"The nature of an educational system is determined by the manner in
which it is begun."
The question for us to decide to-day is not how we can interest people
in and how illustrate the true kindergarten, for that is already done
to a considerable extent; but, how we can convince school boards,
superintendents, and voters that the final introduction of the
kindergarten into the public school system is a thing greatly to
be desired. The kindergarten and the school, now two distinct,
dissimilar, and sometimes, though of late very seldom, antagonistic
institutions,--how will the one affect, or be affected by the other?
As to the final adoption of the kindergarten there is a preliminary
question which goes straight to the root of the whole matter. At
present the state accepts the responsibility of educating children
after an arbitrarily fixed age has been reached. Ought it not, rather,
if it assumes the responsibility at all, to begin to educate the child
when he _needs education?_
Thoughtful people are now awaking to the fact that this regulation is
an artificial, not a natural one, and that we have been wasting two
precious years which might not only be put to valuable uses, but would
so shape and influence after-teaching that every succeeding step
would be taken with greater ease and profit. We have been discreet in
omitting the beginning, so long as we did not feel sure how to begin.
But we know now that Froebel's method of dealing with four or five
year old babies, when used by a discreet and intelligent person,
justifies us in taking this delicate, debatable ground.
So far, then, it is a question of law--a law which can be modified
just as soon and as sensibly as the people wish. Before, however, that
modification can become the active wish of the people, its importance
must be understood and its effects estimated. Could it be shown that
after-education will be hindered or in any way rendered more difficult
by the kindergarten, clearly all efforts to introduce it must cease.
Were it merely a matter of indifference, something that would neither
make nor mar the after-work of schools, then it would remain a matter
of choice or fancy, for individual parents to decide as they like;
but, if it can be shown that the work of the kindergarten will lay a
more solid foundation, or trace more direct paths for the workers of a
later period, then it behooves us to give it a hearty welcome, and to
work out its principles with zealous good will: and "working out"
its principles means, _not_ accepting it as a finality--a piece of
flawless perfection--but as a stepping-stone which will lead us nearer
to the truth. If it is a good thing, it is good for all; if it is
truth, we want it everywhere; but if this new department of education
and training is to gain ground, or accomplish the successful fruition
of its wishes, there must be perfect unity among teachers concerning
it. If they all understood the thing itself, and understood each
other, there could be no lack of sympathy; yet there has been
misunderstanding, conflict occasionally, and some otherwise worthy
teachers have used the kindergarten as a sort of intellectual
cuttle-fish to sharpen their conversational bills upon.
Of course I am not blind to the fact that after we have determined
that we ought to have the kindergarten, there are many questions of
expediency: suitable rooms, expense of material, salaries, assistants,
age of children at entrance, system of government, number of children
in one kindergarten; and greatest of all, but least thought of,
strangely, the linking together of kindergarten and school, so that
the development shall be continuous, and the chain of impressions
perfect and unbroken.
Suffice it to say that it has been done, and can be done again; but it
needs discretion, forethought, tact, earnestness, and unimpeachable
honesty of administration, for unless we can depend upon our school
boards and kindergartners _implicitly_, counting upon them for wise
coöperation, brooding care, and great wisdom in selection of teachers,
the experiment will be a failure. We have risks enough to run as it
is; let us not permit our little ones, more susceptible by reason of
age than any we have to deal with now,--let us not permit them to
become victims of politics, rings, or machine teaching.
The kindergarten is more liable to abuse than any other department of
teaching. There is no ground in the universe so sacred as this.
But the difference between primary schools is just as great, only,
unfortunately, we have become used to it; and the kindergarten being
under fire, so to speak, must be absolutely ideal in its perfection,
or it is ruthlessly held up to scorn.
There is a tremendous awakening all over the country with regard to
kindergarten and primary work, and this is well, since the greatest
and most fatal mistakes of the public school system have been made
_just here_; and the time is surely coming when more knowledge,
wisdom, tact, ingenuity, forethought, yes, and money, will be expended
in order to meet the demands of the case. The time is coming when the
imp of parsimony will no longer be mistaken for the spirit of economy;
when a woman possessed of ordinary human frailty will no longer be
required to guide, direct, develop, train, help, love, and be patient
with sixty little ones, just beginning to tread the difficult paths of
learning, and each receiving just one sixtieth of what he craves. The
millennium will be close at hand when we cease to expect from girls
just out of the high school what Socrates never attempted, and would
have deemed impossible.
