sewing with the colored threads on the cards; and the colors may be
arranged so as to illustrate the connections, &c., just learned. The use
of the First Gift need only be once a week. It will then be a fresh
pleasure every time during the whole of the Kindergarten course, even if
it should last three years. After the children have become perfectly
familiar with the primary and secondary colors, their combinations and
connections, the lessons on colors may be varied, by telling them that
tints of the primary colors and of the secondary colors, are made by
adding white to them; and shades of them, (which will, of course, be
darker,) by adding black to them. This may be illustrated by flowers, as
may various combinations of colors. A very little child, whom it was
hard to train even to the hilarious and gay plays, and whose attention
could not easily be fixed, surprised a teacher one day by his aptitude
in detecting what color had been mixed with red to make a very glorious
pink in a phlox. This child liked to sew, but was very impatient of
putting his needle into any special holes. It proved to be the pleasure
of handling the colored yarns, and he was always eager to change them
and form new combinations. It may not be irrelevant to say here, in
regard to ball playing, from which I have digressed to colors, that the
ball is the last plaything of men as well as the first with children.
The object teaching upon the ball is strictly inexhaustible. Children
learn practically, by means of it, the laws of motion. Beware of any
strictly scientific teaching of these laws _in terms_. You may make
children familiar with the phenomena of the laws of incidence and
reflection, by simply telling them that if they strike the ball straight
against the wall opposite, it will bound straight back to them, and then
ask them whether it returns to them when they strike it in a slanting
direction. By and by this knowledge can be used to give meaning to a
scientific expression. It is a first principle that the object, motion,
or action, should precede the _word_ that names them. This is Froebel's
uniform method, and the reason is, that when the scientific study does
come, it shall be substantial mental life, and not mere superficial
talk. It is the laws of _things_ that are the laws of _thought_; and
thought must precede all attempt at logic, or logic will be deceptive,
not reasonable. Most erroneous speculation has its roots in mistakes
about words, which it is fatal to divorce from what they express of
nature, or to use without taking in their full meaning.
In the easy mood of mind that attends the lively play of childhood,
impressions are made clearly; and it should be the care of the educator
to have all the child's notions associated with significant words, as
can only be done by his becoming their companion in the play, and
talking about it, as children always incline to do. It is half the
pleasure of their play, to represent it in words, as they are playing.
In the nursery, the mothers play with the child, and all her dealings
with it, are expressed in words that are important lessons in language;
and together with language, we give a lesson in manners, by first
trotting a child gently, and then jouncingly, to the words, "This is the
way the gentle folks go, this is the way the gentle folks go; and this
is the way the country folks go, this is the way the country folks
go--bouncing and jouncing and jumping so." To describe what they are
doing in little rhymes when playing ball, makes it a mental as well as
physical play of faculty, and Froebel published a hundred little rhymes,
and the music for as many ball plays.
It is not an unimportant lesson for children to learn, that the same
things seem different in different circumstances. The fact that white
light is composed of different colored rays can be illustrated by giving
the children prisms to hold up in the sunshine; and by calling their
attention to the splendid colors of the sky at sunset and sunrise, when
the clouds act as prisms, and to the rainbow. Children of the
Kindergarten age, will be so much engaged with the beautiful phenomenon,
they will not be likely to ask questions as to how the light is
separated by the prism and clouds; they will rest in the fact. But if,
by chance, analytic reflection has supervened, and they do, then a large
ball on which all the six colors are arranged in lines meridian-wise, to
which a string is attached at one pole, or both poles, can be given
them, and they be told to whirl it very swiftly. This will present the
phenomenon of the merging of the colors to the eye by motion, so that
the ball looks whitish from which you can proceed to speak of light as
being composed of multitudinous little balls, of the colors of the
rainbow, in motion, and so looking white.
If some uncommon little investigator should persist to ask why things
seem to be other than they are, he must be plainly told, that the reason
is in something about his eyes, which he cannot understand now, but will
learn by and by, when he goes to school and learns _optics_.
Children are only to be _entertained_ in the Kindergarten, with the
facts of nature that develop the organs of perception, but a skillful
teacher who reads Tyndall's charming books and the photographic
journals, may bring into the later years of the Kindergarten period many
pretty phenomena of light and colors, which shall increase the stock of
facts, on which the scientific mind, when it shall be developed, may
work, or which the future painter may make use of in his art.
