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.
Nursery Schools are needed for children of all classes. It is not only the children of the poor who require sympathy and guidance from those specially qualified by real grasp of the facts of child-development. Well-to-do mothers, too, often leave their children to ignorant and untrained servants, or to the equally untrained and hardly less ignorant nursery governess.
Mothers in small houses have much to do; making beds and washing 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 has gone to the very source from which Froebel took his ideas—she has gone to what Froebel indeed called "the only true source, life itself," and she writes from the point of view of the biologist.
There exists at present, in certain quarters, a belief that the Kindergarten is old-fashioned, out of date, more especially that it has no scientific basis. It is partly on this account that the ideas of Dr. Maria Montessori, who has approached the question of the education of young children from the point of view of medical science, have been warmly welcomed by so large a circle. But neither in England nor in America does that circle include the Froebelians, and this for several reasons. For one thing, much that the general public has accepted as new—and in this general public must be included weighty names, men of science, educational authorities, and others who have never troubled to inquire into the meaning of the Kindergarten—are already matters of everyday life to the Froebelian. Among these comes the idea of training to service for the community, and the provision of suitable furniture, little chairs and tables, which the children can move about, and low cupboards for materials, all of which tend to independence and self-control.
It is a more serious stumbling-block to the Froebelian that Dr. Montessori, while advocating freedom in words, has really set strict limits to the natural activities of children by laying so much stress on her "didactic apparatus," the intention of which is formal training in sense-discrimination. This material, which is an adaptation and enlargement of that provided by Séguin for his mentally deficient children, is certainly open to the reproach of having been "devised by adults." It is formal, and the child is not permitted to use it for his own purposes.
Before everything else, however, comes the fact that in no place has Dr. Montessori
