CHAPTER XI.

THE KINDERGARTENS AND NURSERIES

If the influence of an annual cleaning up is thus distinctly traced in the lives of the children, what must be the effect of the daily teaching of the kindergarten, in which soap is always the moral agent that leads all the rest? I have before me the inventory of purchases for a single school of this kind that was started a year ago in a third loft of a Suffolk Street tenement. It included several boxes of soap and soap-dishes, 200 feet of rope, 10 bean-bags, 24 tops, 200 marbles, a box of chalk, a base-ball outfit for indoor use, a supply of tiddledywinks and "sliced animals," and 20 clay pipes. The pipes were not for lessons in smoking, but to smooth the way for a closer acquaintance with the soap by the friendly intervention of the soap-bubble. There were other games and no end of colored paper to cut up, the dear delight of childhood, but made in the hands and under the eyes of the teacher to train eye and hand while gently but firmly cementing the friendship ushered in by the gorgeous bubble. No wonder, with such a stock, a mother complained that she had to whip her Jimmie to keep him home.

Without a doubt the kindergarten is one of the longest steps forward that has yet been taken in the race with poverty; for in gathering in the children it is gradually, but surely, conquering also the street with its power for mischief. There is only one force that, to my mind, exerts an even stronger influence upon the boys' lives especially; I mean the club, of which I shall speak presently. But that comes at a later stage. The kindergarten begins at the very beginning, and in the best of all ways, with the children's play. What it does, counts at both ends on that tack. Very soon it makes itself felt in the street and in what goes on there, as anyone can see for himself by observing the children's play in a tenement neighborhood where there is a kindergarten and again where there is none, while by imperceptibly turning the play into work that teaches habits of observation and of industry that stick, it builds a strong barrier against the doctrine of the slum that the world owes one a living, which lies in ambush for the lad on every grog-shop corner. And all corners in the tenement districts are grog-shop corners. Beyond all other considerations, beyond its now admitted function as the right beginning of all education, whether of rich or poor, its war upon the street stands to me as the true office of the kindergarten in a city like New York, with a tenement-house population of a million and a quarter souls.[20] The street itself owns it, with virtual surrender. Hostile as its normal attitude is to every new agency of reform, the best with the worst, I have yet to hear of the first instance in which a kindergarten has been molested by the toughest neighborhood, or has started a single dead cat on a post-mortem career of window-smashing, whether it sprang from Christian, Jewish, or heathen humanity. There is scarce a mission or a boy's club in the city that can say as much.

The kindergarten is no longer an experiment in New York. Probably as many as a hundred are to-day in operation, or will be when the recently expressed purpose of the Board of Education to make the kindergarten a part of the public school system has been fully carried out. The Children's Aid Society alone conducts a dozen in connection with its industrial schools, and the New York Kindergarten Association nine, if its intention of opening two new schools by the time this book is in the printer's hands is realized. There is no theology, though there is a heap of religion in most of them. Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Theosophists, and Ethical Culturists, if I may so call them, men of one or of various opinions, or of none, concerning the hereafter, alike make use of the kindergarten as a means of reaching and saving the shipwrecked of the present. Sometimes the Sunday School is made to serve as a feeder for the kindergarten, or the kindergarten for the Sunday School. Sometimes the wisdom that wrests success from doubt and perplexity is expressed in the fundamental resolution that the kindergarten "shall not be a Sunday School." The system is the same in all cases with very little change. "We have tried it and seen it tried with various kinks and variations," said one of the old managers of the Children's Aid Society to me, "but after all there is only one way, the way of the great kindergartner who said, 'We learn by doing.'"

A clean face is the ticket of admission to the kindergarten. A clean or whole frock is wisely not insisted upon too firmly at the start; torn or dirty clothes are not so easily mended as a smudged face, but the kindergarten reaches that too in the end, and by the same road as the Fresh Air scrubbing--the home. Once he is let in, the child is in for a general good time that has little of school or visible discipline to frighten him. He joins in the ring for the familiar games, delighted to find that the teacher knows them too, and can be "It" and his "fair lady" in her turn. He does not notice the little changes the game has undergone, the kindergarten touch here and there that lifts it out of the mud; but the street does presently, when the new version is transferred to it, and is the better for it. After the game there are a hundred things for him to do that do not seem like work in the least. Between threading colored beads, cutting and folding pink and green papers in all sorts of odd ways, as boats and butterflies and fancy baskets; moulding, pasting, drawing, weaving and blowing soap-bubbles when all the rest has ceased to hold his attention, the day slips by like a beautiful dream, and he flatly refuses to believe that it is gone when the tenement home claims him again. Not infrequently he goes home howling, to be found the next morning waiting at the door an hour before the teacher comes. Little Jimmie's mother says that he gets up at six o'clock to go to the Fifty-first Street kindergarten, and that she has to whip him to make him wait until nine.