When Allston painted his great picture of Uriel, whose background was
the sun, he thought out carefully the means of producing the dazzling
effect, and drew lines of all the rainbow colors in their order, side by
side, after having put on his canvass a ground of the three primary
colors mixed. When the picture was first exhibited at Somerset House,
the effect was dazzling, and it was bought at once by Lord Egremont, in
a transport of delight; and for twice the sum the artist put upon it,
that is, six hundred guineas. I do not know whether time may not have
dimmed its brilliancy, since paint is of the earth, earthy; but to paint
the sun at high noon, and have it a success, even for a short time, is a
great feat; and art, in this instance, took counsel of science
deliberately, according to the artist's confession. But perfect sensuous
impressions of color and its combinations, were the basis of both the
science and the art.
This lecture is getting too long, and I will close by saying, that the
First Gift has, for its most important office, to develop the organ of
sight, which grows by seeing. Colors arouse _intentional_ seeing by the
delightful impression they make. I believe that _color-blindness_,
(which our army examinations have proved to be as common as _want of ear
for music_,) may be cured by intentional exercise of the organ of sight
in a systematic way; just as _ear for music_ may be developed in those
who are not born with it. Lowell Mason proved, by years of experiment in
the public schools, that the musical ear may be formed, in all cases, by
beginning gently with little children, giving graduated exercises, so
agreeable to them as to arouse their will to _try to hear_, in order to
reproduce.
That you may receive a sufficiently strong impression of the fact, that
the organs of perception actually grow by exercise _with intention_, I
will relate to you a fact that came under my own observation.
A young friend of mine became a pupil of Mr. Agassiz, who gave him,
among his first exercises, two fish scales to look at through a very
powerful microscope, asking him to find out and tell all their
differences. At first they appeared exactly alike, but on peering
through the microscope, all the time that he dared to use his eyes, for
a month, he found them full of differences; and he afterwards said, that
"it was the best month's work he ever did, to form _the scientific eye_
which could detect differences ever after, _at a glance_," and proved to
him an invaluable talent, and gave him exceptional authority with
scientists.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] An American translation has been published by Lee & Shepard, Boston.
[2] Since this lecture was written and delivered in Boston, I have
received from Europe a French version of the Baroness Crombrugghe's
translation of Froebel's _Education of Man_, and find that the first
chapters analyze the first and second stages of development so much, in
the way that I have done, that it gives me, on the one hand, confidence
in myself as a true interpreter of Froebel, and on the other, new
confidence in Froebel as a scientific observer and recorder of what I
have been accused of founding on a merely sentimental knowledge. But
scientific knowledge, or that gained by the exercise of the
understanding, and sentimental knowledge, or what is gained by the
intuitions of the heart, must necessarily correspond if the
understanding is sound and the heart has been kept diligently to the
issues of life. Mr. Emerson calls the intellect sensibility, and there
is a fine meaning in this. Is there not analogous instruction in calling
the heart apprehension? What are love, justice, beauty, &c., but
apprehensions of the primal relations established by God? Can the
understanding have sensibility to them, unless apprehension of them
exists from the beginning?
In the June, July and August numbers of the _Kindergarten Messenger_,
for 1874, will be found translations of the first chapters of Froebel's
book, above mentioned. I began in February to print the translation of
the introduction, which will be finished in the May number, and then
will follow the first chapter, entitled "The Nursling," and in the
following numbers the subsequent chapters, on the child's development
during the Kindergarten era. This work of Froebel's was published at an
earlier period of his career than 1840, when he began to devote himself
almost entirely to the first stage of education, which, as he grew
older, he felt to be the most important, because it enfolds the germs of
all later developments.
[3] It is sold for ten cents by Hammett, publisher, in Brattle street,
Boston.
LECTURE III.
DISCIPLINE.
SINCE the kindergartner is to receive the child from the nursery, and
half of the work in the kindergarten is what ought to have been done in
the nursery, I will give another lecture upon what Froebel thought the
nursery ought to do for religious nurture; since, if it has not been
done in the nursery, it must be done in the kindergarten.
We have seen that the soul takes possession of the organs of sense
gradually, by tasting, hearing, seeing, smelling, and touching that
which is agreeable; and that the continuous exercise of the organs
develops them up to a certain though indefinite limit to finer
susceptibility of impression. We have seen that by exercising the limbs,
the soul takes possession of them in particular and in general. Thus the
nursery plays, improvised instinctively by all mothers, Froebel has
enlarged, describing in his _Mother's Book_ various duplicate movements
of the limbs, especially of the hands, that, with the accompanying
songs, have for their end, besides physical health, to make the mind
discriminate various parts of the body and know their several forms and
functions. This is the beginning of human education.
