effectually saved me from being didactic and dogmatic in my religious
teaching of children. The Socratic method is the true way of bringing
into the definite conscious thought God's revelation of Himself to the
soul. That image of authority and power to punish did not, I think,
help, but rather puzzled my moral sense of which I was already
conscious. For I remember that I used to muse very much in my childhood
upon the mental phenomenon of feeling myself to be two persons. I was
clearly conscious of an inward conversation on all occasions of a
question of right and wrong, when a higher and lower law distinctly
uttered themselves. The lower self often prevailed by the argument that
the thing to be done was _transient_, I would do it only this _once_,
and never again; and often I thus sinned against the very present God,
which I think I might not have done so presumptuously, had I associated
the thought of this strange other me with that kind face of Love Divine.
When later in life I did learn that the remonstrating voice was
unquestionably God, because He is the Love that I saw in my childish
vision, the war between self-love and conscience ceased. But this was
not till a great body of death had been accumulated, which I have never
shuffled off except in moments of hope.
But to take up the thread of my discourse again. I would very earnestly
say that the Socratic or conversational method is the only way of
bringing into a child's definite consciousness God's revelation of
Himself to souls. But this requires a mutual understanding of words,
and if we are careful, we may produce this in the kindergarten.
Froebel intimates that a general impression of there being an invisible
Friend and Protector may be given by the baby's seeing the mother in the
attitude of devotion, and he would have recognition of God called forth
by her naming the unseen Father at moments when the child's heart is
overflowing with joy and love, or seeking to know where some beautiful
thing comes from. The child feels already at such times the presence of
the Infinite Cause, the Infinite Source of joy and goodness, and the
name of Heavenly Father given to this presence will not be an empty
vocable. Using with the name of Father the word "our," with which the
Lord's Prayer begins, suggests that He is the Father of all alike, and
all human beings will thus be united together with Him in the child's
imagination.[6]
This idea of one personal but comprehensive Being, the centre of the
social organization, is a quickening of the immortal personality, which
has a date in time no less certainly than the quickening of the body,
and is our sense of identity.[7]
FOOTNOTES:
[4] See Hazard's _Man a Creative First Cause_. A book published since
this lecture was first given.
[5] "Order reigns in Warsaw" was the form of words in which the
subjugation of the Poles to Russians in 1849 was announced in France.
[6] See Frederic Denison Maurice's book on the Lord's Prayer, published
by Hurd & Houghton.
[7] See Appendix, note A.
LECTURE IV.
THE KINDERGARTEN.
IN my last lecture I spoke of the ideal nursery; for only there,
hitherto, has the divine method of education ever been completely
carried out, the unquestionable teacher there being _the child_,
"trailing clouds of glory from God who is our home"; its sweet content
and inspiring smile indicating when its nurse is treating it aright;
while all that is wrong, whether proceeding from mere ignorance or
selfish wilfulness on the part of the adult, is indicated by its cries
of fright and anger, which it behooves her to heed.
How is it that, with the spectacle forever before our eyes of the mother
and infant, mutually emparadised in child's play (that mutually
educating communion of trust and love, by which the child is put into
gradual possession of his body, and joyous consciousness of his
individuality),--how is it, I say, that we find education has lost its
_ideal_, and as soon as the child leaves the nursery for the schoolroom,
an antagonism has begun, "with its blessedness at strife," and which
leaves us all such scarred and bewildered creatures as we find ourselves
to be, as soon as we come to reflect?
But I must remember that what we have to speak of especially is the
kindergarten, which follows hard upon the nursery.
When the child's growing activities begin to require a larger social
sphere than the nursery,--_i.e._, at about three years old,--it was
Froebel's plan to gather the children of several families into what he
called a "Child Garden," and to extend the nursery law of _cherishing_
(which is the dealing with living organisms that children are), by
exercising them for several hours of every day in rehearsing in plays,
in the first place, all the sweet charities of life. This employs their
physical forces, and makes them experimentally know that human happiness
and goodness are social and generous.
For the so-called "movement plays" are social exercises, gently calling
out moral sentiments, as well as intellectual powers. They can only be
beautiful and enjoyable when they give mutual pleasure; and this
involves that mutual reference and kind consideration of each other
which leave no room for selfish feeling or action. Moral education is
the alpha and omega of a kindergarten, but it cannot be given by
precept. To _do_ the will of God,--_i.e._, to obey the moral
law,--"doing to others as we would have others do to us," _even in
play_, is the only way for children to know vitally the doctrine of
moral life.
Froebel has suggested a variety of these movement plays, all of them
conceived with the greatest care as to their intellectual as well as
moral effect. They always have a fanciful aim, within the scope of the
child's knowledge and affection, and to play them begins to develop the
understanding also.