The hours pass with happy play that slowly but surely moulds head, hand, and heart together. The utmost freedom is allowed, but it stops short of the license of the street. Its law of violence is replaced by the law of love. The child learns to govern himself. Not at once; I observed two or three black eyes during a tour of a half-score kindergartens, last June, that showed that the street yielded its reign reluctantly. During my visit to the East Sixty-third Street school I became interested in a little fellow who was its special pet and the ward of the Alumnæ of the Normal college, who through the New York Kindergarten Association had established and maintained the school. Johnny was a sweet little fellow, one of eight children from a wretched tenement home down the street into which the kindergartner had found her way. The youngest of the eight was a baby that was getting so big and heavy that it half killed the mother to drag it around when she went out working, and the father, with a consideration for her that was generously tempered with laziness, was considering the advisability of staying home to take care of it himself, "so as to give her a show." There was a refinement of look and manner, if not of dress, about little Johnny after he was washed clean, that made the tenement setting seem entirely too plebeian for him, and his rescuers had high hopes of his future. I regret to say that I saw the pet, before I left, deliberately knock the smallest baby in the school down, and when he was banished from the ring in consequence and condemned to take his howling playmate over in the corner and show her pictures until he repented, take an unworthy revenge by pinching her surreptitiously until she howled louder. Worse than that, when the baby had finally been comforted with a headless but squeaking toy sheep, he secretly pulled the insides and the ba-a out of the lambkin through its broken neck, when no one was looking. I was told that Johnny was believed to have the making of a diplomat in his little five-year-old body, and I think it very likely--of a politician anyway.

While this was going on, another boy, twice as large as Johnny, had been temporarily exiled from the ring for clumsiness. It was even more hopelessly constitutional, to all appearances, than Johnny's Machiavelian cunning. In the game he had persistently stumbled over his own feet. Made to take a seat at the long table, he fell off his chair twice in one minute from sheer embarrassment. In luminous contrast to his awkwardness was the desperate agility of a little Irishman I had just left in another kindergarten. Each time he was told to take his seat, which was about every ten seconds, he would perform the feat with great readiness by climbing over the back of the chair as a dog climbs over a fence, to the consternation of the teacher, whose reproachful "O Alexander!" he disarmed with a cheerful "I'm all right, Miss Brown," and an offer to shake hands.

Let it not be inferred from this that the kindergarten is the home of disorder. Just the reverse. Order and prompt obedience are the cardinal virtues taught there, but taught in such a way as to make the lesson seem all fun and play to the child. It sticks all the better. It is the province of the kindergarten to rediscover, as it were, the natural feelings the tenement had smothered. But for its appeal, the love of the beautiful might slumber in those children forever. In their homes there is nothing to call it into life. The ideal of the street is caricature, burlesque, if nothing worse. Under the gentle training of the kindergartner the slumbering instinct blossoms forth in a hundred different ways, from the day the little one first learns the difference between green and red by stringing colored beads for a necklace "for teacher," until later on he is taught to make really pretty things of pasteboard and chips to take home for papa and mamma to keep. And they do keep them, proud of the child--who would not?--and their influence is felt where mayhap there was darkness and dirt only before. So the kindergarten reaches directly into the home, too, and thither follows the teacher, if she is the right kind, with encouragement and advice that is not lost either. No door is barred against her who comes in the children's name. In the truest and best sense she is a missionary to the poor.

Nearly all the kindergartens in this city are crowded. Many have scores of applicants upon the register whom they cannot receive. There are no truants among their pupils. All of the New York Kindergarten Association's schools are crowded, and new are added as fast as the necessary funds are contributed. The Association was organized in the fall of 1889 with the avowed purpose of engrafting the kindergarten upon the public school system of the city, through persistent agitation. There had been no official recognition of it up till that time. The Normal School kindergarten was an experiment not countenanced by the School Board. The Association has now accomplished its purpose, but its work, far from being ended, has but just begun. It is doubtful if all the kindergartens in the city, including those now in the public schools, accommodate much more than five or six thousand children, if that number. The last sanitary census showed that there were 160,708 children under five years old in the tenements. At least half of these are old enough to be in a kindergarten, and ought to be, seeing how little schooling they will get after they outgrow it. That leaves in round numbers 75,000 children yet to be so provided for in New York's tenements. There is no danger that the kindergarten will become too "common" in this city for a while yet. As an adjunct to the public school in preparing the young minds for more serious tasks, it is admitted by teachers to be most valuable. But its greatest success is as a jail deliverer. "The more kindergartens the fewer prisons" is a saying the truth of which the generation that comes after us will be better able to grasp than we.

