Kindergarten teacher

“ The Mother the best Kindergärtnerin.—​It is hardly necessary, here, to discuss the merits of the Kindergarten School. The success of such a school demands rare qualities in the teacher—high culture, some knowledge of psychology and of the art of education; intense sympathy with the children, much tact, much common sense, much common information, much ‘joyousness of nature’ and much governing power;—in a word, the Kindergarten method is nicely contrived to bring the child en rapport with a superior intelligence. ”

“ To Froebel, life, action, and knowledge were the three notes of one harmonious chord; but he did not advocate manual training merely that children might be kept busy, nor even that technical skill might be acquired. The piece of finished kindergarten work is only a symbol of something more valuable which the child has acquired in doing it.
The first steps in all the kindergarten occupations are directed or suggested by the teacher; but these dictations or suggestions are merely intended to serve as a sort of staff, by which the child can steady himself until he can walk alone. ”

“ This is altogether different from the play work of the kindergarten that has no connection with the seriousness of reality. A wise mother or teacher will adopt from the kindergarten system just so much as will enable her to teach children to observe nature and their surroundings; will take from it what enables her to make them combine their activity with some useful end ”

“ Social Training
A good Kindergarten is a mother's best help in this endeavor, for there her child meets with all sorts of other children. The very influence of the place, and the ever-ready help of the teacher are on his side. Every effort he makes to do right is met and welcomed. In every stand that he takes against temptation, he is unobtrusively reinforced. Moreover, the wrong-doing of his comrades is never allowed to retain the attractive glitter that it sometimes acquires on the play-ground. ”

“ And if only genius and love like his own could in one lifetime have discovered the science and worked out the processes of this culture, yet hundreds of pupils of these normal classes have proved, that any fairly gifted, well-educated, genial-tempered young woman, who will devote a reasonable time to training for it, can become a competent Kindergartner.
Nothing short of this will do; for none of the manuals which have been written to guide already trained experts, can supply the place of the living teacher. ”

“ This work will be education in the true sense of the term.” His great theory was idealistic—he believed in the unity of the universe, in the essential harmony of the world. It was the duty of the teacher to fit the child for his place in human society. This could be best done if the child was taken at a very early age and prepared for life in an ordinary school. The kindergarten, or child-garden, is thus a school where a child learns social life, where his play is systematized and his activities are directed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is naturally a matter for regret that the teacher into whose hands the child comes first at school usually knows so little of the home training he has had or failed to have. Children whose parents have made little or no attempt to teach these fundamental qualities which we have had under discussion are sometimes forever handicapped unless the teacher can supply the deficiency. Children who have made a good beginning may lose much of what they have been taught unless the teacher recognizes and holds them to the ideal. The kindergarten or primary teacher needs to know the homes of her pupils ”

“ It uses the ability of the individual teacher in adaptation, not unaided and alone, but assisted by the concentrated knowledge and practice of the expert. Such a logical course, seeking uniformity only by what it requires at the close of a year's work, would give to the individual teacher a large freedom of choice and would bring into kindergarten and elementary literature a basis of content demanding as much respect as high school or college literature. It is in no way opposed to maintaining the child as the center of interest. ”

“ In my observation, the success of the kindergarten depends entirely upon the teacher; where she is competent, fully believes in and understands the Froebel system, and is enthusiastic, the pupils are interested and alert ”

“ Progress in number work is equally rapid, but varies with the individual.”
“Can the Montessori teacher handle successfully more or less children than the teacher under the Kindergarten method?”
“In earlier stages fewer, as each child requires individual attention. One teacher and an assistant are sufficient for 25 children. Later on as children become self disciplined, fewer teachers are required than in the Kindergarten work.” ”

“ She maintains a visiting kindergarten by means of which children too crippled to attend school are visited in their homes and instructed by trained kindergarten teachers, and yet the half has not been told. ”

“ Of the 164 public normal schools, 36 made provision for training kindergarten teachers. The scientific and literary activity of some of the private kindergarten training classes is very great, and they exert a beneficial and stimulating effect on teaching in the elementary schools. It is generally admitted that from the point of view of the children, of the teachers, of the schools, and of the community at large, the kindergarten has been and is an inspiration of incalculable value. ”

