TABLE B.

Statement of liabilities of the United States for educational purposes, as per treaty stipulations; vide report of Indian affairs, 1869.

a, b, e, g, interest on trust funds.

c, d, estimate made for teachers' salaries, at $1,000; balance for repairs.

f, estimated from mixed appropriation.

NOTE.-It will be seen that 42 tribes and bands in the above tables are without any provision for school purposes.

KINDERGARTEN CULTURE.

In undertaking to initiate a national system of education, and especially in a nation that, for the first time in the ages, embodies in its constitution provision for the development of will, heart, and thought in every man, in such harmonious play that he shall be free to do the will of God on earth, as it is done in heaven-which is at once our daily prayer and the ideal of human society-we must not stop with providing tho material conditions, but consider the quality of the education to be given.

The history of many great nations shows that there may be an education which paralyzes and perverts instead of developing and perfecting individual and national life. It is not from want of a most careful and powerful system of education that China is what she is. And India, Egypt, Greece, and Rome had their systems of education, efficient for the production of material and intellectual glories, certainly, but which, nevertheless, involved the principles of the decay and ruin of those nations. Even the education of Christian Europe, that, with all its acknowledged defects of method and scope, has made all the glory of modern civilization, has failed to bring out the general results that are to be hoped for, if we are to believe in the higher prophetic instincts of the sages and saints of past ages, to say nothing of the promises of Christ, who expressly includes the life that now is with that which is to come. At our own present historical crisis, when it is the purpose to diffuse throughout the United States

the best educational institutions, it is our duty to pause and ask whether all has been gained in educational method and quality which it is desirable to spread over the South; whether it may not be possible to improve as well as diffuse, and in the reconstructed States to avoid certain mistakes into which experience has proved that the Northeastern States have fallen. It is certain that a mere sharpening of the wits, and opening to the mind the boundlessness of human opportunity for producing material wealth, are not the only desiderata. As education builds the intellect high with knowledge, it should sink deep in the heart the moral foundations of character, or our apparent growth will involve future national ruin. In defining education as only the acquisition of knowledge, which is but an incident of it, we have indeed but followed the example set by the Old World, and have hoped that by offering this knowledge to all, instead of sequestrating it to certain classes, we have done all that is possible. But it is not so. The quality of our education should rise above, or at least not sink below, that of the nations that have educated their few to dominate over the many, else our self-government will be disgraced; and, therefore, I would present the claims of the new system of primary education, which has been growing up in Germany during the present century, and which, in the congress of European philosophers that met at Frankfort-on-the-Main, in September 1839, received a searching examination and was pronounced the greatest advance of method. A distinguished private teacher of America was present at this congress, and has furnished a translation, which I hope some time to see put to the press by the Bureau, of the report drawn up by Professor Fichte, of Stuttgard, son of the great Fichte, who, with Goethe, Schiller, Pestalozzi, Diesterweg, and other eminent men, effected that reform of education in Germany that commenced in the early part of this century, and whose results are so brilliantly manifested at this very moment in the discipline and efficiency of the Prussian army, and also in the still more significant pervasive demand of the mass of the people for the peace of Europe.

In the report of Dr. Hoyt (United States commissioner to the Paris Exposition of 1867) on the present state of education in Europe, there is a short, clear, and very striking statement of the normal education given to the primary teachers of all the Germanic nations, Prussia taking the lead. He says they all recognize that the primary department of education is at once the most important and difficult, and requires in its teachers, first, the highest order of mind; secondly, the most general cultivation; and thirdly, the most careful cherishing, greatest honor, and the best pay, for it has the charge of children at the season of life when they are most entirely at the mercy of their educators. As this report is distributed by the Senate to whoever will send for it, I will not repeat Dr. Hoyt's minute description of the normal training required of the primary teachers, or his statistics of the satisfactory results of their teaching, but pass at once to a consideration of the still profounder method of Froebel, which immediately respects the earliest education, but of which Dr. Hoyt does not speak, inasmuch as it is not yet anywhere a national system, though, within the last twenty years, it has spread over Germany and into Scandinavia and Switzerland, and been introduced into Spain, France, Italy, and Russia; but to no country is it adapted so entirely as to America, where there is no hinderance of aristocratic institution, nor mountain of ancient custom, to interfere with a method which regards every human being as a subject of education, intellectual and moral as well as physical, from the moment of birth, and as the heir of universal nature in co-sovereignty with all other men, endowed by their Creator with equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is all the more important to make an exact statement of Froebel's art and science of education in its severity, because it has been and is extensively travestied in this country by numerous schools called Kindergartens, which have disgraced its principles, inasmuch as they have only the most superficial resemblance to those institutions to which Froebel that name. gave

One of your assistants, in a voluminous paper upon all the reforms of education made in Europe and America during this century, has given an exhaustive history of the rise and progress of Kindergartens and their imitations, together with very valuable criticisms on education generally of his own and of various other writers of Europe and America; and this, also, I trust you may be able to send to the press before long. In the meantime, however, I must say something in this report on a subject of such vital importance, since it respects the beginning of education.

The fundamental or rather root point by which Froebel's method differs from that of all other educators, is this: he takes up the human being in the full tide of that prodigious but blind activity in which he comes into the world, and seeks to make it intelligent of itself and of things around it by employing it to produce palpable effects, at once satisfactory to the heart and fancy of childhood and true to nature by knowledge of whose order and organization the human understanding is built up in soundness and truth. For the blind heart and will, which the human being is, until by becoming intelligent of nature he is transmuted into a principle of order, is the very principle of evil. Without imagining any inherent malignity of heart, we must admit that the child necessarily goes on, knocking down and tearing up, and creating disorder