Now we come to another epoch of childhood, which Froebel calls the stage of boyhood. The preceding period was “preëminently the period of development of the faculty of speech” (5: p. 90). Whatever the child perceived was designated by the word. It was the period for naming. “Every object, everything became such, as it were, only through the word; before it had been named, although the child might have seemed to see it with the outer eyes, it had no existence for the child. The name, as it were, created the thing for the child; hence, the name and the things seemed to be one.” But now sets in the separation between speech and the speaking subject, the name and the object; language at last “is externalized and materialized in signs and writing, and begins to be considered as something actually corporeal” (5: pp. 91-93). This new period, thinks Froebel, is preëminently the period for learning, for schooling, for instruction proper. In the preceding stage everything was considered as the expression of the child’s own being; the spontaneous activity springing from his inner life was the starting-point and center of his education; its process was the externalization of the internal. That process is now reversed; it is the internalization of the external; we start from the outer world and unite with it in the inner world of the child. “The consideration and treatment of individual and particular things, as such, and in their inner bearings and relationships, constitute the essential character and work of instruction.... This instruction is conducted not so much in accordance with the nature of man as in accordance with the fixed, definite, clear _laws_ that lie in the nature of things, and more particularly the laws to which man and things are equally subjected.... This implies knowledge, insight, a conscious and comprehensive view of the field.... With this period school begins for him, be it in the home or out of it, and taught by the father, members of the family, or a teacher. School, then, means here by no means the schoolroom or school-keeping, but _the conscious communication of knowledge, for a definite purpose and in definite inner connection_” (5: pp. 94-95). By this it seems clear that Froebel distinguished the character and function of the school from those of the kindergarten. He explicitly states this in one of his letters (2: p. 155).