Kindergarten

“ The habit, in the city of New York, of sending children to school in an omnibus, hired to go round the city and pick them up, suggests the possibility of a Kindergarten in one of those beautiful residences up in town, where there is a garden before or behind the house. It is impossible to keep Kindergarten by the way. It must be the main business of those who undertake it; for it is necessary that every individual child should be borne, as it were, on the heart of the gardeners, in order that it be inspired with order, truth, and goodness. ”

“ The kindergarten succeeds in getting these interesting and valuable free productions from children of four or five years only by developing, in every possible way, the sense of beauty and harmony and order. We know that people assume, somewhat at least, the color of their surroundings; and, if the sense of beauty is to grow, we must give it something to feed upon.
The kindergarten tries to provide a room, more or less attractive, quantities of pictures and objects of interest, growing plants and vines, vases of flowers, and plenty of light, air, and sunshine. ”

“ The crèche and the kindergarten were and continue to be a blessing undoubtedly for those innumerable mothers who work outside of their homes and are badly prepared for their duties. Some type of kindergarten will perhaps be necessary under particular circumstances as a partial substitute for the home, as, for example, when a child has no companions to play with, or when the mother herself is disinclined or not able to educate the child. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No single chapter can contain all of the progressive notes that are being sounded in American Elementary Education; yet it is possible, after some arbitrary picking and choosing, to describe a number of the most typical and most successful educational innovations. At the bottom of most up-to-date elementary school systems is the kindergarten. Not so often as it might be, but still frequently, the child begins school work there. The games, the songs, the children’s sports of these kindergarten years, make a joyous entry-way into the grades. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This is where the Kindergarten has its great value. In the true Kindergarten the children live under a dispensation of loving justice, and selfishness betrays itself instantly there, because it is alien to the whole spirit of the place. ”

“ Sometimes he would gather up all the children and take them to the meadow, and teach them about the leaves and stones, the flowers and birds and ants, as his brother used to teach him, and then they would play the very plays the wind and flowers and birds had played. So he called it his kindergarten,—his child-garden,—and he began to show to the whole world that little children must learn and grow in the same sweet way that flowers do. ”

“ But when the kindergarten receives the child, three or four of the most precious educational years have already passed away, and at the still tender age of seven the child is surrendered to a very different system of training. The kindergarten is therefore only a brief episode in the educational period of the child’s life. But if it be the true education, it is susceptible of universal application. Throughout all nature the order of development is constant and harmonious, and the child-nature cannot in reason constitute an exception to this rule. ”

“ So soon as a child-house is built and education seen to begin in earliest babyhood, so soon as we begin to plan a beautiful and delicately adjusted environment for our children, in which line and colour and sound and touch are all made avenues of easy unconscious learning, we shall find that there is no sharp break between "home" and "school." In the baby-garden the baby will learn many things, and never know it. In the kindergarten the little child will learn many things, and never know it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One of the rooms it would be well to provide with flat box-desks, in which can be kept all the materials which each child uses,—slates and pencils, blocks, sticks, weaving and sewing materials,—and the children should be required to keep these in order.
In my own Kindergarten I provide all the materials for their work and instruction, thus securing uniformity; and it is better to do so always, and to charge a price covering the expense. It should be understood, from the first, that Kindergarten education is not cheap. ”

“ We must say a word about the locality and circumstances of a Kindergarten. There is published in Lausanne, France, a newspaper devoted to the interests of this mode of education, in whose early numbers is described a Kindergarten which seems to be of the nature of a boarding-school; at least, the children are there all day. Each child has a garden, and there is one besides where they work in common. There are accommodations for keeping animals, and miniature tools to do mechanical labor of various kinds. In short, it is a child's world. ”

“ Here we see plainly foreshadowed the Kindergarten, whose foundation is "education by play"; as the study of the Kindergarten system leads to the earnest, thoughtful consideration of the office of play, and the exact value which the plaything or toy has in the development of the child, when this is once understood, the choice of what toys to give to children is easily made.
In the world of nature, we find the blossom comes before the fruit; in history, art arose long before science was possible; in the human race, the emotions are developed sooner than the reason. ”

