"A correct comprehension of external, material things is a preliminary
to a just comprehension of intellectual relations."
FRIEDRICH FROEBEL.
"The A, B, C of things must precede the A, B, C of words, and give to
the words (abstractions) their true foundations. It is because these
foundations fail so often in the present time that there are so few
men who think independently and express skillfully their inborn divine
ideas."
FRIEDRICH FROEBEL.
"Perception is the beginning and the preliminary condition for
thinking. One's own perceptions awaken one's own conceptions, and
these awaken one's own thinking in later stages of development. Let us
have no precocity, but natural, that is consecutive, development."
FRIEDRICH FROEBEL.
"Every child brings with him into the world the natural disposition to
see correctly what is before him, or, in other words, the truth. If
things are shown to him in their connection, his soul perceives them
thus as a conception. But if, as often happens, things are brought
before his mind singly, or piecemeal, and in fragments, then the
natural disposition to see correctly is perverted to the opposite, and
the healthy mind is perplexed."
FRIEDRICH FROEBEL.
"The linking together which is everywhere seen, and which holds the
Universe in its wholeness and unity, the eye receives, and thereby
receives the representation, but without understanding it except as an
impression and an image. But these first impressions are the
root-fibres for the understanding that is developed later."
FRIEDRICH FROEBEL.
"The correct perception is a preparation for correct knowing and
thinking."
FRIEDRICH FROEBEL.
"No new subject of instruction should come to the scholar, of which he
does not at least conjecture that it is grounded in the former
subject, and how it is so grounded as its application shows, and
concerning which he does not, however dimly, feel it to be a need of
the human spirit."
FRIEDRICH FROEBEL.
"The sequences which the child builds, as well as the sequence of the
kindergarten gifts, point on the one hand to physical evolution,
wherein each form 'remembers the next inferior and predicts the next
higher,' and on the other to the process of historic development,
which magnifies the present by linking with it the past and the
future."
SUSAN E. BLOW.
"Let us educate the senses, train the faculty of speech, the art of
receiving, storing, and expressing impressions, which is the natural
gift of infants, and we shall not need books to fill up the emptiness
of our teaching until the child is at least seven years old."
E. SEGUIN.
"As soon as we, young or old, have taken to the habit of asking the
book for what it is in our power to learn from personal observation,
we dismiss our organs of perception and comprehension from their
righteous charge, and cover the emptiness of our own minds with the
patchwork of others."
E. SEGUIN.
"Natural geometry (taking the word in its limited sense of study of
form in space) is the object of a desire which generally precedes the
artificial curiosity for the meaning of letters."
E. SEGUIN.
"Without an accurate acquaintance with the visible and tangible
properties of things, our conceptions must be erroneous, our
inferences fallacious, and our operations unsuccessful."
HERBERT SPENCER.
"The truths of number, of form, of relationship in position, were all
originally drawn from objects; and to present these truths to the
child in the concrete is to let him learn them as the race learned
them."
HERBERT SPENCER.
"If we consider it, we shall find that exhaustive observation is an
element of all great success."
HERBERT SPENCER.
"Learn to comprehend each thing in its entire history. This is the
maxim of science guided by the reason."
WM. T. HARRIS.
"Geometrical facts and conceptions are easier to a child than those of
arithmetic."
THOMAS HILL.
"Instruction must begin with actual inspection, not with verbal
descriptions of things. From such inspection it is that certain
knowledge comes. What is actually seen remains faster in the memory
than description or enumeration a hundred times as often repeated."
COMENIUS.
"Observation is the absolute basis of all knowledge. The first object,
then, in education, must be to lead the child to observe with
accuracy; the second, to express with correctness the results of his
observation."
PESTALOZZI.
"If in the external universe any one constructive principle can be
detected, it is the geometrical."
BULWER-LYTTON.
"The education of the senses neglected, all after-education partakes
of a drowsiness, a haziness, an insufficiency, which it is impossible
to cure."
LORD BACON.
"Of this thing be certain: Wouldst thou plant for eternity? Then plant
into the deep infinite faculties of man, his fantasy and heart.
Wouldst thou plant for year and day? Then plant into his shallow,
superficial faculties, his self-love, and arithmetical understanding,
what will grow there."
THOS. CARLYLE.