Again: Frœbel's discovery, or invention, furnishes the means to follow the natural order of all development for human beings, by which alone they will come to the knowledge of, and at last to union with, their Heavenly Father. This is the way which Christianity prescribed eighteen hundred years ago, but into which education has not understood how to lead us, because it has put statutes instead of actual experience, and has not let the study of nature, as the work of God, _precede_ statutes. Frœbel leads education again into the path intended by GOD, which, in the course of universal development, will lead to the happiness of the individual, as well as of the whole of society. In the human being itself are the rich mines, the development of which our false modes of education have hitherto made impossible. May mothers have faith in GOD, the Heavenly Father of their children, and that he has given them the capacity for good, which will crush the head of the serpent, and bring the kingdom of God upon earth.
In the second part of my _Guide to Kindergarten and Moral Training of Infancy_, published by E. Steiger, 25 Park Place, New York, is an account of how I actually first began to teach to read on this method, that may be of practical aid to one teaching _After Kindergarten--what?_ The first kindergartner who tried the method, in the course of the first half-hour led her children to write on their slates (in imitation of what she wrote on the blackboard, letter by letter, giving the power, not the name, of each as she wrote) words enough to involve the whole alphabet; namely, _cars_, _go_, _bells_, _sing_, _dizzy_, _old_, _hen_, _fixes_, _vest_, _jelly_, _jars_, _puss_, _kitty_. The words were in a column, and after they were written, the children recognized each word, pronouncing it right when she pointed to it on the blackboard. But she was surprised the next day to find they remembered every one, and they had so clear an idea of the correspondence of the letters and sounds, that, long before they had finished writing at her dictation the words of the first vocabulary, they read at sight any word of it, no matter how many syllables it had. In fact, at the end of the first week she wrote and asked me for the groups of exceptions, and, beginning with the smallest group, which is most exceptional, in a few weeks they could all read.