The kindergarten discipline is at its best --
or at its farthest remove from ancient patriarchal and
pedagogical ideals -- in the advanced industrial communities,
where there is a considerable body of intelligent and idle women,
and where the system of status has somewhat abated in rigor under
the disintegrating influence of industrial life and in the
absence of a consistent body of military and ecclesiastical
traditions. It is from these women in easy circumstances that it
gets its moral support. The aims and methods of the kindergarten
commend themselves with especial effect to this class of women
who are ill at ease under the pecuniary code of reputable life.
The kindergarten, and whatever the kindergarten spirit counts for
in modern education, therefore, is to be set down, along with the
"new-woman movement," to the account of that revulsion against
futility and invidious comparison which the leisure-class life
under modern circumstances induces in the women most immediately
exposed to its discipline. In this way it appears that, by
indirection, the institution of a leisure class here again favors
the growth of a non-invidious attitude, which may, in the long
run, prove a menace to the stability of the institution itself,
and even to the institution of individual ownership on which it
rests.
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