Students of primitive and backward races tell us that the small children show as much promise and as many signs of undeveloped capability as do children of civilized lands, but before many years a cloud seems to overcast their minds, while selfishness and sin and passion take possession of their moral natures. Never again is there the same chance to make them what they might have been, as there was during those first early days when the kindergarten should have opened wide her doors to receive them. This argument would in itself seem sufficient to urge missionary Boards to speedy, thorough action in this matter, but there is another far-reaching argument to be considered. All through the East, wherever there are missionary kindergartens, mothers come to them to learn how to train their children, and countless homes have caught and passed on a reflection of the Christ life because of what the mothers have heard and observed and what the children have taken home with them. Make a flying trip to the Fuchow Kindergarten and watch “the irrepressible John.”
“This little lad’s father died, after a period of faithful service in Miss Wiley’s kitchen, and when the widowed mother came back to Miss Wiley from her country home to earn a living for herself and John and baby Joseph, John was already master of the situation and of his mother, and enforced his will on that by no means weak-minded woman by kicking, biting, pulling her ears, and similar methods. Now Miss Wiley is a famous trainer of boys, and she soon taught the young mother that the masculine will is not necessarily law at the age of two plus; the kindergarten carried out the same idea, and now John devotes vast energy and determination to the shaping of inanimate clay into pigs and other fascinating things, and treats animate nature as a well-mannered and kindly little gentleman should.”[62]
Kindergartners must be inventive and adaptable.
It would be most interesting and instructive to make a tour of missionary kindergartens for the purpose of seeing how ingenious our missionary teachers are, how they adapt Froebel’s ideas and methods to the most extraordinary circumstances which would have made that great educator gasp, how they must not only translate and adapt songs and tunes and games, but compose and create and invent,—all in an acquired language which has perhaps been only recently reduced to writing by some pioneer missionary. It might be pertinent to ask if all Women’s Boards provide the kindergartners and other teachers whom they send to the foreign field with a first-class outfit of all needed material, and if they remember that such an outfit needs to be replenished at least as often as a similar one does in the home land. It is not fair to require a missionary to make bricks without straw.
A West African kindergarten.
A visit to a West African Kindergarten will show an inventive and adaptable missionary in charge.
We have a new primary Sunday-School room which will be my kindergarten. It is a low wall covered by a round thatched roof high enough to leave a good big space for air. The floor is mudded and marked in squares. It looks very nice, but I shall take pains to get the cracks filled up, for they catch too much dirt and jigger seeds. The benches are not yet made, so the children who were cleaned up for Sunday went after leaves to sit on. The classes have to go out under trees to separate, but it is a great improvement upon the dirty and dangerous saw pit where they have met for so long. The only advantage about the saw pit was the roof for shade and pieces of wood and logs to sit upon. The big folks have been getting most of the attention and all of the advantages, but we feel that the children should have most because they are in the future. They do not show such shining results at once, but work with them will lay a foundation which is greatly needed here for really effective work....
I have a box cupboard, a sand table, two long low tables marked with squares, and strong benches. I have not much kindergarten material, but I do not need more at present. My first “gift” is a basin of water. They march in singing “Good morning, kind teacher” (only I am thankful to say the Umbundu words leave out the “kind”). Then we sing another song or two, and the prayer with bowed heads. I have no music, so I have to learn the tunes myself before I come to school. The children are the dearest, cunning things and they do want to learn.[63]
Primitive education among backward nations.
There are lands such as large sections of Africa and many of the Pacific Islands where no education whatever existed, where the language was not even reduced to writing, until Christian missionaries began their work. Other countries gave a certain so-called education to their boys or to the sons of certain privileged classes, leaving the girls absolutely illiterate. They agreed in principle if not in expression with that man in the mountains of Kurdistan who was asked by a missionary to send his bright little daughter down to the mission school at the beginning of the fall term. “Do you want my girl?” questioned the man in amazement and disgust. “Why don’t you take my cow?”
Again in other sections girls have a brief chance to learn, but are not expected to keep pace with their brothers or to attain to anything beyond the rudiments of book learning.