yellowflowers3

We owe the name of this institution to the German pedagogue Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel, but the very first kindergarten was established long before him by Robert Owen. This was the same Owen whom older Russian generations remember from their compulsory studies of scientific communism. Even those who justly considered communism unscientific knew it was from Owen specifically that Marx borrowed a number of absurdities which laid the foundation of his theory of communism. Time spent in kindergarten varies from country to country. In the United States, I’m told, it’s only a year. In the USSR, kindergarten lasted for four hopeless years.

Kindergarten was a miniature model of real life, where days of glory and success intertwined with periods of failure and bad luck.