To Froebel, life, action, and knowledge were the three notes of one harmonious chord; but he did not advocate manual training merely that children might be kept busy, nor even that technical skill might be acquired.  The piece of finished kindergarten work is only a symbol of something more valuable which the child has acquired in doing it.

The first steps in all the kindergarten occupations are directed or suggested by the teacher; but these dictations or suggestions are merely intended to serve as a sort of staff, by which the child can steady himself until he can walk alone.  It is always the creative instinct that is to be reached and vivified:  everything else is secondary.  By reproduction from memory of a dictated form, by taking from or adding to it, by changing its centre, corners, or sides,—­by a dozen ingenious preliminary steps,—­the child’s inventive faculty is developed; and he soon reaches a point in drawing, building, modeling, or what not, where his greatest delight is to put his individual ideas into visible shape.  The simple request, “Make something pretty of your own,” brings a score of original combinations and designs,—­either the old thoughts in different shape or something fresh and audacious which hints of genius.  Instead of twenty hackneyed and slavish copies of one pattern, we have twenty free, individual productions, each the expression of the child’s inmost personal thought.  This invests labor with a beauty and power, and confers upon it a dignity, to be gained in no other way.  It makes every task, however lowly, a joy, because all the higher faculties are brought into action.  Much so-called “busy work,” where pupils of the “A class” are allowed to stick a thousand pegs in a thousand holes while the “B class” is reciting arithmetic, is quite fruitless, because it has so little thought behind it.

Unless we have a care, manual training, when we have succeeded in getting it into the school, may become as mechanical and unprofitable as much of our mind training has been, and its moral value thus largely missed.  The only way to prevent it is to borrow a suggestion from Froebel.  Then, and only then, shall we have insight with power of action, knowledge with practice, practice with the stamp of individuality.  Then doing will blossom into being, and “Being is the mother of all the little doings as well as of the grown-up deeds and heroic sacrifices.”

The kindergarten succeeds in getting these interesting and valuable free productions from children of four or five years only by developing, in every possible way, the sense of beauty and harmony and order.  We know that people assume, somewhat at least, the color of their surroundings; and, if the sense of beauty is to grow, we must give it something to feed upon.