All selfish conduct, all rudeness and roughness come from ignorance; we are all more or less self-centred, and the child’s consciousness of self has to be widened, his scope has to be enlarged to sympathy with the thoughts, feelings and desires of other selves.  “The sane man is the man who (however limited the scope of his behaviour) has no such suppression incorporated in him.  The wise man must be sane and must have scope as well."[20]

[Footnote 19:  The Freudian Wish, Edwin Holt.]

[Footnote 20:  The Freudian Wish, Edwin Holt.]

Professor Earl Barnes always used to describe the child mind as “scrappy.”  How can we best aid development into the wholeness or healthiness and the scope of sanity and wisdom?  For it may well be that this widening and ordering of experience, of consciousness, of behaviour into moral behaviour is our most important task as teachers.  Froebel emphasised the “crying need” for connection of school and life, pointing out how the little child desires to imitate and the older to share in all that, as Professor Dewey puts it, is “surcharged with a sense of the mysterious values that attach to whatever their elders are concerned with.”  This is one of the points to which Professor Dewey called attention in his summing up of Froebel’s educational principles, this letting the child reproduce on his own plane the typical doings and occupations of the larger, maturer society into which he is finally to go forth.

It is in this connection that he says the Kindergarten teacher has the opportunity to foster that most important “sense of continuity.”  In simple reproduction of the home life while there is abundant variety, since daily life may bring us into contact with all the life of the city or of the country, yet, because the work is within a whole, “there is opportunity to foster that sense which is at the basis of attention and of all intellectual growth, a sense of continuity.”

Since Professor Dewey gave to the world the results of his experimental school, all the Kindergartens and most of the Infant Schools in England have tried to carry out their accustomed reproduction of home surroundings, more or less on the lines of the Primary Department of his experimental school.  They have extended their scope, and in addition to the material already taken from workman and shop, from garden and farm, have also with much profit to older children used his suggestions about primitive industries.

Reproduction of home surroundings can be done in many ways, one of which is to help the children to furnish and to play with a doll’s house.  But the play must be play.  It is not enough to use the drama as merely offering suggestions for handwork, and one small doll’s house does not allow of real play for more than one or two children.