en: if so
regarded, they are not intelligently used by the teacher. Their purpose
is to stimulate intelligent individual effort, to furnish training of
the senses of sight and touch, to promote accurate co-ordination of hand
movements with sense impressions, and, not least important, to implant a
habit of obedience."

"Formal teaching, even by means of Kindergarten Occupations, is
undesirable for children under five. At this stage it is sufficient to
give the child opportunity to use his senses freely. To attempt formal
teaching will almost inevitably mean, with some of the children, either
restraint or over-stimulation, with constant danger to mental growth and
health."[36]

From these extracts from the _Suggestions for the Consideration of
Teachers_ of the Head of the English Board of Education, it will be
evident that the spirit of the "Kindergarten" now largely enters into
the curriculum of the infant classes. In the future we may hope to see
it carried further and that no formal teaching of the child will be
undertaken during the first six years of his life. Further, we may hope
to see in the future the infant departments of our schools more
thoroughly organised than they are at present on the Kindergarten
principle, and the curriculum of the Infant School so devised that it
shall fit into and pave the way for the curriculum of the Elementary
School. For at the earlier stage much may be done by the methods of the
Kindergarten to lay the basis for the teaching of the arts of reading,
writing, and arithmetic which it is the main business of the Primary
School to lead the child to acquire. _E.g._, at the earlier stage, by
the breaking up and reconstructing of concrete groups of things, the
child can be initiated into the meaning of a number system. By means of
pictures and of concrete forms he can be made gradually acquainted with
alphabetic forms, and this teaching lays the basis for the future
acquisition of the abstract symbols of printed and written words.

But while much has been done in England to recognise the importance of
the early education of the child for the after moral and social good
both of the individual and of the community, and to place the
instruction of the infant classes in the Public Elementary Schools upon
a rational basis, little attention has been paid in Scotland to this
subject. As a rule, children in that country do not enter school before
the age of five, and there is no separate provi