Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/797

Rh I shall not speculate very long upon the material of babyhood. Clever men and women are at work upon this problem, and they have already made preliminary reports of the highest interest and value. Now that mothers have been enlisted in the work and have been encouraged to record observations made in their own nurseries, the data will doubtless grow apace, and soon lead to wider knowledge. I recently spent a morning at Miss Aborn's model kindergarten in Boston. The children were from three and a half years up to six. The drama was full of action, full of life, full of suggestion. When twelve o'clock came, and the little people marched out of the room, I felt very much as you do when the green curtain goes down at the theater, and the play is at an end. Teddy and George and Hazel and the rest remained very real figures in my thought for many days. The impression made by such practical studies as these is a double one. Looking at the children alone, the one great fact that absolutely forces itself upon your attention is their intense individuality. Each little person is a bundle of possibilities, but each bundle is so different! You can imagine no one process able to deal successfully with all of them, or indeed with any considerable number of them. You are face to face with the great fact of heredity, which can not be ignored and must not be belittled. Fate, or destiny, or Karma, or predestination, or whatever you choose to call it, accomplished more than half her work when the child was so born, and can well afford to hand him over ironically to the schoolmaster. Looking too steadily at this great fact robs one of hope. So much has been done and settled once for all, quite placed beyond the chance of our control, that it seems hardly worth while to work and struggle over what is left. Yet fate is not altogether unkind. The very persistence that baffles us, gives a permanence to the type which in a longer view is touched with promise.

And then, there is the other impression. Looking at the teacher and remembering that it is the outer world that is to react upon these little organisms, and noticing how completely she may control this outer world, and how skillfully she may direct its reactions, one is struck anew with the tremendous forces in the hands of education. In the kindergarten much more than in the elementary schools one finds a flexibility in the educational process that is a promise of high efficiency, for it not only allows for the intense individuality of each little person, but builds upon it. The direction of this constructive process will depend upon what we want at eighteen years, and this question of what we want is always pertinent, for in such an elaborate process as modern secondary education there is a certain inertia, and it seems unavoidable that much should come to be done that has no direct bearing upon what we now want. Familiarity dulls our power