THE PHILOSOPHY OF MANUAL TRAINING. 773 



I shall not speculate very long upon the material of babyhood. 

 Clever men and women are at work upon this problem, and they have 

 already made preliminary reports of the highest interest and value. 

 Now that mothers have been enlisted in the work and have been en- 

 couraged to record observations made in their own nurseries, the data 

 will doubtless grow apace, and soon lead to wider knowledge. I re- 

 cently spent a morning at Miss Aborn's model kindergarten in Bos- 

 ton. The children were from three and a half years up to six. The 

 drama was full of action, full of life, full of suggestion. When 

 twelve o'clock came, and the little people marched out of the room, 

 I felt very much as you do when the green curtain goes down at the 

 theater, and the play is at an end. Teddy and George and Hazel and 

 the rest remained very real figures in my thought for many days. 

 The impression made by such practical studies as these is a double 

 one. Looking at the children alone, the one great fact that absolutely 

 forces itself upon your attention is their intense individuality. Each 

 little person is a bundle of possibilities, but each bundle is so differ- 

 ent! You can imagine no one process able to deal successfully with 

 all of them, or indeed with any considerable number of them. You 

 are face to face with the great fact of heredity, which can not be 

 ignored and must not be belittled. Fate, or destiny, or Karma, or pre- 

 destination, or whatever you choose to call it, accomjDlished more 

 than half her work when the child was so born, and can well afford 

 to hand him over ironically to the schoolmaster. Looking too stead- 

 ily at this great fact robs one of hope. So much has been done and 

 settled once for all, quite placed beyond the chance of our control, 

 that it seems hardly worth while to work and struggle over what is 

 left. Yet fate is not altogether mdvind. The very persistence that 

 baffles us, gives a permanence to the type which in a longer view is 

 touched with promise. 



And then, there is the other impression. Looking at the teacher 

 and remembering that it is the outer world that is to react upon these 

 little organisms, and noticing how completely she may control this 

 outer world, and how skillfully she may direct its reactions, one is 

 struck anew with the tremendous forces in the hands of education. 

 In the kindergarten much more than in the elementary schools one 

 finds a flexibility in the educational process that is a promise of high 

 efficiency, for it not only allows for the intense individuality of each 

 little person, but builds upon it. The direction of this constructive 

 process will depend upon what we want at eighteen years, and this 

 question of what we want is always pertinent, for in such an elaborate 

 process as modern secondary education there is a certain inertia, and 

 it seems unavoidable that much should come to be done that has no 

 direct bearing upon what we now want. Familiarity dull^ our power 



