Quote:
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{NPRI article} Hmmm...Socialized medicine is getting some pushback from the people. The gov't responds by addressing school children.
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As a West Euro FAO, History major, and second-career educator, everything I studied says the first kindergarten was actually founded by Friedrich Froebel around the early decades of the mid-19th Century - a time when Germany was not a wholly Prussian-oriented society as NPRI’s marketing manager Diane Alden would like readers to believe in her
opinion piece - and was actually based on his ideas that
children need to have play time in order to learn - that kindergarten should be a place for children to grow and learn from their social interaction with other children. Ms. Alden's ideas that kindergarten was developed as some form of
nationalistic weaning of children from their mothers for a future of unquestioning servitude to the Prussian state [
ala Nazism] is so far from the truth that it should be laughable - except for the dangers it presents in its misleading of those ignorant of History's lessons.
FWIW - the first kindergartens were actually established rather altruistically to help impoverished children and those who had special needs - not to defeat some future Napoleon - but to support those who did not fit the
mold of established society - and actually paralled the many nurseries of the time which were run by philanthropically minded women to serve the families of the poor as Europe moved from a cottage industry society towards the first industrial revolution. Froebel's
non-Prussian basic philosophic principles of free self activity, creativity, social participation, and motor expression are valuable components which exist functionally, with some modifications, in most of today's early childhood education programs. Froebel's philosophy basically supports the idea that - through systematic
play - children are able to learn to discriminate, analyze, share and solve problems - not learn to
goose-step or develop a
zu befehl mentality.
And the idea that because "socialized
medicine is getting some pushback from the people" it is somehow related to "
the gov't responds by addressing school children" {
about the importance of school in their achieving their goals} is -
- which really causes me to have a bit of
angst about the effectiveness of our educational systems (remember - it is a
decentralized series of systems) and the dangers of the WWW's potential to misinform and mislead.
And so it goes...
Richard's $.02
