roach to the perfect beginning which we
have yet found.

We see in the excellence of Froebel's idea, educationally considered,
its only claim to peculiar power in dealing with incipient hoodlumism.
It is only because it has such unusual fitness to child-nature, such a
store of philosophy and ingenuity in its appliances, and such a wealth
of spiritual truth in its aims and methods, that it is so great a
power with neglected children and ignorant and vicious parents.

The principles on which Froebel built his educational idea may be
summed up briefly under four heads. First, All the faculties of the
child are to be drawn out and exercised as far as age allows. Second,
The powers of habit and association, which are the great instruments
of all education, of the whole training of life, must be developed
with a systematic purpose from the earliest dawn of intelligence.
Third, The active instincts of childhood are to be cultivated through
manual exercise (chiefly creative in character), which is made an
essential part of the training, and this manual exercise is to be
valued chiefly as a means of self-expression. Fourth, The senses are
to be trained to accuracy as well as the hand. The child must learn
how to observe what is placed before him, and to observe it truly, an
acquirement which any teacher of science or art will appreciate. To
work out these principles, Froebel devised his practical method of
infant education, and the very name he gave to the place where his
play lessons were to be used marks his purpose. No books are to be
seen in a kindergarten, because no ideas or facts are presented to the
child that he cannot clearly understand and verify. The object is not
to teach him arithmetic or geometry, though he learns enough of both
to be very useful to him hereafter; but to lead him to discover
_truths_ concerning forms and numbers, lines and angles, for himself.

Thus in the play-lessons the teacher simply rules the order in which
the child shall approach a new thing, and gives him the correct
names which, henceforth, he must always use; but the observation of
resemblances and differences (that groundwork of all knowledge), the
reasoning from one point to another, and the conclusions he arrives
at, are all his own; he is only led to see his mistake if he makes
one. The child handles every object from which he is taught, and
learns to reproduce it.

It is not enough to say that any ordinary system of object teach