While this might be a laudable enough function to perform, it is by no means the function of the Kindergarten. This method of instruction aims at much more. It aims to lay foundations for a complete later education, and especially to make firm in the child those virtues and aptitudes which, when they are held by the majority of men, constitute the safety and welfare of society. For this reason no home, however well ordered, can supply to the child what the Kindergarten supplies. For the home is necessarily limited to the members of one family, while the Kindergarten, on the contrary, makes plain to the child the claims upon him of society not made up of his kinsfolk. It is the wide world in miniature, and if it is a properly organized Kindergarten, it will contain within itself a wide variety of children—children of wealth and of poverty, of ignorance and of gentle breeding—and will bring them all under one just rule. For only by this commingling of many characters upon a common level and under the strict reign of justice can the child be fitted practically, and by means of a series of progressive experiments, for citizenship in a genuine democracy.
Exclusive Associates
Parents sometimes so far miss the aim of the Kindergarten as to desire that instead of such a commingling there shall be a narrow limit set; that in the Kindergarten shall be only such children as the child is accustomed to associate with. But if the Kindergarten acceded to this demand, as it seldom does, it would lose much of its usefulness, for every one knows that children cannot be permanently sheltered from contact with the outside world, nor can they be always reared in an atmosphere of exclusiveness. A wisdom greater than the mother's has ordered that no child shall be so narrowly nourished. If he has any freedom whatever, any naturalness of life, he must and will enlarge his circle of acquaintances beyond the limit of his mother's calling list.
Indeed, even those Kindergartens which are professedly exclusive, and which confine their ministrations to the children of one particular neighborhood, are obliged by the nature of things to contain nascent individualities of almost every type. For no neighborhood, however equal in wealth and fashion, ever produced children of an unvarying quality. In any circle, no matter how exclusive, there are mischievous children, children who use bad language, children who have sly, mean tricks, children who do not speak the truth, and who are in other ways quite as undesirable as the children of the poor and ignorant. It is often asserted, indeed, that the children of exclusive neighborhoods very often show more varieties of badness than the children of the open street. The records of the private Kindergarten as compared with the public Kindergarten amply prove this statement.
Evil Example
Since, then, whether you confine your child to the limits of your own circle or not, you cannot successfully keep him from playing with children who are more or less objectionable, what are you going to do to keep him from the harm of such association? You have to make him strong enough to withstand temptation and resist the force of evil example. Of course, he must have as little of the wrong example, especially in his younger and tenderer years, as can be managed without too greatly checking his activity and curtailing his freedom. Yet after all he is to be taught a positive and not a negative righteousness, and if his home training is not sufficient to enable him to stand against a certain downward pull from the outside, there is something the matter with it.
While he must not be strained too hard, nor too constantly associate with children whose manners put his manners to the test, still he ought by degrees, almost imperceptibly, to be accustomed to holding to the truth, to that which is found good, no matter whether his associates find it desirable or not.
Social Training