“The elder children are expected to employ themselves in cleaning, taking care of, arranging, keeping in order, and using the many various things belonging to the housekeeping department of the Kindergarten; for example, they set out and clear away the materials required for the games and handicrafts; they help in cleaning the rooms, furniture and utensils; they keep all things in order and cleanliness; they paste together torn wallpapers or pictures, they cover books, and they help in the cooking and in preparations for it; in laying the tables, in washing up the plates and dishes, etc.  The children gain in this manner the simple but most important foundations of their later duties as housekeepers and householders, and at the same time learn to regard these duties as things done in the service of others.”

It is worth while to notice the order in which the necessities of this place are described.  First comes a kitchen and next a bathroom, then an out-of-doors playground with abundant material for gaining ideas through action—­sand, pebbles, pine-cones, moss, shells and straw.  Then comes the garden, and only after all these, the rooms and halls for indoors games, handwork and instruction.  It is worth while also to note the prominence given to play, music, poetry and story-telling pictures, domestic occupations and gardening, all preceding the “systematic and ordered occupations” which to some have seemed so all-important.

If we compare this with the current ideas about Nursery Schools, we do not find that it falls much below the present ideal.  There has been a time when some of us feared that only the bodily needs of the little child were to be considered, but the “Regulations for Nursery Schools” have banished such fear.  In these the child is regarded as a human being, with spiritual as well as bodily requirements.

To put it shortly, the physical requirements of a child are food, fresh air and exercise, cleanliness and rest.  It is not so easy to sum up the requirements of a human soul.  The first is sympathy, and though this may spring from parental instinct, it should be nourished by true understanding.  Next perhaps comes the need for material, material for investigation, for admiration, for imitation and for construction or creation.  Power of sense-discrimination is important enough, but in this case if we take care of the pounds of admiration and investigation, the pence of sense-discrimination will take care of themselves.

Besides these the child has the essentially human need for social intercourse, for speech, for games, for songs and stories, for pictures and poetry.  He must have opportunity both to imitate and to share in the work and life around him; he must be an individual among other individuals, a necessary part of a whole, allowed to give as well as to receive service.  In the National Kindergarten of 1873 no one of these requirements is overlooked except the provision for sleep, and from old photographs we know that this, too, was considered.