[Illustration:  Photograph by Brown Bros.  Helping in the home tasks.  Wisely directed activity will teach the child both unselfishness and industry]

The working outfit of a child under school age may or may not include kindergarten or Montessori material.  Balls, blocks, pencils and paper, paste, colored crayons, scissors, a blackboard, a cart, a wheelbarrow, stout little garden tools, a sand tray or, better, in summer an outdoor sandpile, will furnish endless work and endless delight to a child or group of children.  It is not so much what sort of material we use as the way in which we use it.  Even at this age the child longs to be a producer, to “make things”; and his best development requires that we train this inclination.  There is a prevalent notion that women especially are no longer required to be producers and that all our energies should be bent toward the sole task of making them intelligent consumers.  There is, however, a joy in producing without which no life is really complete.  And no scheme of education can be a true success which ignores or neglects the necessity of producing.  The joy of work, the delight in achievement, should be the keynote of all industrial training.  This should be kept constantly in view.

To most people there is something wonderfully appealing about the innocence of the little child.  We watch with delight the marvelous development of the little mind keeping pace with the growth of bodily strength and dexterity.  We are reluctant to see the day drawing near when the child must begin his long course of training in school.  Sometimes we fail to recognize the fact that before school days come the child has already received a considerable part of his education; that the habits which will make or mar his future are often firmly implanted and in a fair way to become masters of the young life.  An elaborate plan for the little child’s training would probably be abandoned even if undertaken, since elaborate plans involve endless work.  If, however, we attempt no more than I have outlined in this chapter, we have some reasonable chance of success.  Given good health, with regular bodily habits, as a physical foundation, the child will have had much done for him if we have begun to build the habits of sympathy, self-control, industry, and service which will purify and sweeten the family relations of later years and make the one-time child worthy himself to undertake the important task of home building.

It is naturally a matter for regret that the teacher into whose hands the child comes first at school usually knows so little of the home training he has had or failed to have.  Children whose parents have made little or no attempt to teach these fundamental qualities which we have had under discussion are sometimes forever handicapped unless the teacher can supply the deficiency.  Children who have made a good beginning may lose much of what they have been taught unless the teacher recognizes