Upon the organization and arrangement of the school largely depends the success of the educator. Two things must be borne constantly in mind. First, to create truthful and intellectual atmosphere, where wisdom, honor, and knowledge can be inhaled as with the breath, and second, to make the school cheerful and attractive in every way possible. We must get rid of the idea now generally prevailing among children, that the school is to be resorted to with regret and escaped from with pleasure.
So soon as the child will look at and become interested in pictures and toys, and will listen to tales and little stories, it can profitably be introduced in the school, the first department of which should be the Infant-school, or, as the Germans so aptly term it, the children’s garden, or Kinder Garten.
Here plaiting, modelling, and building, with simple object lessons for the older infants, develop their powers of observation, and give employment and impart skill to little fingers which might else be engaged in destroying furniture or clothes, or in pilfering from the sugar-bowl. Practical familiarity with the properties of lines, angles, circles, spheres, cylinders, cubes, cones, and the conic sections will be acquired, which will give a life and reality to the geometrical studies which will occupy them in their school career. Dancing and singing will relieve the tedium of sitting, shake off the surplus energy, give rest to the body, and power, time, and tune to the voice. Models of houses, stores, workshops, kitchens, farms, and factories, which later on they will assist in making, will be a source alike of amusement and instruction.
In the children’s garden no teacher should have charge of more than about twelve children, who should regard her as their mother-teacher, while she should seek to win the love and confidence of the little ones as the beginning of her work.
Each class of twelve should have their own special room, while for general purposes, such as music, drilling, gymnastic exercises, games, tableaux, and exhibitions of the magic lantern, the oxyhydrogen microscope, the stereopticon, and the like, they should assemble in a large hall. The details of arrangements will readily suggest themselves. The main feature is to have all things natural, free, pleasant, cheerful, bright, refined, and unrestrained by external forms or rigid rules, at the same time that order is secured by an easy discipline.
So deeply are we impressed with the importance and utility of the kinder garten, and with the high qualities required by the teacher of the very young, that we are more and more disposed to believe that the true order in rank and promotion among teachers should be, to speak in paradox, downwards; that is to say, the younger the children to be taught, the higher the rank and remuneration of the teacher; for not only is an extensive range of knowledge necessary to enable the teacher truthfully to answer the innumerable questions of inquisitive infancy, and to avoid giving false notions, to be afterwards with greater or less difficulty removed—always with a shock to the moral sentiment when the child discovers it has been deceived—but also a knowledge of the infant mind, a perception of the thoughts and fancies which chase one another through the infant brain, a knowledge and perceptive power which only a watchful and loving experience can acquire. An industry and a patience far beyond any needed by the teacher of more advanced pupils are also required by the highly-cultivated men and women, to whom alone the training of infant minds should be intrusted. Advanced pupils go more than half-way to meet their teacher—the infant can render no assistance to his, all has to be borne, suffered and done for him—his future habits depend mainly on those given to him in his earliest years. Yet the care of him in these important days is generally confided to ignorant nurses and to the less-skilled class of teachers.
In building the school, a pleasing style of architecture should be adopted, and the walls of the main hall should be hung with diagrams of all kinds, illustrative of natural history in its largest sense, of the sciences and of the mechanical arts, and with portraits or busts of distinguished men. The walls of the class-rooms should be decorated with diagrams and maps and figures referring to the special branches taught therein.
A large and commodious laboratory should be fitted up in the building, to enable every pupil to acquire experimentally that knowledge of chemical forces and action which books alone can never impart. A convenient observatory should afford facility for astronomical study and observation.
On the top floors or around the building should be arranged workshops, where the use of tools and machinery could be taught. The classes should assemble in the large hall, in the morning, where they might join in singing or light gymnastic exercises, or listen to some short appropriate address before betaking themselves to their class-rooms.
The teaching in these latter should be conducted, wherever practicable, upon the Socratic method, and every branch of science and of art could be thus explained. The mother unconsciously uses this method in educating or drawing out the first perceptions of infancy and early youth; and the impressions derived from this method of acquiring knowledge are the most lasting, being such as become most absolutely assimilated with the pupil’s mind. The teacher would also, at frequent intervals, conduct his class into the fields and woods for the study of botany, entomology, and geology, where Nature would supply in abundance the materials, and the teacher would be the only book. Instruction in the various trades which could be conveniently practised should receive attention, the taste of the pupils being made a guide to selection.