The Girl and the Kingdom

As the day of opening approached an unexpected and valuable aide-de-camp appeared on the scene. An American girl of twelve or thirteen slipped in the front door one day when I was practicing children's songs, whereupon the following colloquy ensued.

"What's this place goin' to be?"

"A kindergarten."

"What's that?"

Explanation suited to the questioner, followed.

"Can I come in afternoons, on my way home from school and see what you do?"

"Certainly."

"Can I stay now and help round?"

"Yes indeed, I should be delighted."

"What's the bird for?"

"What are all birds for?" I answered, just to puzzle her.

"I dunno. What's the plants and flowers for?"

"What are all flowers for?" I demanded again.

"But I thought 'twas a school."

"It is, but it's a new kind."

"Where's the books?"

"The children are going to be under six; we shan't have reading and writing."

We sat down to work together, marking out and cutting brown paper envelopes for the children's sewing or weaving, binding colored prints with gold paper and putting them on the wall with thumb tacks, and arranging all the kindergarten materials tidily on the shelves of the closets. Next day was a holiday and she begged to come again. I consented and told her that she might bring a friend if she liked and we would lunch together.

"I guess not," she said, with just a hint of jealousy in her tone. "You and I get on so well that mebbe we'd be bothered with another girl messin' around, and she'd be one more to wash up for after lunch."

From that moment, the Corporal, as I called her, was a stanch ally and there was seldom a day in the coming years when she did not faithfully perform all sorts of unofficial duties, attaching herself passionately to my service with the devotion of a mother or an elder sister. She proved at the beginning a kind of travelling agent for the school haranguing mothers on the street corners and addressing the groups of curious children who gathered at the foot of the school steps.

"You'd ought to go upstairs and see the inside of it!" she would exclaim. "It's just like going around the world. There's a canary bird, there's fishes swimmin' in a glass bowl, there's plants bloomin' on the winder sills, there's a pianner, and more'n a million pictures! There's closets stuffed full o' things to play and work with, and whatever the scholars make they're goin' to take home if it's good. There's a play-room with red rings painted on the floor and they're going to march and play games on 'em. She can play the pianner standin' up or settin' down, without lookin' at her hands to see where they're goin'. She's goin' to wear white, two a week, and I got Miss Lannigan to wash 'em for her for fifteen cents apiece. I tell her the children 'round here's awful dirty and she says the cleaner she is the cleaner they'll be.... No, 'tain't goin' to be no Sunday School," said the voluble Corporal. "No, 'tain't goin' to be no Mission; no, 'tain't goin' to be no Lodge! She says it's a new kind of a school, that's all I know, and next Monday'll see it goin' full blast!"

It was somewhat in this fashion, that I walked joyously into the heart of a San Francisco slum, and began experimenting with my newly-learned panaceas.

These were early days. The kindergarten theory of education was on trial for its very life; the fame of Pestalozzi and Froebel seemed to my youthful vision to be in my keeping, and I had all the ardor of a neophyte. I simply stepped into a cockle-shell and put out into an unknown ocean, where all manner of derelicts needed help and succor. The ocean was a life of which I had heretofore known nothing; miserable, overburdened, and sometimes criminal.

My cockle-shell managed to escape shipwreck, and took its frail place among the other craft that sailed in its company. I hardly saw or felt the safety of the harbor or the shore for three years, the three years out of my whole life the most wearying, the most heart-searching, the most discouraging, the most inspiring; also, I dare say, the best worth living.

"Full blast," the Corporal's own expression, exactly described the setting out of the cockle-shell; that is, the eventful Monday morning when the doors of the first free kindergarten west of the Rockies threw open its doors.

The neighborhood was enthusiastic in presenting its offspring at the altar of educational experiment, and we might have enrolled a hundred children had there been room. I was to have no assistant and we had provided seats only for forty-five, which prohibited a list of more than fifty at the outside. A convert to any inspiring idea being anxious to immolate herself on the first altar which comes in the path of duty, I carefully selected the children best calculated to show to the amazed public the regenerating effects of the kindergarten method, and as a whole they were unsurpassed specimens of the class we hoped to benefit.

