THE TRAINING OF THE KINDERGARTNER FOR SOCIAL CO-OPERATION: IN RELATION TO THE HOME

By Mary V. Grice, Founder of the Home and School League

THROUGH the present unfoldings of our complex civilization the demands made upon the teacher of the young are becoming louder and more insistent every day. Those who are consciously facing the problems of the newer social order into which we are entering are growing keenly aware of the increasing importance of the relation of the teacher to the triangle of child life, the home, the school, the community.

For a generation and more the wave of interest has swept around and over the school, the claim being that the teacher's duty was there, her influence was to focus on that one spot. But by the signs of human wreckage in the past, by our bitter failures in character building, we are learning that the force which molds and shapes in the school must reach out both backward and forwardbackward into the home and forward into the community. The phase of the subject we are to consider is, just what form shall the training of the kindergartner take on that she may be better fitted to carry the dynamic of her methods into the home, and thereby co-operate with its forces successfully.

weakest point of our national structure is just that unit. Not for an instant would we be unmindful of the rare fine homes on all sides, the few fathers and many mothers who through study and training have been fitted to deal with child life as it came to them; but they are completely overshadowed by the thousands of homes lacking in even the essential preparation of a physical wellbeing, to say nothing of that preparation which grows out of the great sweep of an inspiring vision.

How shall the kindergartner be so trained that she shall co-operate more intelligently and effectively with these homes whose limitations she realizes daily through their product?

First: She herself must have a more practical training in homemaking.

Second: She must touch the child in the more intimate relations of the home life, in ways that her present training fails to give.

Third: She must be definitely trained in that which makes for a wider and deeper spiritual insight.

She cannot point a path she has not trodden. She cannot teach a lesson she has not learned, nor can she disclose a vision she has not

The unit which composes national life is the home, and the very seen.

It is the training by doing, the very slogan of the kindergarten, for which we plead.

Let me, in making the suggestions which follow, stress the fact that I come to you from no organization, from no group of people with preconceived ideas and plans as to how this should be done, from no system of education with its rigid requirements. I simply represent the everyday homes of our land, which are as yet unorganized and largely unsystematized.

For that reason the claim is made that the kindergartner, who touches the very taproot of the home in her work, should herself be trained in home-making. You realize, of course, that this would mean a far different training from what has been required of our young people who are thought to learn by a mental drill which has had no connection between lessons and life. We would urge that such training be given in the grades, so that should a girl decide later on to fit herself for the kindergarten, she shall have a certain equipment of the knowledge of home-making which she shall have acquired in the application of it.

Home-making centers are growing up in connection with some schools. In such centers it would be possible for the kindergartner to touch more closely upon the home life about her.

connected with the domestic science course of a well known university in the West, we were struck with this fact. No girl received a diploma from the institution who had not kept house for several weeks in the “home," a cottage with its eight rooms beautifully equipped. During that time she was required to care for a good sized family, making out a household budget and preparing the meals. The course in homemaking was deeply interesting and to my untrained mind seemed most logical and practical with one great exception. There was in this cottage no nursery, no room given over to the care of children, nor any place within its walls that suggested that the home-makers being trained there would ever have anything to do with children. As if one could make a home without counting on the possible presence of child life!

Quite different was the training in the school of horticulture for women over in Pennsylvania, which we visited a few days ago. There each woman had put into her care the seeds and plants for which which she was responsible, and under the guiding eye of the head gardener, she was taught to grow flowers by growing them.

Why should not the worker in the "child garden" learn in the same way? Not only should the kindergartner be trained as a home-maker, which we believe

In a recent visit to "the home" should include the study and care

of child life gained through the touch of the actual child, but she should know more of the child in his home life. For this reason it would be good could every kindergartner include in her training the experience of several months spent as a mother's helper. It is not alone the actual child, but the actual mother and her problems that the kindergartner wants to know. It is a vital fault of our educational system that our teachers do not know enough to help parents in their problems of child training. There are organizations and groups of people claiming to be able to do this, but when such help comes logically into the home it will follow the path worn by the tread of little feet, and the hand that offers it will be the same hand that is laid in blessing day by day on the little child who in turn is leading the parent. The kindergartner will need all the volunteer help she can secure from her community, but she herself will be the guiding principle.

ligious training, the Kriss-Kringle myth, the untruthful child, the child who takes things,—and many more that you all know, as they come pouring in, give one the sense that what is true of our age in general is true in a larger degree of the home individually. It seems to have lost its sense of Eternity. Everything must be done in such a hurry. Life is rounded by the "threescore-and-ten years" measure. Its continuity, its everlastingness, has been forgotten. The mother is demanding the impossible in many cases, forgetting that character building is not a thing of a day's growth. Just because she has not been trained, because she does not know the psychology of child nature, she fails at the crucial point. It is at this juncture that the kindergartner's training should "make good," filling in this gap of necessity in the home, until that glad day comes when every girl shall have had as part of her required training a kindergarten course.

Again, it would be well if each kindergarten could have its "fivefoot bookshelf" holding books of child study for the use of the homes. gamut of homes. Or if, as in many cases, the books were not available there might be created small packet libraries, these "packets" to consist of magazine articles, newspaper clippings, monographs, of which there are many issued by various organizations, dealing with a given subject.

Time forbids our enlarging upon some of the hundreds of problems that have come to our notice as a student of this subject, problems running the entire gamut of mother-love and mother-fear, for fear plays a tragic part in the training, or lack of training, of children. Questions of discipline, play, sex education, sulks and quarrels, companionship, training the will, imagination, habits, tendencies, table manners, story telling, re

If, for instance, in the group of children the teacher meets each day, there is a timid, frightened, nervous little one (from thousands of letters received, one would be led to suppose that all American children were nervous or so considered by their mothers), could not there be put into the hands of the mother of that child, to advantage, a packet dealing with the subject of "fear," and might not the mother profit thereby? Some day we may be able to do this for our foreign mothers and in their own language. It is the hope of many that the day is not far distant when we shall have what, for want of a better name, we will call social teachers, whose duties it will be to prepare just such helps for the home and the community.

After the kindergartner has revealed to the mother a newer and finer interpretation of home-making, after she has opened to her a clearer knowledge of the possibilities of child life on its physical, mental, and moral sides, there still remains a great and indispensable service to be rendered the home, there is none greater, and that is the service of inspiration, a service that can be born of but one impulse, the impulse to action, which grows out of a clear spiritual vision. The greatest need of the American home to-day is its need of this "lilt" to the spirit of its founders, a "lilt" that shall make the hearts of motherhood and

fatherhood sing for the very joy of the "worth-whileness" of their task. Parents need inspiration quite as much, if not more, than information. They have thought too long in terms of things, things to be touched and handled; they must be helped, indeed, we must all help one another, to think in terms of life. In no place is such thinking needed more than in the home. Again, I ask, who could so reasonably effect this co-operation with the home as the kindergartner, were she trained to do it? For she touches the home at the very source of its being.

This all requires great faith and great patience to reveal to the consciousness of the unthinking the fact so aptly voiced by the author of The Promised Land, that "we are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first and the spirit later, and the birth and growth of the spirit are slow and exceedingly painful.”

To help the home to catch a glimpse of this fact, and the fact that grows out of it, that it is the child himself who must bear the birth pangs of his own spirit, should be the last and greatest effort of social co-operation on the part of the kindergartner, an effort that must spring from the very center of her being, from the very heart of a life that proclaims in its act of living-yea, though the birth of the spirit is exceedingly slow and painful, still it is exceedingly sure.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF INITIATIVE

By Lucy Maxwell