The kindergarten should offer the child experience instead of instruction; life instead of learning; practical child-life, a miniature world, where he lives and grows, and learns and expands.  No primary teacher, were she Minerva herself, can work out Froebel’s idea successfully with sixty or seventy children under her sole care.

You will see for yourselves that this simple, natural, motherly instruction of babyhood cannot be transplanted bodily into the primary school, where the teacher has fifty or sixty children who are beyond the two most fruitful years which the kindergarten demands.  Besides, the teachers of the lower grades cannot introduce more than an infinitesimal number of kindergarten exercises, and at the same time keep up their full routine of primary studies and exercises.

Any one who understands the double needs of the kindergarten and primary school cannot fail to see this matter correctly, and as I said before, we do not want a few kindergarten exercises, we want the kindergarten.  If teachers were all indoctrinated with the spirit of Froebel’s method, they would carry on its principles in dealing with pupils of any age; but Froebel’s kindergarten, pure and simple, creates a place for children of four or five years, to begin their bit of life-work; it is in no sense a school, nor must become so, or it would lose its very essence and truest meaning.

Let me show you a kindergarten!  It is no more interesting than a good school, but I want you to see the essential points of difference:—­

It is a golden morning, a rare one in a long, rainy winter.  As we turn into the narrow, quiet street from the broader, noisy one, the sound of a bell warns us that we are near the kindergarten building....  A few belated youngsters are hurrying along,—­some ragged, some patched, some plainly and neatly clothed, some finishing a “portable breakfast” thrust into their hands five minutes before, but all eager to be there....  While the Lilliputian armies are wending their way from the yard to their various rooms, we will enter the front door and look about a little.

The windows are wide open at one end of the great room.  The walls are tinted with terra cotta, and the woodwork is painted in Indian red.  Above the high wood dado runs a row of illuminated pictures of animals,—­ducks, pigeons, peacocks, calves, lambs, colts, and almost everything else that goes upon two or four feet; so that the children can, by simply turning in their seats, stroke the heads of their dumb friends of the meadow and barnyard....  There are a great quantity of bright and appropriate pictures on the walls, three windows full of plants, a canary chirping in a gilded cage, a globe of gold-fish, an open piano, and an old-fashioned sofa, which is at present adorned with a small scrap of a boy who clutches a large slate in one hand, and a mammoth lunch-pail in the other....  It is his first day, and he looks as if his big brother had told him that he would be “walloped” if he so much as winked.