Children's Rights: A Book of Nursery Logic Part 10

Suffice it to say that it has been done, and can be done again; but it needs discretion, forethought, tact, earnestness, and unimpeachable honesty of administration, for unless we can depend upon our school boards and kindergartners _implicitly_, counting upon them for wise cooperation, brooding care, and great wisdom in selection of teachers, the experiment will be a failure. We have risks enough to run as it is; let us not permit our little ones, more susceptible by reason of age than any we have to deal with now,--let us not permit them to become victims of politics, rings, or machine teaching.

The kindergarten is more liable to abuse than any other department of teaching. There is no ground in the universe so sacred as this.

But the difference between primary schools is just as great, only, unfortunately, we have become used to it; and the kindergarten being under fire, so to speak, must be absolutely ideal in its perfection, or it is ruthlessly held up to scorn.

There is a tremendous awakening all over the country with regard to kindergarten and primary work, and this is well, since the greatest and most fatal mistakes of the public school system have been made _just here_; and the time is surely coming when more knowledge, wisdom, tact, ingenuity, forethought, yes, and money, will be expended in order to meet the demands of the case. The time is coming when the imp of parsimony will no longer be mistaken for the spirit of economy; when a woman possessed of ordinary human frailty will no longer be required to guide, direct, develop, train, help, love, and be patient with sixty little ones, just beginning to tread the difficult paths of learning, and each receiving just one sixtieth of what he craves. The millennium will be close at hand when we cease to expect from girls just out of the high school what Socrates never attempted, and would have deemed impossible.

Look at Senator Stanford's famous Palo Alto stock farm. Each colt born into that favored community is placed in a cla.s.s of twelve. These twelve colts are cared for and taught by four or five trained teachers. No man interested in the training of fine horses ever objects, so far as I know, to such expenditure of labor and money. The end is supposed to justify the means. But when the creatures to be trained are human beings, and when the end to be reached is not race-horses, but merely citizens, we employ a very different process of reasoning.

That this subject of early training is a vitally interesting one to thinking people cannot be denied. The kindergarten has become the fashion, you say, cynically. This is scarcely true; but it is a fact that the upper, the middle, and the lower cla.s.ses among us begin to recognize the existence of children under six years of age, and realize that far from being nonent.i.ties in life, or unknown quant.i.ties, they are very lively units in the sum of progressive education.

When we speak of kindergarten work among the children of the poor, and argue its claims as one of the best means of taking unfortunate little Arabs from the demoralizing life of the streets, and of giving their aimless hands something useful to do, their restless minds something good and fruitful to think of, and their curious eyes something beautiful to look on, there is not a word of disapproval. People seem willing to concede its moral value when applied to the lower cla.s.ses, but, when they are obliged to pay anything to procure this training for their own children, or see any prospect of what they call an already extravagant school system made more so by its addition, they become prolific in doubts. In other words, they believe in it when you call it _philanthropy_, but not when you call it _education_; and it must be called the germ of the better education, toward which we are all struggling, the nearest approach to the perfect beginning which we have yet found.

We see in the excellence of Froebel's idea, educationally considered, its only claim to peculiar power in dealing with incipient hoodlumism.

It is only because it has such unusual fitness to child-nature, such a store of philosophy and ingenuity in its appliances, and such a wealth of spiritual truth in its aims and methods, that it is so great a power with neglected children and ignorant and vicious parents.

The principles on which Froebel built his educational idea may be summed up briefly under four heads. First, All the faculties of the child are to be drawn out and exercised as far as age allows. Second, The powers of habit and a.s.sociation, which are the great instruments of all education, of the whole training of life, must be developed with a systematic purpose from the earliest dawn of intelligence.

Third, The active instincts of childhood are to be cultivated through manual exercise (chiefly creative in character), which is made an essential part of the training, and this manual exercise is to be valued chiefly as a means of self-expression. Fourth, The senses are to be trained to accuracy as well as the hand. The child must learn how to observe what is placed before him, and to observe it truly, an acquirement which any teacher of science or art will appreciate. To work out these principles, Froebel devised his practical method of infant education, and the very name he gave to the place where his play lessons were to be used marks his purpose. No books are to be seen in a kindergarten, because no ideas or facts are presented to the child that he cannot clearly understand and verify. The object is not to teach him arithmetic or geometry, though he learns enough of both to be very useful to him hereafter; but to lead him to discover _truths_ concerning forms and numbers, lines and angles, for himself.

