The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years.... Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life begins at six--at least in the minds of six-year-olds. . . . In kindergarten you are the baby. In first grade you put down th...e baby. . . . Every first grader knows in some osmotic way that this is real life. . . . First grade is the first step on the way to a place in the grown-up world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten in the age ...of perversions of Dewey-style education: everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We put [young children] into kindergarten where their reasoning powers are ruined; or, if we can afford it, we buy Montessori outf...its that were invented for semi-imbeciles in Italian slums; or we send them to outdoor schools and give them prizes for sleeping.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Placing too much importance on where a child goes rather than what he does there . . . doesn't take into account the child's needs... or individuality, and this is true in college selection as well as kindergarten.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While waiting to get married, several forms of employment were acceptable. Teaching kindergarten was for those girls who stayed in... school four years. The rest were secretaries, typists, file clerks, or receptionists in insurance firms or banks, preferably those owned or run by the family, but respectable enough if the boss was an upstanding Christian member of the community.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Too many existing classrooms for young children have this overriding goal: To get the children ready for first grade. This goal is... unworthy. It is hurtful. This goal has had the most distorting impact on five-year-olds. It causes kindergartens to be merely the handmaidens of first grade.... Kindergarten teachers cannot look at their own children and plan for their present needs as five-year-olds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Taking men into the union is just the kindergarten of their education and every force is against their further education. Men who ...live up those lonely creeks have only the mine owners' Y.M.C.As, the mine owners' preachers and teachers, the mine owners' doctors and newspapers to look to for their ideas. So they don't get many.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The system--the American one, at least--is a vast and noble experiment. It has been polestar and exemplar for other nations. But f...rom kindergarten until she graduates from college the girl is treated in it exactly like her brothers. She studies the same subjects, becomes proficient at the same sports. Oh, it is a magnificent lore she learns, education for the mind beyond anything Jane Austen or Saint Theresa or even Mrs. Pankhurst ever dreamed. It is truly Utopian. But Utopia was never meant to exist on this disheveled planet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child's life were crucial. Educatio...n should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play--that embryonic notion of kindergarten.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »