THE KINDERGARTNER.
THE first requisite to a Kindergarten is, of course, the Kindergartner,
fully intelligent of childhood, and thoroughly trained herself in
everything that the child is to do.
The first Kindergartner was Froebel himself; who, in the course of a
long life, studied into the science of childhood, and worked out a
series of artistical exercises, which aim to educate--that is, _draw_
forth---the powers of children from a more profound depth than ordinary
education respects. But instead of beginning with putting checks upon
childish play, he took the hint of his method from this spontaneous
activity; and began with genially directing it to a more certainly
beautiful effect than it can attain when left to itself. A large part of
the art of primary school-teaching hitherto, has consisted in keeping
children still, and preventing them from playing.
It was Froebel's wisdom to accept the natural activity of childhood as a
hint of the Divine Providence, and to utilize its spontaneous play for
education. And it is this which takes away from his system that element
of baneful antagonism which school discipline is so apt to excite, and
which it is such a misfortune should ever be excited between the young
and old. Nothing is worse for the soul, at any period of life, than to
be put upon self-defence; for humility is the condition of the growth of
mind as well as morals, and ensures that natural self-respect shall not
degenerate into a petty wilfulness and self-assertion. The divine
impulse of activity in children should not be directly opposed, but
accepted and guided into beautiful production, according to the laws of
creative order, which the adult has studied out in nature, and genially
presents in _playing_ with the child.
But such playing is a great art, and founded on the deepest science of
nature, within and without; and therefore Froebel never established a
Kindergarten without previously preparing Kindergartners by a normal
training, which his faithful disciples have scrupulously kept up. And if
only genius and love like his own could in one lifetime have discovered
the science and worked out the processes of this culture, yet hundreds
of pupils of these normal classes have proved, that any fairly gifted,
well-educated, genial-tempered young woman, who will devote a reasonable
time to training for it, can become a competent Kindergartner.
Nothing short of this will do; for none of the manuals which have been
written to guide already trained experts, can supply the place of the
living teacher. Written words will not describe the fine gradations of
the work, or give an idea of the conversation which is to be constantly
had with the children. It would be less absurd to suppose that a person
could learn to make watches by reading a description of the manufacture
in an encyclopædia, than to suppose a person could learn to educate
children by mere formulas.
Indeed, it is _infinitely_ less absurd. For a child is not finite mass
to be moulded, or a blank paper to be written upon, at another's will.
It is a living subject, whose own coöperation--or at least
willingness--is to be conciliated and made instrumental to the end in
view. Would a Cremona violin be put into the hands of a person ignorant
of music, to be tuned and made to discourse divine harmonies? How is it,
then, that the "harp of a thousand strings"--which God puts into the
hands of every mother, in perfect tune--is so recklessly committed,
first to ignorant girl-nurses, and then to the least educated teachers?
Looking at children's first schools, it would seem that anybody is
thought skilful enough to begin a child's education! It takes a long
apprenticeship to learn to play on the instrument with seven strings,
in order to bring out music. But it is stupidly thought that anybody
can play on the greater instrument, whose strings thrill with pleasure
or pain, and discourse good or evil, as they are touched wisely or
unwisely!
Froebel struck the key-note of the music of the spheres, which human
life is destined to become, when he announced, as a first principle,
that the well-thought-out wisdom of the ideal mother's love is the
science of education; and that this science of sciences is founded on
self-knowledge; by which he did not mean (any more than did Socrates, or
that older sage who engraved "know thyself" upon the temple of Delphi)
individual idiosyncrasy, but the very self which Jesus Christ said all
men must _become_, when he set a little child in the midst, and declared
that no one could enter his kingdom, that did not _become_ as _one_; and
when, another time, he called and blessed little children, because, as
he said, of such was the kingdom of heaven; and again, more
significantly still, when he warned from "_offending_ (it might be
better rendered _perverting_) these little ones; _because_," as he
added, "_their spirits do always behold the face of my Father who is in
heaven_." To know the soul before it has been warped by individual
caprice and circumstance, is the science of sciences, on which is to be
founded the art of arts; viz., that of educating the child so that its
individuality may develop, not destroy, its sense of universal
relations. And here I must pause to say, that it is simply astonishing
that when most of us believe, as our religion, that Jesus Christ
embodied in himself the wisdom, as well as love, and even power of
God,--"without measure,"--his words about children are passed over with
so little inquiry into the depths of their _meaning_. What can it
mean--that their spirits always behold the face of the Father--short of
the very philosophy of Gioberti,--that the newly-created soul commences
its consciousness in the eternal world, with a reciprocal vision of God
_remembered in the heart_ through life, and constituting the divine term
of conscience, which is the CONSTANT, while the human term is of only
fitful growth. As Wordsworth says,--
"Our Life's Star
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar!
