DISCUSSION OF MRS. COOPER'S PAPER BY MRS. CAROLINE M. SEVERANCE OF CALIFORNIA.

I have but a few words to say, but they are very practical. Having accepted the value of the kindergarten, as you do to-night by being present, the next questions are: "Why should we try to make the kindergarten a part of the public-school system, and how shall we do it?" The public-school system now is arranged only for the very poor or for the very rich, for those who can pay high prices or for those who will send their children to the free kindergarten; but our hope is to get the kindergartens into the public schools, in order that all classes and who need them more than the poorer classes? — can be sent there, and that the children may be kept entirely free from dogmatie theology and know only the Heavenly Father, and rejoice in his sunshine and air, and in his blessings, and later there will be time enough to learn of the miserable theology that we have.

DISCUSSION OF MRS. COOPER'S PAPER BY REV. MILA FRANCES TUPPER OF MICHIGAN.

About the time that America was arousing to its sense of new responsibility toward its individual people, evinced by the battle of Bunker Hill and the following battles, a man of unique personality in Germany was trying a series of strangely unsuccessful experiments in dealing with little children. The era of Pestalozzi and that of our American Revolution cover about the same period. I have always been glad that this was true; it seems to me that unless this developing human race learns how to develop itself by the very best means in the world, that experiment. inaugurated a century ago would necessarily be a failure. You know the reason humanity is so very much better than other forms of evolving life is that it has reached. the stage where it can look back over its progress

and find the means whereby it has developed; it uses the laws that are found in that development; it takes the younger, weaker portions of the race in its arms and lifts them according to the same laws whereby men find that they themselves have been elevated. In other words, humanity's evolution now is deliberate consciousness, and that is all that the science and philosophy of education means-finding out its laws, making the most of them, and helping those who have not so far had the best help. We hear people ask: "Do we believe in the kindergarten?” I wonder sometimes whether we might not just as well ask: Do we believe in trying to develop the little human beings that come into the world, and do we believe in education or cultivation at all?" The kindergarten system is not anything that is hide-bound, nothing that is settled into stereotyped forms, at all. It is simply the name now given to the best means that have been discovered so far for the systematic development of the little members of the human race, those who are beginning life. One hundred years from now the system may have developed vastly different methods; its spirit may have become more enlightened; its vision cleared so that we may scarcely recognize the method; but it will be the same system, because, starting with the careful observation of individuals, it found the laws of development among children. Well-nigh every town and every school board will claim economy as the motive for keeping kindergartens out of the public school. I would urge that they be placed in the public schools because of their economy. We waste in this broad land of ours the most valuable years of the children's lives. Two or three years prior to the time when a child usually enters the public schools could be used to vastly greater advantage than any of the later years. In the boat races at colleges, months before they begin to drill on the lake they begin to drill in the gymnasium, getting the muscles in trim and getting the general system in order; and so the kindergarten would get the whole system and

nature of the child into good condition, so that when the alphabet and the number lessons came the children would be ready for them, developed in eye and ear and other faculties.

We now scarcely realize what an obstruction these studies are to the children. The teacher is burdened by undisciplined children, so that things that ought to be learned in a few months take years, so that the science has to be left for the high school, and things that might easily come with the readiness of a child's memory have to be put away off where the period of generalization comes. We could have years more, as far as actual results are concerned, if we would begin at an earlier time. And this does not mean that the child is to be overtrained that is, its mind developed too rapidly. It is done in a natural fashion, so that the child is always better for it.

Now, in regard to the industrial problem, I was glad of what was said in the original paper in regard to the need of equalizing the advantages. Oh, it is pitiful in this world of ours that so many people never know what it is to enjoy the beauties of life, the finer, softer, and more finished things the things that really give the reasons for life — and if we could in this way take these little hobblers off the street and put into their souls a love of the beautiful, it would never depart from them. Do you think of any insanity greater than to leave on our city streets children of the ages from three to six utterly without training, when the same amount of time, from thirteen to sixteen, has to be put into the shop? Most children have to leave school at the early age of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen. If we could only utilize these years that they have lost in this earlier part of their life, how much more just would it be! There is another phase that always attracts me more than the kindergarten itself, and that is the training school that must inevitably go with the kindergarten. I believe the time will come when it will be considered a great lack in the education of every girl not to have had a training in

the principles of child-development and child-culture. The time will come when it will be equally necessary that every man should have the same training, that every human being that has any kind of relationship with little children in the world should have systematic and careful training for that relationship. If in every school in the city there was a kindergarten there would necessarily be in the high school a training school for kindergartners. This training school would send out into the world every year young women who were trained— young women who for many months had had their attention directed to the fundamental laws of psychology, and all the various things that have to do with the development of tender, tiny child-life. If any one of you has given any thought to this matter, or been associated with many mothers, have you not seen them violate at almost every turn some fundamental law, not only of psychology, but of morals?

In a thousand instances we lose the higher and more delicate distinctions of morality in dealing with children, and such violations could scarcely be if for even three months in the high school a girl's thought had been directed in these channels.

The kindergarten must be eventually in our public schools, because every year of our life must be used to the best advantage; we can not let grow up to weeds those precious years, most precious of all in the home. It is needed in the public school because it will inevitably bring about that cycle of training whereby the mothers will be trained as well as the children. It will help to prepare us for that day, which I hope another generation at least will see, when every one will have leisure enough in some way to live really as a human being. So it will help on the reign that is to come when our industrial system is in a little better shape, and so we shall have developed human beings as well as grinding labor-machines. It will, more than all, tend to give throughout all humanity that sense of rever

ence for human life, that reverence for the little blossoming buds of the world, which if once in our souls will make us reverence every human being; and it will fit us for the coming of that day "wherein reigneth righteousness."

THE KINDERGARTEN AND THE PRIMARY SCHOOL--ADDRESS BY MISS N. CROPSEY, SUPERINTENDENT OF PRIMARY INSTRUCTION IN THE INDIANAPOLIS PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

A system of education is inspired by the philosophical and moral ideas of the time. More than one man must give consent to its general fundamental notions before doctrines can grow into systems of practice. A system of education is the consequence of all that we believe. It forms the present, and is formed by our ideals of what man should be. The doctrines taught by Froebel have universal application. The primary school and all education of our time, kindergarten and university, should be based upon Froebel's theory of the education of man, because it is a comprehensive philosophy of human life. It does not differ from the thought of other great philosophers. Rosmini, Froebel's great contemporary in Italy, applies to education the same doctrines. We receive them now because we are coming to realize unity. The individual does not stand unrelated to the whole; nor is he to be broken and unrelated to himself, but whole and efficient.

It is impossible in a short discussion to trace the development of educational thought. We may only repeat a few of the great names which have made the kindergarten and the primary school of our time possible: Plato, Plutarch, Luther. To the Greek thought of harmonious development we must return. Greece has given us typical forms in art, in deeds, in thought-ideals which must produce different results, under new conditions, it is true. With the name of Luther the primary school begins.

Rousseau, in 1778, was the protestant against the mean