lead?” The ideal which guides the teacher is the child’s best self as she can interpret him.  This ideal will be higher and larger than the child himself can know.  In the manipulation of subject-matter, through the practical application of principles, the artist aims to have the child awake, inquire, plan, and act, so that under her influences he grows by what he thinks, by what he feels, by what he chooses, and by what he achieves.

Teaching will be good art when the child’s growth is a perfect fit to the uses of his life, when subject-matter brings to him influences he needs and can use.  Teaching will be good art when it breaks up old habits, starts new ones, strengthens good traits, and weakens bad ones; when it gives a new attitude of cheerfulness in life or of thoughtfulness for others or of reason in all things.  It will be good art when under it the child wants to do something and learns how to do it.  Teaching will be great art when under it the child continually attains self-activity, self-development, and self-consciousness, when he continually grows so that he may finally contribute his utmost portion to the highest evolution of the race.  Teaching will be great art when it touches the emotions of the child,—­when history calls forth a warm indignation against wrong, when mathematics strengthens a noble love of truth or literature creates a strong satisfaction in justice.  This is the poetry of teaching, because mere subject-matter becomes a criticism of life.  Teaching will be great art when you, the teacher, through the humble means of your presentation of subject-matter, furnish the child at the same time with ideas, perceptions, and opinions which are your personal criticism of life.  Teaching will be great art when you, the teacher, have worked up into your own character a portion of life which is of value, so that the child coming in touch with you knows an influence more powerful than anything you can do or say.  Teaching will then awaken in the child a social relation of abiding confidence, of secure trust, of faith unshakable.  And this relation will then create for the teacher the obligation to keep this trust inviolable, to practice daily, noblesse oblige.  Teaching will be great art when with the subject-matter the artist gives love, a great universal kindness that thinks not of itself but, being no respecter of persons, looks upon each child in the light of that child’s own best realization.  This penetrating sympathy, this great understanding, will call forth from the child an answering love, which grows daily into a larger humanity of soul until the child, in time too, comes to have a universal sympathy.  This is the true greatness of teaching.  This it is which brings the child into harmony with the Divine love which speaks in all God’s handiwork and brings him into that unity with God which is the mystery of Froebel’s teaching.