Feeble Mind is a lack of healthy brain tissue and relates to quantity of mind possibility, while mental bent is a matter of quality and is amenable to direction of aim, either in the direction of good, or in the direction of bad efforts. Ingenuous childhood prefers the good in all normal cases, even if its home surroundings are perverse, for the good is sweeter, and children are especially susceptible to the allurement of sweets.
The ranks of greatness and genius are usually filled from humble parental sources, in which character dominates over a desire for material accumulation, and rarely from greatness or genius itself, whose child-product, under parental neglect—or possibly shadow—frequently drops to an insignificant place in the scale of usefulness. If any fixed, progressive, inexorable law of mental heredity were in force in evolution, these tendencies would be reversed. Mind is Nature's one unknown quantity, except that it is good in preference to being bad, if it is given a chance to choose; progressive, if deterrents to its normal growth are removed from about it, but reactive and resentful if denied the blessing of cultivation.
The efficacy of Character-Building schools lies in their ability to teach children how to aim. What they learn while character is forming is their chief equipment in life.
Whoever learns to swim or to play billiards or to shoot when he is young never forgets his cunning at these acquired habits. It is the work of the kindergartner to find out what the natural born equipment of the child is, and to direct it; teach it to shoot right and straight, to swim safely through life, and to carom, follow or draw with the skill of an expert billiardist; carom from the evil, follow the walks of usefulness and draw unto itself the happiness of life.
[1] ] See corroborative testimony page 221.
[2] ] In the city of Saint Louis, at the end of the 1896 school-year, there were seventy-one volunteer kindergartners, and the length of the waiting list of the training schools precluded promise of even volunteer appointments for three years to come. This is but an illustration of the trend of interest in the direction of character-building school employment.
SOCIAL QUARANTINE FIRST
"Said a wealthy tax-payer to me recently, as he paid me his monthly kindergarten subscription: 'Mrs. Cooper, this work among the children is the best work that can be done. I give you this aid most gladly. I consider it an investment for my children. I would rather give five dollars a month now to educate these children than to have my own taxed ten times that amount by and by to sustain prisons and penitentiaries.'"—Sarah B. Cooper, before the National Conference of Charities and Correction.
SOCIAL QUARANTINE FIRST
Man is social first and individual afterward.