the regular curriculum. This is in line with the vitalization of the curriculum that is going on in the higher grades by making use of the environment of the child outside the schoolroom. If the most telling lessons can be given children through bringing into the school their occupations in their free hours, it is only natural to use play as a large share of the work for the youngest pupils. Certainly the greatest part of the lives of very young children is spent in playing, either games which they learn from older children or those of their own invention. The latter usually take the form of imitations of the occupations of their elders. All little children think of playing house, doctor, or soldier, even if they are not given toys which suggest these games; indeed, half of the joy of playing comes from finding and making the necessary things. The educational value of this play is obvious. It teaches the children about the world they live in. The more they play the more elaborate becomes their paraphernalia, the whole game being a fairly accurate picture of the daily life of their parents in its setting, clothed in the language and bearing of the children. Through their games they learn about the work and play of the grown-up world. Besides noticing the elements which make up this world, they find out a good deal about the actions and processes that are necessary to keep it going.
(1) Making a town, instead of doing gymnastic exercises.
(Teachers College Playground, N. Y. City.)
(2) Gymnasium dances in sewing-class costumes.
(Howland School, Chicago.)
While this is of real value in teaching the child how to live, it is evident as well that it supplies a strong influence against change. Imitative plays tend, by the training of habit and the turn they give to the child’s attention and thoughts, to make his life a replica of the life of his parents. In playing house children are just as apt to copy the coarseness, blunders, and prejudices of their elders as the things which are best. In playing, they notice more carefully and thus fix in their memory and habits, more than if they simply lived it indifferently, the whole color of the life around them. Therefore, while imitative games are of great educational value in the way of teaching the child to notice his environment and some of the processes that are necessary for keeping it going, if the environment is not good the child learns bad habits and wrong ways of thinking and judging, ways which are all the harder to break because he has fixed them by living them out in his play.
Modern kindergartens are beginning to realize this more and more. They are using play, the sort of games they find the children playing outside of school hours, not only as a method of making work interesting to the children, but for the educational value of the activities it involves, and for giving the children the right sort of ideals and ideas about every day life. Children who play house and similar games in school, and have toys to play with and the material to make the things they need in their play, will play house at home the way they played it in school. They will forget to imitate the loud and coarse things they see at home, their attention will be centered on problems which were designed by the school to teach better aims and methods.
The kindergarten of the Teachers’ College of Columbia University could hardly be recognized as a kindergarten at all by a visitor who was thinking of the mechanism of instruction worked out by Froebel’s disciples. The kindergarten is part of the training school of the university, and from the start has been considered as a real part of the school system, as the first step in an education, not as a more or less unnecessary “extra.” With a view to laying a permanent basis for higher education, the authorities have been developing a curriculum that should make use of whatever was of real worth in existing systems of education and in the experiments tried by themselves. To find what is of real worth, experiments have been conducted, designed to answer the following questions: “Among the apparently aimless and valueless spontaneous activities of the child is it possible to discover some which may be used as the point of departure for ends of recognized worth? Are there some of these crude expressions which, if properly directed, may develop into beginnings of the fine and industrial arts? How far does the preservation of the individuality and freedom of the child demand self-initiated activities? Is it possible for the teacher to set problems or ends sufficiently childlike to fit in with the mode of growth, and to inspire their adoption with the same fine enthusiasm which accompanies the self-initiated ones?”
The result showed that the best success came when the children’s instinctive activities were linked up with social interests and experiences. The latter center, with young children, in their home. Their personal relations are of the greatest importance to them. Children’s intense interest in dolls is a sign of the significance attached to human relations. The doll thus furnished a convenient starting point. With this as a motive, the children have countless things they wish to do and make. Hand and construction work thus acquired a real purpose, with the added advantage of requiring the child to solve a problem. The doll needs clothes; the whole class is eager to make them, but the children do not know how to sew or even cut cloth. So they start with paper and scissors, and make patterns, altering and experimenting on the doll for themselves, receiving only suggestions or criticisms from the teacher. When they have made successful patterns, they choose and cut the cloth, and then learn to sew it. If the garments are not wholly successful, the class has had a great deal of fun making them, and has had the training that comes from working towards a definite end, besides acquiring as much control over scissors, paper, and needle, and manual dexterity as would accrue from the conventional paper cutting, pricking, and sewing exercises.
The doll needs a house. In a corner of the room there is a great chest of big blocks, so large that it takes the whole class to build the house, and then it is not done in one day. There are flat long blocks like boards for the walls and roof, and square blocks for the foundations and window frames. When the house is done, it is big enough for two or three children to go into to play with the doll. One readily sees that it has taken a great deal of hard thinking and experimenting to make a house that would really stand up and serve such uses. Then the house needs furniture; the children learn to handle tools in fashioning tables, chairs, and beds, from blocks of wood and thin boards. Getting the legs on a table is an especially interesting problem to the class, and over and over again they have discovered for themselves how it can be done. Dishes for the doll family furnish the motive for clay modeling and decoration. Dressing and undressing the dolls is an occupation the children never tire of, and it furnishes excellent practice in buttoning and unbuttoning and tying bows.
The changing seasons of the year and the procession of outdoor games they bring furnish other motives for production that meet a real need of the children. In the spring-time they want marbles and tops, in the fall, kites; the demand for wagons is not limited to any one season. Whenever possible the children are allowed to solve their own problems. If they want marbles they experiment until they find a good way to make them round, while if they are making something more difficult where the whole process is obviously beyond them, they are helped. This help, however, never takes the form of dictation as to how to perform each step in its order, for the object of the work is to train the child’s initiative and self-reliance, to teach him to think straight by having him work on his own problems. The little carts which the older children make would be beyond them if they had to plan and shape the material for themselves; but when they are given the sawed boards and round pieces for wheels, they find out by trying how they can be put together, and thus make usable little wagons. Making bags for their marbles, and aprons to protect their clothes while they are painting the dolls’ furniture or washing the dishes after lunch, offer additional opportunities for sewing.
From the needs of an individual doll the child’s interest naturally develops to the needs of a family and then of a whole community. With paper dolls and boxes, the children make and furnish dolls’ houses for themselves, until all together they produce an entire village. On their sand table the whole class may make a town with houses and streets, fences and rivers, trees and animals for the gardens. In fact, the