Look at Senator Stanford's famous Palo Alto stock farm. Each colt born
into that favored community is placed in a class of twelve. These
twelve colts are cared for and taught by four or five trained
teachers. No man interested in the training of fine horses ever
objects, so far as I know, to such expenditure of labor and money. The
end is supposed to justify the means. But when the creatures to be
trained are human beings, and when the end to be reached is not
race-horses, but merely citizens, we employ a very different process
of reasoning.
That this subject of early training is a vitally interesting one to
thinking people cannot be denied. The kindergarten has become the
fashion, you say, cynically. This is scarcely true; but it is a fact
that the upper, the middle, and the lower classes among us begin
to recognize the existence of children under six years of age,
and realize that far from being nonentities in life, or unknown
quantities, they are very lively units in the sum of progressive
education.
When we speak of kindergarten work among the children of the poor, and
argue its claims as one of the best means of taking unfortunate little
Arabs from the demoralizing life of the streets, and of giving their
aimless hands something useful to do, their restless minds something
good and fruitful to think of, and their curious eyes something
beautiful to look on, there is not a word of disapproval. People seem
willing to concede its moral value when applied to the lower classes,
but, when they are obliged to pay anything to procure this training
for their own children, or see any prospect of what they call an
already extravagant school system made more so by its addition, they
become prolific in doubts. In other words, they believe in it when you
call it _philanthropy_, but not when you call it _education_; and it
must be called the germ of the better education, toward which we are
all struggling, the nearest approach to the perfect beginning which we
have yet found.
We see in the excellence of Froebel's idea, educationally considered,
its only claim to peculiar power in dealing with incipient hoodlumism.
It is only because it has such unusual fitness to child-nature, such a
store of philosophy and ingenuity in its appliances, and such a wealth
of spiritual truth in its aims and methods, that it is so great a
power with neglected children and ignorant and vicious parents.
The principles on which Froebel built his educational idea may be
summed up briefly under four heads. First, All the faculties of the
child are to be drawn out and exercised as far as age allows. Second,
The powers of habit and association, which are the great instruments
of all education, of the whole training of life, must be developed
with a systematic purpose from the earliest dawn of intelligence.
Third, The active instincts of childhood are to be cultivated through
manual exercise (chiefly creative in character), which is made an
essential part of the training, and this manual exercise is to be
valued chiefly as a means of self-expression. Fourth, The senses are
to be trained to accuracy as well as the hand. The child must learn
how to observe what is placed before him, and to observe it truly, an
acquirement which any teacher of science or art will appreciate. To
work out these principles, Froebel devised his practical method of
infant education, and the very name he gave to the place where his
play lessons were to be used marks his purpose. No books are to be
seen in a kindergarten, because no ideas or facts are presented to the
child that he cannot clearly understand and verify. The object is not
to teach him arithmetic or geometry, though he learns enough of both
to be very useful to him hereafter; but to lead him to discover
_truths_ concerning forms and numbers, lines and angles, for himself.
Thus in the play-lessons the teacher simply rules the order in which
the child shall approach a new thing, and gives him the correct
names which, henceforth, he must always use; but the observation of
resemblances and differences (that groundwork of all knowledge), the
reasoning from one point to another, and the conclusions he arrives
at, are all his own; he is only led to see his mistake if he makes
one. The child handles every object from which he is taught, and
learns to reproduce it.
It is not enough to say that any ordinary system of object teaching in
the hands of an ingenious teacher will serve the purpose or take the
place of the kindergarten. People who say this evidently have no
conception of Froebel's plan, in which the simultaneous training of
head, heart, and hand is the most striking characteristic.
