These
twelve colts are cared for and taught by four or five trained
teachers. No man interested in the training of fine horses ever
objects, so far as I know, to such expenditure of labor and money. The
end is supposed to justify the means. But when the creatures to be
trained are human beings, and when the end to be reached is not
race-horses, but merely citizens, we employ a very different process
of reasoning.
That this subject of early training is a vitally interesting one to
thinking people cannot be denied. The kindergarten has become the
fashion, you say, cynically. This is scarcely true; but it is a fact
that the upper, the middle, and the lower classes among us begin
to recognize the existence of children under six years of age,
and realize that far from being nonentities in life, or unknown
quantities, they are very lively units in the sum of progressive
education.
When we speak of kindergarten work among the children of the poor, and
argue its claims as one of the best means of taking unfortunate little
Arabs from the demoralizing life of the streets, and of giving their
aimless hands something useful to do, their restless minds something
good and fruitful to think of, and their curious eyes something
beautiful to look on, there is not a word of disapproval.
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