"Patty-cake" teaches a child that he has hands and fingers; "This little
pig goes to market, this one stays at home," that he has toes. It is the
child's own body that first furnishes the objects of his attention to be
associated with words. From the beginning it is the instinct of the
maternal nurse to talk to the child, which attracts him to observe the
organs of speech; and this prompts the sympathetic use of his own
organs. Speech is a function distinctively human, which, beginning in
the nursery, is carried on carefully in the kindergarten, creating the
sphere of the intellectual life; for words support the operation of
thinking.
From all that I said of the _modus operandi_ of the child's taking
possession of his body in the nursery period, you see that childish
action is involved in the mother's action. It is _her_ wisdom, such as
it may be, which must be the guide of the child's will, as it is brought
gradually out of the blindness of ignorance; and it is she, not the
child, who is responsible for the perfection of this part of the child's
life.
And is not this, on the whole, the common sense of mankind? Does any
sane person hold a baby, up to three years old, and often, indeed, much
later, responsible for the state of its temper, or for the rightfulness
of its action?
Nevertheless, the child is a moral person all this time, and it is of
the last importance to his subsequent moral life whether or not his
temper has been kept sweet, and his action according to law, or
discordant. Discordant action must have a bad reactionary effect upon
the temper, and interrupt or retard the growth of the several organs of
sense and of motion. Hence the mother or nurse must not neglect to use
her power wisely as well as gently to prevent these evils, by duplicate
movements that are rhythmic, and calculated to bring about some end that
the child's mind may easily grasp.
It is instinctive with every one, as soon as he begins to play with a
child, whether it be reasonable or not, to talk to it about its being
good or bad, although a little child cannot be good or bad, but only
orderly or disorderly; and there is no little danger to his moral and
spiritual future in anticipating by our words the workings of his
conscience before it has the conditions for its development. One of
these conditions is such a sense of individuality as enables the child
to say "I," with which it presently combines such perception of
relationship to others as will say, "I ought,"--a phrase that occurs in
all languages, and means something very different from "I will." It is
of the greatest importance to keep this distinction in mind, for an
imposed or artificial conscience almost certainly forecloses the natural
or inspired conscience,--a truth largely illustrated by the history both
of families and of nations, from which we learn that periods of
corruption and wild license invariably follow periods of extreme
restraint and asceticism. And all conscientious action and moral
judgment in children also presupposes _thinking_, which is a process
that does not begin until after much repetition of impressions, being a
reflective act, which associates impressions with specific things and
actions (as the etymology of the word suggests). Mere reception of
impressions is passive; but to compare impressions of difference or
similarity (which individualizes _things_) is _active_. Therefore
thinking and putting thoughts into words includes comparison and
inference, and really _produces_ the human understanding, which we do
not bring into the world with us, as we do our heart and will. Before
there is a possibility of conscience or any moral judgment properly so
called, the child's affections (or feeling of relation with other
persons) must be cultivated by the mother's genial care, directing
mental activity towards fellow-beings, instead of leaving the heart to
turn back and stagnate upon self. The more impressible a child is, the
more important is the mother's or kindergartner's providential care of
his affections during this irresponsible, pre-intellectual period of his
life.
I think the most frightfully selfish beings I have ever known were
endowed with great natural sensibility, which was left to concentrate
upon self, because the claims made by the sensibility of others were not
early enough presented to the imagination of their hearts. By the growth
of personal affections, the individual intensifies the feeling of
individuality, which first comes to him by his having taken such
possession of his body as enabled him to run alone; and this growth,
whether intentionally directed towards that combination of his soul and
body, which he begins to call himself or "I," or directed toward others,
to whom he clings at first as part of himself (their embrace of him
being necessary to his comfort), is cherished by the duplicate action of
the mother. She moulds his heart in her heart, as she has moulded his
bodily activity by her care and cheering sympathy, when helping out the
power of his limbs in walking and manipulation. She half creates the
child's generous and devout affections, if she is herself faithful to
their proper objects, starting him on the way of a brotherly humanity
and a filial adoration of the common Father, long before the
understanding has completely discerned the objects of these human and
divine affections, which must be blended in order to continue vital and
pure. But the moral and religious is the most delicate region of the
child's life, the _holy of holies_, into which "fools incontinently
rush, though angels fear to tread." She can only be the mother of the
soul as well as of the body of her child, on condition of being herself
rich in love of others and in piety to God.