“ The kindergarten is not alone in its appeal to the child and in its affiliation with the community. Traditional grade education has likewise been modified and rehabilitated until it makes an appeal to parent and child alike. In the first place, a consistent effort has been made to provide accommodations for the physical education in the grades of the fifty-seven elementary schools. ”

“ In the kindergarten season various sensibilities are manifest that have not shown themselves in the nursery, and which are premonitions of the destined dominion over material nature, which at first so much dominates the child, and would destroy his body if you did not intervene with your loving care. These are to be mothered in the kindergartner's heart till they become conscious desires, informing and directing his will, which is encouraged and strengthened—if it is never superseded by your will—until he shall begin to realize his personal responsibility. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the foregoing pages I have done what I can, to make a Kindergarten Guide; not only for the use of those who undertake the new education, but in order to give parents a definite idea of the value of the new education to their children, and how they may aid rather than hinder its legitimate effect. Parents who live in places so isolated as to make a Kindergarten impossible, may also get some hints how to supply the want in some measure, by becoming themselves the playmates of their children. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If we also find that the influence of the kindergarten upon the parents of the infants is more potent than any other which can be brought to bear upon them, we see [Pg 319] clearly that the way to secure the widest reform in the most thorough manner is to concentrate attention upon the kindergarten phase of education, advocate its extension to include even the last one of the children, beginning with the most needy first, and extending the care outward from the centre of worst neglect to finally reach the whole. ”

“ The Nursery need not therefore be a Kindergarten.—​Though every mother should be a Kindergärtnerin, in the sense in which Froebel would employ the term, it does not follow that every nursery should be a regularly organised Kindergarten. Indeed, the machinery of the Kindergarten is no more than a device to ensure the carrying out of certain educational principles, and some of these it is the mother’s business to get at, and work out according to Froebel’s method—or her own. ”

“ These are the persistent working upon school boards until they adopt the kindergarten, and, much more delicate and difficult, the protection of its interests after it is adopted; the opening of kindergartens in orphanages and refuges where they prove the most blessed instrumentality for good; the spreading of such clear knowledge and intelligent insight into the kindergarten as shall prevent it from deterioration; the insistence upon kindergartners properly trained by properly qualified training teachers ”

“ In the opening hour of the kindergarten, when the kindergartner interchanges the songs and hymns which the children choose, or at least agree to, with real free conversation, in which each child has a chance to tell what is uppermost in his little mind, the very most important work of the kindergartner is done. ”

“ On the whole, we may say that some of the principles which should govern Kindergarten training are precisely those in which every thoughtful mother endeavours to bring up her family; while the practices of the Kindergarten, being only ways, amongst others, of carrying out these principles, and being apt to become stereotyped and wooden, are unnecessary, but may be adopted so far as they fit in conveniently with the mother's general scheme for the education of her family. ”

“ The idea of a kindergarten, usually regarded as a small part of the school program, has been evolved until, in this one city, it is a potent influence, working on children, teachers, parents and public opinion. ”

“ Amongst its other merits, this book tends to correct the still too prevalent notion, that the Kindergarten is a peculiar—an almost magical—institution, which provides a sure remedy for children's imperfections, apart from their home conditions. Doubtless, in the case of poor neglected little ones, the contrast between their treatment at the Kindergarten and their ordinary experience, is necessarily striking and decided, because the parents are careless and ignorant. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Given such a superior being to conduct it, and the Kindergarten is beautiful--'tis like a little heaven below'; but put a commonplace woman in charge of such a school, and the charmingly devised gifts and games and occupations become so many instruments of wooden teaching. If the very essence of the Kindergarten method is personal influence, a sort of spiritual mesmerism, it follows that the mother is naturally the best Kindergartnerin ”

“ Hence one aim of the Kindergarten is to present experiences which may eventually issue in right conduct, and to prevent the acquisition of experiences of an immoral kind. Hence also its insistence upon the need of carefully selecting the environment of the young child, so that as far as possible its early experiences—its first acquisitions—shall be of a healthy nature. Moreover, by means of the organised activities of the school, and by utilising the play-instinct of the child, it seeks to form and establish certain habits of future social worth to the community and to the individual. ”

“ 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. ”