THE CHILD IN THE NURSERY AND KINDERGARTEN




CHAPTER I

"WHAT'S IN A NAME?"


It is an appropriate time to produce a book on English schools for
little children, now that Nursery Schools have been specially selected
for notice and encouragement by an enlightened Minister for Education.
It was Madame Michaelis, who in 1890 originally and most appropriately
used the term Nursery School as the English equivalent of a title
suggested by Froebel[1] for his new institution, before he invented the
word Kindergarten, a title which, literally translated, ran "Institution
for the Care of Little Children."

[Footnote 1: Froebel's _Letters_, trans. Michaelis and Moore, p. 30.]

In England the word Nursery, which implies the idea of nurture, belongs
properly to children, though it has been borrowed by the gardener for
his young plants. In Germany it was the other way round; Froebel had to
invent the term _child garden_ to express his idea of the nurture, as
opposed to the repression, of the essential nature of the child.
Unfortunately the word Kindergarten while being naturalised in England
had two distinct meanings attached to it. Well-to-do people began to
send their children to a new institution, a child garden or play school.
The children of the people, however, already attended Infant Schools,