In and Around Berlin

by Minerva Brace Norton

All the children are given a luncheon in the middle of the forenoon. Parents who desire it can have a dinner of good porridge also served to their children, about noon, at a cost of a little more than one cent.

As the children approach the age of six, they enter the elementary class, where they have slates and pencils and a blackboard, and are taught the elements of reading. This is the only school exercise, so called, connected with the institution, and is to prepare the children to enter the public schools. After they leave the Kindergarten, some are received in the afternoons,—the girls to be taught sewing, and the boys carpentering.

The last department shown to us was the music-room. Here the little ones stood, and counted, and beat double time, under the direction of a leader, to a slow, melodious air played on the piano. Then they marched, keeping step, and still counting the time. After this they took tambourines, triangles, drums, and clappers, and made a noise, in perfect time and tune.

"Children like a noise," said the Directress. "Here they have it, but under direction and limitation. Some of the boys, when they are received here," continued the lady, "are so very, very naughty; but when they come to the music-class and have this noise, then they grow quiet and good. If it is taken away, they get naughty again."

A religious atmosphere is sought, as the only one in which child-nature can normally develop. They have daily morning prayers and songs, religious books and pictures, such as "Christ blessing Little Children," and at Christmas time stories of the birth of Christ. Benevolence in their relations to one another is sedulously cultivated. The four-or-five-year-olds make little wooden spades and rakes for the two-or-three-year-olds, saying gravely, "We do it for the little ones."

Meetings are held by the Directress with the mothers, and in several parts of the city three or four mothers have united in supporting little Kindergartens for their own families. The teaching of the Directress is also put in practice by mothers in their own homes, where much more time is devoted to the children than formerly.

As applications are constantly on hand for more than can be received to this institution, I asked if the revenue from fees and gifts were devoted to the enlargement of the accommodations. "No; for perfecting the system and its methods," was the reply. And this seemed to me to be the key to this most interesting undertaking. A perfect development of child-nature is sought; and a Kindergarten means here, "not several hours a day spent in much folding of papers and braiding of pretty things," said the Directress, but a many-sided and all-embracing culture of the whole being.

Having given this full account of the methods of the Kindergarten, the description of the department for the training of teachers may be omitted. Not so with the department devoted to the preparation of girls who have left school for the duties of wives, mothers, nurses, housekeepers, and servants. In this important department of the Pestalozzi-Froebel-Haüs, over forty young women from the various ranks of life were gathered. It was under the special patronage of the Crown Princess, whose own daughters were its first pupils.

The lady who directed the teaching of washing and ironing kept a close eye to the perfection of the work, which is all classified. At one time table-linen is washed and ironed properly; at another, the best methods of treating dish-towels are taught; at another, the washing of flannels and the doing up of prints and ginghams; at another, clear-starching, the cleansing of laces and fine materials; and so on, until the whole round of a family laundry has been scientifically taught and enforced by practice.

In one room a girl of fourteen or fifteen, formerly a pupil in the Kindergarten, was washing windows and paint. Well dressed, she was poised on a step-ladder, polishing a large pane of glass with a chamois skin. Her pail of suds stood on the shining floor, with a bit of oil-cloth under it, that not a drop of water should touch the varnish. I involuntarily looked at the wall-paper along the edges of the window and door casings and baseboards, and saw that no careless washcloth had ever left its trail on a surface for which it was not designed. As I glanced back at the maiden, she was folding her towels and placing them in a covered basket, with a compartment for each.