[44] Froebel goes on to say: “I believe, that after progressing through the vast orbit of almost two generations (he was nearly fifty-nine) I have been carried round to the point of commencement, to the fountain head of the education of mankind, but _with the significant addition of a full consciousness of my task_.” [45] The material can of course be used at any age provided it conveys suitable ideas in a suitable manner. Some of it is even now found useful in helping senior classes to realize problems in area and in volume. [46] Many years ago, a young teacher came to me for help. She had been told to give her class number lessons, for a whole term, from Gift III, which consists of eight little cubes, and the children had long since grasped 4 + 4, 6 + 2, 5 + 3, and 8 - 4, 8 - 2, etc. I suggested that she should leave the number out and let the children play with the blocks. “Oh! I mayn’t do that,” was the answer, “they have building with Gift IV.” [47] A really pathetic story has been told me of an earnest teacher in far Australia, whose educational opportunities had been very limited, but whose desire for knowledge was most sincere. She had been listening without comprehension to some glib user of phrases, and was bewailing her ignorance to an enlightened teacher who knew there had been little of real value, and who said with a laugh “Never mind, Miss ----, it is only a case of ‘Mind and Matter glide swift into the vortex of immensity.’” And the listener said, “Oh please, would you say that slowly, and I’ll write it down.” [48] These objections were embodied in a paper entitled “A Criticism of Froebelian Pedagogy,” which Mr. Graham Wallas read at a Conference of the Froebel Society in January 1901, and which was published in the Conference Supplement for Child Life, July 1901. [49] See _p. 200_. [50] Few critics are likely to go so far as Mr. Winch, who gave as a Froebelian conception “that the true destiny of man is to be obtained by gratifying every youthful impulse.” But, Mr. Winch is perhaps not to be taken seriously, for in the same paper he took _one sentence out of a passage on the importance of continuity extending over four pages_, and says of it, “This jerky discontinuity (!) has not the slightest support in biological science, and never had.” (See Memorandum written for Mr. Graham Wallas in “Problems of Education.”) [51] Deshalb sollen Erziehung, Unterricht und Lehre ursprünglich und in ihren ersten Grundzügen nothwendig leidend, nachgehend (nur behütend schützend), nicht vorschreibend, bestimmend, eingreifend sein. [52] Mr. Graham Wallas said: “The educational task for us is not to find out how completely we can stand aside, but how far we can so influence the environment of the child, as to cause those tendencies in it which we think best, to become permanent.”