The kindergarten is mainly distinguished from the later instruction of
the school by making the knowledge of facts and the cultivation of
the memory subordinate to the development of observation and to the
appropriate activity of the child, physical, mental, and moral. Its
aim is to utilize the now almost wasted time from four to six years, a
time when all negligent and ignorant mothers leave the child to chance
development, and when the most careful mother cannot train her
child into the practice of social virtues so well as the truly wise
kindergartner who works with her. "We learn through doing" is the
watchword of the kindergarten, but it must be a _doing_ which blossoms
into _being_, or it does not fulfill its ideal, for it is character
building which is to go on in the kindergarten, or it has missed
Froebel's aim.
What does the kindergarten do for children under six years of age?
What has it accomplished when it sends the child to the primary
school? I do not mean what Froebel hoped could be done, or what is
occasionally accomplished with bright children and a gifted teacher,
or even what is done in good private kindergartens, for that is yet
more; but I mean what is actually done for children by charitable
organizations, which are really doing the work of the state.
I think they can claim tangible results which are wholly remarkable;
and yet they do not work for results, or expect much visible fruit in
these tender years, from a culture which is so natural, child-like,
and unobtrusive that its very outward simplicity has caused it to be
regarded as a plaything.
In glancing over the acquirements of the child who has left the
kindergarten, and has been actually _taught_ nothing in the ordinary
acceptation of the word, we find that he has worked, experimented,
invented, compared, reproduced. All things have been revealed in the
doing, and productive activity has enlightened and developed the mind.
First, as to arithmetic. It does not come first, but though you
speak with the tongues of men and angels, and make not mention of
arithmetic, it profiteth you nothing. The First Gift shows one object,
and the children get an idea of one whole; in the Second they receive
three whole objects again, but of different form; in the Third
and Fourth, the regularly divided cube is seen, and all possible
combinations of numbers as far as eight are made. In the Fifth
Gift the child sees three and its multiples; in fractions, halves,
quarters, eighths, thirds, ninths, and twenty-sevenths. With the
Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Gifts the field is practically unlimited.
Second, as to the child's knowledge of form, size, and proportion. His
development has been quite extensive: he knows, not always by name,
but by their characteristics, vertical, horizontal, slanting, and
curved lines; squares, oblongs; equal sided, blunt and sharp angled
triangles; five, six, seven and eight sided figures; spheres,
cylinders, cubes, and prisms. All this elementary geometry has, of
course, been learned "baby fashion," in a purely experimental way, but
nothing will have to be unlearned when the pupil approaches geometry
later in a more thoroughly scientific spirit.
Third, as to the cultivation of language, of the power of expression,
we cannot speak with too much emphasis. The vocabulary of the
kindergarten child of the lower classes is probably greater than
that of his mother or father. You can see how this comes about.
The teachers themselves are obliged to make a study of simple,
appropriate, expressive, and explicit language; the child is led to
express all his thoughts freely in proper words from the moment he
can lisp; he is trained through singing to distinct and careful
enunciation, and the result is a remarkably good power of language.
I make haste to say that this need not necessarily be used for the
purposes of chattering in the school.
The child has not, of course, learned to read and write, but reading
is greatly simplified by his accurate power of observation, and his
practice of comparing forms. The work of reading is play to a child
whose eye has been thus trained. As to writing, we precede it by
drawing, which is the sensible and natural plan. The child will have
had a good deal of practice with slate and lead pencil; will have
drawn all sorts of lines and figures from dictation, and have created
numberless designs of his own.
If, in short, our children could spend two years in a good
kindergarten, they would not only bring to the school those elements
of knowledge which are required, but would have learned in some degree
how to _learn_, and, in the measure of their progress, _have nothing
to unlearn_.
