KINDERGARTEN—­WHAT IS IT?

What is a Kindergarten?  I will reply by negatives.  It is not the old-fashioned infant-school.  That was a narrow institution, comparatively; the object being (I do not speak of Pestalozzi’s own, but that which we have had in this country and in England) to take the children of poor laborers, and keep them out of the fire and the streets, while their mothers went to their necessary labor.  Very good things, indeed, in their way.  Their principle of discipline was to circumvent the wills of children, in every way that would enable their teachers to keep them within bounds, and quiet.  It was certainly better that they should learn to sing by rote the Creed and the “definitions” of scientific terms, and such like, than to learn the profanity and obscenity of the streets, which was the alternative.  But no mother who wished for anything which might be called the development of her child would think of putting it into an infant-school, especially if she lived in the country, amid

  “the mighty sum
  Of things forever speaking,”

where any “old grey stone” would altogether surpass, as a stand-point, the bench of the highest class of an infant-school.  In short, they did not state the problem of infant culture with any breadth, and accomplished nothing of general interest on the subject.

Neither is the primary public school a Kindergarten, though it is but justice to the capabilities of that praiseworthy institution, so important in default of a better, to say that in one of them, at the North End of Boston, an enterprising and genial teacher has introduced one feature of Froebel’s plan.  She has actually given to each of her little children a box of playthings, wherewith to amuse itself according to its own sweet will, at all times when not under direct instruction,—­necessarily, in her case, on condition of its being perfectly quiet; and this one thing makes this primary school the best one in Boston, both as respects the attainments of the scholars and their good behavior.

Kindergarten means a garden of children, and Froebel, the inventor of it, or rather, as he would prefer to express it, the discoverer of the method of Nature, meant to symbolize by the name the spirit and plan of treatment.  How does the gardener treat his plants?  He studies their individual natures, and puts them into such circumstances of soil and atmosphere as enable them to grow, flower, and bring forth fruit,—­also to renew their manifestation year after year.  He does not expect to succeed unless he learns all their wants, and the circumstances in which these wants will be supplied, and all their possibilities of beauty and use, and the means of giving them opportunity to be perfected.  On the other hand, while he knows that they must not be forced against their individual natures, he does not leave them to grow wild, but prunes redundancies,