A gentle intellectual exercise, involved in learning by rote, reciting,
and singing the songs that direct the plays, takes the rudeness out and
puts intelligence into that exhilaration of the animal spirits which
healthy children crave, and prevents it from exhausting the body or
disordering the mind; the joyous association of the children with each
other aiding this effect. In the sedentary plays, which are called
"occupations," and in which the child is genially drawn into producing
symmetrical effects to the eye, by making things (albeit only little
toys) which begin their artistic life, Froebel has had equal regard to
the moral as to the intellectual influences. When the child has gone
beyond the age in which he is satisfied with making transient forms and
gathering the materials back into boxes, and desires to make something
that will last, a legitimate sense of property arises. He feels that
what he has made is _his own_, for the thought and work which he knows
that he has put into it are his own. Froebel, therefore, would have him,
before he begins to _make_ anything, pause and appropriate it
intentionally to some object of his love, reverence, or pity. This will
check the otherwise rampant propensity to hoard, and prevent the
passions of avarice, vanity, and jealousy from making their appearance.
In our common school life, the pride of _showing off_ their powers, and
excelling others, is regularly cultivated in children by competition, as
a stimulus to industry. But this is as unnecessary as it is deleterious.
For disinterested desire to confer pleasure, and express gratitude and
love of others, is found by experience to be a surer stimulus to
industry than the baser passions, and has the additional value of
cultivating positive sweetness and active benevolence. It is desirable,
and really produces the greatest practical humility, for children to
regard themselves as embryo powers of beneficence, learning to do the
Heavenly Father's business from the beginning, like the child Jesus.
Then may they grow "in favor with God and men," as they grow "in
stature," and all their knowledge will prove a divine wisdom unto the
salvation of others and themselves. To go into a truly ordered and well
governed child-garden, and see all the little children busy making
things for the Christmas tree, or for birthday and new year's gifts, for
all the friends they know or fancy, we shall see sufficient proofs that
love is the truest quickener of industry, and love-inspired industry the
true sweetener of the disposition and temper.
Moreover, such industry is the special desideratum to temper the spirit
of the present age, which is so keen and energetic that it hurries our
young men into pursuits in their amusements which take on the character
of gambling; and hence gambling in business, gambling in politics, where
even human beings, instead of being regarded as _brothers to be kept_,
are used as dice, to be recklessly thrown in our game. The only
preventive or cure for this passion for gambling is industry, and the
only industry that is attractive is artistic; and why should not all
industry become artistic, now that the great cosmic forces are suborned,
by our advancing civilization, as the legitimate slaves of men, to do
all the hard work for men? I have already set forth this view of the
subject in the _Plea for Froebel's Kindergarten as the Primary
Art-School_, which I appended to Cardinal Wiseman's lecture on the
relation of the arts of design with the arts of production (which I
published in 1869, under the title of _The Artist and the Artisan
Identified,--the Proper Object of American Education_).
Before I leave these general remarks for more specific explanation of
Froebel's method of intellectual development, I would make one more
observation. It is in the social and moral character of the kindergarten
that Froebel has shown himself so much superior to Rousseau, whose
method was to cultivate individualities exclusively, the teacher
pretending to know no more than the child, but taking his idiosyncrasy
for his only guide in discovery and invention. In the first place,
Rousseau's method has been found an impracticable one, for it requires a
separate teacher for every child; and in the only instance, perhaps, in
which it was ever carried out with perfect fidelity, that of Maria
Edgeworth's eldest brother (we have in her memoirs of her father all the
facts), the ultimate effect was to make a monstrosity. He was utterly
strange, so odd and unsocial, nobody but his father, who educated him,
could have any practicable relation with him. He might be said to be
conscientiously unsocial, and therefore immoral; and, though not
ungifted, he was an utter failure in human life. We see similar effects
produced measurably, in all cases where the main object is to cultivate
the individual rather than the universal characteristics of humanity.
Froebel was tender, and gave freedom to individualities, but he took
great care not to _pamper_ them. They are the results of the free-will,
irrefragable, and will take care of themselves sufficiently, if not
cruelly snubbed, but tenderly respected.
What is to be _intentionally_ cultivated in earliest infancy, are the
_general_ affections and faculties, which relate us to our kind,
insuring _common_ sense and _common_ conscience with a reasonable
self-respect. Therefore, what is done in the kindergarten is necessary
for all children, their idiosyncrasies being left free to play on the
surface and give variety and piquancy to life, freedom and dignity to
the individual.
