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LECTURES

IN THE

TRAINING SCHOOLS

FOR

Kindergarten Teachers.

EDUCATION

THE HOME, THE KINDERGARTEN,

AND

THE PRIMARY SCHOOL.

ELIZABETH P. PEABODY.

E. ADELAIDE MANNING.

LONDON: SWAN SONNENSCHEIN, LOWREY & CO., PATERNOSTER SQUARE. 1887.

INTRODUCTION.

AMONG those who in the last twenty years have helped to spread a knowledge of the educational principles of Froebel beyond the limits of his native country, Miss Elizabeth Peabody's name deserves to be specially remembered. It is mainly owing to her enthusiastic efforts that the value of the Kindergarten was early recognised in the United States, and that its first American promoters were encouraged to maintain, amid many difficulties, a standard of real efficiency for the teachers of Froebel's system. Miss Peabody had long occupied herself, theoretically and practically, with educational subjects. Not satisfied by merely intellectual methods of instruction, and impatient of the superficiality which was too often approved, she made it her great aim to train character, and, by a simultaneous development of children's mental capacities and of their moral nature, to prepare them for the responsible duties of life. It was not surprising that when Miss Peabody, holding such views of education, came in contact with the ideas and the work of Froebel, she at once experienced the delight always attached to the discovery that the problems exercising our own minds have been successfully solved by some one who has started from principles such as ours, and who has cultivated the same ideal. She found that Froebel had carried into practice that very kind of training of which she had realized the immense importance, and that he had placed in a clear light truths which she had already more dimly perceived. Eager to inform herself about the new system, Miss Peabody travelled, in 1868, to Europe, on purpose to visit in Germany the Kindergartens established by Froebel, who was no longer living, and by his best pupils. On her return to America, she devoted herself for many years to the introduction and improvement of Kindergartens and of training institutions, and to enlightening, by her writings and addresses, mothers and educators respecting the value and simplicity of Froebel's methods. Miss Peabody has the satisfaction of witnessing a good measure of success from her generous exertions, in the increasing number of advocates of the Kindergarten in America, in its adoption as a first department of many State primary schools, and in the numerous private and charity Kindergartens founded from North to South, and from New York to San Francisco. Advanced now in years, this warm-hearted lady is engaged in other lines of philanthropic work, but she retains, and still manifests, her earnest interest in the educational progress which she has laboured so actively to secure.

Ever since Miss Peabody's zeal was kindled for Froebel's ideal as to young children's education, her help and criticism have been sought by the trainers of Kindergarten students in America, and by all who, with serious purpose, have thus worked for the movement. Hence she has often delivered lectures at the opening of the session at Normal Colleges, and on other occasions when she saw an opportunity of exercising influence in favour of rational principles of education. This book, which appeared only lately at Boston, consists of a few of such lectures. It is now, with Miss Peabody's consent, published in England, where many parents and teachers will be glad to profit by the author's wise and loving study of little children, and her sympathetic insight into Froebel's methods for their development. During the last few years various thoughtful writers on education have drawn attention here to the subject of infant management, and it is remarkable how widely the principles of Froebel and Pestalozzi are now recognised and accepted. But books are still greatly needed which, especially addressed to those who have charge of children, urge in a convincing manner how essential it is that the first few years should be rightly guided, and indicate certain defined educational aims. I think that Miss Peabody's lectures are likely to prove very useful in this direction. Though her readers will perhaps contest some of her psychological deductions, they cannot fail to be impressed and benefited by the high tone of her reasoning, by her evidently tender and reverent love of children, and by her excellent suggestions in regard to their harmonious development.