Thus in the play-lessons the teacher simply rules the order in which the child shall approach a new thing, and gives him the correct names which, henceforth, he must always use; but the observation of resemblances and differences (that groundwork of all knowledge), the reasoning from one point to another, and the conclusions he arrives at, are all his own; he is only led to see his mistake if he makes one. The child handles every object from which he is taught, and learns to reproduce it.

It is not enough to say that any ordinary system of object teaching in the hands of an ingenious teacher will serve the purpose or take the place of the kindergarten. People who say this evidently have no conception of Froebel's plan, in which the simultaneous training of head, heart, and hand is the most striking characteristic.

The kindergarten is mainly distinguished from the later instruction of the school by making the knowledge of facts and the cultivation of the memory subordinate to the development of observation and to the appropriate activity of the child, physical, mental, and moral. Its aim is to utilize the now almost wasted time from four to six years, a time when all negligent and ignorant mothers leave the child to chance development, and when the most careful mother cannot train her child into the practice of social virtues so well as the truly wise kindergartner who works with her. "We learn through doing" is the watchword of the kindergarten, but it must be a _doing_ which blossoms into _being_, or it does not fulfill its ideal, for it is character building which is to go on in the kindergarten, or it has missed Froebel's aim.

What does the kindergarten do for children under six years of age?

What has it accomplished when it sends the child to the primary school? I do not mean what Froebel hoped could be done, or what is occasionally accomplished with bright children and a gifted teacher, or even what is done in good private kindergartens, for that is yet more; but I mean what is actually done for children by charitable organizations, which are really doing the work of the state.

I think they can claim tangible results which are wholly remarkable; and yet they do not work for results, or expect much visible fruit in these tender years, from a culture which is so natural, child-like, and un.o.btrusive that its very outward simplicity has caused it to be regarded as a plaything.

In glancing over the acquirements of the child who has left the kindergarten, and has been actually _taught_ nothing in the ordinary acceptation of the word, we find that he has worked, experimented, invented, compared, reproduced. All things have been revealed in the doing, and productive activity has enlightened and developed the mind.

First, as to arithmetic. It does not come first, but though you speak with the tongues of men and angels, and make not mention of arithmetic, it profiteth you nothing. The First Gift shows one object, and the children get an idea of one whole; in the Second they receive three whole objects again, but of different form; in the Third and Fourth, the regularly divided cube is seen, and all possible combinations of numbers as far as eight are made. In the Fifth Gift the child sees three and its multiples; in fractions, halves, quarters, eighths, thirds, ninths, and twenty-sevenths. With the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Gifts the field is practically unlimited.

Second, as to the child's knowledge of form, size, and proportion. His development has been quite extensive: he knows, not always by name, but by their characteristics, vertical, horizontal, slanting, and curved lines; squares, oblongs; equal sided, blunt and sharp angled triangles; five, six, seven and eight sided figures; spheres, cylinders, cubes, and prisms. All this elementary geometry has, of course, been learned "baby fashion," in a purely experimental way, but nothing will have to be unlearned when the pupil approaches geometry later in a more thoroughly scientific spirit.

Third, as to the cultivation of language, of the power of expression, we cannot speak with too much emphasis. The vocabulary of the kindergarten child of the lower cla.s.ses is probably greater than that of his mother or father. You can see how this comes about.

The teachers themselves are obliged to make a study of simple, appropriate, expressive, and explicit language; the child is led to express all his thoughts freely in proper words from the moment he can lisp; he is trained through singing to distinct and careful enunciation, and the result is a remarkably good power of language.

I make haste to say that this need not necessarily be used for the purposes of chattering in the school.

The child has not, of course, learned to read and write, but reading is greatly simplified by his accurate power of observation, and his practice of comparing forms. The work of reading is play to a child whose eye has been thus trained. As to writing, we precede it by drawing, which is the sensible and natural plan. The child will have had a good deal of practice with slate and lead pencil; will have drawn all sorts of lines and figures from dictation, and have created numberless designs of his own.

If, in short, our children could spend two years in a good kindergarten, they would not only bring to the school those elements of knowledge which are required, but would have learned in some degree how to _learn_, and, in the measure of their progress, _have nothing to unlearn_.

Let those who labor, day by day, with inert minds never yet awakened to a wish for knowledge, a sense of beauty, or a feeling of pleasure in mental activity, tell us how much valuable school time they would save, if the raw material were thus prepared to their hand. "After spending five or six years at home or in the street, without training or discipline, the child is sent to school and is expected to learn at once. He looks upon the strange, new life with amazement, yet without understanding. Finally, his mind becomes familiar in a mechanical manner, ill-suited to the tastes of a child, with the work and exercises of primary instruction, the consequence being, very often, a feeble body and a stuffed mind, the stuffing having very little more effect upon the intellect than it has upon the organism of a roast turkey." The kindergarten can remedy these intellectual difficulties, beside giving the child an impulse toward moral self-direction, and a capacity for working out his original ideas in visible and permanent form, which will make him almost a new creature. It can, by taking the child in season, set the wheels in motion, rouse all his best, finest, and highest instincts, the purest, n.o.blest, and most vivifying powers of which he is possessed.

