Park and Pavement

Excerpt from Park and Pavement

A kindergarten  a children's garden. We have accepted the term for our language, but have not absorbed its fullest meaning. With this I do not say that Froebel, the most fundamental of all reformers, understood a kindergarten to consist of walks and lawn and plants with happy children as the fortunate possessors. I mean more. The writer of these paragraphs, who never attended an established kindergarten and yet enjoyed the kindergarten in its most unrestricted meaning, who developed in a profession on just such lines as Froebel laid down, feels it his duty to build upon and build out Froebel's lines with the aid of his professionalism. I have in mind a kindergarten which has added to all of Freebel's methods the fullest complement which nature can place within a child's reach and comprehension. This land of vast dimensions must do more than merely accept Froebel's teachings. 'we must improve upon them, and bestow upon them that liberality which is ours, as soon as an occasion appeals to us. The time is drawing close when the kindergartens will be made part of our free school system. How will we be prepared for such change? Shall we move from the empty stores and vacant ?ats, now set aside for our children, to the basements of the school buildings? Let us give the matter our most earnest study, and let us realize that it is easier to direct the run of a brooklet than to change the volume of a deeply bedded river. The broad acres of our United States are yet comparatively undivided, and, except where the most expensive real estate demands business buildings to tower Skyward, none are too costly to furnish the ground upon which our kindergartens shall be founded. Let us insist at the very outset of our movement upon the proper reservation, and nothing will prevent us from securing for our children what, through them, will redound to far more benefit to the land than the most gorgeous improvement we could devise.