the completion of its period of most rapid growth in brain weight, and keeps him until the maximum is almost attained, is a significant one.

These are merely illustrations of the fact that the conditions of child life cannot be measured in terms of adult standards. If growth were regular and proportional in each part for each year, we might state the child in adult terms, but all of our factors are variable. Yet our curricula of studies, both in school and kindergarten, set up these adult standards by which to measure the child's progressive development, as tho growth were something to be measured by regular periods of time. On the contrary, growth is by fits and starts, as it were, with periods of very rapid rate followed by resting periods.

To cite another important illustration of the uselessness of judging the child by adult standards, the matter of sex is striking. The adult is sexed, and, physiologically or psychologically, no treatment of the adult can be exact unless we specify the sex; but the child, until the age of ten or eleven, is practically without sex. The difference in the size of the sexes, in their rates of growth, their instincts, impulses, interests, physical and mental traits, etc., is so slight and immaterial as to justify no separate consideration of them either in theory or practice. Yet, after the age of ten or eleven years, the sex changes are so enormous, both physically and mentally, that the sexes can no longer be classed together in any description; and our system of giving them both the same course of instruction is rendered extremely questionable.

There is another important distinction between the child and the adult, or even adolescent. The adult has, to some extent at least, possibilities of original deviation from the habits of ancestry; the child is the slave of ancestry. His movements, his plays, his games, his instincts, his fears, his methods of thought and action, all bear the indelible stamp of hereditary control, and are all fairly well in the middle of the welltraveled road of race evolution. As the creek, confined to the deep-worn gorges in the mountains where it originates, nevertheless, upon issuing forth finally upon the plains, finds it easy to change its channel bed, so the human being, in its earlier stages of development, is more determined by hereditary influences, until in adolescence it comes to the open plain where originality is more possible. In the growth of the nervous system we find this law well demonstrated. The structures which mature first are those which are oldest in race evolution. Those which are most recent, and consequently are more pliable and subject to modification, mature later. The time at which a structure controlling a given movement matures is determined by conditions which are internal, and, in the case of the activities which appear in childhood, are less subject to modification by external environment than in the case of those which mature in adolescence. The forms of movements and exercises which are

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oldest racially are also determined by internal law, and are little susceptible to modification.

Education of the adolescent may include the idea, to some extent, of teaching the individual something new to the race. Education of the kindergarten child can signify nothing more than at the proper time and in the form heredity has determined to reawaken into activity the structures of racial antiquity. The kindergarten child is still in the deepworn gorges which his ancestors for ages have trod. Originality is a virtue in adolescent education. In the kindergarten originality in the form of exercise, in the time of its application, which many of our systems of physical culture have attempted arbitrarily to introduce for reasons of æsthetic grace or theories of some systematic or orderly development, cannot be too severely condemned. With kindergarten children these are matters to be determined by internal laws of the nervous system. This hereditary order obeys no logical or æsthetic system. On the contrary, the order by which movements develop in childhood appears to the adult mind with a love of orderly system to be mere vagrant caprice. For example, the thumb movements, from a logical standpoint the most fundamental and elementary of the hand, develop several months later than those of the hand as a whole, because the ancestors of man did not use the thumb, and its movements are among the latest in a racial sense. The baby's two eyes tend at birth to move independently of each other, and only acquire perfect co-ordination in the course of some months, while the baby's two hands begin with such strong tendencies toward co-ordination that he must duplicate the movement of one by the other; in hand development the child grows from co-ordination toward independence, while the principle is reversed in the matter of eye movements. This paradoxical condition doubtless finds its explanation in the fact that in animal ancestry the movements of the fore limbs ever have been co-ordinated, while the eyes, as a rule, have been more or less independ ent of each other. In human life the conditions have been reversed, and the individual repeats this history in his earlier stages.

This dependence of the order, form, and time in the development of movements upon the past habits in racial evolution is manifest everywhere in children's instinctive activities, and peremptorily forbids our artificial attempts to systematize movements upon any superficial theory of grace or logical order, or to introduce original departures from racial habit.

From this standpoint we come upon the principle of first importance, that the fundamental movements, i. e., those oldest in the race, and comprising largely those which are performed by the larger and more centrally located muscles, normally become functional before the accessory movements those which came late into the race. Among the latter are those of accuracy, rapidity, and long and complex sequences of finger movements used in writing, sewing, weaving, etc. Spontaneously, children

of the kindergarten use only the fundamental movements, as the studies of Gulick, Miss Sisson, and others have shown, and as our careful daily observations of children's plays in the Santa Barbara kindergartens have corroborated. In so far as accuracy and rapidity of finger movements are concerned, the studies of Bryan and Gilbert show clearly that the nascent periods for these do not appear until after six or seven years. The child of six years, normally, has scarcely half the power for rapid finger movement that an adolescent of sixteen possesses, and accuracy of finger movements, such as writing requires, Dr. Bryan shows, reaches its nascent growth between six and eight. These considerations demand. from the kindergarten the abolishment of all movements which are not fundamental and which seek to introduce delicate finger movements of any kind. Blackboard work instead of pencil and paper, and the abolition of drawing or other similar work which requires accurate line work, are essential.

But it by no means follows that, because we cannot arrange for the kindergarten child some system of orderly and systematic exercises, physical culture has no place in the kindergarten curriculum. The child's natural play certainly comes under pedagogic cognizance, not as a necessary nuisance to be put up with, but as an important instrument of education. But I think modern study bids us reverse some current notions we have entertained of play. Many have chosen some idea to present and then have constructed artificial plays arbitrarily to illustrate the idea. The modern view would, on the contrary, bid us take the child's instinctive play without alteration and let it lead and direct us. Darwin, Spencer, and the earlier biologists gave play a place of some theoretic importance when they ascribed to it the rudimentary place of representing the reawakening of the left-over activities of our primitive ancestors. But Karl Groos, in his recent monograms, while admitting that children's plays are rudimentary in origin, shows, nevertheless, that they have a preparatory function in stimulating the growth of those. higher activities, mental as well as physical, which have proceeded in race history from the activities now represented by children's play. The large majority of young children's plays are those which the race once used in the practical business affairs of war and chase-those of pursuing, jumping, hiding, throwing, wrestling, etc. As in the race, so in the individual, they lead to higher activities and are essential links in the chain of education.

But in our selection and arrangement of plays for the kindergarten in the past we have been not altogether happy. The majority of the kindergarten games are socialistic in form, while modern study shows that the plays of children from four to six years are predominantly individualistic and the social tendency is minor. The social factor enters the child's life later than the kindergarten period. The play of children of

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