THE KINDERGARTENS AND NURSERIES
If the influence of an annual cleaning up is thus distinctly traced in the
lives of the children, what must be the effect of the daily teaching of
the kindergarten, in which soap is always the moral agent that leads all
the rest? I have before me the inventory of purchases for a single school
of this kind that was started a year ago in a third loft of a Suffolk
Street tenement. It included several boxes of soap and soap-dishes, 200
feet of rope, 10 bean-bags, 24 tops, 200 marbles, a box of chalk, a
base-ball outfit for indoor use, a supply of tiddledywinks and "sliced
animals," and 20 clay pipes. The pipes were not for lessons in smoking,
but to smooth the way for a closer acquaintance with the soap by the
friendly intervention of the soap-bubble. There were other games and no
end of colored paper to cut up, the dear delight of childhood, but made in
the hands and under the eyes of the teacher to train eye and hand while
gently but firmly cementing the friendship ushered in by the gorgeous
bubble. No wonder, with such a stock, a mother complained that she had to
whip her Jimmie to keep him home.
Without a doubt the kindergarten is one of the longest steps forward that
has yet been taken in the race with poverty; for in gathering in the
children it is gradually, but surely, conquering also the street with its
power for mischief. There is only one force that, to my mind, exerts an
even stronger influence upon the boys' lives especially; I mean the club,
of which I shall speak presently. But that comes at a later stage. The
kindergarten begins at the very beginning, and in the best of all ways,
with the children's play. What it does, counts at both ends on that tack.
Very soon it makes itself felt in the street and in what goes on there, as
anyone can see for himself by observing the children's play in a tenement
neighborhood where there is a kindergarten and again where there is none,
while by imperceptibly turning the play into work that teaches habits of
observation and of industry that stick, it builds a strong barrier against
the doctrine of the slum that the world owes one a living, which lies in
ambush for the lad on every grog-shop corner. And all corners in the
tenement districts are grog-shop corners. Beyond all other considerations,
beyond its now admitted function as the right beginning of all education,
whether of rich or poor, its war upon the street stands to me as the true
office of the kindergarten in a city like New York, with a tenement-house
population of a million and a quarter souls.[20] The street itself owns
it, with virtual surrender. Hostile as its normal attitude is to every new
agency of reform, the best with the worst, I have yet to hear of the first
instance in which a kindergarten has been molested by the toughest
neighborhood, or has started a single dead cat on a post-mortem career of
window-smashing, whether it sprang from Christian, Jewish, or heathen
humanity. There is scarce a mission or a boy's club in the city that can
say as much.
The kindergarten is no longer an experiment in New York. Probably as many
as a hundred are to-day in operation, or will be when the recently
expressed purpose of the Board of Education to make the kindergarten a
part of the public school system has been fully carried out. The
Children's Aid Society alone conducts a dozen in connection with its
industrial schools, and the New York Kindergarten Association nine, if its
intention of opening two new schools by the time this book is in the
printer's hands is realized. There is no theology, though there is a heap
of religion in most of them. Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Theosophists,
and Ethical Culturists, if I may so call them, men of one or of various
opinions, or of none, concerning the hereafter, alike make use of the
kindergarten as a means of reaching and saving the shipwrecked of the
present. Sometimes the Sunday School is made to serve as a feeder for the
kindergarten, or the kindergarten for the Sunday School. Sometimes the
wisdom that wrests success from doubt and perplexity is expressed in the
fundamental resolution that the kindergarten "shall not be a Sunday
School." The system is the same in all cases with very little change. "We
have tried it and seen it tried with various kinks and variations," said
one of the old managers of the Children's Aid Society to me, "but after
all there is only one way, the way of the great kindergartner who said,
'We learn by doing.'"