Amongst its other merits, this book tends to correct the still too prevalent notion, that the Kindergarten is a peculiar--an almost magical--institution, which provides a sure remedy for children's imperfections, apart from their home conditions. Doubtless, in the case of poor neglected little ones, the contrast between their treatment at the Kindergarten and their ordinary experience, is necessarily striking and decided, because the parents are careless and ignorant. But Froebel's view of the Kindergarten was, that it should be a supplementary help to the loving and judicious mother, who, owing to her many household and other duties, might be unable to give, through the whole day, to her younger children the regular attention which their awakening faculties need. It was to be a portion of the home pattern and web of training, not a patch of a new texture. He saw that a child requires to have about it, as Miss Peabody says, "love and thought in practical operation," and this not now and then, but always. And as the mother may have at times to transfer her children to the charge of others, he organised the Kindergarten--a higher nursery, under refined and motherly influences, for those that have passed out of babyhood. There, on the same principles as at home, they may be gently tended for two or three hours of the day, and developed in body, mind, and character. Froebel's object also was to provide companionship for these children, adapted to their age and attainments, which could only be done by including some from outside the family circle. But again, he desired to give the opportunity to inexperienced mothers of observing the patient and resourceful guidance carried out by even young teachers, who had been trained to study children, and had learnt how to occupy them suitably. Here we see another link with the home. Now Miss Peabody entered so much into Froebel's ideas that she helps to remove the Kindergarten out of its supposed exceptional sphere, and to show that the teachers represent temporarily the mother, doing that which the mother also aims, or ought to aim, at doing, for the children's good.

These Lectures are also useful in presenting a high ideal of Kindergarten teaching. Miss Peabody sees that the work of educating requires special qualifications in those who undertake it, and that such as are not fitted for it, had better take up a different career. At the same time placing, as always, character above intellect, she considers that most women, whose religious and moral nature is well cultivated, and who take pains to develop their mental powers, may hope for success in devoting themselves to the training of young children. Her writings are calculated to inspire the teacher with hearty zest for her labour, and yet with an abiding feeling that even years of practice leave her far behind her ever advancing standard. Miss Peabody encourages no exaggerated estimate of Froebel's thoughts and methods. She freely recognises that he gained many truths from fellow-students of children's nature and faculties; but she claims for him the originality which belongs to those who with unselfish aims bestow close attention on a subject of deep human interest. To teachers, therefore, as well as to all who love children, she says--and with this quotation I will close my few introductory remarks--"You will not be wise if you do not look out of Froebel's window."

E. A. MANNING.

THE KINDERGARTNER.

Not till children who have been themselves educated according to Froebel's principles, grow up, will there be found any adult persons who can keep kindergartens without devoting themselves to a special study of child-nature in the spirit of devout humility. For we are all suffering the ignorance and injury inevitable from having begun our own lives in the confusions of accidental and disorderly impressions, without having had the clue of reason put into our hands by that human providence of education, which, to be true, must reflect point by point the Divine Providence, that according to the revelations of history is educating the whole race, and which may find hints for its procedure in observing the spontaneous play of children fresh from the hands of the Creator.

"Play has the mightiest influence on the maintenance and non-maintenance of laws; and if children's plays are conducted according to laws and rules, and they always pursue their amusements in conformity with order, while finding pleasure therein, it need not be feared that when they are grown up they will break laws whose objects are more serious."

"From their earliest years, the plays of children ought to be subject to strict laws. For if their plays, and those who mingle with them, are arbitrary and lawless, how can they become virtuous men, law-abiding and obedient? On the contrary, when children are early trained to submit to laws in their plays, love for these laws enters into their souls with the music accompanying them, and helps their development."

