There are other Free Kindergartens at work. One is in charge of Miss
Rowland, and is in connection with the Bermondsey Settlement. It is Miss
Rowland who tells of the "candid mother" she met one Saturday who
remarked, "I told the children to wash their faces in case they met
you."
The Phoenix Park Kindergarten in Glasgow is interesting because the site
was granted by an enlightened Corporation and the Parks Committee laid
out the garden, while the real start came from the pupils of a school
for girls of well-to-do families. By this time other social agencies
have been grouped round the Kindergarten as a centre.
The Caldecott Nursery School was opened in 1911 and has grown into the
Caldecott Community, which has now taken its children to live altogether
in the country. This Nursery School was never intended to be a
Kindergarten; it was started as an interesting experiment, "chiefly
perhaps in the hope that the children might enjoy that instruction which
is usually absorbed by the children of the wealthy in their own
nurseries by virtue of their happier surroundings."
And in the very year in which we were plunged into war Miss Margaret
M'Millan put into actual shape what she had long thought of, and opened
her "Baby Camp" and Nursery School, with a place for "toddlers" in
between, the full story of which is told in _The, Camp School_. In the
Camp itself the things which impress the visitor most are first the
space and the fresh air, the sky above and the brown earth below, and
next the family feeling which is so plain in spite of the numbers. The
Camp existed long before it was a Baby Camp and Nursery School, for Miss
M'Millan began with a School Clinic and went on to Open-Air Camps for
girls and for boys, before going to the "preventive and constructive"
work of the Baby Camp. Clean and healthy bodies come first, but to Miss
M'Millan's enthusiasm everything in life is educative.
The war has increased the supply of Nursery Schools, because the need
for them has become glaringly apparent. Many experiments are going on
now, and it seems as if experimental work would be encouraged, not
hampered by unyielding regulations. The Nursery School should cover the
ages for which the Kindergarten was instituted, roughly from three to
six years old. Already there are excellent baby rooms in some parts of
London, and no doubt in other towns, and the only reason for disturbing
these is to provide the children with more space and more fresh air, or
with something resembling a garden rather than a bare yard.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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