Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/223

Rh development of children in different parts of the world. The new era has begun.

In the kindergarten the child's spontaneity is respected. He is not guided too much. He is allowed to work out, with the material given him, the plans, the designs, the problems, that arise in his own mind. The kindergarten dictates plans, designs, or problems to him only so far as may be necessary to help his mind to recognize new conceptions. He never has a lesson in which he is a follower or an imitator all the time. The idea that he should produce a result similar to his neighbor's is never presented to him. He is trained to depend on his own mind for the plan or design, and for its execution. Nature's plan before the child goes to school is to let him find his own problems. His greatest mental power is the ability to recognize in the material world by which he is surrounded the new things he has not seen before and the new problems he does not understand. If he has the privilege of growing up among the beauties of natural life, if the trees and flowers, and birds and butterflies, and bees and crickets, are his companions, if he has sand and stones and sticks for his playthings, there are few of the problems of science and material philosophy that do not present themselves to his mind. He solves thousands of them unaided, and brings those that are too deep for him to his mother or father, or most sympathetic older friend. These problems are not forced upon his mind by any external agency, they lie all around his path awaiting recognition by his mind. The recognition comes under such conditions exactly at the right moment, when the mind is ready to deal with the problem. No wonder that, under such conditions, knowledge is acquired and mental power defined and developed so rapidly. But when the child goes to school all these conditions are absolutely reversed. The teacher finds the problems and brings them to the child. Worse than this, the problems are those that suggest themselves to the teacher's mind and not the child's. Such problems can not be appropriate for the child. The problems suitable for one child can not be the best for other children at the same time. No mind but the child's own can decide the character of the problems suited to its present condition of development. Mind-growth can be dwarfed in no other way so completely as by the presentation of unsuitable problems. Loss of interest and loss of power, negation instead of positivity, indifference in place of aggressive wonderment, must follow when the child is forced to deal with problems that are not in harmony with his mental development.

One of the greatest improvements in school-teaching will be the placing of the children in such conditions that they may find their own problems. In the kindergarten this is the foundation