ss, _have nothing
to unlearn_.

Let those who labor, day by day, with inert minds never yet awakened
to a wish for knowledge, a sense of beauty, or a feeling of pleasure
in mental activity, tell us how much valuable school time they would
save, if the raw material were thus prepared to their hand. "After
spending five or six years at home or in the street, without training
or discipline, the child is sent to school and is expected to learn at
once. He looks upon the strange, new life with amazement, yet without
understanding. Finally, his mind becomes familiar in a mechanical
manner, ill-suited to the tastes of a child, with the work and
exercises of primary instruction, the consequence being, very often, a
feeble body and a stuffed mind, the stuffing having very little more
effect upon the intellect than it has upon the organism of a roast
turkey." The kindergarten can remedy these intellectual difficulties,
beside giving the child an impulse toward moral self-direction, and a
capacity for working out his original ideas in visible and permanent
form, which will make him almost a new creature. It can, by taking the
child in season, set the wheels in motion, rouse all his best, finest,
and highest instincts, the purest, noblest, and most vivifying powers
of which he is possessed.

There is a good deal of time spent in the kindergarten on the
cultivation of politeness and courtesy; and in the entirely social
atmosphere which is one of its principal features, the amenities of
polite society can be better practiced than elsewhere.

The kindergarten aims in no way at making infant prodigies, but it
aims successfully at putting the little child in possession of every
faculty he is capable of using; at bringing him forward on lines he
will never need to forsake; at teaching within his narrow range what
he will never have to unlearn; and at giving him the wish to learn,
and the power of teaching himself. Its deep simplicity should always
be maintained, and no lover of childhood or thoughtful teacher would
wish it otherwise. It is more important that it should be kept pure
than that it should become popular.

I have tried, thus, somewhat at length, to demonstrate that our
educational system cannot be perfect until we begin still earlier with
the child, and begin in a more childlike manner, though, at the same
time, earnestly and with definite purpose. In trying to make manhood
and womanhood, we sometimes treat children as l