A clean face is the ticket of admission to the kindergarten. A clean or
whole frock is wisely not insisted upon too firmly at the start; torn or
dirty clothes are not so easily mended as a smudged face, but the
kindergarten reaches that too in the end, and by the same road as the
Fresh Air scrubbing--the home. Once he is let in, the child is in for a
general good time that has little of school or visible discipline to
frighten him. He joins in the ring for the familiar games, delighted to
find that the teacher knows them too, and can be "It" and his "fair lady"
in her turn. He does not notice the little changes the game has undergone,
the kindergarten touch here and there that lifts it out of the mud; but
the street does presently, when the new version is transferred to it, and
is the better for it. After the game there are a hundred things for him to
do that do not seem like work in the least. Between threading colored
beads, cutting and folding pink and green papers in all sorts of odd
ways, as boats and butterflies and fancy baskets; moulding, pasting,
drawing, weaving and blowing soap-bubbles when all the rest has ceased to
hold his attention, the day slips by like a beautiful dream, and he flatly
refuses to believe that it is gone when the tenement home claims him
again. Not infrequently he goes home howling, to be found the next morning
waiting at the door an hour before the teacher comes. Little Jimmie's
mother says that he gets up at six o'clock to go to the Fifty-first Street
kindergarten, and that she has to whip him to make him wait until nine.
[Illustration: PLAYING AT HOUSEKEEPING.]
The hours pass with happy play that slowly but surely moulds head, hand,
and heart together. The utmost freedom is allowed, but it stops short of
the license of the street. Its law of violence is replaced by the law of
love. The child learns to govern himself. Not at once; I observed two or
three black eyes during a tour of a half-score kindergartens, last June,
that showed that the street yielded its reign reluctantly. During my visit
to the East Sixty-third Street school I became interested in a little
fellow who was its special pet and the ward of the Alumnae of the Normal
college, who through the New York Kindergarten Association had established
and maintained the school. Johnny was a sweet little fellow, one of eight
children from a wretched tenement home down the street into which the
kindergartner had found her way. The youngest of the eight was a baby that
was getting so big and heavy that it half killed the mother to drag it
around when she went out working, and the father, with a consideration for
her that was generously tempered with laziness, was considering the
advisability of staying home to take care of it himself, "so as to give
her a show." There was a refinement of look and manner, if not of dress,
about little Johnny after he was washed clean, that made the tenement
setting seem entirely too plebeian for him, and his rescuers had high
hopes of his future. I regret to say that I saw the pet, before I left,
deliberately knock the smallest baby in the school down, and when he was
banished from the ring in consequence and condemned to take his howling
playmate over in the corner and show her pictures until he repented, take
an unworthy revenge by pinching her surreptitiously until she howled
louder. Worse than that, when the baby had finally been comforted with a
headless but squeaking toy sheep, he secretly pulled the insides and the
ba-a out of the lambkin through its broken neck, when no one was looking.
I was told that Johnny was believed to have the making of a diplomat in
his little five-year-old body, and I think it very likely--of a politician
anyway.
While this was going on, another boy, twice as large as Johnny, had been
temporarily exiled from the ring for clumsiness. It was even more
hopelessly constitutional, to all appearances, than Johnny's Machiavelian
cunning. In the game he had persistently stumbled over his own feet. Made
to take a seat at the long table, he fell off his chair twice in one
minute from sheer embarrassment. In luminous contrast to his awkwardness
was the desperate agility of a little Irishman I had just left in another
kindergarten. Each time he was told to take his seat, which was about
every ten seconds, he would perform the feat with great readiness by
climbing over the back of the chair as a dog climbs over a fence, to the
consternation of the teacher, whose reproachful "O Alexander!" he disarmed
with a cheerful "I'm all right, Miss Brown," and an offer to shake hands.