Not in entire forgetfulness
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy,
But he beholds the light and whence it flows;
He sees it _in his joy_:
The youth, who daily from the East
Must travel, still is nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended."
But Froebel does not, like Wordsworth, make it strictly inevitable,
however it may have hitherto been common, that
"The man perceives it die away
And fade into the light of common day;"
for he teaches that the parental sympathy and instruction of those
adults who have attained
"The faith that looks through death
In years that bring the philosophic mind"
should intervene; which is just Kindergarten culture; preserving the
heart's vision of the truths that
"We are toiling all our lives to find"
unshadowed; while the organs of the human mind gradually bring to bear
God's manifestation in nature, which, point by point, forms the human
understanding, by making an intellectual consciousness of what the heart
knows.
Because the science of education is the analysis and gauging of love by
intellect, Froebel sought the true form of the art of education in the
method of the mother's love, which he studied out with a philosophic
earnestness. Not that any mother could _tell_ him the secret. It cannot
be put into formulas, nor does it come by intuition into the scientific
form in which a Kindergartner needs to have it. Froebel, in watching the
mother, saw that she was "led in a way she knew not." But he divined the
meaning of that way, and its issues, and gives it to the Kindergartner.
The beginning of a child's life is its learning the fact and uses of its
body. Here, as everywhere, human action blindly gropes for knowledge.
The child cannot even find the breast to suck, but sucks what is
nearest, compelling the mother to give it the breast by automatic
motions which she understands; or by cries which awaken her heart.
Gradually these reciprocal instincts open upon the child the first thing
it knows; namely, that it is dependent for the means of life. For a
child knows, in its heart, for a long time before it reflects and gets
the thought, that not in itself, but outside of itself, is the source of
its life. Of course, it is bodily life merely that it seeks at first,
trying to incorporate the without with the within by eating every thing;
the organs for this action on the outward world being first developed.
But if it is regularly fed and kept comfortable, the eye will be
satisfied with seeing, the ear with hearing, the hand with handling.
Now it is no less the instinct of the mother to make the baby's body the
first plaything, than to feel its own body is the first pleasure of the
child. To use its organs in play is the first action in which the
voluntary combines with the instinctive animal impulse.
The first distinctive human intelligence a child _expresses_, is the
recognition of its mother's smile. Its higher life begins in the
reciprocation of that smile. _No mere animal smiles!_ The mother's heart
also goes to meet the child's faith with vocal expressions of tender
joy; the heart of the child is awakened by tones which emparadise it,
and it answers by like tones. There is nothing among the lower animals
like this conversation of mother and child, by looks and tones,
emparadising both. By and by, it notices light and colors, and begins to
play with its hands and feet.
Hence the most characteristic work of Froebel is "The Mother's Cosseting
Songs." In this imperfect world, mothers are not always true to ideal
motherhood; but ignorance, and often indolence, and other forms of
self-indulgence, superinducing stupidity,--even a tyrannous sense of
property in the child, and sometimes mere timidity, interferes. And, in
general, Froebel saw how little most mothers reflect on the great work
they are doing when they play with their children. He wished them to
study into the laws they are obeying, in order to discover their scope
and meaning, that they may be able to supplement with thought the
short-comings of their too often spoilt instincts. Mothers taught him
more than they knew themselves; and he repaid the debt by telling them
what they taught him in these "Cosseting Songs," which he gathered from
many lips and brought together for the enriching of all.
