that can re-enforce the moment by the hours (and time by eternity). The child in his games represents to himself his kinship to the human race-his identity, as little self, with the social whole as his greater self.

(d) The child is always outgrowing his playthings, always exhausting the possibilities of a given object to represent or symbolize the occupations and deeds of grown-up humanity in the world about him. Were the child to arrest his development and linger contented over a doll or a hobby-horse, the result would be lamentable. Hence unmaking is as important as making to the child.* His destructive energy is as essential to him as his power of construction-a point often missed by kindergartners who have not penetrated Froebel's doctrine of inner connection in its third degree.

(e) True inner development or education should proceed from the symbolic to the æsthetic or artistic, from art to science, and from science to philosophy; for true art (including also poetry) is a higher form of "inner connection" than the merely symbolic, which constitutes the spiritual side of play. Again, science and philosophy are more advanced than art in the fact that they, seize the inner connection directly and simply, while the symbolic form is only a suspicion or intimation of an inner connection, and art is only a personification or an illustration of it.

§ 207. After the symbolic comes what is called the conventional. In his first stages of using language the child is just in the symbolic stage of culture, and the kindergarten is exactly the kind of

*Goethe has indicated this in his Wilhelm Meister by showing how the father, by a puppet show and a wrong policy in regard to it, made a lifelong impression on the mind of Wilhelm, and nearly arrested his growth at the puppet stage.

instruction best adapted to him. At the age of seven years, or in the beginning of the seventh year in some cases, the child has acquired this sense of higher individuality. Just as in the first attainment of the gift of speech the child learns to see all things as specimens of their universals, and to desire names for all things, so four or five years later he has acquired the humane culture which it was the object of the plays and games of Froebel to teach, and he now regards himself as a member of a social whole-in fact, as an individual having special duties to perform in the life of the whole. With the beginning of this consciousness the symbolic bent of the mind begins to yield place to a higher and more conscious form of intellectual and moral activity, and the child is ready for the methods of the primary school. The child, in fact, has arrived at a point where he needs instruments of self-help; he needs to master the conventionalities of human learning; he needs to learn how to read and write, and how to record the results of arithmetic.

(a) The human race uses arbitrary characters to represent elementary sounds and combines them into words, a process of analysis and synthesis quite difficult for the child of the symbolic period of culture to master. With the acquirement of these arbitrary means of indicating speech the child will have a new means of self-help altogether more wonderful than anything that he has before

learned. He will be able now to appeal from the oral and desultory statement or narrative to the printed page, which contains the well-considered and exhaustive results of all human experience near and remote. Once acquired, the child is emancipated from dependence on the leisure of others; he can now, at his own leisure, consult the experience of the race in so far as it exists in his language and in so far as he can master its special form of exposition.

(b) This must be done by individual industry, and is an ethical deed quite distinct from the work of the child in the kindergarten. The child now feels the impulse of duty. Self-subordination to reasonable tasks is no longer play. He has arrived at the transition from play to work. He can now begin to be responsible to authority for the performance of them. Here we have the contrast of play and work. In play the child exercises his caprice. He sees possibilities and transforms things according to his arbitrary will. In this he learns his own power, the power of his selfhood, and thereby develops his individuality. When he acts under the direction of another he does not realize what is peculiarly his own causal energy. It is not his ideal, but the ideal of another that he realizes.

(c) It is very important not to force on the child, in the symbolic stage of his culture-say from four to six years of age-the ideals of others in the details of his work, for that will produce arrested development, and he will not have the vivid sense of personality that he ought to have. The kindergarten method encourages spontaneity, and thus protects the fountains of his originality.

(d) At the age of seven years the average child begins to tire of mere caprice, having gained, through play, the essential development of his originality. It is now attracted toward work or the exercise of the will along the lines of rational activity, or prescribed by established authority. This is work. While the kindergarten should lay stress on the form of play, and give the child opportunity to develop his spontaneity, the primary school must

lay stress on the form of work, and lay down definite tasks for the pupil to perform by his own industry.

(e) By language the child rises from an animal individuality to a human individuality. By realizing his membership in society and conforming his deeds to the general standard, he develops a higher spiritual individuality. This, as we have seen, is the object of the kindergarten plays and games. When it is achieved, the method of play gives place to the method of work; the symbolic yields to the conventional; the kindergarten methods to the methods of the primary school. (See Dr. N. M. Butler, on The Meaning of Infancy and Education, Educational Review, 1897, p. 73.)

CHAPTER XXXVI.

Psychology of the Course of Study in Schools, Elementary, Secondary, and Higher.

§ 208. In the elementary course completed in the first eight years of school life (say from six to fourteen years of age) the pupil has acquired the conventional branches of common English. Reading, writing, arithmetic-the so-called "three R's' grammar, geography, and United States history, furnish him the necessary disciplines that enable him to take up the rudiments of human experience; they give him a mastery over the technical elements which enter the practical theories of human life.

(a) There are five windows of the soul, which open out upon five great divisions of the life of man. Two of these relate to man's comprehension and conquest over Nature, the realm of time and space. Arithmetic furnishes the survey of whatever has the form of time; all series and successions of individuals, all quantitative multiplicity being mastered by the aid of the art of reckoning. Through the geographical window of the soul the survey extends to organic and inorganic Nature. The surface of the earth, its concrete relations to man as his habitat and as the producer of his food, clothing, and shelter, and the means of intercommunication which unite the detached fragments of humanity into one grand man—all these important matters are introduced to the pupil through the study of geography, and spread out as a panorama before the second window of the soul.

(b) Three other departments or divisions of human life lie before the view. Human life is revealed in the history-civil, social, and religious-of peoples. The study of the history of one's native country in the elementary school opens the window of the soul which looks out upon the spectacle of the will power of his nation. In the language of a people are revealed the internal logical laws or structural framework of its intellect and the conscious realization of the mind of the race, as they appear in the vocabulary, grammatical laws, or syntax. Grammar opens to the child his view of the inner workings of the mind of the race, and helps him in so far to a comprehension of his own spiritual self. Literature, finally, is the most accessible, as well as the fullest and completest expression of the sentiments, opinions, and convictions of a people; of their ideals, longings, aspirations. The fifth window of the soul looks out upon this revelation of human nature through literature. The study of literature commences with the child's first reader, and continues through his school course, until he learns, by means of the selections from the poets and prose writers in the higher readers, the best and happiest expression for those supreme moments of life felt and described first by men of genius,