No. 111 - Kindergarten

My kids asked me yesterday what "kindergarten" meant and why, if it's the first year of school, it isn't called 1st grade. That is, what they were asking was why aren't all the grade levels re-numbered so that school starts with "1" instead of something less than "1".

I learned that the word kindergarten in German literally means "children's garden."

Webster's 1913 Dictionary defined kindergarten as:

A school for young children, conducted on the theory that education should be begun by gratifying and cultivating the normal aptitude for exercise, play, observation, imitation, and construction; -- a name given by Friedrich Froebel, a German educator, who introduced this method of training, in rooms opening on a garden.

Wikipedia says that kindergarten "serves as a transition from home to the commencement of more formal schooling." I have heard some people say that "preschool" helps a child transition from home to kindergarten. I don't buy either assertion. Who needs a whole year to transition? From what I've seen children adapt to new things fairly rapidly and are quite resilient. I believe that learning is a lifelong process. It doesn't begin with kindergarten and it doesn't end with high school or college. It begins when you are born and it ends when you die.

Perhaps the grade levels are numbered similar to how we count how old we are. Are we technically zero for the first twelve months of our lives until we turn one? Perhaps kindergarten is grade zero until we move on to the 1st grade.