340 , State Horticultural Society. 



nish to its boys elementary tool work during the seventh and eighth years 

 of their school life and to every girl of the same grade either the same as 

 the boys get or the elements of needle work, plain sewing and tidy house- 

 keeping." He further says: "It is scarcely sixty years since Froebcl 

 organized his little children's garden, yet the kindergarten is now well 

 established in every progressive community. The watchwords of tb.e 

 kindergarten, unity, continuity, self-activity, freedom, characterize the 

 new education from first to last. They really cover all that has been done 

 in Nature Study, Sloyd, Manual Training and in the laboratory methods 

 of higher education." 



The late lamented Dr. Hinsdale of the Michigan University said a 

 short time before his death, "Nature lessons and literature are pre- 

 sented to the child while his faculties of observation and imagination 

 are quick and active and his curiosity is alert. Lessons of a more 

 abstract character as grammar and theoretical arithmetic are held in 

 reserve until his powers of reflection are more fully developed, i. e., 

 to the seventh and eighth grades." 



The studious and scholarly Dr. John Dewey of the Chicago Univer- 

 sity, speaking of these subjects, says, "We learn from books only as 

 they are related to experience ; but the ordinary school has been so set 

 apart, so isolated from the ordinary conditions and motives of life that 

 the place where the children are sent for discipline is the one place in 

 the world where it is most difficult to get experience, the mother of all 

 discipline worth the name. The occupations supply the child with a gen- 

 uine motive. They give him experience at first hand. They bring him 

 into contact with realities. Plato speaks of the slave as one who in his 

 actions does not express his own ideas but those of some other man. The 

 introduction of active occupations, of Nature Study, of Elementary 

 Science, of Art, of History, the relegation of the merely formal to a sec- 

 ondary position, the introduction of more active experimentation and self- 

 directing factors, all these are not mere accidents. They are necessities 

 of the larger social organization. The child comes to the traditional 

 school with a healthy body and a more or less unwilling mind. He does 

 not bring both his body and his mind with him. He has to leave his mind 

 behind because there is no way to use it in the school. If he had a purely 

 abstract mind he could bring it to school with him ; but his is a concrete 

 mind, interested in concrete things and unless these things get over into 

 school life he can not keep his mind wath him." 



My friends, these witnesses can not be ignored. These are men 

 who are living for the highest purposes. They are living where the din 

 of combat is most intense. They are practical men. They are scholarly 