Let those who labor, day by day, with inert minds never yet awakened
to a wish for knowledge, a sense of beauty, or a feeling of pleasure
in mental activity, tell us how much valuable school time they would
save, if the raw material were thus prepared to their hand. "After
spending five or six years at home or in the street, without training
or discipline, the child is sent to school and is expected to learn at
once. He looks upon the strange, new life with amazement, yet without
understanding. Finally, his mind becomes familiar in a mechanical
manner, ill-suited to the tastes of a child, with the work and
exercises of primary instruction, the consequence being, very often, a
feeble body and a stuffed mind, the stuffing having very little more
effect upon the intellect than it has upon the organism of a roast
turkey." The kindergarten can remedy these intellectual difficulties,
beside giving the child an impulse toward moral self-direction, and a
capacity for working out his original ideas in visible and permanent
form, which will make him almost a new creature. It can, by taking the
child in season, set the wheels in motion, rouse all his best, finest,
and highest instincts, the purest, noblest, and most vivifying powers
of which he is possessed.
There is a good deal of time spent in the kindergarten on the
cultivation of politeness and courtesy; and in the entirely social
atmosphere which is one of its principal features, the amenities of
polite society can be better practiced than elsewhere.
The kindergarten aims in no way at making infant prodigies, but it
aims successfully at putting the little child in possession of every
faculty he is capable of using; at bringing him forward on lines he
will never need to forsake; at teaching within his narrow range what
he will never have to unlearn; and at giving him the wish to learn,
and the power of teaching himself. Its deep simplicity should always
be maintained, and no lover of childhood or thoughtful teacher would
wish it otherwise. It is more important that it should be kept pure
than that it should become popular.
I have tried, thus, somewhat at length, to demonstrate that our
educational system cannot be perfect until we begin still earlier with
the child, and begin in a more childlike manner, though, at the same
time, earnestly and with definite purpose. In trying to make manhood
and womanhood, we sometimes treat children as little men and women,
not realizing that the most perfect childhood is the best basis for
strong manhood.
Further, I have tried to show that Froebel's system gives us the only
rational beginning; but I confess frankly that to make it productive
of its vaunted results, it must be placed in the hands of thoroughly
trained kindergartners, fitted by nature and by education for their
most delicate, exacting, and sacred profession.
Now as to compromises. The question is frequently asked, Cannot
the best things of the kindergarten be introduced in the primary
departments of the public school? The best thing of kindergartening
is the kindergarten itself, and nothing else will do; it would be
necessary to make very material changes in the primary class which
is to include a kindergarten--changes that are demanded by radically
different methods.
The kindergarten should offer the child experience instead of
instruction; life instead of learning; practical child-life, a
miniature world, where he lives and grows, and learns and expands. No
primary teacher, were she Minerva herself, can work out Froebel's idea
successfully with sixty or seventy children under her sole care.
You will see for yourselves that this simple, natural, motherly
instruction of babyhood cannot be transplanted bodily into the primary
school, where the teacher has fifty or sixty children who are beyond
the two most fruitful years which the kindergarten demands. Besides,
the teachers of the lower grades cannot introduce more than an
infinitesimal number of kindergarten exercises, and at the same time
keep up their full routine of primary studies and exercises.
Any one who understands the double needs of the kindergarten and
primary school cannot fail to see this matter correctly, and as I
said before, we do not want a few kindergarten exercises, we want the
_kindergarten_. If teachers were all indoctrinated with the spirit of
Froebel's method, they would carry on its principles in dealing with
pupils of any age; but Froebel's kindergarten, pure and simple,
creates a place for children of four or five years, to begin their bit
of life-work; it is in no sense a school, nor must become so, or it
would lose its very essence and truest meaning.
Let me show you a kindergarten! It is no more interesting than a good
school, but I want you to see the essential points of difference:--
It is a golden morning, a rare one in a long, rainy winter. As we turn
into the narrow, quiet street from the broader, noisy one, the sound
of a bell warns us that we are near the kindergarten building.... A
few belated youngsters are hurrying along,--some ragged, some patched,
some plainly and neatly clothed, some finishing a "portable breakfast"
thrust into their hands five minutes before, but all eager to be
there.... While the Lilliputian armies are wending their way from the
yard to their various rooms, we will enter the front door and look
about a little.
The windows are wide open at one end of the great room. The walls are
tinted with terra cotta, and the woodwork is painted in Indian red.
