ose it is only a superior sort of day-nursery where
children may be safely kept and innocently employed while the mother
gets the housework done.

[Sidenote: The Kindergarten]

While this might be a laudable enough function to perform, it is by
no means the function of the Kindergarten. This method of instruction
aims at much more. It aims to lay foundations for a complete later
education, and especially to make firm in the child those virtues and
aptitudes which, when they are held by the majority of men, constitute
the safety and welfare of society. For this reason no home, however
well ordered, can supply to the child what the Kindergarten supplies.
For the home is necessarily limited to the members of one family,
while the Kindergarten, on the contrary, makes plain to the child the
claims upon him of society not made up of his kinsfolk. It is the wide
world in miniature, and if it is a properly organized Kindergarten,
it will contain within itself a wide variety of children--children of
wealth and of poverty, of ignorance and of gentle breeding--and will
bring them all under one just rule. For only by this commingling of
many characters upon a common level and under the strict reign of
justice can the child be fitted practically, and by means of a series
of progressive experiments, for citizenship in a genuine democracy.

[Sidenote: Exclusive Associates]

Parents sometimes so far miss the aim of the Kindergarten as to desire
that instead of such a commingling there shall be a narrow limit set;
that in the Kindergarten shall be only such children as the child is
accustomed to associate with. But if the Kindergarten acceded to this
demand, as it seldom does, it would lose much of its usefulness, for
every one knows that children cannot be permanently sheltered from
contact with the outside world, nor can they be always reared in an
atmosphere of exclusiveness. A wisdom greater than the mother's has
ordered that no child shall be so narrowly nourished. If he has any
freedom whatever, any naturalness of life, he must and will enlarge
his circle of acquaintances beyond the limit of his mother's calling
list.

Indeed, even those Kindergartens which are professedly exclusive, and
which confine their ministrations to the children of one particular
neighborhood, are obliged by the nature of things to contain nascent
individualities of almost every type. For no neighborhood, however
equal in wealth and fashion, ever pro