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TESTING THE VALUE OF THE KINDERGARTEN.

Testing and measuring the value of the kindergarten by its results is a theme no less interesting to the entire school world than to the kindergarten portion of it. For several years investigations have been undertaken in different cities for the purpose of ascertaining in concrete terms the advantages gained by children with kindergarten training over nonkindergarten children. The emphasis in these investigations has been placed usually upon the rate of speed with which the children make the successive grades. The fallacy of drawing conclusions from such surveys is manifest at once. In the first place, it is well-nigh impossible to gauge the speed correctly, because in the first grade both kindergarten and nonkindergarten children are placed together, and by the rule of uniformity which seems necessary in school systems, the teacher more or less unconsciously standardizes the progress of her class. The laggards are brought up by dint of conscientious work, and the forward ones are held in leash, so that by the time the fifth or sixth grade is reached, whatever special impetus may have resulted from a child's kindergarten training has ceased to be measurable.

A correct evaluation of the kindergarten in point of time saving can never be reached except where kindergarten children are kept separated from nonkindergarten children throughout their subsequent school course, and are advanced as rapidly as healthy development allows. An experiment of this type has been under way for a year or more at Horace Mann School, New York City, and before another five years have passed definite data on this problem should be available.

In the second place, the permanent value of the kindergarten has little if any connection with the number of years required to go through the grades. The kindergarten's concern is with the content of the years rather than with their number; with the fullness of the life of the child rather than with mere economy of time. Richness of mental content, power to think and to do, a tendency to assume right attitudes toward life and life relationships, and an ability to work and play happily with one's fellows-these are the results of training based upon the belief in education by development. The true test and measure of the kindergarten must be taken by qualitative standards; the quantitative measure must be merely incidental to the other. Dr. Frank McMurry, in his survey of the New York City schools, has supplied an instance of the kind of tests that should be applied in forming a judgment. The clearer perceptions gained during the past year or so concerning these matters are about to pass into action and eventuate in a somewhat different type of investigation from that of the past.

The following plans form a basis for an inquiry about to be undertaken by the International Kindergarten Union committee on investigation, and are indicative of the many-sidedness of the study:

(a) The committee believes that the value of the kindergarten, like the value of home education, can not merely be shown in ways that permit of statistical tabulation; that to cultivate fully the capacity of each stage of growth in the child should be the purpose of education, and therefore speed is not a criterion of value.

(b) The undertaking is to make a study in several different cities of one set of children who entered kindergarten five years ago, and another set in the same school who did not attend kindergarten.

(c) The records of these children will then be examined with reference to their interests, attitudes, spirit toward one another, etc.; also with reference to their proficiency in different school studies.

(d) In both cases the quality and spirit of the teachers who have had these children must enter into the estimates.

(e) The quality and spirit of the homes also will be taken into consideration.

REORGANIZATION OF KINDERGARTEN TRAINING COURSES.

Discussions of the content and organization of training courses for kindergarten teachers have been growing more thoughtful and forceful. Demands on all sides are insistent that the kindergartner shall have a wide acquaintance with educational principles in general and their application to all periods of childhood and youth; that she shall be so trained as to have an intelligent as well as sympathetic understanding of problems of teaching throughout elementary and secondary schools, and a firm grasp of the biologic and hygienic principles that play so large a part in the present-day conception of education. Another factor in this question is the increasing demand for kindergarten-trained women to engage in various forms of social welfare work. It is recognized that such women have a peculiar fitness for serving as charity organization officers, school-home visitors, missionaries, deaconesses, settlement residents, organizers of parents' clubs, librarians of children's rooms, etc. In consequence, the courses of training schools are being enriched and enlarged in order to give still better preparation to their students for the new and wider opportunities of usefulness. In some instances the length of the period of training has been extended from the customary two years to three years in order to include courses in sociology, social welfare, hygiene, maternal efficiency, and similar subjects, as well as the more specific pedagogical courses. Efforts to adjust wisely the proportion of time that shall be devoted respectively to technical kindergarten subjects and materials, to the academic branches, to general pedagogy, and

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to practice-teaching, are causing much earnest deliberation and experimentation. So important is this problem that it has been selected as the main subject for discussion at the conference of kindergarten teachers and supervisors to be held in connection with the International Kindergarten Union meeting at San Francisco, August, 1915.