Froebel suggests this in the introductory poems of _Die Mutter Spiele
und Kose Lieder_. The first five of these are the mother's communings
with herself upon the emotions that arise in her heart, as she nurses
her baby in her arms, and realizes that to her and her husband has been
sent a living witness of the "very present God," who is the author of
their being, and has united them by a love that makes that being a
blessing to themselves, which they are bound to extend beyond
themselves. The rhymed introduction of the several little child-songs
that follow are suggestions to her of the meaning of her instincts, and
of the bearing on the development of the child's heart and mind of the
little gymnastics described. And just as she could not be the educator
of her child into his individual body if she were a paralytic herself,
so, if she be not affectionate and generous herself, she cannot educate
him into the social body of which he is a living member; nor unless she
loves God herself, can she inspire him to recognize the Parental Spirit
of whom we are (as heathen poet and Christian apostle alike aver) the
veritable children. "We are the offspring of God," said St. Paul,
quoting from the Greek poet Aratus in the Sermon on Mars' Hill, which is
a model of all reformatory instruction, whether religious or secular. I
think all true instruction, proceeding from the known to the unknown, is
both secular and religious, on the principle that to those who have the
seed, can be given the increase.
In the first of these mother-songs of Froebel, the mother finds that the
baby she holds in her arms, though another than herself, is in a certain
sense one with herself; thus is unveiled (revealed) to her the Divine
Fountain of Being, the Person of Persons, from whom she and her little
one have severally come; and her feelings of wonder and gratitude awaken
the sense of responsibility to make her child grow conscious as she is
of the common Father,--and thankful as she is for life in such close
relation with herself,--who is the first form in which God reveals
Himself to the child; for when he first looks away from his body so far
as to perceive that his mother is another than himself, she fills the
whole sphere of his perception!
Rousseau affirms that every child, if left to its own natural growth,
would think its mother was its creator. And William Godwin in his
_Enquirer_ (or some volume of his writings) has quite an eloquent paper,
setting forth that the natural religion of a child is to worship its
earthly parents. I have made some observations and had a personal
experience which makes me doubt this, though I do not doubt that the
characteristics of parents nearly always determine the character of the
child's religion. But the question of who is his own creator does not
naturally come up to a child, even when he begins to ask who made the
things about him. His own consciousness is of "being increate," and when
brought to know that his body grows old and must die, the fear that this
causes is because he imaginatively associates his undying self, which is
a "presence not to be put by" with the perishing body. What the soul, by
virtue of its inherent immortality, fears and hates, is loneliness,
absolute isolation! And when we think of the body, which we identify
with ourselves from the moment that we have taken it up and walked by
its instrumentality, as put away alone in the ground, the undying person
that the soul is, shudders, and can only be comforted by learning to
conceive itself wholly detached from the decay, and housed within the
bosom of Him who is the Alpha and Omega of our life; of Him whom we have
learnt to know with the spirit and understanding also, by the process of
living in human relations. For we know ourselves as individuals first by
means of the body, and we know ourselves as a component part of the
social whole of humanity by means of genial intercourse with our
kindred, it being revealed to us that we are substantially social, as
well as distinctly individual, by our instinctive horror of separation
from them. Later in life only, there are pleasures of solitude for those
few who by imaginative act make nature populous with personifications,
and consequently the refracting atmosphere of the Divine Personality.
The baby that finds itself alone cries for and is comforted by the
embrace which restores the sense of union with its mother. Seldom is a
baby in such a wretched state of feeling that a tender embrace and kiss
will not completely comfort it.
What a proof it is that God is _Love_, that the very embrace that
symbolizes to the baby's heart the sense of human companionship, gives
its mind that impression of objective nature which is the first momentum
of the human understanding! The gentle pressure of one sensitive body
upon another produces counter-pressure, a resistance that is positively
pleasurable, whereby the impenetrability of matter becomes a delightful
instead of a frightful revelation to the mind of the Immutable Reality
of the loving Creator, as the complement of our own changeful
individuality! It is the first syllable of that word (or speech of God)
made intelligible by the various qualities and forms of matter, the
Truth which He is forever addressing to man. How gracious it is, that He
should so inextricably mingle the first impression of matter with that
perception of the _otherness_ of person that makes Love possible! Thus
love and the sense of individuality are correlative creations and twin
births. Later, the sense of individuality becomes a positive self-love
(which in its healthy degree is innocent), and the perception of
_otherness of person_, with whom it is delightful to be in free union,
becomes the basis of the self-forgetting generosity of mankind. These
opposite principles are at first mere and perhaps equal sources of
satisfaction, having no moral character whatever. Afterwards, they
become respectively hard selfishness or a weak and base servility, or
they may rise into a majestic self-respect, and that sublimest love
which is to make the human race, as a whole, the _image of God_, not
only king over material nature, but one with the perfect Son of Man,
also Son of God, who, with a humility and dignity equally venerable, is
able to say, "I and my Father are One!"
But you will say that I am getting quite beyond the nursery.