372 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION.
Only this I will say, at last : As nature gives the young duck the ele-
ment of water for swimming, so Froebel in his kindergarten provides the
child with suitable material, so that he is enabled to give his ideas an ex-
ternal form, a body by the work of his hand. Thus his mind is strength-
ened through perception by the senses, through intuition and observation
of good, beautiful, and true things. Froebel’s kindergarten method con-
sists in this, that the child, by means of forming and shaping in free self-
activity, learns to seek, find, and invent, and is enabled to elaborate through
this activity, which corresponds to his nature, his individuality. and his
seculiar character.
Thus Froebel has become, through the representative idea, the true
artist among pedagogues. The “A B C of activity,” which Pestalozzi
looked for but did not find, Froebel has added to the ancient German
and to Pestalozzi’s representative school. Thus for all the time in which
children shall be educated, as long as learning and teaching survive, the
intuitive learning and teaching will be maintained. Froebel’s system of
representation as a necessary completion makes possible an all-sided, har-
monious, developing, educating human culture, and this will be in the
ture time the true aim of teachers and educators.
PREVENTION OF CRIMINAL IDLENESS.
BY MISS EMMA MARWEDEL.*®
IT seems almost unnecessary to urge the educational value of labor
sefore a body which has considered this problem for years.
Philosophy, science, and experience force the educators of the nineteenth
century to recognize the reciprocal relation existing between mental and
bodily activity, a fact which brings bodily activity at once into the curric-
1lum of the school, especially in a government by the people, for the
people, which must rise or fall according to the mental and bodily condi-
tion of the people. .
The work accomplished by the American nation shows gigantic concen-
iration of cosmopolitan energies. What wonder that the children are
born with the highest degree of bodily activity ? Yet, strange to say, in
spite of this inborn activity, the American baby is very quiet. The rea-
son for this seems to be that the first settlers having very little time to
spare, the American baby was consequently more left without tovs, and is
* Miss Emma Marwedel established an industrial art school for women at Hamburg, Germany, in 1867.
She came to this country in 1872, and opened the first kindergarten in Washington, D. C. In 1876 she
founded the first kindergarten normal school at Los Angeles, Cal. For several years past she had been
sngaged in kindergarten work in San Francisco, Cal., where she died November 17, 1893. Although
nearly seventy-five years old, she continued her active labors almost to the time of her death.
