Nothing so delights the little girl as to play at housekeeping in her
tiny mansion, sacred to the use of dolls. See her whimsical attention
to dust and dirt, her tremendous wisdom in dispensing the work and
ordering the duties of the household, her careful attention to the
morals and manners of her rag-babies.
The boy, too, tries to share in the life of a man, to play at his
father's work, to be a miniature carpenter, salesman, or what not. He
rides his father's cane and calls it a horse, in the same way that
the little girl wraps a shawl about a towel, and showers upon it the
tenderest tokens of maternal affection. All these examples go to show
that every conscious intellectual phase of the mind has a previous
phase in which it was unconscious or merely symbolic.
To get at the spirit and inspiration of symbolic representation in
song and game, it is necessary first of all to study Froebel's "Mutter
und Kose-Lieder," perhaps the most strikingly original, instructive,
serviceable book in the whole history of the practice of education.
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