It is common to speak of the Greeks, as if they were of exceptional organization. I think their organization was only exceptional, because it was more carefully treated in infancy than ours is apt to be. I do not believe that in Greece, or anywhere in the world, there were ever more beautiful little children than there are in America; and the beauty would not be so transient as it unquestionably is with us, if truly cultivated persons took our children in hand from babyhood for the care of their bodies and minds, instead of leaving this work to the most ignorant class of the community, such as the general run of the servants who have the education of them during their earliest infancy. Even many parents who take care of their own children do not make it an object to study physiology or psychology, and seem to think that there is nothing in little children which requires special study, except indeed at the very first, when the child is put into the mother's arms more helpless than the lowest form of animal life . It seems mysterious, at first sight, that the child, whose duty and whose destiny it is to have dominion over nature, should be endowed least of all creatures with any absolute knowledge of it. But the mystery is solved when we consider that the happiness which is distinctively human, is only to be found in the discovery and enjoyment of ever-widening relations to our kind, with the fulfilment of the duties belonging to them. It is the absolute helplessness of the human infant which challenges the maternal instinct to rush to his rescue, lest he should die at once. And to continue to study his manifestations of pleasure and discontent with obedient respectfulness, is the perfection of the maternal nursing. But when the child has got on so far as to know the simplest uses of its own body, and especially after it has learned enough words to express its simplest wants and sensations, even parents seem to think it can get on by itself, so that children from about two to five years of age are left to self-education, as it were; this virtual abandonment being crossed by a capricious and arbitrary handling of them--mind and body--on the part of those around them, which is even worse than the neglect; for when are children more unable, than between three and five years old, to guide their own thoughts and action? How would a garden of flowers fare, to be planted, and then left to grow with so little scientific care taken by the gardener, as is bestowed upon children between one and five years old?

Froebel, in the very word kindergarten, proclaimed that gospel for children which holds within it the promise of the coming of the kingdom, in which God's will is to be done on earth as it is in heaven--a consummation which we daily pray for with our lips, but do not do the first thing to bring about, by educating our children in the way of order, which is no less earth's than "heaven's first law," and makes earth heaven so far as it is fulfilled.

I think there is perhaps no better way of making apparent what this kindergartning is, which makes such an importunate demand on your consideration, than to tell you how the idea germinated and grew in the mind of Froebel himself; for thus we shall see that it would be unreasonable to expect that it could be improvised by every teacher; but that here, as elsewhere in human life, God has sent into the world a gifted person to guide his fellows, according to the law enunciated by St. John in the 38th verse of the 4th chapter of his Gospel.

After a few years of this happy home and school life, which he continually reflected upon in contrast with what he had suffered for so many years, the good grandmother died, and he was sent back to his stepmother. The question now came up, whether he should study for the university, where his brothers had gone; but the stepmother, in the interest of her younger child, opposed his father's spending the money, and he went to a farmer to learn practical agriculture. But he was physically so incompetent to the labor of a farm life, that it did not pay; and being sent home by the farmer, he was finally apprenticed to a forester, where he found genial occupation in wood-lore, and in studying geometry for the purpose of surveying. Here he became a thorough and ardent mathematician. But his friend the forester died, or was removed, which brought this occupation to a premature close. At that moment, however, a maternal relation died, and left him a little money, so that he went to the University of Jena, where he devoted himself principally to the physical sciences; and by and by we find him curator of the Mineralogical Museum of Berlin. Here he made a great impression on the mind of a young lady who frequented the museum, by the "sermons" that he found "in stones," for he read them out to her, showing that in inorganic nature, so called, could be traced not only laws of decay, that threw into stronger light those laws of life that he had learned to see in vegetation, but those of crystallization. Everywhere he read God's revelation of the processes of life and death, which also make human development and happiness, or its deterioration and misery.