Above the high wood dado runs a row of illuminated pictures of
animals,--ducks, pigeons, peacocks, calves, lambs, colts, and almost
everything else that goes upon two or four feet; so that the children
can, by simply turning in their seats, stroke the heads of their dumb
friends of the meadow and barnyard.... There are a great quantity of
bright and appropriate pictures on the walls, three windows full of
plants, a canary chirping in a gilded cage, a globe of gold-fish, an
open piano, and an old-fashioned sofa, which is at present adorned
with a small scrap of a boy who clutches a large slate in one hand,
and a mammoth lunch-pail in the other.... It is his first day, and he
looks as if his big brother had told him that he would be "walloped"
if he so much as winked.
A half-dozen charming girls are fluttering about; charming, because,
whether plain or beautiful, they all look happy, earnest, womanly,
full to the brim of life.
"A sweet, heart-lifting cheerfulness,
Like spring-time of the year,
Seems ever on their steps to wait."
... They are tying on white aprons and preparing the day's
occupations, for they are a detachment of students from a kindergarten
training school, and are on duty for the day.
One of them seats herself at the piano and plays a stirring march. The
army enters, each tiny soldier with a "shining morning face." Unhappy
homes are forgotten ... smiles everywhere ... everybody glad to
see everybody else ... happy children, happy teachers ... sunshiny
morning, sunshiny hearts ... delightful work in prospect, merry play
to follow it.... "Oh, it's a beautiful world, and I'm glad I'm in it;"
so the bright faces seem to say.
It is a cosmopolitan regiment that marches into the free kindergartens
of our large cities. Curly yellow hair and rosy cheeks ... sleek
blonde braids and calm blue eyes ... swarthy faces and blue-black
curls ... woolly little pows and thick lips ... long arched noses and
broad flat ones. Here you see the fire and passion of the Southern
races, and the self-poise, serenity and sturdiness of Northern
nations. Pat is here with a gleam of humor in his eye ... Topsy,
all smiles and teeth,... Abraham, trading tops with Isaac, next in
line,... Gretchen and Hans, phlegmatic and dependable,... François,
never still for an instant,... Christina, rosy, calm, and
conscientious, and Duncan, as canny and prudent as any of his people.
Pietro is there, and Olaf, and little John Bull.
What an opportunity for amalgamation of races, and for laying the
foundation of American citizenship! for the purely social atmosphere
of the kindergarten makes it a life-school, where each tiny citizen
has full liberty under the law of love, so long as he does not
interfere with the liberty of his neighbor. The phrase "Every man for
himself" is never heard, but "We are members one of another" is the
common principle of action.
The circles are formed. Every pair of hands is folded, and bright eyes
are tightly closed to keep out "the world, the flesh," and the rest of
it, while children and teachers sing one of the morning hymns:--
"Birds and bees and flowers,
Every happy day,
Wake to greet the sunshine,
Thankful for its ray.
All the night they're silent,
Sleeping safe and warm;
God, who knows and loves them,
Will keep them from all harm.
"So the little children,
Sleeping all the night,
Wake with each new morning,
Fresh and sweet and bright.
Thanking God their Father
For his loving care,
With their songs and praises
They make the day more fair."
Then comes a trio of good-morning songs, with cordial handshakes and
scores of kisses wafted from finger-tips.... "Good-Morning, Merry
Sunshine," follows, and the sun, encouraged by having some notice
taken of him in this blind and stolid world, shines brighter than
ever.... The song, "Thumbs and Fingers say 'Good-Morning,'" brings two
thousand fingers fluttering in the air (10 x 200, if the sum seems too
difficult), and gives the eagle-eyed kindergartners an opportunity to
look for dirty paws and preach the needed sermon.
