Children's Rights: A Book of Nursery Logic

by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

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.