The trumpet call of patriotism, to rescue Germany from French despotism, made by the good Queen Louise of Prussia, called him from these peaceful studies to partake in the great national act of delivering his country; and he obeyed it by volunteering his service. Though his regiment was never called into battle, he always rejoiced in the effects upon himself of learning the military drill, as well as in the life-long friendships he made in camp. After the war was over, a legacy received at the death of his uncle Hoffman gave him the means to enter an architect's office, to which he had a great attraction. He was boarding at Frankfort-on-the-Main, where Middendorf and other of his late military friends were boarding, who had just engaged themselves as teachers in the city, waiting to perfect this arrangement. It was a moment when there was a great uprising of education in Germany, and that system was beginning to germinate, which has turned out to make Prussia the effective power in Europe that she has lately proved herself to be; and whose first principle is, that the primary is the most important stage of education. In connection with this general movement, there was about to be established a new school in Frankfort; and Gr?ner, its principal, who was one of the boarders, talked over with Froebel and the others the new plan. Whatever Froebel said was so striking and vital, that Gr?ner at last exclaimed: "Plainly this is your vocation! Give up the architecture, and come in with us, and help to build men." Strange to say, though Froebel had all his life been meditating upon the secret of human education, this was the first time it occurred to him to make it his own business. The more he thought of Gr?ner's suggestion, the more he liked it; and the issue was, that he took one of the younger classes in the new school. Immediately afterwards he wrote to his brother that at last he had found his element--he "felt like a bird in air, a fish in water." But the teachers were hampered in their action by the proprietors of the school; and after a season Gr?ner said to Froebel, "You should lead; not be led. I release you from your engagement. Set up independently, and carry out your own ideas unhindered."

When his purpose of leaving was known, one of the parents who patronized the school, gave him his two sons to educate, just as he should think best; and because he now heard of Pestalozzi, he took them to Yverdun, where he remained as pupil with them, for a season. But he was not quite satisfied with Pestalozzi's methods. He saw there was a process to be attended to, anterior to the observation of objects; namely, to employ and discipline the activity of children yet too young to attend except to what they are themselves doing. Education was to begin, as he saw, in doing, and thence proceed to knowing. In returning from Yverdun, his elder brother, and his younger brother's widow, offered him their children to add to the two young Frankforters; and the widow offered, besides, a small house that she owned in Keilhau, if he would fit it up. He and Middendorf and another friend united together and accepted this offer; and, with their own hands repaired the house, living in the outbuildings meanwhile and subsisting on rations most carefully economized. They then, for one thing, went to work on the land, which they taught the children to cultivate, and deduced their lessons out of the objects into which they were putting their life and labor. To these six children three cultivated men devoted themselves; and Froebel also wrote to the lady that used to study with him in the Mineralogical Museum of Berlin, and she took her fortune, and left her rank, to help the poor schoolmaster in his life work, as the most devoted of wives.

Working on the land was not all that they did. They began with it, because the children of the city had been rather starved of the gratification of that instinct to work in the earth, which very soon appears in all children--though, as Froebel says, it will die out by being left uncultivated. He found that his pupils had been already injured by their artificial city life, and in many ways they had things to unlearn. It was not a perfectly easy thing to determine how much liberty to give to individual tendencies that had been exaggerated by the reactions of disorder, or of an artificial order. Froebel thought the educator should give full play to all that is universal in human nature without pampering human idiosyncrasy, to do which was the vicious point of Rousseau's system that Froebel has happily avoided. It was natural that he should first bring before his pupils the processes of vegetable growth, because it was in observing them that he had himself first found the laws of God. But he was older than any child in the kindergarten when he learned that lesson. Observation of anything outward is not the first thing in human development, but exertion of powers from within, which provokes the reaction of the outward and makes it known.

It may be said that everybody cannot have, at will, imagination and culture. This is true; but such persons should not undertake to keep a kindergarten. Let them do something else; keep shop, cultivate vegetables, work the sewing machine; even keep those schools for older children, in which books are the main teachers. There are multitudes of things to be done; the greatest variety of functions to be performed in human life. But of all things to do, the cultivation of human beings at that period of life when they are utterly at the mercy of those who teach them, is the most sacred. Why rush into that, impelled by any motive below the highest?