Of the forty who were accepted the first morning, thirty appeared to be either indifferent or willing victims, while ten were quite the reverse. These screamed if the maternal hand were withdrawn, bawled if their hats were taken away, and bellowed if they were asked to sit down. This rebellion led to their being removed to the hall by their mothers, who spanked them vigorously every few minutes and returned them to me each time in a more unconquered state, with their lung power quite unimpaired and their views of the New Education still vague and distorted. As the mothers were uniformly ladies with ruffled hair, snapping eyes, high color and short temper, I could not understand the childrens' fear of me, a mild young thing "in white"—as the Corporal would say—but they evidently preferred the ills they knew. When the last mother led in the last freshly spanked child and said as she prepared to leave: "Well, I suppose they might as well get used to you one time as another, so good-day, Miss, and God help you!" I felt that my woes were greater than I could bear, for, as the door closed, several infants who had been quite calm began to howl in sympathy with their suffering brethren. Then the door opened again and the Corporal's bright face appeared in the crack.

"Goodness!" she ejaculated, "this ain't the new kind of a school I thought 'twas goin' to be!—Stop your cryin', Jimmy Maxwell, a great big boy like you; and Levi Isaacs and Goldine Gump, I wonder you ain't ashamed! Do you 'spose Miss Kate can do anything with such a racket? Now don't let me hear any more o' your nonsense!—Miss Kate," she whispered, turning to me: "I've got the whole day off for my uncle's funeral, and as he ain't buried till three o'clock I thought I'd better run in and see how you was gettin' on!"

"You are an angel, Corporal!" I said. "Take all the howlers down into the yard and let them play in the sand tables till I call you."

When the queue of weeping babes had been sternly led out by the Corporal something like peace descended upon the room but there could be no work for the moment because the hands were too dirty. Coöperation was strictly Froebelian so I selected with an eagle eye several assistants from the group—the brightest-eyed, best-tempered, and cleanest. With their help I arranged the seats, the older children at the back tables and the babies in the front. Classification was difficult as many of them did not know their names, their ages, their sexes, nor their addresses, but I had succeeded in getting a little order out of chaos by the time the Corporal appeared again.

"They've all stopped cryin' but Hazel Golly, and she ran when I wa'n't lookin' and got so far I couldn't ketch her; anyway she ain't no loss for I live next door to her.—What'll we do next?"

"Scrub!" I said firmly. "I want to give them some of the easiest work, two kinds, but we can't touch the colored cards until all the hands are clean.—Shall we take soap and towels and all go down into the yard where the sink is, children, and turn up our sleeves and have a nice wash?" (Some of the infants had doubtless started from home in a tolerable state of cleanliness but all signs had disappeared en route).

The proposition was greeted amiably. "Anything rather than sit still!" is the mental attitude of a child under six!

"I told you just how dirty they'd be," murmured the Corporal. "I know 'em; but I never expected to get this good chance to scrub any of 'em."

"It's only the first day;—wait till next Monday," I urged.

"I shan't be here to see it next Monday morning," my young friend replied. "We can't bury Uncle every week!" (This with a sigh of profound regret!)

Many days were spent in learning the unpronounceable names of my flock and in keeping them from murdering one another until Froebel's justly celebrated "law of love" could be made a working proposition. It was some time before the babies could go down stairs in a line without precipitating one another head foremost by furtive kicks and punches. I placed an especially dependable boy at the head and tail of the line but accidentally overheard the tail boy tell the head that he'd lay him out flat if he got into the yard first, a threat that embarrassed a free and expeditious exit:—and all their relations to one another seemed at this time to be arranged on a broad basis of belligerence. But better days were coming, were indeed near at hand, and the children themselves brought them; they only needed to be shown how, but you may well guess that in the early days of what was afterwards to be known as "The Kindergarten Movement on the Pacific Coast," when the Girl and her Kingdom first came into active communication with each other, the question of discipline loomed rather large! Putting aside altogether the question of the efficiency, or the propriety, of corporal punishment in the public schools, it seems pretty clear that babies of four or five years should be spanked by their parents if by anyone; and that a teacher who cannot induce good behavior in children of that age, without spanking, has mistaken her vocation. However, it is against their principles for kindergartner's to spank, slap, flog, shake or otherwise wrestle with their youthful charges, no matter how much they seem to need these instantaneous and sometimes very effectual methods of dissuasion at the moment.