The public has become father, mother,
physician, and guild master as well as teacher of the new generation.
The public has even become the nurse, for in most of the large cities the
kindergarten has become transformed into a public institution which takes
the child from the home, sometimes almost from the cradle, but more often
from the street, at the age of four, five, or six years, and keeps it
until it is ready for the tuitions of the elementary grades. In St. Louis,
just across and up the river from Fort Chartres, where the initial
municipal experiment was made, there are now more than two hundred and
eighty-three such schools.
It has, moreover, gone beyond these serious maternal employments. The
strenuous civilization of the west has insisted that every man shall work.
But now that it has succeeded in this, it is not only beginning to insist
that he shall not work too much--the maximum hours of labor in many
employments being fixed by law--but he is being taught how to play wisely.
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