Froebel outlined, nearly a century ago, a thorough, practical training course for young women, preparatory to home-making or to vocational work as teachers or mothers’ assistants. At Pestalozzi-Froebel House in Berlin, half a century ago, under the administration of Frau Shrader and Miss Annette Schepel, such a course was organized. Echoes of it to-day are found in the German secondary schools and special schools for girls. The same idea spread to England a quarter of a century ago, and there to-day a score of special schools, and some girls’ high schools, provide such a training.
In America, the School of Mothercraft was opened in New York City in December, 1911, to work out experimentally a training course for educated young women.[1] Here has been developed a comprehensive, human, practical course including domestic science and art, and the care and training of babies and little children. The students work in a home atmosphere, under home conditions, using the household for their practice work, caring for the resident babies and children, educating and training them in the course of the day’s régime, and receiving their own training in personality and technique as well as in theory. Extension classes have been maintained for young mothers, brides, and engaged young women.
It is work with young women and the children in the School of Mothercraft that has made possible the preparation of the present volume.
No book can take the place of the living teacher. No amount of discussion of theory can be a substitute for experience. Yet experience, without sound principles, is also of minor value. Any book presupposes a modicum of common sense and rational judgment in its readers.
In a volume of such limited compass only a few significant principles can be presented, and some of the important elementary facts and technique that more technical books may overlook. The present volume aims only to be an introduction to the many phases of home-making, child care, and child training, to furnish something of vision for these responsibilities, and a guide for further study.
No book can be a substitute for the personal advice of the physician, the hygienist, the psychologist, and the teacher. The reader of any book on applied science may easily make the mistake of interpreting statements out of proportion to their significance, or of misunderstanding directions so that they even become misleading. Only discussion with the living teacher will discover and correct such errors.
The reader must be open-minded to new discoveries, new theories, new methods. At the present time, as never before, extensive researches are being made in biology, hygiene, dietetics, child psychology, and pedagogy. Important discoveries as revolutionary as the discovery of the circulation of the blood, radio-activity, the cellular basis of life, may be made at any future time.
In the present volume no attempt has been made to present controversial points of view, but a consistently constructive régime and programme has been given. The novice in any art must first learn to work constructively and rather dogmatically, until he has learned to apply one set of principles efficiently. Then he may begin to modify details according to some rational principle, instead of by mere whim, and to compare his method with other possibilities. The basis and the special authorities for the régime here presented will be found in the final chapter on bibliography.
July, 1916.
MARY L. READ.