"The plays of the age are the heart-leaves of the whole future life,
for the whole man is visible in them in his finest capacities and his
innermost being."
Mr. W.W. Newell, in his admirable book on "Children's Games," traces
to their proper source all the familiar plays which in one form or
another have been handed down from generation to generation, and are
still played wherever and whenever children come together in any
numbers. The result of his sympathetic and scholarly investigations
is most interesting to the student of childhood, and as valuable
philologically as historically. In speaking of the old rounds and
rhymed formulas which have preserved their vitality under the effacing
hand of Time, he says,--
"It will be obvious that many of these well-known game-rhymes were not
composed by children. They were formerly played, as in many countries
they are still played, by young persons of marriageable age, or even
by mature men and women.... The truth is, that in past centuries all
the world, judged by our present standard, seems to have been a little
childish. The maids of honor of Queen Elizabeth's day, if we may
credit the poets, were devoted to the game of tag, with which even
Diana and her nymphs were supposed to amuse themselves....
"We need not, however, go to remote times or lands for illustration
which is supplied by New England country towns of a generation ago.
Dancing, under that name, was little practiced; the amusement of young
people at their gatherings was "playing games." These games generally
resulted in forfeits, to be redeemed by kissing, in every possible
variety of position and method. Many of these games were rounds; but
as they were not called dances, and as man-kind pays more attention to
words than things, the religious conscience of the community, which
objected to dancing, took no alarm.... Such were the pleasures of
young men and women from sixteen to twenty-five years of age. Nor were
the participants mere rustics; many of them could boast as good blood,
as careful breeding, and as much intelligence, as any in the land.
Neither was the morality or sensitiveness of the young women of that
day in any respect inferior to what it is at present.
"Now that our country towns are become mere outlying suburbs of
cities, these remarks may be read with a smile at the rude simplicity
of old-fashioned American life. But the laugh should be directed, not
at our own country, but at the bygone age. It must be remembered that
in mediaeval Europe, and in England till the end of the seventeenth
century, a kiss was the usual salutation of a lady to a gentleman whom
she wished to honor.... The Portuguese ladies who came to England with
the Infanta in 1662 were not used to the custom; but, as Pepys says,
in ten days they had 'learnt to kiss and look freely up and down.'
Kissing in games was, therefore, a matter of course, in all ranks....
"In respectable and cultivated French society, at the time of which we
speak, the amusements, not merely of young people but of their elders
as well, were every whit as crude.
"Madame Celnart, a recognized authority on etiquette, compiled in 1830
a very curious complete manual of society games recommending them as
recreation for _business men_.... 'Their varying movement,' she
says, 'their diversity, the gracious and gay ideas which these games
inspire, the decorous caresses which they permit, all this combines
to give real amusement. These caresses can alarm neither modesty
nor prudence, since a kiss in honor given and taken before numerous
witnesses is often an act of propriety.'"
The old ballads and nursery rhymes doubtless had much of innocence and
freshness in them, but they only come to us nowadays tainted by the
odors of city streets. The pleasure and poetry of the original essence
are gone, and vulgarity reigns triumphant. If you listen to the words
of the games which children play in school yards, on sidewalks, and in
the streets on pleasant evenings, you will find that most of them,
to say the least, border closely on vulgarity; that they are utterly
unsuitable to childhood, notwithstanding that they are played with
great glee; that they are, in fine, common, rude, silly, and boorish.
One can never watch a circle of children going through the vulgar
inanities of "Jenny O'Jones," "Say, daughter, will you get up?" "Green
Gravel," or "Here come two ducks a-roving," without unspeakable
shrinking and moral disgust. These plays are dying out; let them die,
for there is a hint of happier things abroad in the air.
The wisest mind of wise antiquity told the riddle of the Sphinx, if
having ears to hear we would hear. "Our youth should be educated in a
stricter rule from the first, for if education becomes lawless and
the youths themselves become lawless, they can never grow up into
well-conducted or meritorious citizens; and _the education must begin
with their plays_."