There is a good deal of time spent in the kindergarten on the cultivation of politeness and courtesy; and in the entirely social atmosphere which is one of its princ.i.p.al features, the amenities of polite society can be better practiced than elsewhere.

The kindergarten aims in no way at making infant prodigies, but it aims successfully at putting the little child in possession of every faculty he is capable of using; at bringing him forward on lines he will never need to forsake; at teaching within his narrow range what he will never have to unlearn; and at giving him the wish to learn, and the power of teaching himself. Its deep simplicity should always be maintained, and no lover of childhood or thoughtful teacher would wish it otherwise. It is more important that it should be kept pure than that it should become popular.

I have tried, thus, somewhat at length, to demonstrate that our educational system cannot be perfect until we begin still earlier with the child, and begin in a more childlike manner, though, at the same time, earnestly and with definite purpose. In trying to make manhood and womanhood, we sometimes treat children as little men and women, not realizing that the most perfect childhood is the best basis for strong manhood.

Further, I have tried to show that Froebel's system gives us the only rational beginning; but I confess frankly that to make it productive of its vaunted results, it must be placed in the hands of thoroughly trained kindergartners, fitted by nature and by education for their most delicate, exacting, and sacred profession.

Now as to compromises. The question is frequently asked, Cannot the best things of the kindergarten be introduced in the primary departments of the public school? The best thing of kindergartening is the kindergarten itself, and nothing else will do; it would be necessary to make very material changes in the primary cla.s.s which is to include a kindergarten--changes that are demanded by radically different methods.

The kindergarten should offer the child experience instead of instruction; life instead of learning; practical child-life, a miniature world, where he lives and grows, and learns and expands. No primary teacher, were she Minerva herself, can work out Froebel's idea successfully with sixty or seventy children under her sole care.

You will see for yourselves that this simple, natural, motherly instruction of babyhood cannot be transplanted bodily into the primary school, where the teacher has fifty or sixty children who are beyond the two most fruitful years which the kindergarten demands. Besides, the teachers of the lower grades cannot introduce more than an infinitesimal number of kindergarten exercises, and at the same time keep up their full routine of primary studies and exercises.

Any one who understands the double needs of the kindergarten and primary school cannot fail to see this matter correctly, and as I said before, we do not want a few kindergarten exercises, we want the _kindergarten_. If teachers were all indoctrinated with the spirit of Froebel's method, they would carry on its principles in dealing with pupils of any age; but Froebel's kindergarten, pure and simple, creates a place for children of four or five years, to begin their bit of life-work; it is in no sense a school, nor must become so, or it would lose its very essence and truest meaning.

Let me show you a kindergarten! It is no more interesting than a good school, but I want you to see the essential points of difference:--

It is a golden morning, a rare one in a long, rainy winter. As we turn into the narrow, quiet street from the broader, noisy one, the sound of a bell warns us that we are near the kindergarten building.... A few belated youngsters are hurrying along,--some ragged, some patched, some plainly and neatly clothed, some finishing a "portable breakfast"

thrust into their hands five minutes before, but all eager to be there.... While the Lilliputian armies are wending their way from the yard to their various rooms, we will enter the front door and look about a little.

The windows are wide open at one end of the great room. The walls are tinted with terra cotta, and the woodwork is painted in Indian red.

Above the high wood dado runs a row of illuminated pictures of animals,--ducks, pigeons, peac.o.c.ks, calves, lambs, colts, and almost everything else that goes upon two or four feet; so that the children can, by simply turning in their seats, stroke the heads of their dumb friends of the meadow and barnyard.... There are a great quant.i.ty of bright and appropriate pictures on the walls, three windows full of plants, a canary chirping in a gilded cage, a globe of gold-fish, an open piano, and an old-fashioned sofa, which is at present adorned with a small sc.r.a.p of a boy who clutches a large slate in one hand, and a mammoth lunch-pail in the other.... It is his first day, and he looks as if his big brother had told him that he would be "walloped"

if he so much as winked.

A half-dozen charming girls are fluttering about; charming, because, whether plain or beautiful, they all look happy, earnest, womanly, full to the brim of life.

