end of the skein nearest to
our hand, and patiently endeavor to straighten the tangled threads.

The kindergarten starts out plainly with the assumption that the moral
aim in education is the absolute one, and that all others are purely
relative. It endeavors to be a life-school, where all the practices of
complete living are made a matter of daily habit. It asserts boldly
that doing right would not be such an enormously difficult matter if
we practiced it a little,--say a tenth as much as we practice the
piano,--and it intends to give children plenty of opportunity for
practice in this direction. It says insistently and eternally, "Do
noble things, not dream them all day long." For development, action is
the indispensable requisite. To develop moral feeling and the power
and habit of moral doing we must exercise them, excite, encourage, and
guide their action. To check, reprove, and punish wrong feeling and
doing, however necessary it be for the safety and harmony, nay, for
the very existence of any social state, does not develop right feeling
and good doing. It does not develop anything, for it stops action,
and without action there is no development. At best it stops wrong
development, that is all.

In the kindergarten, the physical, mental, and spiritual being
is consciously addressed at one and the same time. There is no
"piece-work" tolerated. The child is viewed in his threefold
relations, as the child of Nature, the child of Man, and the child
of God; there is to be no disregarding any one of these divinely
appointed relations. It endeavors with equal solicitude to instill
correct and logical habits of thought, true and generous habits of
feeling, and pure and lofty habits of action; and it asserts serenely
that, if information cannot be gained in the right way, it would
better not be gained at all. It has no special hobby, unless you would
call its eternal plea for the all-sided development of the child a
hobby.

Somebody said lately that the kindergarten people had a certain stock
of metaphysical statements to be aired on every occasion, and that
they were over-fond of prating about the "being" of the child. It
would hardly seem as if too much could be said in favor of the
symmetrical growth of the child's nature. These are not mere "silken
phrases;" but, if any one dislikes them, let him take the good,
honest, ringing charge of Colonel Parker, "Remember that the whole boy
goes to school!"

Yes, the whol