The results of the emphasis on health and hygiene in the kindergarten training schools are evident in many ways, but particularly in the establishment of open-air classes for kindergarten children as well as other grades. Partial reports show the existence of effective outdoor kindergarten work in communities of seven States-California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Pennsylvania-and in Hawaii.

Closely connected with the open-air doctrine is the proposal to place the annual vacation for kindergarten children and teachers in the winter months, when bad weather always decreases the attendance, and to hold sessions during the summer months, thus making the kindergarten year run from March to January. The success of vacation schools and summer kindergartens, wherever held, is a forceful argument, and in two or three instances kindergartners are making the experiment. When the response becomes more general, it will be only a step from shifting the vacation time to holding kindergartens all the year round. But that is another story.

A thorough overhauling of the subject of the education of little children has been the result of the spread of Dr. Montessori's ideas in this country. Parents, school men, and kindergartners are all beneficiaries of the renewed interest in child life in general and of the attention which has been focused upon the important pre-school years in particular. Kindergartners are especially grateful for the reemphasis which has been placed by Dr. Montessori upon Froebel's demands for greater freedom in education, for development of individuality, for self-activity, and for right sense training. In several training schools, lectures on the Italian method and materials are now included in the courses in general pedagogy; and in a few communities kindergartens make use of the Montessori materials in addition to the Froebelian materials, and keep records of the experiments. Froebelian materials are also being used according to Montessori methods, and the results carefully noted.

STATISTICAL GROWTH.

In the matter of the numerical extension of the kindergarten a survey of statistics for 1913-14 made by the Bureau of Education reveals a most satisfactory rate of increase. It has been possible to secure data from practically every village and city in the country with a population of 500 and over. It would seem that lack of size

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in a town is no hindrance to the establishment of a public school kindergarten; some of the most effective kindergartens are in small villages where community ideals are high. Comparative figures for 1912 and 1914 are as follows:

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1 I. e., parochial, private, mission, mill, settlement, association, State normal, orphanage, for Indians, ia institutions for the blind, in institutions for the deaf, in institutions for backward children.

CHAPTER XV.

THE MONTESSORI MOVEMENT IN AMERICA.

By ANNE E. GEORCE,

Director of Work for the Montessori Educational Association, Washington, D. C.

A review of the Montessori movement in America can, at present, be little more than a broad review of the interest manifested in this country toward the pedagogical spirit and methods developed by Dr. Montessori in her experimental schools and set forth in her books. Statistics of schools where the materials are used or the principles applied are not available, and an attempt to make a report of such a nature would probably strengthen the tendency, greatly deplored by Dr. Montessori, toward the rigid classification of her contribution to the science of pedagogy within the narrow limits of a "method of teaching."

The tenement schools in Rome within which Dr. Montessori initiated her experiments with normal children were regarded by her as laboratories for research work. To this study of man in the formative period she brought years of scientific preparation. Her first book, "Pedagogical Anthropology," consisting of lectures given in the University of Rome, is a partial record of this preparatory period. Her next book, through which her work is best known, was published (in Italy) in May, 1909, after two years' observation and experiments in the Case dei Bambini (children's houses), as the schools in the San Lorenzo tenements were called. Dr. Montessori gave to this book the title "The Method of Scientific Pedagogy Applied to Infant Education." She still holds by this title as defining the work done by her, and regrets the fact that it has been rejected by the publishers in many of the countries where the book has been translated.

The idea of applying the methods of experimental science to the study of man was not new; Dr. Montessori's particular contribution to the work has been that of establishing the conditions of the experiment, of developing a method of research that, while distinctly analogous to that of other branches of experimental science, has been modified by the characteristics peculiar to the form of life under observation.

Briefly summed up, her method for the experimental study of man reads:

Give the best conditions of life, and then, as is done with other living organisms, give freedom for development, disturbing as little as possible, observing, certainly helping, by every means, in this development.

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