It was my privilege, a year or two since, to pass a week in one of the schools of the feeble-minded; and I there saw six women, some of them quite young girls, devoted to the terrible work of waking up Will and Perception in those poor prisoners of mal-organization, so many of them frightful to look upon. They were doing their work under the strongest sense of humanity and religion. It would have been impossible to do it at all, as they were doing it, had they had no other inspiration than the pay they were receiving. The main reward was in their having some success in waking up the mind. In their countenances something angelic was dawning; and this was not my fancy merely, for I heard the same remark made again and again, by persons who went there as I did. I do not think one of these women wished to leave the good work; and if acting on a mind-cherishing principle was so interesting, and productive of such reactive effects, in such sad circumstances, how much more may be expected from working upon children fairly gifted! The charm of the sadder work was, that, like kindergartning, it stimulated to profound study of the laws of mental nature, in order to work reverently among them, instead of arbitrarily, in defiance or irreverence of them. To do this made these women feel that they were working with God; and this made them practical saints. But why cannot we believe that God is present, and acting with us, and wooing us to act with Himself, in the joyous paradise of life, as well as in chambers of disease, and among the wretched? Is He not the God of the living and joyful, as well as of the dying and sad? Why is the church-yard only a grave-yard? Why should it not always be a kindergarten?

There is reason, on their own account, why we want our pupils, in this art of kindergartning, to be in their disposition and circumstances above merely pecuniary motive for entering on the work; and that is, because it will be long before the work will pay much in money. I need not adduce any other proof of this than our experience in Boston; where, for four years, the rarely gifted, thoroughly educated, religiously devoted Alma Kriege poured out her young energies on classes of less than a score of children; bringing her a pittance so small that she had to fill up the rest of her hours, which ought to have been given to recreation and culture, with other work, in order to pay for rent and necessary bread. Our rich and cultivated people will not forego a little more upholstery than is necessary, or a style of dress that makes the laundry bill--to say nothing of the mantua-maker's and milliner's--larger than the school bill, in order to give the required remuneration to the kindergartner for spending herself on their children in exhausting study and labor. But the truth is, people do not really believe that anything better can be done for children than to kill the time between the mother's arms and the season when they are to be taught to read; and so this precious interval, when the habits of thought and affection are forming, is given up to be filled by chance, risking life-long difficulties for the child.

Now, what is to reform this state of things? Nothing but the self-sacrificing work of kindergartners, who, for the sake of enlightening these benighted parents, will do their work faithfully, steadily refusing to undertake the care of those whom their parents will not trust to Froebel's system. The refusal will not seldom force the truth on the parents--who, when they know it, will be glad to know it. I do not say to any particular person, it is your duty to wear yourself out and half starve, for the sake of keeping a kindergarten. It is only you who are sufficiently free from other obligations, to give yourselves the privilege and luxury of working with God, on the paradisaical ground of childhood, who should enter this field. If you can make it your object to study how to avoid offending those who are beholding the face of the Father in heaven, by not hindering, but bringing them to Christ, which means helping them to grow as He did, in grace as in stature, and in favor with God and man, till like Him they become redeemers of their brethren from bondage, and can help to make earth the kingdom of heaven; then you may hope, in your day and generation, to initiate kindergartning, and make the way smooth for those that follow. When the true thing is initiated, it will pay even in money; for parents will see that it is invaluable.