It is Benny's birthday; five years old to-day. He chooses the songs he
likes best, and the children sing them with friendly energy.... "Three
cheers for Benny,--only three, now!" says the kindergartner.... They
are given with an enthusiasm that brings the neighbors to the windows,
and Benny, bursting with pride, blushes to the roots of his hair. The
children stop at three, however, and have let off a tremendous amount
of steam in the operation. Any wholesome device which accomplishes
this result is worthy of being perpetuated.... A draggled, forsaken
little street-cat sneaks in the door, with a pitiful mew. (I'm sure I
don't wonder! if one were tired of life, this would be just the place
to take a fresh start.) The children break into the song, "I Love
Little Pussy, Her Coat is so Warm," and the kindergartner asks the
small boy with the great lunch pail if he wouldn't like to give
the kitty a bit of something to eat. He complies with the utmost
solemnity, thinking this the queerest community he ever saw.... A
broken-winged pigeon appears on the window-sill and receives his
morning crumb; and now a chord from the piano announces a change of
programme. The children troop to their respective rooms fairly warmed
through with happiness and good will. Such a pleasant morning start to
some who have been "hustled" out of a bed that held several too many
in the night, washed a trifle (perhaps!), and sent off without a kiss,
with the echo of a sick mother's wails, or a father's oaths, ringing
in their ears!
After a few minutes of cheerful preparation, all are busily at work.
Two divisions have gone into tiny, "quiet rooms" to grapple with the
intricacies of mathematical relations. A small boy, clad mostly in red
woolen suspenders, and large, high-topped boots, is passing boxes of
blocks. He is awkward and slow. The teacher could do it more quietly
and more quickly, but the kindergarten is a school of experience where
ease comes, by and by, as the lovely result of repeated practice....
We hear an informal talk on fractions, while the cube is divided into
its component parts, and then see a building exercise "by direction."
In the other "quiet room" they are building a village, each child
constructing, according to his own ideas, the part assigned him. One
of them starts a song, and they all join in--
"Oh! builders we would like to be,
So willing, skilled, and strong;
And while we work so cheerily,
The time will not seem long."
"If we all do our parts well, the whole is sure to be beautiful," says
the teacher. "One rickety, badly made building will spoil our village.
I'm going to draw a blackboard picture of the children who live in the
village. Johnny, you haven't blocks enough for a good factory, and
Jennie hasn't enough for hers. Why don't you club together and make a
very large, fine one?"
This working for a common purpose, yet with due respect for
individuality, is a very important part of kindergarten ethics. Thus
each child learns to subordinate himself to the claims and needs of
society without losing himself. "No man liveth to himself" is the
underlying principle of action.
Coming back to the main room we find one division weaving bright paper
strips into a mat of contrasting color, and note that the occupation
trains the sense of color and of number, and develops dexterity in
both hands.
But what is this merry group doing in the farther corner? These
are the babies, bless them! and they are modeling in clay. What an
inspired version of pat-a-cake and mud pies is this! The sleeves are
pushed up, showing a high-water mark of white arm joining little brown
paws. What fun! They are modeling the seals at the Cliff House (for
this chances to be a California kindergarten), and a couple of
two-year-olds, who have strayed into this retreat, not because there
was any room for them here, but because there wasn't any room for them
anywhere else, are slapping their lumps of clay with all their might,
and then rolling it into caterpillars and snakes. This last is not
very educational, you say, but "virtue kindles at the touch of joy,"
and some lasting good must be born out of the rational happiness that
surrounds even the youngest babies in the kindergarten.
The sand-table in this room represents an Italian or Chinese vegetable
garden. The children have rolled and leveled the surface and laid it
off in square beds with walks between. The planting has been "make
believe,"--a different kind of seed in each bed; but the children have
named them all, and labeled the various plats with pieces of paper,
fastened in cleft sticks. A gardener's house, made of blocks,
ornaments one corner, and near it are his tools,--watering-pot, hoe,
rake, spade, etc., all made in cardboard modeling.
We now pass up-stairs. In one corner a family of twenty children are
laying designs in shining rings of steel; and as the graceful curves
multiply beneath their clever fingers, the kindergartner is telling
them a brief story of a little boy who made with these very rings a
design for a beautiful "rose window," which was copied in stained
glass and hung in a great stone church, of which his father was the
architect.
Another group of children is folding, by dictation, a four-inch square
of colored paper. The most perfect eye-measure, as well as the most
delicate touch, is needed here. Constant reference to the "sharp"
angle, "blunt" angle, square corner and right angle, horizontal and
vertical lines, show that the foundation is being laid for a future
clear and practical knowledge of geometry, though the word itself is
never mentioned.
