We certainly want the help both of the trained nurse and of the motherly woman.  The trained nurse will be far more use in detecting and attending to the ailments of children than the teacher can be, and the motherly woman can give far more efficient help in training children to decent habits than any young probationer, useful though these may be.  But there is always the fear that the nurses may think that good food and cleanliness are all a child requires, and, as Miss M’Millan says, “The sight of the toddlers’ empty hands and mute lips does not trouble them at all.”

But every man to his trade, and though the teacher in charge must know something about ailing children, it is very doubtful if a few months in a hospital will advantage her much.  Here she trenches on the province of the real nurse, whose training is thorough, and the little knowledge, as every one knows, is sometimes dangerous.  One Nursery School teacher, with years of experience, says that what she learned in hospital has been of no use to her, and it is probable that attendance at a clinic for children would be really more useful.  Certainly the main concern of the Nursery School teacher is sympathetic understanding of children.  There must be no more of Punch’s “Go and see what Tommy is doing in the next room and tell him not to,” but “Go and see what Tommy is trying to accomplish, and make it possible for him to carry on his self-education through that ’fostering of the human instincts of activity, investigation and construction’ which constitutes a Kindergarten.”

CHAPTER V

“THE WORLD’S MINE OYSTER”

     A box of counters and a red-veined stone,
     A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
     And six or seven shells.

If early education, consist in fostering natural activities, there can be no doubt that Froebel hit upon the activity most prominent of all in the case of young children, viz. the impulse to investigate.  For his crest, the little child should share in the “motto given to the mongoose family, in Kipling’s Rikki-Tikki, ‘Run and find out.’”

Most writers on the education of young children have emphasised the importance of what is most inadequately called sense training, and it is here that Dr. Montessori takes her stand with her “didactic apparatus.”  Froebel’s ideas seem wider; he realises that the sword with which the child opens his oyster is a two-edged sword, that he uses not only his sense organs as tools for investigation, but his whole body.  His pathway to knowledge, and to power over himself and his surroundings, is action, and action of all kinds is as necessary to him as the use of his senses.

“The child’s first utterance is force,” says Froebel, and his first discovery is the resistance of matter, when he “pushes with his feet against what resists them.”  His first experiments are with his body, “his first toys are his own limbs,” and his first play is the use of “body, senses and limbs” for the sake of use, not for result.  One use of his body is the imitation of any moving object, and Froebel tells the mother: