ABSTRACT
The kindergarten takes its methods and exercises from the child. In the kindergarten he plays—when he gets into the grades he works. The opposition, then, between the methods of kindergarten and public school has been diametrical. The kindergarten has been satisfied to take the child before the school could claim him, before he could be inducted piece-meal into the full-grown man’s activity. The school aims to give to the child the technique of life work—for example, the use of number and language—and then in history, natural and social, the information which makes the basis for their use. The chapter emphasizes that the problem which the kindergarten has recognized, and from its standpoint has solved, is not only that of finding the possibilities of beginning a school education earlier than the primary grade. The problem is so to organize and arrange the exercises that the child will carry them out through his own spontaneous activity.