"A sweet, heart-lifting cheerfulness, Like spring-time of the year, Seems ever on their steps to wait."

... They are tying on white ap.r.o.ns and preparing the day's occupations, for they are a detachment of students from a kindergarten training school, and are on duty for the day.

One of them seats herself at the piano and plays a stirring march. The army enters, each tiny soldier with a "shining morning face." Unhappy homes are forgotten ... smiles everywhere ... everybody glad to see everybody else ... happy children, happy teachers ... sunshiny morning, sunshiny hearts ... delightful work in prospect, merry play to follow it.... "Oh, it's a beautiful world, and I'm glad I'm in it;"

so the bright faces seem to say.

It is a cosmopolitan regiment that marches into the free kindergartens of our large cities. Curly yellow hair and rosy cheeks ... sleek blonde braids and calm blue eyes ... swarthy faces and blue-black curls ... woolly little pows and thick lips ... long arched noses and broad flat ones. Here you see the fire and pa.s.sion of the Southern races, and the self-poise, serenity and st.u.r.diness of Northern nations. Pat is here with a gleam of humor in his eye ... Topsy, all smiles and teeth,... Abraham, trading tops with Isaac, next in line,... Gretchen and Hans, phlegmatic and dependable,... Francois, never still for an instant,... Christina, rosy, calm, and conscientious, and Duncan, as canny and prudent as any of his people.

Pietro is there, and Olaf, and little John Bull.

What an opportunity for amalgamation of races, and for laying the foundation of American citizenship! for the purely social atmosphere of the kindergarten makes it a life-school, where each tiny citizen has full liberty under the law of love, so long as he does not interfere with the liberty of his neighbor. The phrase "Every man for himself" is never heard, but "We are members one of another" is the common principle of action.

The circles are formed. Every pair of hands is folded, and bright eyes are tightly closed to keep out "the world, the flesh," and the rest of it, while children and teachers sing one of the morning hymns:--

"Birds and bees and flowers, Every happy day, Wake to greet the sunshine, Thankful for its ray.

All the night they're silent, Sleeping safe and warm; G.o.d, who knows and loves them, Will keep them from all harm.

"So the little children, Sleeping all the night, Wake with each new morning, Fresh and sweet and bright.

Thanking G.o.d their Father For his loving care, With their songs and praises They make the day more fair."

Then comes a trio of good-morning songs, with cordial handshakes and scores of kisses wafted from finger-tips.... "Good-Morning, Merry Sunshine," follows, and the sun, encouraged by having some notice taken of him in this blind and stolid world, shines brighter than ever.... The song, "Thumbs and Fingers say 'Good-Morning,'" brings two thousand fingers fluttering in the air (10 x 200, if the sum seems too difficult), and gives the eagle-eyed kindergartners an opportunity to look for dirty paws and preach the needed sermon.

It is Benny's birthday; five years old to-day. He chooses the songs he likes best, and the children sing them with friendly energy.... "Three cheers for Benny,--only three, now!" says the kindergartner.... They are given with an enthusiasm that brings the neighbors to the windows, and Benny, bursting with pride, blushes to the roots of his hair. The children stop at three, however, and have let off a tremendous amount of steam in the operation. Any wholesome device which accomplishes this result is worthy of being perpetuated.... A draggled, forsaken little street-cat sneaks in the door, with a pitiful mew. (I'm sure I don't wonder! if one were tired of life, this would be just the place to take a fresh start.) The children break into the song, "I Love Little p.u.s.s.y, Her Coat is so Warm," and the kindergartner asks the small boy with the great lunch pail if he wouldn't like to give the kitty a bit of something to eat. He complies with the utmost solemnity, thinking this the queerest community he ever saw.... A broken-winged pigeon appears on the window-sill and receives his morning crumb; and now a chord from the piano announces a change of programme. The children troop to their respective rooms fairly warmed through with happiness and good will. Such a pleasant morning start to some who have been "hustled" out of a bed that held several too many in the night, washed a trifle (perhaps!), and sent off without a kiss, with the echo of a sick mother's wails, or a father's oaths, ringing in their ears!

After a few minutes of cheerful preparation, all are busily at work.

Two divisions have gone into tiny, "quiet rooms" to grapple with the intricacies of mathematical relations. A small boy, clad mostly in red woolen suspenders, and large, high-topped boots, is pa.s.sing boxes of blocks. He is awkward and slow. The teacher could do it more quietly and more quickly, but the kindergarten is a school of experience where ease comes, by and by, as the lovely result of repeated practice....

We hear an informal talk on fractions, while the cube is divided into its component parts, and then see a building exercise "by direction."