It is twenty-two years since Froebel died. He had made a band of kindergartners, and set them at work. They all began with small pecuniary reward. It was at first a starving business. In Europe it is more difficult than it is here, to induce women of culture and position to undertake any work which is paid for with money. Froebel's genius had overcome this prejudice in a few instances. The ladies of one wealthy family in Hamburg became his pupils, one of whom introduced it into England, though under some great disadvantages. The Baroness Marenholtz-B?low is the most important person inspired by Froebel; and the circumstances of her introduction to him are even picturesque. Being in feeble health, she went into an obscure village for rest and retirement; and one day asked the woman with whom she boarded, if anything interesting was going on among the villagers. The woman replied that there was "one queer thing, a natural fool who played about among the children, who followed him, and were very much taken up with him." The Baroness hardly heeded this singular assertion; but some time after, being abroad for exercise, she saw a white-haired man under a tree, with a group of children around him; and, thinking this might be the "natural fool," she drew near, and was soon arrested by what she heard, and joined the little throng herself. Subsequent interviews with Froebel--for it was he--made a new era in her life, and she corresponded with him closely till his death. She has since been his chief apostle. After years of earnest work, with tongue and pen, she succeeded in getting rid of the injunction against his schools, made by the Prussian Government, which was jealous of what claimed to be an improvement on their world-renowned Reform. Since this injunction was taken off, she has worked, by means of a normal school which she helped to found in Berlin, in which she lectured gratuitously many years, fighting earnestly against just such deteriorations of the system as have already begun to appear in this country. Some of the pseudo-kindergartens use the plays and occupations there, as here, in the most superficial way. When children work by patterns, or are shown--instead of being told in words--how to do things, they merely imitate, with as little accompaniment of intellectual action as a monkey; and neither the mind nor the character will be developed, but rather dissipated and weakened. Others, especially in this country, use the plays in the intervals between lessons or reading,--which, being taught before the mind has been regularly developed by success in doing things, and before the meaning of words has been learned in an adequate manner, are confused with a chaos of unrelated particulars, that it will take years of self-education, by and by, to grow out of; and, in short, only a few vigorous natures fortunately situated ever surmount the difficulty.

But the work of the Baroness has not been in vain; and she writes in a late letter that a government decree has just been made in Austria, ordering that all the children between four and six years of age should be sent to kindergartens; and that every normal school must give kindergarten training, and every teacher, whether of that or the following stages of education, must be made acquainted with Froebel's principles and practices. This great step is the final result of the agitation of the subject for the last few years in Europe, which began in the first Philosophers' Congress at Prague, in 1867. The dying out of the teachers instructed by Froebel himself was manifestly producing a deteriorating effect in the quality of kindergartners; and his most intelligent and devoted disciples proposed to the Congress an effort for the revival of his science and art in its pristine purity and power.

The experience I have had in my apostolate in this cause, has brought me to the conclusion that in America the best way to proceed is, to induce the public authorities to have kindergartning taught in the State and city normal schools, and to open public kindergartens as fast as there are adequate teachers for them.

THE NURSERY.

IT is my object to inspire, if I can, an enthusiasm for educating children strictly on Froebel's method, and no other; and I wish to justify myself by giving reasons for this; for I know that, at first sight, Americans start back from putting faith in any leader; immediately exclaiming, that they must be free to follow the light of their own minds.

The story I told you, in my last lecture, of the growth of Froebel's mind from his boyhood, suggested the fact that the common motherly instinct, purified of individual passion and caprice, and, understanding itself as the presence of the Living God overshadowing her, is the social atmosphere necessary to be breathed by every child who is to grow in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.

Froebel learned this primal fact or truth, first negatively, as it were, by lacking it in his own childish experience; and he verified it positively afterwards, by studying the method of unsophisticated mothers, at that earliest period of their children's lives, when, in order to keep them alive merely, the nurse must take the rule of her nursing from the needs which her heart divines, aided by the nursling's own expression of want and content--its tears and smiles.

Let us then determine first, as he did, the nursery art, which is preliminary to that of the Kindergarten.

And throughout the existence of the human being, the forethought that is to enable him to appreciate his ever multiplying relations with his own kind, and which grows wider and sweeter as he fulfils the duties they involve, is essentially outside of himself as a mere individual; being found first in those who are in relation with him in the family, afterwards in social, national, cosmopolitan relationship; till at last he realizes himself to be in sonship with God, in whom all humanity, nations, families, individuals, "live and move and have their being." There is no absolute isolation or independency possible for a spiritual being. This is a truth involved in the very meaning of the word spirit, and revealed to every family on earth, by the ever recurring fact of the child born into the arms of a love that emparadises both parties, on which he lives more or less a pensioner throughout his whole existence, so far as he lives humanly, finding fullness of life at last in the clear vision and conscious communion of an Infinite Father, who has been revealing Himself all along, in the love of parent and child, brother and sister, husband and wife, friend, fellow-citizen and fellow-man. Christ said, that little children see the Father face to face, but surely not with the eyes of the body or of the understanding! They see him with the heart. And is it not true, that we never quite forget the child's vision in turning our eyes on lower things? for what but remembrance of our Heavenly Father's face is hope, "that springs eternal in the human breast?" What but this remembrance are the ideals of beauty, that haunt the savage and the sage? the sense of law that gives us our moral dignity, and in the saddest case, what but this are the pangs of remorse, in which, as Emerson has sung in his wonderful sphinx song, "lurks the joy that is sweetest?"

