§ 28. No less than six-and-thirty years ago Henry Barnard (in his Report to Governor of Connecticut, 1854) declared the Kindergarten to be “by far the most original, attractive, and philosophical form of infant development the world has yet seen.” Since then it has spread in all civilised lands, and in many of them there are now _public_ Kindergartens, the first I believe having been established in 1873 by Dr. William T. Harris in St. Louis, Mo. But Froebel’s ideas are not so easily got hold of as his “Gifts,” and the real extension of his system may be by no means so great as it seems. “The Kindergarten system in the hands of one who understands it,” says Dr. James Ward, “produces admirable results; but it is apt to be too mechanical and formal. There does not seem room for the individuality of a child, to which all free play possible should be given in the earliest years.” (In _Parents’ Review_ Ap. 1890.) And Mr. Courthope Bowen has well said: “Kindergarten work without the Kindergarten idea, like a body without a soul, is subject to rapid degeneration and decay.” So perhaps it will in the end prove that Froebel in his _Education of Man_ which is “a book with seven seals” has left us a more precious legacy than in his “Gifts” and Occupations which are so popular and so easily adopted. § 29. It has been well said that “the essence of stupidity is in the demand for final opinions.” How our thoughts have widened about education since a man like Dr. Johnson could assert, “Education is as well known, and has long been as well known, as ever it can be!”[179] (Hill’s _Boswell’s J._ ij, 407.) The astronomers of the Middle Ages might as well have asserted that nothing more could ever be known about astronomy. Was Froebel what he believed himself to be, the Kepler or the Newton of the educational system? Whoso is wise will not during the nineteenth century lay claim to a “final opinion” on this point. But the “New Education” seems gaining ground. F. W. Parker emphatically declares “the Kindergarten” (by which he probably means Froebel’s encouragement of self-activity) to be “the most important far-reaching educational reform of the nineteenth century.” We sometimes see it questioned whether the “New Education” has any proper claim to its title; but the education which Dr. Johnson considered final and which seems to us old aimed at learning; and the education which aims not at learning, but at developing through self-activity is so different from this that it may well be called New. If we consider the platform of the New Educationists as it stands, _e.g._, in the New York _School Journal_, we shall find that if it is not all new in theory it would be substantially new in practice. § 30. Let us look at a brief statement of what the “New Education” requires:— 1. Each study must be valued in proportion as it develops _power_; and power is developed by self-activity.