The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1879-12-13 00:00:00

CANON FARRAR ON THE EDUCATION
OF THE YOUNG.

The annual meeting of the Frobel Society, which has been
established for the promotion of the Kindergarten system,
was held in London on Tuesday evening at the rooms of the
Society of Arts—the Rev. Canon Farrar, D.D., occupying
the chair. The meeting was composed almost entirely of
ladies. The report was read by the hon. secretary, Mrs.
Ada Berry.

The Chairman, in his opening address, said that the
reason he had consented to take the chair that evening
was that he thought that his opinion of the value of
the Kindergarten system might be appreciated by
some of them, simply because a great many years of
his life had been spent in public schools and as a
teacher. He was very happy to take that opportunity
of saying that he felt considerable iriterest in the ex.
periment of the Kindergarten system, and he very sin-
cerely and strongly desired that it might be tried in
England under the best auspics s and the best possible
chances of success. It was impossible to overrate the
importance of taking children by the hand in their
earliest years and endeavouring to train them. It
might be thought much leas important in the homes of
the rich than in the homes of the poor, but he thought
there was great need for it even among the former. Of
course when a mother thoroughly understood her
duties, and tried to carry them out, the Kindergarten
system was, perhaps, unnecessary. The probability
was, however, that many mothers had never paid any
"attention to the theory of education, 'and that many
who did understand the theory pretty well were so
entirely occupied by social and other engagements
as to render it utterly impossible for them to attend
td children in their earliest years. He did not think
that as a nation they could congratulate themselves
on the intellectual and moral care they had taken of
infants, nor did he know of any race in the world th at
had seriously made that their study. There was only
one race that at any rate in theory admitted the im-
portance of infant training, viz., the Jews. It
might really be said that so slow was the human
race to arrive at the practice of even the most
obvious theories, that until the days of Pestalozzi
and Froebel no serious attempt had been made to
carry out the wise idea of training children from the
very first. He supposed one faculty that those eminent
men desired to train was the most neglected faculty
of all—the faculty of observation. Ignorance was
not merely a vacuum of knowledge—it was a plenum
of errors; and when a child was allowed to grow up to
the age of six or seven years old without adequate
training of its powers cf observation, the child would
not only have not l..arried certain things, but it wculd
have learned certain thgs in a ruibta'aen and iej wrious
way, and would have lost the opportunity of learniug
other things which would have been extremely vain.
able. He did not think that anything had been neg-
lected in education so much as that invaluable family
of using One's eyes and looking around one.

After the tr-ansaction of some routine business a
paper on "The Physical Education of Girls" was read
by Dr. Frances Hoggan.