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influences combine at the present moment in favour of educational reform in a certain definite direction — the direction of what is sometimes called manual instruction.

First among these influences we might reckon the “Kindergarten” movement, tracing its descent from Fröbel, and through him, perhaps, from Rousseau, Schiller, and Goethe. The principle of this movement is, in Fröbel’s own words, to impart “a human education by the appropriate training of the productive or active impulses.” A fine and complete school on this principle — not a mere kindergarten — is Dr. Adler’s school in New York, which our technical commissioners refer to as based on a method of “creative” education.

The idea of calling into play the productive impulse was not in itself new — the teaching of Latin versifying might be defended on this ground — but in its application to manual work, and to the early training of children, it was practically a new departure. The kindergarten employments, especially Fröbel’s highest employment, clay-modelling, are closely akin to, and an excellent basis for, the kind of teaching which I am to discuss to-day.