"Kindergarten" is a beautiful name, with fine poetic significance, but unfortunately is not quite sufficiently descriptive of its high purpose. In common acceptance it means a something intended principally to "amuse children and keep them out of mischief until they are old enough to learn something useful."
The method of analysis and training that has ripened out of the wise suggestions of Saint Froebel is the most important acquisition to pedagogy that has ever been discovered and is applicable to any branch of education and also to the use of industrial institutions in improving the condition and status of employees as well as establishing cordial relations between employers and their employees.
A splendid example of the latter application has been carried to success by the National Cash Register Company, of Dayton, Ohio, whose happy and enthusiastic employees number nearly two thousand persons of all ages and both sexes, scattered in every part of the world where commerce reaches, but the subject of this institution and its methods is worthy of a special treatise. It is an "object lesson" which should be known to everyone within the whole range of contact between directors and directed in industrial pursuits.
The first aim of all education should be Character-Building and Habit-Forming in order to prepare a fertile and weedless soil in which to nurture seeds of intellectual attainment, manual skill, and religious intuition, all of which are the certain product of character cultivation. These insure industry and growth which never fail to produce blossoms of religious yearnings.
Intellectual and manual training are themselves most useful instruments in establishing character and habit, but their first and best mission is sometimes overlooked, and intellect and skill are frequently taught to children without reference to poise, honor, order and harmony, in which case the instruction is like building upon sand, without adequate foundation.
Character is really the chief object and recognized mission of the kindergarten and no disrespect is intended by suggesting the names "Character-Building" and "Habit-Forming" to include it in a wider scope of application.
All great world-movements in the evolution of civilization are modestly started. Froebel was undoubtedly unconscious of the tremendous impetus toward reform that his "Mutter Werk" had put in motion. Like all great movements it started in the warmth of a simple and spontaneous love impulse, but has spread a wave of true charity that more nearly satisfies the Christ ideal than any that has before covered the world. In the simplicity of its inception it received the blessed name of "Kindergarten," unconscious of its wide mission in the cause of general reform and harmony.
That the mission of the kindergarten is a very broad one is proven by the fact that more victims of hopeless and hardened criminal mania have been touched and reclaimed through kindness to the children of these unfortunates in kindergartens, as related elsewhere, than by direct effort.
Until the time of Froebel educational methods left character and habit forming to parents and religion. These are not sought to be replaced by the Froebel method, but they are powerfully supplemented by it; and, when character and habit schools for young children, followed by an adequate number of manual-training and parental farm schools to test older children for preference of occupation, have come to be appreciated as the most important functions of government, as well as of education, as they must do to keep up with the present acceleration of progress, the Science of Government will rest on the Science of Child-Care, and will have been simplified to the position of greatest effectiveness.
Herein will woman find the sphere of her greatest usefulness and of her natural inclination.