328 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION.
We shall never have clear, strong thinking in the boys and girls in our
schoolrooms until we have given them materials to make thought of.
Words do not feed the whole being of the child ; and if this entity is not
rightly nourished, the youth and maiden will find, when the day of reck-
oning comes, that the bank account has been overdrawn.
[t is a common thing to hear parents say : ‘I want my child to learn to
read early, so that he can amuse himself.” I wonder if they realize what
it means, in this day, to keep this reading wholesome! Do you know how
a child who loves to read devours everything that comes in his way ? His
taste for good reading is often vitiated before we realize it. It is of vital
importance, therefore, that our children have their eyes opened to nature
and true art, that there may be some standard within by which to meas-
ure the value of what is brought to them in books.
So we return to the thought, as all of this experimental nature-study
takes time, that in the first seven years plastic material shall be given
through which the child can store up a fund of sense impressions—a power
of imagination without which later study will be but an effort to make
‘bricks without straw.”
When the page 7s turned, and the child passes on to a stage in which
the love of knowing, of investigating, is the ruling desire, we find the con-
ventional symbols of written language a most helpful means of growth,
and it is at this time that the art of reading can be acquired most readily.
There is testimony enough to substantiate the claim that the child
;rained in the kindergarten loses no time, but rather gains a strength that
words can never bring to him if they are presented too soon. I know per-
fectly well that children can be taught, and easily taught, to read at the
age of three or four years. That is not the question, but rather, What
has been gained by the process? I believe, nothing, for it only induces
an earlier habit of thinking other people’s thoughts instead of our own,
when, at this age, our children need to be gathering firsé-hand the materi-
als for thought.
OHANGES IN KINDERGARTEN PLAYS AND GAMES.
BY MISS SARAH A. STEWART. PHILADELPHIA, PA.
(1) Should plays and games which Froebel invented be modified ?
(2) Should substitutions be made for any of them ?
(8) Should others be added ?
FRrOEBEL was the first of the great educational innovators to base sys-
tematic development upon the spontaneous activity of the child. Edu-
cators of all times had acted upon the theory that suppression of physical
activity was a necessary condition of mental growth. The instinct for