There is one unhappy little boy in this class. He has broken the law
in some way, and he has no work.
"That is a strange idea," said the woman visitor. "In my time work was
given to us as a punishment, and it seemed a most excellent plan."
"We look at it in another way," said the kindergartner, smiling. "You
see, work is really the great panacea, the best thing in the world.
We are always trying to train the children to a love of industry and
helpful occupation; so we give work as a reward, and take it away as a
punishment."
We pass into the sunny upper hall, and find some children surrounding
a large sand-table. The exercise is just finished, and we gaze upon
a miniature representation of the Cliff House embankment and curving
road, a section of beach with people standing (wooden ladies and
gentlemen from a Noah's Ark), a section of ocean, and a perfect Seal
Rock made of clay.
"Run down-stairs, Timmy, please, and ask Miss Ellen if the seals are
ready." ... Timmy flies....
Presently the babies troop up, each carrying a precious seal extended
on two tiny hands or reposing in apron. They are all bursting with
importance.... Of course, the small Jonah of the flock tumbles up
the stairs, bumps his nose, and breaks his treasure.... There is an
agonized wail.... "_I bust my seal!_"... Some one springs to the
rescue.... The seal is patched, tears are dried, and harmony is
restored.... The animals are piled on the rocks in realistic
confusion, and another class comes out with twenty-five paper fishes
to be arranged in the waves of sand.
Later on, the sound of a piano invites us to witness the kindergarten
play-time.
Through kindergarten play the child comes to know the external world,
the physical qualities of the objects which surround him, their
motions, actions, and reactions upon each other, and the relations of
these phenomena to himself; a knowledge which forms the basis of
that which will be his permanent stock in life. The child's fancy is
healthily fed by images from outer life, and his curiosity by new
glimpses of knowledge from the world around him.
There are plays and plays! The ordinary unguided games of childhood
are not to be confounded for an instant with the genuine kindergarten
plays, which have a far deeper significance than is apparent to the
superficial observer. "Take the simplest circle game; it illustrates
the whole duty of a good citizen in a republic. Anybody can spoil it,
yet nobody can play it alone; anybody can hinder its success, yet no
one can get credit for making it succeed."
The play is over; the children march back to their seats, and settle
themselves to another period of work, which will last until noon. We
watch the bright faces, cheerful, friendly chatter, the busy figures
hovering over pleasant tasks, and feel that it has been good to pass a
morning in this republic of childhood.
I have given you but a tithe of the whole argument, the veriest
bird's-eye view; neither is it romance; it is simple truth; and, that
being the case, how can we afford to keep Froebel and his wonderful
influence on childhood out of a system of free education which has
for its aim the development of a free, useful, liberty-loving,
self-governing people? It is too great a factor to be disregarded, and
the coming years will prove it so; for the value of such schools is no
longer a matter of theory; they have been tested by experience, and
have won favor wherever they have been given a fair trial But how
important a work they have to do in our scheme of public education is
clear only when we consider the conditions which our public schools
must meet nowadays.
On the theory upon which the state undertakes the education of
its youth at all--the necessity of preparing them for intelligent
citizenship--a community might better economize, if economize it must,
anywhere else than on the beginning. An enormous immigrant population
is pressing upon us. The kindergarten reaches this class with great
power, and increases the insufficient education within the reach of
the children who must leave school for work at the age of thirteen or
fourteen. It increases it, too, by a kind of training which the child
gets from no other schooling, and brings him under influences which
are no small addition to the sum total of good in his life.
The entire pedagogical world watches with interest the educational
awakening of which the kindergarten has been the dawn. If people
really want to make the experiment, if parents and tax-payers are
anxious to have for their younger children what seems so beneficent a
training, then let them accept no compromises, but, after taking the
children at a proper age, see to it that they get pure kindergarten,
true kindergarten, and _nothing_ but kindergarten till they enter the
primary school. Then they will be prepared for study, and begin it
with infinite zest, because they comprehend its meaning. Having had
that beautiful beginning, every later step will seem glad to the
child; he will not see knowledge "through a glass darkly, but face to
face," in her most charming aspect.