masses of instruction that were not to be found in the schools of the
past. The school has reached downward and taken over, systematized, and
on the whole, I think, improved that preliminary training of the senses
and the observation that was once left to the spontaneous activity of
the child among its playmates and at home. The kindergarten department
of a school is a thing added to the old conception of schooling, a
conversion of the all too ample school hours to complete and rectify
the work of the home, to make sure of the foundation of sense
impressions and elementary capabilities upon which the edifice of
schooling is to rise. In America it has grown, as a wild flower
transferred to the unaccustomed richness of garden soil will sometimes
do, rankly and in relation to the more essential schooling,
aggressively, and become a highly vigorous and picturesque weed. One
must bear in mind that Froebel's original thought was rather of the
mother than of the schoolmistress, a fact the kindergarten invaders of
the school find it convenient to forget. I believe we shall be carrying
out his intentions as well as the manifest dictates of common sense if
we do all in our power by means of simply and clearly written books for
nurses and mothers to shift very much of the kindergarten back to home
and playroom and out of the school altogether. Correlated with this
development, there has been a very great growth in our schools of what
is called manual training and of the teaching of drawing. Neither of
these subjects entered into the school idea of any former period, so
far as my not very extensive knowledge of educational history goes.

Modern, too, is the development of efficient mathematical teaching; so
modern that for too many schools it is still a thing of tomorrow. The
arithmetic (without Arabic numerals, be it remembered) and the geometry
of the mediaeval quadrivium were astonishingly clumsy and ineffectual
instruments in comparison with the apparatus of modern mathematical