FYI: Something Important I Learned About Kindergarten after Kindergarten

So kindergarten means children's garden, of course, but garten doesn't really mean just garden exactly, in its current American sense as an unbounded greensward: it means a walled enclosure, which everyone used to build to keep fauna and would-be cabbage thieves honest and hungry, so really, unless you want to stop etymologically half-way because that's where the compound noun is most picturesque --children frolicking in Nature, or its tame and picturesque cultural simulacrum --you have to re-imagine kindergarten as a protective walled enclosure for children, which is more accurate, anyway. Cabbage-patch kid, ma petite chou, you must not stray into the woods.

Also notice that I failed to unpack greensward, which contains the English cognate of gart: ward. Again the wall. In England a greensward used to be a walled garden, not what we've done since Olmstead. Hearth, house, garth, und aus. Outlandish kindergarteners are verboten.