The kindergarten is the city's best truant officer. Not only has it no truants itself, but it ferrets out a lot who are truants from necessity, not from choice, and delivers them over to the public school. There are lots of children who are kept at home because someone has to mind the baby while father and mother earn the bread for the little mouths. The kindergarten steps in and releases these little prisoners. If the baby is old enough to hop around with the rest, the kindergarten takes it. If it can only crawl and coo, there is the nursery annex. Sometimes it is an independent concern. Almost every church or charity that comes into direct touch with the poor has nowadays its nursery where poor mothers may leave their children to be cared for while they are out working. Relief more practical could not be devised. A small fee, usually five cents, is charged as a rule for each baby. Pairs come cheaper, and three go for ten cents at the nursery in the Wilson mission. Over 50,000 babies were registered there last year, which meant, if not 5,000 separate children, at least 5,000 days' work and wages to poor mothers in dire need of both, and a good, clean, healthy start for the infants, a better than the tenement could have given them. To keep them busy, when the rocking-horse and the picture-book have lost their charm, the kindergarten grows naturally out of the nursery, where that was the beginning, just as the nursery stepped in to supplement the kindergarten where that had the lead. The two go hand in hand. The soap cure is even more potent in the nursery than in the kindergarten, as a silent rebuke to the mother, who rarely fails to take the hint. At the Five Points House of Industry the children who come in for the day receive a general scrubbing twice a week, and the whole neighborhood has a cleaner look after it. The establishment has come to be known among the ragamuffins of Paradise Park as "the school where dey washes 'em." Its value as a moral agent may be judged from the statements of the Superintendent that some of the children "cried at the sight of a washtub," as if it were some new and hideous instrument of torture for their oppression.

Private benevolence in this, as in all measures for the relief of the poor, has been a long way ahead of public action; properly so, though it has seemed sometimes that we might as a body make a little more haste and try to catch up. It has lately, by the establishment of children's play-grounds in certain tenement districts, west and east, provided a kind of open-air kindergarten that has hit the street in a vital spot. These play-grounds do not take the place of the small parks which the city has neglected to provide, but they show what a boon these will be some day. There are at present, as far as I know, three of them, not counting the back-yard "beaches" and "Coney Islands," that have made the practical missionaries of the College Settlement, the King's Daughters' Tenement Chapter, and like helpers of the poor, solid with their little friends. One of them, the largest, is in Ninety-second Street, on the East Side, another at the foot of West Fiftieth Street, and still another in West Twenty-eighth Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, the block long since well named Poverty Gap. Two, three, or half a dozen vacant lots, borrowed or leased of the owner, have been levelled out, a few loads of sand dumped in them for the children to dig in; scups, swings, and see-saws, built of rough timber; a hydrant in the corner; little wheelbarrows, toy-spades and pails to go round, and the outfit is complete. Two at least of the three are supported each by a single generous woman, who pays the salaries of a man janitor and of two women "teachers" who join in the children's play, strike up "America" and the "Star Spangled Banner" when they tire of "Sally in our Alley" and "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay," and by generally taking a hand in what goes on manage to steer it into safe and mannerly ways.

More than two hundred children were digging, swinging, see-sawing, and cavorting about the Poverty Gap playground when I looked in on a hot Saturday afternoon last July. Long files of eager girls, whose shrill voices used to make the echoes of the Gap ring with angry clamor, awaited their turn at the scups, quiet as mice and without an ill word when they trod upon each other's toes. The street that used to swarm with mischievous imps was as quiet as a church. The policeman on the beat stood swinging his club idly in the gate. It was within sight of this spot that the Alley Gang beat one of his comrades half to death for telling them to go home and let decent people pass; the same gang which afterward murdered young Healey for the offence of being a decent, hard-working lad, who was trying to support his aged father and mother by his work. The Healeys lived in one of the rear houses that stood where the children now skip at their play, and the murder was done on his doorstep. The next morning I found the gang camping on a vacant floor in the adjoining den, as if nothing had happened. The tenants knew the toughs were there, but were afraid of betraying them. All that was only a couple of years ago; but a marvellous transformation had been wrought in the Gap. The toughs were gone, with the old tenements that harbored them. Poverty Gap itself was gone. A decent flat had taken the place of the shanty across the street where a 'longshoreman kicked his wife to death in drunken rage. And this play-ground, with its swarms of happy children who a year ago would have pelted the stranger with mud from behind the nearest truck--that was the greatest change of all. The retiring toughs have dubbed it "Holy Terror Park" in memory of what it was, not of what it is. Poverty Park the policeman called it, with more reason. It was not exactly an attractive place. A single stunted ailanthus tree struggled over the fence of the adjoining yard, the one green spot between ugly and ragged brick walls. The "sand" was as yet all mud and dirt, and the dust the many little feet kicked up was smothering. But the children thought it lovely, and lovely it was for Poverty Gap, if not for Fifth Avenue.

I came back to my office to find a letter there from a rich man who lives on the Avenue, offering to make another Poverty Park for the tenement-house children of another street, if he had to buy the lots. I told him the story of Poverty Gap and bade him go and see for himself if he could spend his money to better purpose. There are no play-grounds yet below Fourteenth Street and room and need for fifty. The Alley and the Avenue could not meet on a plane that argues better for the understanding between the two that has been too long and needlessly delayed.