the strongly opposed elements of his life, the individual determining and directing side, and the general ordered and subordinated side.”  He urged the early development of the social consciousness as well as insisting on expansion of individuality, but it is always difficult to combine the two, and most Kindergarten teachers will benefit by learning from Dr. Montessori to apply the method of individual learning to a greater extent.

We are, however, fully prepared to maintain that Froebel; even in 1840, had a wider and a deeper realisation of the needs of the child than has as yet been attained by the Dottoressa.[6] In order to make this clear, it is proposed to compare the theories of Froebel with the conclusions of a biologist.  For biology has a wider and a saner outlook than medical science; it does not start from the abnormal, but with life under normal conditions.

[Footnote 6:  Her latest publication regarding the instruction—­for it is not education—­of older children makes this even more plain.  For here is no discussion of what children at this stage require, but a mere plunge into “subjects” in which formal grammar takes a foremost place.]

In the address, from which the opening words of this chapter are quoted, it is suggested that a capable biologist be set to deal with education, but he is to be freed “from all preconceived ideas derived from accepted tradition.”  After such fundamentals as food and warmth, light, air and sleep, the first problems considered by this Biologist Educator are stages of growth, their appropriate activities, and the stimuli necessary to evoke them.  Always he bears in mind that “interference with a growing creature is a hazardous business,” and takes as his motto “When in doubt, refrain.”

To discover the natural activities of the child, the biologist relies upon, first, observation of the child himself, secondly, upon his knowledge of the nervous system, and thirdly, upon his knowledge of the past history of the race.  From these he comes to a very pertinent conclusion, viz.  “The general outcome of this is that the safe way of educating children is by means of Play,” play being defined as “the natural manifestation of the child’s activities; systematic in that it follows the lines of physiological development, but without the hard and fast routine of the time-table."[7]

[Footnote 7:  It is in this connection that the Kindergarten is stigmatised as “pretty employments devised by adults and imposed at set times by authority,” an opinion evidently gained from the way in which the term has been misused in a type of Infant School now fast disappearing.]

It is easy to show that although Froebel was pre-Darwinian, he had been in close touch with scientists who were working at theories of development, and that he was largely influenced by Krause, who applied the idea of organic development to all departments of social science.  It was because Froebel was himself, even in 1826, the Biologist Educator desiring to break with preconceived ideas and traditions that he wished one of his pupils had been able to “call your work by its proper name, and so make evident the real nature of the new spirit you have introduced."[8]