Froebel has authority with me, because, in this great faith, making himself a little child, he received little children in the name of the Divine humanity, with a simple sincerity, such as few seem to have done since Jesus claimed little children as the pure elements of the kingdom he came to establish on earth; and exhorted that, as they were such, they should be brought to him as the motherly instinct prompted, and declared that they were not to be forbidden

It is quite necessary for me to say, and for you to accept this now, or our short time together will be wasted. There is a time for criticism undoubtedly, and nothing is true that can not make itself good against "honest doubt." But as Sterne has said, "of all the cants that are canted in this canting world, though the cant of hypocrisy may be the worst, the cant of criticism is the most provoking. I would go fifty miles on foot to kiss the hand of that man, whose generous heart will give up the reins into his author's hands, for the time being, and let him lead him where he will." I am quoting from memory, and may forget the exact words; but the idea is, that the mood of self-surrendering reverence is the mood for profitable study, for it is to "become a little child," which Christ told his disciples was the condition of any one's becoming the greatest in the kingdom of Divine Truth.

Let us begin, then, with reverently considering the new born child, as Froebel did; for that is to be "the light of all our seeing."

A child is a living soul, from the very first; not a mere animal force, but a person, open to God on one side by his heart, which appreciates love, and on the other side to be opened to nature, by the reaction upon his sensibility of those beauteous forms of things that are the analysis of God's creative wisdom; and which, therefore, gives him a growing understanding, whereby his mere active force shall be elevated into a rational, productive will. For heart and will are, at first, blind to outward things and therefore inefficient, until the understanding shall be developed according to the order of nature.

But during this process of its development, adult wisdom must supply the place of the child's wisdom, which is not, as yet, grown; that is--an educator must point out the way, genially, not peremptorily; for in following the educator's indications, the child must still act in a measure from himself. As he is irrefragably free, he will not always obey; he will try other paths--perhaps the contrary one--by way of testing whether he has life in himself. But unless he shall go a right way, he will accomplish nothing satisfactory and reproductive; and it is Froebel's idea to give him something to do, within the possible sphere of his affection and fancy, which shall be an opportunity of his making an experience of success, that shall stimulate him to desire, and thereby make him receptive of the guidance of creative law, which is the only true object for the obedience of a spiritual being.

The whole body is the organ of touch; but as the hands are made convenient for grasping, to which the infant has an instinctive tendency, and the tips of the fingers are especially handy for touching, they become, by the intension of the mind into them, the special organ for examining things by touch, and getting impressions of qualities obvious to no other sense. When, as it sometimes happens, by malformation or maltreatment of them, the eyes fail to perform their functions, it is wonderful how much more the soul intends itself into the special organs of touch, developing them to such a degree, that a cultivated blind person seems almost to see with the tips of the fingers. This fact proves what I have been trying to impress on your minds, that the soul which spontaneously desires and wills enjoyment, takes possession and becomes conscious of its organs of sensuous perception, partly by an original impulse, given to it by the Creator, and partly, by the genial, sympathetic, intelligent, careful co-working of the mother and nurse; who, by what we call nursery play, gives a needed help to the child to accomplish this feat in a healthy and pleasurable manner. And we shall be better convinced of the virtue of this nursery play, if we consider the case of the neglected children of the very poor, so pathetically described by Charles Lamb. See essays on Popular Fallacies, No. 12.

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