Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/290

276 first trial, and what by perseverance and contrivance. The child is naturally always outgrowing his playthings, always exhausting the possibilities of a given object to symbolize occupations and deeds of grown-up humanity about him. Were the child to arrest his development and linger contented over a doll or hobbyhorse, the result would be lamentable. Hence unmaking is as important as making, destructive energy is as essential to him as power of construction—a point often missed by kindergartners who have not penetrated Froebel's inner connection. This ideal of play material is realized in his gifts. Play must be purified by rational insight. From insight into the deep meaning that lies hid in childish play, there is but a step to its use in education. The manifold errors of kindergartners can be avoided only by clear insight into Froebel's aim—development of creative activity—and his kindergarten gifts are the practical response to the cravings of childhood. Rousseau's idea of atomism is criticised in contradistinction to Gliedganzes—"member whole"—man as a self-determined individual yet a constituent of a social whole. This, Dr. Harris says, "is undoubtedly the deepest and most fruitful idea in the philosophy of education, and the key to the practical work of Froebel—the source of that symbolism which is his most original contribution to educational science. . . . Rousseau's significance in education lay in opposing established institutions. He failed to see the revelation of human nature in social combination and thus missed education's chief aim. His Émile (Appletons') made educators recognize the sacredness of childhood. Its study is necessary to explain Pestalozzi, Froebel, etc."

Important considerations are offered in opposition to Rousseau's suggestions concerning exercising the senses and restraining the mind's activity. To develop quick perception, it is necessary not only to exercise the senses but to increase the pupil's stock of general ideas, and thus illuminate the mind that uses the senses. Environment and absorption of ideas from harmonious surroundings follow as important in child-education.

Pestalozzi is quoted as having struck the keynote of educational reform: "Nature develops all the powers of humanity by exercising them; they increase with use." Misuse is not use—not all exercising is developing. "The child that walks too soon deforms its legs." Exercise must be proportioned to strength to increase strength. Remarks upon education dealing with powers only as they become explicit are exceptionally strong. "Notwithstanding all that has been said and written, we still make knowledge our idol, and continue to fill the child's mind with foreign material, under the gratuitous assumption that at a later age he will be able, through some magic transubstantiation, to make it a vital part of his own thought. This is like loading his stomach with food which he can not digest under the delusive hope that he may be able to digest it when he is a man. . . . But glaring as are our sins of commission they pale before our sins of omission, for, while we are forcing upon the child's mind knowledge which has no roots in his experience, or calling on him to exercise still dormant powers, we refuse any aid to his spontaneous struggle to do and learn and be that which his stage of development demands."

This book is emphatically one for mothers, as it presents the subject of early child-training in a thoroughly practical manner.

leading and principal article in the first number of this periodical, January, 1894, is the presidential address of Prof. George T. Ladd before the New York meeting of the American Psychological Association, in which, while the science of psychology is confessed to be embryonic in its present stage, it is claimed that more opportunity is afforded on that account for students and investigators to contribute something important to its more stable and higher evolution. Three classes of inquiries are suggested, embracing the relation in which the statistical and experimental investigations stand to the total science of psychology, the relation in which the science stands to what we call