First may be seen in the pictured illustrations which accompany the
songs, that the plays are merely the sympathetic furtherance of the
child's own motions. The mother enjoys the sight of her baby kicking up
its little legs, fumbling its little hands, and enjoying its bodily
existence generally; and she sympathizingly intervenes, and draws the
child to forget itself in its heart-sense of her sympathetic presence.
She feeds the instinctive putting forth of its own joy, the first form
of its faith, with the expression of her joy; and thus the heart grows
with the body, and the mind opens to expect boundless love, which it
reciprocates without reserve. A healthy child
"Loves whate'er it looks upon."
If it is not happy and loving, it is the condemnation of its
environment. Some one in relation with it, perhaps more than one, has
failed to show the necessary love; and "better were it for such," as
Jesus Christ has said "that a millstone were hung about their necks,
and they were cast into the uttermost depths of the sea." If these words
mean any thing,--and who will dare say they are mere rhetoric?--then let
us take care that we do not rush into the work of education, without
being sure that we shall not do so immense a mischief; and let mothers
see to it, that they do not put their children into the care of persons
who do not combine love and knowledge of childhood in measures not to be
expected of the common run of children's nurses and primary teachers.
Not only because every mother is not an ideal mother, but because
sometimes children are consigned, by inevitable circumstance, to other
nursing than a wise mother's, such a manual as the "Cosseting Songs" is
indispensable _to instruct nurses_.
And nurses ought always to be instructed. When Froebel was in Hamburg,
he received nurses into normal training. Both mothers and nurses brought
their infants of six months old to his house, and he taught them how to
play with--without fatiguing--them, by carefully respecting those
indications of pleasure and pain which are the child's only means of
communication.
And as lectures on _child-nature_ are a part of the Kindergarten
training, those preparing to be children's nurses, even to this day, are
admitted to the Hamburg training-school, which was not relinquished when
Froebel died, but is now instructed by the best teachers of the
Volks-Kindergartens, who go into it by turns. It has its sessions in the
evenings; and the normal pupils pay for their instruction, at least in
part, by assisting in the morning in the Volks-Kindergarten, which forms
also an important part of their training.
But at all events, there can be no adequate Kindergarten culture
anywhere, unless a specific normal training is constantly kept up to
supply the ever-increasing demand which tends to outgo the supply,
especially when nurses are admitted, as at Hamburg.
Having thus indicated the source whence must be drawn the Kindergarten
culture, it is not our purpose to attempt the impossible, by stating it
abstractly; for a series of abstractions is more apt to conceal than to
reveal a living science. No book can train a Kindergartner, but only at
best serve as a convenient reminder to educated experts, and instruct
parents that there is one necessary condition of their children's
receiving the benefit of Kindergarten culture; viz., a thoroughly
educated Kindergartner.
And this may be obtained even in America, from a lady of _the apostolic
succession_; a pupil of the training-school of the Baroness Marienholtz,
of Berlin, who has devoted her talents, her fortune, the prestige of her
rank, and her personal services, to spread the art of her revered master
on the continent of Europe. Miss Kriege not only has studied a year in
this training-school, but all the while frequented the Kindergarten of
Madame Vogler, as observer and assistant; and,--together with her
mother, a lady who is the equal of the Baroness Marienholtz in every
thing but the fortune which enables the latter to teach without
price,--combines every qualification, with enthusiasm, for the spread of
a method of education that unquestionably has a great future in this
country, inasmuch as it makes a true base to the grand harmonies of our
national constitution.
As one feature of the normal class is a series of lectures on _the being
of the child_, which are given on one day of the week, it would be
desirable that Madame Kriege should admit mothers and sisters who have
no intention of making teaching their vocation, but who may thus
understand and be able to co-operate in spirit with the Kindergartner,
in the education of the children; for it is a great hindrance to the
Kindergarten when it is not understood at home. All the educators of the
child should understand each other, and co-operate, if the highest
results are to be attained.