Let those who labor, day by day, with inert minds never yet awakened to a wish for knowledge, a sense of beauty, or a feeling of pleasure in mental activity, tell us how much valuable school time they would save, if the raw material were thus prepared to their hand.  “After spending five or six years at home or in the street, without training or discipline, the child is sent to school and is expected to learn at once.  He looks upon the strange, new life with amazement, yet without understanding.  Finally, his mind becomes familiar in a mechanical manner, ill-suited to the tastes of a child, with the work and exercises of primary instruction, the consequence being, very often, a feeble body and a stuffed mind, the stuffing having very little more effect upon the intellect than it has upon the organism of a roast turkey.”  The kindergarten can remedy these intellectual difficulties, beside giving the child an impulse toward moral self-direction, and a capacity for working out his original ideas in visible and permanent form, which will make him almost a new creature.  It can, by taking the child in season, set the wheels in motion, rouse all his best, finest, and highest instincts, the purest, noblest, and most vivifying powers of which he is possessed.

There is a good deal of time spent in the kindergarten on the cultivation of politeness and courtesy; and in the entirely social atmosphere which is one of its principal features, the amenities of polite society can be better practiced than elsewhere.

The kindergarten aims in no way at making infant prodigies, but it aims successfully at putting the little child in possession of every faculty he is capable of using; at bringing him forward on lines he will never need to forsake; at teaching within his narrow range what he will never have to unlearn; and at giving him the wish to learn, and the power of teaching himself.  Its deep simplicity should always be maintained, and no lover of childhood or thoughtful teacher would wish it otherwise.  It is more important that it should be kept pure than that it should become popular.

I have tried, thus, somewhat at length, to demonstrate that our educational system cannot be perfect until we begin still earlier with the child, and begin in a more childlike manner, though, at the same time, earnestly and with definite purpose.  In trying to make manhood and womanhood, we sometimes treat children as little men and women, not realizing that the most perfect childhood is the best basis for strong manhood.

Further, I have tried to show that Froebel’s system gives us the only rational beginning; but I confess frankly that to make it productive of its vaunted results, it must be placed in the hands of thoroughly trained kindergartners, fitted by nature and by education for their most delicate, exacting, and sacred profession.

Now as to compromises.  The question is frequently asked, Cannot the best things of the kindergarten be introduced in the primary departments of the public school?  The best thing of kindergartening is the kindergarten itself, and nothing else will do; it would be necessary to make very material changes in the primary class which is to include a kindergarten—­changes that are demanded by radically different methods.