Let it not be inferred from this that the kindergarten is the home of
disorder. Just the reverse. Order and prompt obedience are the cardinal
virtues taught there, but taught in such a way as to make the lesson seem
all fun and play to the child. It sticks all the better. It is the
province of the kindergarten to rediscover, as it were, the natural
feelings the tenement had smothered. But for its appeal, the love of the
beautiful might slumber in those children forever. In their homes there is
nothing to call it into life. The ideal of the street is caricature,
burlesque, if nothing worse. Under the gentle training of the
kindergartner the slumbering instinct blossoms forth in a hundred
different ways, from the day the little one first learns the difference
between green and red by stringing colored beads for a necklace "for
teacher," until later on he is taught to make really pretty things of
pasteboard and chips to take home for papa and mamma to keep. And they do
keep them, proud of the child--who would not?--and their influence is felt
where mayhap there was darkness and dirt only before. So the kindergarten
reaches directly into the home, too, and thither follows the teacher, if
she is the right kind, with encouragement and advice that is not lost
either. No door is barred against her who comes in the children's name. In
the truest and best sense she is a missionary to the poor.
Nearly all the kindergartens in this city are crowded. Many have scores of
applicants upon the register whom they cannot receive. There are no
truants among their pupils. All of the New York Kindergarten Association's
schools are crowded, and new are added as fast as the necessary funds are
contributed. The Association was organized in the fall of 1889 with the
avowed purpose of engrafting the kindergarten upon the public school
system of the city, through persistent agitation. There had been no
official recognition of it up till that time. The Normal School
kindergarten was an experiment not countenanced by the School Board. The
Association has now accomplished its purpose, but its work, far from being
ended, has but just begun. It is doubtful if all the kindergartens in the
city, including those now in the public schools, accommodate much more
than five or six thousand children, if that number. The last sanitary
census showed that there were 160,708 children under five years old in the
tenements. At least half of these are old enough to be in a kindergarten,
and ought to be, seeing how little schooling they will get after they
outgrow it. That leaves in round numbers 75,000 children yet to be so
provided for in New York's tenements. There is no danger that the
kindergarten will become too "common" in this city for a while yet. As an
adjunct to the public school in preparing the young minds for more serious
tasks, it is admitted by teachers to be most valuable. But its greatest
success is as a jail deliverer. "The more kindergartens the fewer prisons"
is a saying the truth of which the generation that comes after us will be
better able to grasp than we.
The kindergarten is the city's best truant officer. Not only has it no
truants itself, but it ferrets out a lot who are truants from necessity,
not from choice, and delivers them over to the public school. There are
lots of children who are kept at home because someone has to mind the baby
while father and mother earn the bread for the little mouths. The
kindergarten steps in and releases these little prisoners. If the baby is
old enough to hop around with the rest, the kindergarten takes it. If it
can only crawl and coo, there is the nursery annex. Sometimes it is an
independent concern. Almost every church or charity that comes into
direct touch with the poor has nowadays its nursery where poor mothers may
leave their children to be cared for while they are out working. Relief
more practical could not be devised. A small fee, usually five cents, is
charged as a rule for each baby. Pairs come cheaper, and three go for ten
cents at the nursery in the Wilson mission. Over 50,000 babies were
registered there last year, which meant, if not 5,000 separate children,
at least 5,000 days' work and wages to poor mothers in dire need of both,
and a good, clean, healthy start for the infants, a better than the
tenement could have given them. To keep them busy, when the rocking-horse
and the picture-book have lost their charm, the kindergarten grows
naturally out of the nursery, where that was the beginning, just as the
nursery stepped in to supplement the kindergarten where that had the lead.
The two go hand in hand. The soap cure is even more potent in the nursery
than in the kindergarten, as a silent rebuke to the mother, who rarely
fails to take the hint. At the Five Points House of Industry the children
who come in for the day receive a general scrubbing twice a week, and the
whole neighborhood has a cleaner look after it. The establishment has come
to be known among the ragamuffins of Paradise Park as "the school where
dey washes 'em." Its value as a moral agent may be judged from the
statements of the Superintendent that some of the children "cried at the
sight of a washtub," as if it were some new and hideous instrument of
torture for their oppression.