All minds seem to be divided into two classes. In one class, the primal
tendency is to observe single objects; and these are the so-called smart
children, interesting the spectator by their vivacity and precocity. In
the other class, children seem to be dull in sense, unobserving, but
dreamy, as if they had an over-mastering _presentiment_ of that
connection of things which binds them into wholes. It has been remarked
that this latter class turns out the great men,--the poets, the
philosophers, the inventors, high artists, great statesmen, and
law-givers,--while the precocious children disappoint expectation;
probably because they have accumulated such a chaos of single
impressions of disconnected things, that it quite overwhelms the
classifying and generalizing powers of the intellect. Froebel's method
equally meets the respective wants of both these classes of minds,
supplying by specific culture the _other_ side of their practical
endowment. By its discipline of production, it gives the lively and
restless ones the wand of the Fairy-Order, in discovering to them the
connections of things, and the conditions as well as laws of
organization; while for those of the dreamy, poetic, philosophic
temperament, it sharpens the senses to individual things, supplying the
definite and sensuous impressions, and suggesting the corresponding
words that enable them to give an account of their own thinking, and
illustrate to others the struggling ideal; which, like conscience and
the love of order and rhythm, is perhaps the yet persistent vision of
that Heavenly Father's face, which Jesus Christ has told us we are
created beholding.
Jesus evidently is quoting a familiar proverb, when he says "for their
angels behold the face of my Father who is in heaven." Does it not refer
to the Persian mythology current in Judea after the captivity? However
neglected and eclipsed, that primeval vision can never be quite lost. It
persists in the love of order and beauty; in the desire to be loved
_infinitely_; in hope "that springs eternal in the human breast"; in the
ideals of imagination, that haunt both the savage and the sage, and, at
worst, in _remorse_, in which, as Emerson says, "there is a certain
_sweetness_," whether it be gentle as in what the Quakers call "the
reproof of truth," or felt as the reproachful strivings within us of our
neglected infinite nature.
This brings me to speak of Froebel's superiority to Pestalozzi. The
kindergarten is not mainly _object-teaching_, though of course a
constant object-teaching is _involved_; all the materials of their work
and all the surroundings of the children become objects of examination
in their individualities of form, size, number, etc., and in their
possible connections with each other and with the _child_. If Froebel
proposes to give the fruits of the tree of _life_, before he gives those
of the tree of knowledge, it is only that the latter may prove, _not a
curse_, but a blessing. The world's history and the present state of
civilization in the foremost nations of the world shows us that
knowledge may be _a power_ without being _a good_ (a snakish subtlety
not Divine Wisdom). It begins to be realized in Europe as well as in
America, that Froebel's idea of education, in making _character_ the
first thing, and knowledge the _hand-maiden_ of goodness, is the
desideratum of the age, and promise of the millennium.
I should like to read you some letters of eminent men in France,
addressed to Froebel's most earnest disciple and apostle, the Baroness
Marenholtz-Bülow, which I have translated from the appendix of her _Work
in Relation to Education_ (see Appendix, Note B).
In an address to the school committee of Boston in 1868 I gave the call
addressed in 1867 by the Philosophers' Congress in Prague to the
convention of teachers in Berlin, and the call of the latter to the
second convention of this congress at Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1869. The
burden of all these papers is the paramount necessity of religious and
moral education, begun in earliest infancy, in order that the modern
intellectual activity may not land us in licentious vices and heartless
atheism, _our nearest dangers_. They all accept Froebel's method of
education by work and experience (beginning with the work and experience
of the child of three years old) as the first condition of the
regeneration of the human race.
It is the office of the kindergartner to awaken the intellect, which the
child does not bring into the world, like its heart and will,
full-grown. The infant suffers and enjoys as keenly, and wills as
energetically, at first as ever in its life, but apparently begins and
lives for some time, unconscious of a world without as a _not me_. It is
purely subjective, _i.e._, feeling its material environment to be a part
of itself. As Emerson says:--
"The babe, by its mother,
Lies bathed in joy;
Glide its hours uncounted;
The sun is its toy!
Shines the peace of all being,
Without cloud, in its eyes;
And the sum of the world
In soft miniature lies!"
Only by intentional help of those around the child can it grow into
individual consciousness of its relations with nature in that order
which produces the sound intellect. For the intellect is a growth in
time, that carries on the nursery exercises of the limbs and affections
by the movement plays, and adds those sedentary plays with the series of
gifts, which are symbols of all nature in miniature, that objective
revelation of God to which the receptive mind answers by thoughts.
Thinking is that reaction of the individual mind upon nature which, when
it is put into words, produces progressively an image of God, which is
the human mind.
