United States or Israel ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Most of the things are directly needed, playgrounds, school gardens, child-labor laws, juvenile courts, kindergartens, pure food laws, and other visible tokens of child concern.
The point I wish you now to realise is that the counsels of the allied countries of Europe in the persons of their Legation Guards' commanders are as effective as those of very juvenile kindergartens. Everybody is intensely jealous of everybody else and determined not to give way on the question of the supreme command.
The best Kindergartens and Infant Schools had already discarded time-tables, and Kindergarten classes have always been small enough to give the individual a fair chance. Froebel himself constantly urged that the child should become familiar with "both the strongly opposed elements of his life, the individual determining and directing side, and the general ordered and subordinated side."
Visitors from America were shocked to find no Kindergartens in England, but only large classes of poor little automatons sitting erect with "hands behind" or worse still "hands on heads," and moving only to the word of command. One lady who ultimately found her way to our own Kindergarten told me that she had been informed at the L.C.C. offices that there were no Kindergartens in London.
"I've thought about it. But a person must know ever to much, nowadays, to keep even the least little school. They want Kindergartens, and all the new plans, that I haven't learnt. And it's just so about music. You must be scientific; and all I really know is a few little songs. But I can dance well, Mr. Sherrett. I could teach that."
The little boxes associated with the Kindergarten were originally planned for the use of nursery children two to three years of age, and in most if not in all Kindergartens these have been replaced by larger bricks.
For half an hour they were all busy with their blocks, and then came 'Come, children, let us play "spring and spring." And when the game was finished they went away full of joy and life, every one giving his little hand for a grateful good-bye." Here in this earliest of Free Kindergartens are certain essentials.
Of nine thousand children from the slummiest quarters of that city who had gone through the Golden Gate Association's kindergartens, just one was found to have got into jail. The merchants who looked coldly on the experiment before, brought their gold to pay for keeping it up.
In New York, where at least three hundred thousand girls and women earn their bread, only about six thousand are helped to summer vacations in the country. What these women are doing now on a small scale, experimentally, will soon be adopted, as their children's playgrounds, their kindergartens, their vacation schools, and other enterprises have been adopted, by the municipalities.
Every afternoon they invite several hundred poor women to spend an hour in the conservatory among the flowers. Every evening with stereopticon they take a thousand boys or men upon a journey to Italy or Egypt or Japan. The kindergartens, public schools and art exhibits cause these women and children to forget for a time their misery.
Word Of The Day