The Child under Eight | Page 6

dishes, sweeping and dusting, baking and cooking, making and mending, not to mention tending an infant or tending the sick, leave little leisure for sympathy with the adventuring and investigating propensities natural and desirable in a healthy child between three and five. There are innumerable Kindergartens open only in the morning for the children of those who can afford to pay, and these could well be multiplied and assisted just as far as is necessary. In towns, at least, mothers with but small incomes would gladly pay a moderate fee to have their little ones, especially their sturdy little boys, guarded from danger and trained to good habits, yet allowed freedom for happy activity.
Kindergartens and Nursery Schools ought to be as much as possible fresh-air schools. They should never be large or the home atmosphere must disappear. They should always have grassy spaces and common flowers, and they ought to be within easy reach of the children's homes.
There must for the present be certain differences between the Free Kindergarten or Nursery School for the poor and for those whose parents are fairly well-to-do. In both cases we must supply what the children need. If the mother must go out to work, the child requires a home for the day, and the Nursery School must make arrangements for feeding the children. All little children are the better for rest and if possible for sleep during the day; but for those who live in overcrowded rooms, where quiet and restful sleep in good air is impossible, the need for daily sleep is very great. All Free Kindergartens arrange for this.
Most important also is the training to cleanliness. This is not invariably the lot even of those who come from apparently comfortable homes to attend fee-paying Kindergartens, and among the poor, differences in respect of cleanliness are very great. But soap and hot water do cost money and washing takes time, and the modern habit of brushing teeth has not yet been acquired by all classes of the community. The Free Kindergartens provide for necessary washing, each child is provided with its own tooth-brush; and tooth-brush drill is a daily practice, somewhat amusing to witness. The best baby rooms in our Infant Schools carry out the same practices, and these are likely to be turned into Nursery Schools.
It cannot yet be accepted as conclusively proved that a completely open-air life is the best in our climate. We have not yet sufficient statistics. No doubt children do improve enormously in open-air camps, but so they do in ordinary Nursery Schools, where they are clean, happy and well fed, and where they live a regular life with daily sleep. Housing conditions complicate the problem, and all children must suffer who sleep in crowded, noisy, unventilated rooms.
Up to the present time Nursery Schools have been provided by voluntary effort entirely, and far too little encouragement has been given to those enlightened headmistresses of Infant Schools who have tried to give to their lowest classes Nursery School conditions. Since the passing of Mr. Fisher's Education Bill, however, we are entitled to hope that soon, for all children in the land, there may be the opportunity of a fair start under the care of "a person with breadth of outlook and imagination," the equivalent of Froebel's "skilled intelligent gardener."
In the following chapter an attempt is made to explain how it is that so many years ago Froebel reached his vision of what a child is, and of what a child needs, and the considerations on which he based his "Nursery School for Little Children" or "Self-Teaching Institution."
CHAPTER II
THE BIOLOGIST EDUCATOR
Progress, man's distinctive mark alone, Not God's, and not the beasts': God is, they are, Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.
"A large bright room, ... a sandheap in one corner, a low tub or bath of water in another, a rope ladder, a swing, steps to run up and down and such like, a line of black or green board low down round the wall, little rough carts and trolleys, boxes which can be turned into houses, or shops, or pretence ships, etc., a cooking stove of a very simple nature, dolls of all kinds, wooden animals, growing plants in boxes, an aquarium."
Any Froebelian would recognise this as the description of a more or less ideal Kindergarten or Nursery School, and yet the writer had probably never read a page that Froebel wrote. On the contrary, she shows her entire ignorance of the real Kindergarten by calling it "pretty employments devised by adults and imposed at set times by authority."
The description is taken from a very able address on "Child Nature and Education" delivered some years ago by Miss Hoskyns Abrahall. It is quoted here, because, for her conception of right surroundings for young children, the speaker