Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/226

212 no reason for leaving the development of the executive powers to the conditions outside of school that does not apply with equal force to the culture of the receptive and reflective powers. Such a course would do away with schools altogether. There are two reasons that render the training of the executive powers of children absolutely essential in a complete education: First, the receptive and reflective powers are really useful to the individual and humanity only when they are made productive by executive ability; and, second, the training of the executive powers is the only way by which the receptive and reflective powers can be thoroughly cultivated. Nature's sequence is: Receive, reflect, use. The first two steps must be imperfect without the third. The kindergarten always completes the ascent; it never destroys the unity of the trinity.

The kindergarten makes children creative; or it is better to say that it preserves and utilizes their creative powers. Men and women were not intended to be mere imitators or servile followers of other men and women. They should be independent, original, creative. Man can not be creative as God is creative, but the divine in each human being gives him power to be and do what others have never been or done. There is something for each of us to discover and reveal; something for each to produce; something for each to add to the helpful agencies that serve to make man happier; something that will aid in the realization of the highest hopes of the heart of humanity. The kindergarten aims from the first to develop the truly productive more than the reproductive tendencies and talents of the child. It makes children not merely submissive and responsive, but suggestive, inventive, creative. The schools and universities will learn to do so in due time.

The discipline of the kindergarten is natural. It is based on love and executed by love. There is no heart whose feelings are not purified and ennobled by the consciousness of the love of another heart; no mind that is not aroused and stimulated to grander efl'ort by the full sympathy of another mind. The young heart yearns for the mother-love, and there is no other who could make so perfect a teacher as the mother of the child to be taught, if her education and her time were sufficient for the work. There will come a time when noble mothers will train great daughters and sons for humanity to a much greater extent than they do now. As women more clearly realize their powers and their responsibilities, it will be impossible to satisfy them with the society customs of semi-civilization. The social instinct has been terribly degraded. The period of its ennobling is at hand, when social unity shall in no sense be formalism. The kindergarten emphasizes the need of mother-love as an educational force. It does