Private benevolence in this, as in all measures for the relief of the
poor, has been a long way ahead of public action; properly so, though it
has seemed sometimes that we might as a body make a little more haste and
try to catch up. It has lately, by the establishment of children's
play-grounds in certain tenement districts, west and east, provided a kind
of open-air kindergarten that has hit the street in a vital spot. These
play-grounds do not take the place of the small parks which the city has
neglected to provide, but they show what a boon these will be some day.
There are at present, as far as I know, three of them, not counting the
back-yard "beaches" and "Coney Islands," that have made the practical
missionaries of the College Settlement, the King's Daughters' Tenement
Chapter, and like helpers of the poor, solid with their little friends.
One of them, the largest, is in Ninety-second Street, on the East Side,
another at the foot of West Fiftieth Street, and still another in West
Twenty-eighth Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, the block long
since well named Poverty Gap. Two, three, or half a dozen vacant lots,
borrowed or leased of the owner, have been levelled out, a few loads of
sand dumped in them for the children to dig in; scups, swings, and
see-saws, built of rough timber; a hydrant in the corner; little
wheelbarrows, toy-spades and pails to go round, and the outfit is
complete. Two at least of the three are supported each by a single
generous woman, who pays the salaries of a man janitor and of two women
"teachers" who join in the children's play, strike up "America" and the
"Star Spangled Banner" when they tire of "Sally in our Alley" and
"Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay," and by generally taking a hand in what goes on
manage to steer it into safe and mannerly ways.
[Illustration: POVERTY GAPPERS PLAYING CONEY ISLAND.]
More than two hundred children were digging, swinging, see-sawing, and
cavorting about the Poverty Gap playground when I looked in on a hot
Saturday afternoon last July. Long files of eager girls, whose shrill
voices used to make the echoes of the Gap ring with angry clamor, awaited
their turn at the scups, quiet as mice and without an ill word when they
trod upon each other's toes. The street that used to swarm with
mischievous imps was as quiet as a church. The policeman on the beat stood
swinging his club idly in the gate. It was within sight of this spot that
the Alley Gang beat one of his comrades half to death for telling them to
go home and let decent people pass; the same gang which afterward murdered
young Healey for the offence of being a decent, hard-working lad, who was
trying to support his aged father and mother by his work. The Healeys
lived in one of the rear houses that stood where the children now skip at
their play, and the murder was done on his doorstep. The next morning I
found the gang camping on a vacant floor in the adjoining den, as if
nothing had happened. The tenants knew the toughs were there, but were
afraid of betraying them. All that was only a couple of years ago; but a
marvellous transformation had been wrought in the Gap. The toughs were
gone, with the old tenements that harbored them. Poverty Gap itself was
gone. A decent flat had taken the place of the shanty across the street
where a 'longshoreman kicked his wife to death in drunken rage. And this
play-ground, with its swarms of happy children who a year ago would have
pelted the stranger with mud from behind the nearest truck--that was the
greatest change of all. The retiring toughs have dubbed it "Holy Terror
Park" in memory of what it was, not of what it is. Poverty Park the
policeman called it, with more reason. It was not exactly an attractive
place. A single stunted ailanthus tree struggled over the fence of the
adjoining yard, the one green spot between ugly and ragged brick walls.
The "sand" was as yet all mud and dirt, and the dust the many little feet
kicked up was smothering. But the children thought it lovely, and lovely
it was for Poverty Gap, if not for Fifth Avenue.
[Illustration: POVERTY GAP TRANSFORMED--THE SPOT WHERE YOUNG HEALEY WAS
MURDERED IS NOW A PLAYGROUND.]
I came back to my office to find a letter there from a rich man who lives
on the Avenue, offering to make another Poverty Park for the
tenement-house children of another street, if he had to buy the lots. I
told him the story of Poverty Gap and bade him go and see for himself if
he could spend his money to better purpose. There are no play-grounds yet
below Fourteenth Street and room and need for fifty. The Alley and the
Avenue could not meet on a plane that argues better for the understanding
between the two that has been too long and needlessly delayed.