=The Social Aspect of Education.=--His emphasis upon this psychological principle of motor expression under the head of ‘self-activity’ and ‘creativeness’ is the chief characteristic of Froebel’s method. Rousseau had also recommended motor activity as a means of learning, but he had insisted upon an isolated and unsocial education for Emile, whereas Froebel stresses the social aspects of education quite as clearly as he does the principle of self-expression. In fact, he holds that increasing self-realization, or individualization through ‘self-activity,’ must come through a process of socialization. The social instinct is primal, and the individual can be truly educated only in the company of other human beings. The life of the individual is necessarily bound up with participation in institutional life. Each one of the various institutions of society in which the mentality of the race has manifested itself--the home, the school, the church, the vocation, the state--becomes a medium for the activity of the individual, and at the same time a means of social control. As far as the child enters into the surrounding life, he is to receive the development needed for the present, and thereby also to be prepared for the future. Through imitation of coöperative activities in play, he obtains not only physical, but intellectual and moral training. Such a moral and intellectual atmosphere Froebel sought to cultivate at Keilhau by coöperation in domestic labor,--‘lifting, pulling, carrying, digging, splitting,’ and through coöperative construction out of blocks of a chapel, castle, and other features of a village. Similarly, the kindergarten was intended to “represent a _miniature state_ for children, in which the young citizen can learn to move freely, but with consideration for his little fellows.” [Sidenote: A school without books or set tasks as his third contribution.] =The Kindergarten.=--Beside his basal principles of motor expression and social participation, Froebel made a third contribution to educational practice in advocating as a means of realizing these principles a school without books or set intellectual tasks, and permeated with play, freedom, and joy. In the kindergarten, ‘self-activity’ and ‘creativeness,’ together with social coöperation, found complete application and concrete expression. The training there has always consisted of three coördinate forms of expression: (1) song, (2) movement and gesture, and (3) construction; and mingled with these and growing out of each is the use of language by the child. But these means, while separate, often coöperate with and interpret one another, and the process is connected as an organic whole. For example, when the story is told or read, it is expressed in song, dramatized in movement and gesture, and illustrated by a construction from blocks, paper, clay, or other material. [Sidenote: _Mother Play._]