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Only yesterday I saw a book, written by a kindergartner, dedicated to "mothers on the rolling prairie, the far-off rancho, the rocky island, in the lonely light-house, the frontier settlement, the high-perched mining-camp," who, distant indeed from school kindergartens and their equipment, might wish help in making out of what materials they have well-equipped home kindergartens.
"Yes; though I have n't talked it over fully yet, even with mamma, lest she should think it one of my wild schemes; but, Margery, I want with all my heart to be a kindergartner like Miss Mary Denison. There would be no sting to me in earning my living, if only I could do it by working among poor, ragged, little children, as she does.
Some years ago, a San Francisco kindergartner was threading her way through a dirty alley, making friendly visits to the children of her flock. As she lingered on a certain door-step, receiving the last confidences of some weary woman's heart, she heard a loud but not unfriendly voice ringing from an upper window of a tenement-house just round the corner.
I was frightened and self-conscious, but I did it, and nobody seemed to notice me; then I was a flower opening its petals in the sunshine, and presently, a swallow gathering straws for nest-building; then, carried away by the spirit of the kindergartner and her children, I fluttered my clumsy apologies for wings, and forgetting self, flew about with all the others, as happy as a bird.
In one corner a family of twenty children are laying designs in shining rings of steel; and as the graceful curves multiply beneath their clever fingers, the kindergartner is telling them a brief story of a little boy who made with these very rings a design for a beautiful "rose window," which was copied in stained glass and hung in a great stone church, of which his father was the architect.
Here the homemaker applies all the knowledge she has gained from her study of the hygiene of foods and of the hygiene of clothes, and also makes some progress toward becoming a Trained Nurse and a Kindergartner by means of researches into "infant diseases and emergencies," "the stages of the mental development of the child," "the child's imagination with regard to truth-telling and deceit," "the history of children's books," and "the art of story-telling."
Its aim is to utilize the now almost wasted time from four to six years, a time when all negligent and ignorant mothers leave the child to chance development, and when the most careful mother cannot train her child into the practice of social virtues so well as the truly wise kindergartner who works with her.
One reason the kindergartner tells her stories, rather than reads them, is that she may have her eyes on the children and thus take advantage of their desire to make contributions of thought. The same tendency is shown in the home, when children want to "talk over" what their parents or other persons read to them.
That is why I am convinced that we should do everything that sympathy and honor and money can do to exalt the office, so that women of birth, breeding, culture, and genius shall gravitate to it. The kindergartner it is who, living with the children, can make her work an integral part of the neighborhood, the centre of its best life.
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