For instance, the children of your neighbours are likely to be the
playmates of your own children, and the children of degenerate parents
in the slum district of your city will possibly be the fellow-citizen
partners of your own family. Again, when it is known that right or
wrong nutrition of the body is the most important agent in forming
character, in establishing predisposition to temperance or intemperance
of living, including the desire for intoxicating stimulants, it is
revealed to one that right nutrition of the community as a whole is an
important factor in his own environment, as is self-care in the case of
his own nourishment.
The moment a student of every-day philosophy starts the study of
problems from the A. B. C. beginning of things, and to shape his study
according to an A. B. C. sequence, each cause of inharmony is at once
traced back to its first expression in himself and then to causes
influenced by his environments.
If we find that the largest influences for good or bad originate with
the right or wrong instruction of children during the home training or
kindergarten period of their development, and that a dollar expended
for education at that time is worth more for good than whole bancs of
courts and whole armies of police to correct the effect of bad training
and bad character later in life, it is quite logical to help promote
the spread of the kindergarten or the kindergarten idea to include
all of the children born into the world, and to furnish mothers and
kindergarten teachers with knowledge relative to the right nutrition
of their wards which they can themselves understand and can teach
effectively to children.
If we also find that the influence of the kindergarten upon the parents
of the infants is more potent than any other which can be brought to
bear upon them, we see clearly that the way to secure the widest
reform in the most thorough manner is to concentrate attention upon the
kindergarten phase of education, advocate its extension to include even
the last one of the children, beginning with the most needy first, and
extending the care outward from the centre of worst neglect to finally
reach the whole.
Experience in child saving so-called, and in child education on the
kindergarten principle, has taught the cheapest and the most profitable
way to insure an environment of good neighbours and profit-earning
citizens; and investigation into the problem of human alimentation
shows that a knowledge of the elements of an economic nutrition is the
first essential of a family or school training; and also that this is
most impressive when taught during the first ten years of life.
One cannot completely succeed in the study of menticulture from its A.
B. C. beginning and in A. B. C. sequence without appreciation of the
interrelation of the physical and the mental, the personal and the
social, in attaining a complete mastery of the subject.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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