The kindergartner's conversation with the children upon their playthings
is therefore her most important and delicate work, and one which she
cannot do instinctively, but only if she scientifically understands the
child on the one hand, and nature in some department on the other. It is
impossible in this lecture, perhaps, to demonstrate my meaning. By
following out Froebel's own method of playing with the gifts, as
suggested in Mrs. Kraus-Boelte's guide or in _The Florence Handbook_,
the whole process of the formation of the human understanding by the
order of objective nature will become patent, and enable the
kindergartner to avoid any great mistakes in her guidance of the
children's minds, which guidance should always be tentative, and
respectful, to say the least, of their freedom to will. Then we shall
have not mechanical work, but orderly, creative work from the children,
whose spontaneity is not to be choked; but when it seems to be going in
a wrong direction, interrogatively guided. Like Ariel, she must do her
spiriting gently, lest she violate the legitimate individuality, and we
have Caliban instead of the germ of Prospero.
I here pause to display two kinds of work actually done by children
under seven years of age at Frau Marquadt's kindergarten in Dresden.
They enable me to show that those sedentary plays, with which Froebel
would have children amused, must needs develop and educate the
perceptive faculty and understanding in a substantial manner; for these
things were done without patterns, and therefore from _thought_,--the
thought being sometimes suggested by the dictation of the
child-gardener, requiring of the child only one single act of
reflection. But much of this work was invented by the children
themselves, their wildest fancies being controlled to produce symmetry,
by following the one rhythmical law of always making an opposite to
everything they do. After showing and explaining the _modus operandi_ of
the work exhibited, I went on to say:--
I believe nobody disputes, after they see what kindergarten is, that it
is the gospel of salvation for children. The exercises put them into
complete possession, not only of their limbs, especially the
characteristic limb of man, the hand, just when they are the most
flexible, and therefore most easily trained; and of their organs of
sense (by which they gradually make the universe their instrumentality),
but also of _accurate speech_, enabling them to express their
impressions of individual things, as well as of what they _do_ with
things and in the order of its doing. Thus they are prepared for
entering upon more abstract subjects, by means of books and schools of
instruction. A child well "gardened" and exercised in the intelligent
use of his mother tongue enters upon the process of learning to read,
for instance, with all the more advantage from being accustomed to hear
and use language with precision and fluency; and is ready to learn to
cipher all the more quickly, because of the concrete arithmetic and
geometry he has mastered experimentally with the playthings and in the
occupations, all his habits of delicate observation and nice calculation
formed by the embroidery and other fanciful work giving the basis for
intelligent classifications. Even the few years of experience of some
genuine kindergartens in this country has already proved this. I can
give an instance in detail of the almost miraculous rapidity with which
a class of seven-year-old children learned to read in the primer called
_After Kindergarten--What?_ (Note C, in Appendix.) All the time given to
"child-gardening" is therefore more than saved at the next stage, when
instruction begins. Other advantages accruing are incalculable, for the
children themselves have become intelligent and conscientious
co-operators with their elders, instead of passive receivers or
antagonists. When Miss Youmans' _First Lessons in Botany_ (a book made
to teach botany in nature on Prof. Henslow's method) was introduced into
the New York primary schools, with great expectations of a brilliant
success, it was found that the children did not take hold as expected of
this science of observation. "I see now," said Miss Youmans to me, "the
indispensableness of kindergartens to develop the faculties; more than
half the children are intellectually demoralized by neglect or
injudicious teaching before they are seven years old." Everything,
however, depends upon the single-minded self-devotion and affectionate
character of the kindergartner, and it is obvious that her education
must be as special as that of a teacher of instrumental and vocal music;
for as little as music can be taught by the ear, or drawing by the eye,
without studying the underlying principles of harmony and symmetry, can
kindergartning be taught empirically. Its foundation is in both a
scientific and sympathetic study and understanding of the child's
perceptive powers and the material world. Not merely what is to be
taught, as is the case with a university professor, but the free-willing
and deep-feeling beings that are to be taught must be studied generally
and individually above all things else. Hence, there must be special
schools for teaching child-gardening, or a special department made in
the already existing normal schools.
The burden of thinking out the steps of procedure in the schoolroom is
too great a one to be laid on the teacher who has to exercise the
general care. It must all be at the tongue's tip and fingers' ends
beforehand. It took Froebel a lifetime, with all his genius and wisdom,
to discover all the steps of this order of exercises, in correspondence
with the true evolution of the faculties; but "one man dies, and other
men enter into the fruits of his labors." Besides, it is as cruel to
study the philosophy of education at the expense of the living
children's minds, as it would be to study anatomy and medicine at the
expense of their living bodies. All kindergartners should observe and
practise for awhile under the direction and criticism of those who are
already experts and adepts; and the latter should be careful that their
assistants try no rash experiments, but at first reverently observe
successful work. It is the highest interest of all teachers to learn
this method, because it develops themselves. It not only makes the best
mothers, but the most perfectly accomplished women. It is entering into
the secret of creation and redemption, which is the flower and fruit of
human culture.[8]