School Board; Miss Heerwart took charge of a training college for
Kindergarten teachers in connection with the British and Foreign School
Society; the Froehel Society was founded, and Madame Michaelis took the
Kindergarten into the newly established High Schools for Girls. For the
children of the well-to-do Kindergartens spread rapidly, but for the
children of the poor there was no such happiness; the Infant School was
too firmly established as a place where children learned to read, write
and count, and above all to sit still. Infants' teachers received no
special training for their work; their course of study, in which
professional training played but a small part, was the same as that
prescribed for the teachers of older children. Some colleges, notably
The Home and Colonial, Stockwell, and Saffron Walden, did try to give
their students some special training, but it was not of much avail, and
the word Kindergarten came to mean not Nursery School, as was the idea
of its founder, but dictated exercises with Kindergarten material, a
kind of manual drill supposed to give "hand and eye training," and with
this meaning it made its appearance on the time-table.

Visitors from America were shocked to find no Kindergartens in England,
but only large classes of poor little automatons sitting erect with
"hands behind" or worse still "hands on heads," and moving only to the
word of command. One lady who ultimately found her way to our own
Kindergarten told me that she had been informed at the L.C.C. offices
that there were no Kindergartens in London.

It was partly the scandalised expressions of these American teachers
that stimulated Miss Adelaide Wragge to take her courage into her hands,
and in the year 1900 to open the first Mission Kindergarten in England.
She called it a Mission, not a Free Kindergarten, partly because the
parents paid the trifling fee of one penny per week, and partly because