child were to be considered, but the "Regulations for Nursery Schools"
have banished such fear. In these the child is regarded as a human
being, with spiritual as well as bodily requirements.

To put it shortly, the physical requirements of a child are food, fresh
air and exercise, cleanliness and rest. It is not so easy to sum up the
requirements of a human soul. The first is sympathy, and though this may
spring from parental instinct, it should be nourished by true
understanding. Next perhaps comes the need for material, material for
investigation, for admiration, for imitation and for construction or
creation. Power of sense-discrimination is important enough, but in this
case if we take care of the pounds of admiration and investigation, the
pence of sense-discrimination will take care of themselves.

Besides these the child has the essentially human need for social
intercourse, for speech, for games, for songs and stories, for pictures
and poetry. He must have opportunity both to imitate and to share in the
work and life around him; he must be an individual among other
individuals, a necessary part of a whole, allowed to give as well as to
receive service. In the National Kindergarten of 1873 no one of these
requirements is overlooked except the provision for sleep, and from old
photographs we know that this, too, was considered.

Nursery Schools are needed for children of all classes. It is not only
the children of the poor who require sympathy and guidance from those
specially qualified by real grasp of the facts of child-development.
Well-to-do mothers, too, often leave their children to ignorant and
untrained servants, or to the equally untrained and hardly less ignorant
nursery governess.