od is a growing thing, and she
who does not grow with it is a hopeless failure); the proper equipment
and furnishing of class-rooms so that the public may have good
object-lessons before its eyes; the insistence upon the ultimate
ideals of the method as well as upon details and technicalities,--that
is, showing people its soul instead of forever rattling its dry bones.
And when all is said and done, the heaviest of the work falls upon the
kindergartner. That is why I am convinced that we should do everything
that sympathy and honor and money can do to exalt the office, so that
women of birth, breeding, culture, and genius shall gravitate to it.
The kindergartner it is who, living with the children, can make her
work an integral part of the neighborhood, the centre of its best
life. She it is, often, who must hold husband to wife, and parent
to child; she it is after all who must interpret the aims of the
Association, and translate its noble theories into practice. (Ay! and
there's the rub.) She it is, who must harmonize great ideal principles
with real and sometimes sorry conditions. A Kindergarten Association
stands for certain things before the community. It is the
kindergartner alone who can prove the truth, who can substantiate the
argument, who can show the facts. There is no more difficult
vocation in the universe, and no more honorable or sacred one. If a
kindergartner is looked upon, or paid, or treated as a nursery maid,
her ranks will gradually be recruited from that source. The ideal
teacher of little children is not born. We have to struggle on as best
we can, without her. She would be born if we knew how to conceive her,
how to cherish her. She needs the strength of Vulcan and the delicacy
of Ariel; she needs a child's heart, a woman's heart, a mother's
heart, in one; she needs clear judgment and ready sympathy, strength
of will, equal elasticity, keen insight, oversight; the buoyancy of
hope, the serenity of faith, the tenderness of patience. "The hope of
the world lies in the children." When we are better mothers, when men
are better fathers, there will be better children and a better world.
The sooner we feel the value of beginnings, the sooner we realize that
we can put bunglers and botchers anywhere else better than in nursery,
kindergarten, or primary school (there are no three places in the
universe so "big with Fate"), the sooner we shall arrive at better
results.

I am afraid it is chiefly women's