If the child is unruly in play, he leaves the circle and sits or stands by himself, a miserable, lonely unit until he feels again in sympathy with the community.  If he destroys his work, he unites the tattered fragments as best he may, and takes the moral object lesson home with him.  If he has neglected his own work, he is not given the joy of working for others.  If he does not work in harmony with his companions, a time is chosen when he will feel the sense of isolation that comes from not living in unity with the prevailing spirit of good will.  He can have as much liberty as is consistent with the liberty of other people, but no more.  If we could infuse the spirit of this kind of discipline into family and school life, making it systematic and continuous from the earliest years, there would be fewer morally “slack-twisted” little creatures growing up into inefficient, bloodless manhood and womanhood.  It would be a good deal of trouble; but then, life is a good deal of trouble anyway, if you come to that.  We cannot expect to swallow the universe like a pill, and travel on through the world “like smiling images pushed from behind.”

Blind obedience to authority is not in itself moral.  It is necessary as a part of government.  It is necessary in order that we may save children dangers of which they know nothing.  It is valuable also as a habit.  But I should never try to teach it by the story of that inspired idiot, the boy who “stood on the burning deck, whence all but him had fled,” and from whence he would have fled if his mental endowment had been that of ordinary boys.  For obedience must not be allowed to destroy common sense and the feeling of personal responsibility for one’s own actions.  Our task is to train responsible, self-directing agents, not to make soldiers.

Virtue thrives in a bracing moral atmosphere, where good actions are taken rather as a matter of course.  The attempt to instill an idea of self-government into the tiny slips of humanity that find their way into the kindergarten is useful, and infinitely to be preferred to the most implicit obedience to arbitrary command.  In the one case, we may hope to have, some time or other, an enlightened will and conscience struggling after the right, failing often, but rising superior to failure, because of an ever stronger joy in right and shame for wrong.  In the other, we have a “good goose” who does the right for the picture card that is set before him,—­a “trained dog” sort of child, who will not leap through the hoop unless he sees the whip or the lump of sugar.  So much for the training of the sense of right and wrong!  Now for the provision which the kindergarten makes for the growth of certain practical virtues, much needed in the world, but touched upon all too lightly in family and school.