“ As one feature of the normal class is a series of lectures on the being of the child, which are given on one day of the week, it would be desirable that Madame Kriege should admit mothers and sisters who have no intention of making teaching their vocation, but who may thus understand and be able to co-operate in spirit with the Kindergartner, in the education of the children; for it is a great hindrance to the Kindergarten when it is not understood at home. All the educators of the child should understand each other, and co-operate, if the highest results are to be attained. ”

“ Both the science and cultivation of flowers comes very naturally into the Kindergarten.
The greatest difficulty about object-teaching is, that it requires personal training, and wide-awake attention in teachers, of a character much more thorough than they commonly have. When it shall become general, as it certainly must, it will no longer be supposed that any ordinary person who can read and write, and is obliged to do something for a living, will be thought fit to keep a school for small children! ”

“ Mothers who would be and can be the best kindergartners should therefore none the less study Frœbel's science carefully and humbly.
All children are alike in having the threefold nature. I wish I had time to tell of a hundred kindergarten experiences that have come under my observation, in which the respectful, genial kindergartner has assisted in some moral development, whose occasion was very trivial to the superficial observer. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But it is to the next age—from three years old and upwards—that the Kindergarten becomes the desideratum, if not a necessity. The isolated home, made into a flower-vase by the application of the principles set forth in the Gifts above mentioned, may do for babies. But every mother and nurse knows how hard it is to meet the demands of a child too young to be taught to read, but whose opening intelligence and irrepressible bodily activity are so hard to be met by an adult, however genial and active. ”

“ The purpose of the kindergarten, according to Froebel himself, is, "to take the oversight of children before they are ready for school life; to exert an influence over their whole being in correspondence with its nature; to strengthen their bodily powers; to exercise their senses; to employ the awakening mind; to make them thoughtfully acquainted with the world of nature and of man; to guide their heart and soul in the right direction, and to lead them to the Origin of all life, and to unison with Him." ”

“ The kindergartner's conversation with the children upon their playthings is therefore her most important and delicate work, and one which she cannot do instinctively, but only if she scientifically understands the child on the one hand, and nature in some department on the other. ”

“ Actual experiences in the child's life are its most natural and potent teachers. We need constantly to remember that the prime value of the [Pg 173] kindergarten lies in its personal influence upon individuals, and seek to develop each separate member of our class according to his possibilities. ”

“ The beauty of this kindergarten subject is its kaleidoscopic character; it presents, like all truth, so many sides that you can give every one that which he likes or is fitted to receive. Take the aggressively self-made man who thinks our general scheme of education unprofitable,—show him the kindergarten plan of manual training. ”

“ Infant schools are nothing but a contradiction of child nature. Little children ought not to be schooled and taught, they merely need to be developed. It is the pressing need of our age, and only the idea of a garden can serve to show us symbolically the proper treatment of children. This idea lies in the very name of a Kindergarten. ”

“ The most important, the crowning work of the kindergartner, is to secure to the child this moment of reflection in the midst of his play and work on all planes of life; and you do so by sympathetically playing with him and gently guiding his unthinking, impulsive activity, and asking him what he has done and is going to do, and not letting him do anything till he seeks to do the symmetrical or, at least, the useful thing. It is not every movement that will produce the satisfactory result. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not till children who have been themselves educated according to Frœbel's principles, grow up, will there be found any adult persons who can keep kindergartens without devoting themselves to a special study of child-nature in the spirit of devout humility. ”

“ But, when the infant leaves the lap of its mother, and other duties divide her care, it is then necessary that a teacher, equally affectionate and equally efficient, be provided; for children seek, and will find, teachers of good or of evil in every scene, and in every playmate. It is now that the Infant School must mature the education which the mother has, or ought to have, begun. ”

“ But I would mingle education with their joy and with their pleasures—health and lessons with their play—and affection and forgiveness in their little bands. Thus their joys or their pleasures, their play and their companions, become their teachers. By an infant school I would not mean a room where a hundred children may be crowded together in an unhealthy atmosphere. The situation and comforts of the school are almost as important as the nature of the instruction, or the character and disposition of the teacher. ”