could roll on the floor and pursue on all fours. As early as two years
old he loves to take things out of boxes and to move objects about, so
boxes of bricks were supplied, graded in number and in variety of form.
Not for a moment did Froebel suggest that the child was to be limited to
these selected playthings, he expressly stated the contrary, and he
frequently said that spontaneity was not to be checked. But from what
has followed, from the way in which these little toys have been misused,
we are tempted to speculate on whether these "Gifts" supplied that
definite foundation without which, in these days, no notice would have
been taken of the new ideas, or whether they have proved the sunken
rock on which much that was valuable has perished. The world was not
ready to believe in the educational value of play, just pure play. Nor
is it yet. For the new system in its "didactic" apparatus out-Froebels
Froebel in his mistake of trying to systematise the material for
spontaneous education. Carefully planned, as were Froebel's own "gifts,"
the new apparatus presents a series of exercises in sense
discrimination, satisfying no doubt while unfamiliar, but suffering from
the defect of the "too finished and complex plaything," in which Froebel
saw a danger "which slumbers like a viper under the roses." The danger
is that "the child can begin no new thing with it, cannot produce enough
variety by its means; his power of creative imagination, his power of
giving outward form to his own ideas are thus actually deadened."

"To realise his aims, man, and more particularly the child, requires
material, though it be only a bit of wood or a pebble, with which he
makes something or which he makes into something. In order to lead the
child to the handling of material we give him the ball, the cube and
other bodies, the Kindergarten gifts. Each of these gifts incites the
child to free spontaneous activity, to independent movement."