We talk a great deal about the strength of early impressions. I wonder
if we mean all we say; we do not live up to it, at all events. "In
childish play deep meaning lies." "The hand that rocks the cradle is
the hand that rules the world." "Give me the first six years of a
child's life, and I care not who has the rest." "The child of six
years has learned already far more than a student learns in his entire
university course." "The first six years are as full of advancement as
the six days of creation," and so on. If we did believe these things
fully, we should begin education with conscious intelligence at the
cradle, if not earlier. The great German dramatic critic, Schlegel,
once sneered at the brothers Jacob and William Grimm, for what he
styled their "meditation on the insignificant." These two brothers,
says a wiser student, an historian of German literature, were animated
by a "pathetic optimism, and possessed that sober imagination which
delights in small things and narrow interests, lingering over them
with strong affection." They explored villages and hamlets for obscure
legends and folk tales, for nursery songs, even; and bringing to bear
on such things at once a human affection and a wise scholarship, their
meditation on the insignificant became the basis of their scientific
greatness and the source of their popularity. Every child has read
some of Grimm's household tales, "The Frog Prince," "Hans in Luck,"
or the "Two Brothers;" but comparatively few people realize, perhaps,
that this collection of stories is the foundation of the modern
science of folk-lore, and a by-play in researches of philology and
history which place the name of Grimm among the benefactors of our
race. I refer to these brothers because they expressed one of the
leading theories of the new education.
"My principle," said Jacob Grimm, "has been to undervalue nothing,
but to utilize the small for the illustration of the great." When
Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the kindergarten, in the course of
his researches began to watch the plays of children and to study their
unconscious actions, his "meditation on the insignificant" became
the basis of scientific greatness, and of an influence still in its
infancy, but destined, perhaps, to revolutionize the whole educational
method of society.
It was while he was looking on with delight at the plays of little
children, their happy, busy plans and make-believes, their intense
interest in outward nature, and in putting things together or taking
them apart, that Froebel said to himself: "What if we could give the
child that which is called education through his voluntary activities,
and have him always as eager as he is at play?"
How well I remember, years ago, the first time I ever joined in a
kindergarten game. I was beckoned to the charming circle, and not only
one, but a dozen openings were made for me, and immediately, though I
was a stranger, a little hand on either side was put into mine, with
such friendly, trusting pressure that I felt quite at home. Then we
began to sing of the spring-time, and I found myself a green tree
waving its branches in the wind. I was frightened and self-conscious,
but I did it, and nobody seemed to notice me; then I was a flower
opening its petals in the sunshine, and presently, a swallow gathering
straws for nest-building; then, carried away by the spirit of the
kindergartner and her children, I fluttered my clumsy apologies for
wings, and forgetting self, flew about with all the others, as happy
as a bird. Soon I found that I, the stranger, had been chosen for the
"mother swallow." It was to me, the girl of eighteen, like mounting a
throne and being crowned. Four cunning curly heads cuddled under my
wings for protection and slumber, and I saw that I was expected to
stoop and brood them, which I did, with a feeling of tenderness and
responsibility that I had never experienced in my life before. Then,
when I followed my baby swallows back to their seats, I saw that the
play had broken down every barrier between us, and that they clustered
about me as confidingly as if we were old friends. I think I never
before felt my own limitations so keenly, or desired so strongly to be
fully worthy of a child's trust and love.
Kindergarten play takes the children where they love to be, into
the world of "make-believe." In this lovely world the children are
blacksmiths, carpenters, wheelwrights; birds, bees, butterflies;
trees, flowers, sunbeams, rainbows; frogs, lambs, ponies,--anything
they like. The play is so characteristic, so poetic, so profoundly
touching in its simplicity and purity, so full of meaning, that it
would inspire us with admiration and respect were it the only salient
point of Froebel's educational idea. It endeavors to express the same
idea in poetic words, harmonious melody and fitting motion, appealing
thus to the thought, feeling, and activity of the child.
Physical impressions are at the beginning of life the only possible
medium for awakening the child's sensibility. These impressions should
therefore be regulated as systematically as possible, and not left to
chance.
Froebel supplies the means for bringing about the result in a
simple system of symbolic songs and games, appealing to the child's
activities and sensibilities. These he argues, ought to contain the
germ of all later instruction and thought; for physical and sensuous
perceptions are the points of departure of all knowledge.
When the child imitates, he begins to understand. Let him imitate the
airy flight of the bird, and he enters partially into bird life. Let
the little girl personate the hen with her feathery brood of chickens,
and her own maternal instinct is quickened, as she guards and guides
the wayward motion of the little flock. Let the child play the
carpenter, the wheelwright, the wood-sawyer, the farmer, and his
intelligence is immediately awakened; he will see the force, the
meaning, the power, and the need of labor. In short, let him mirror in
his play all the different aspects of universal life, and his thought
will begin to grasp their significance.
Thus kindergarten play may be defined as a "systematized sequence of
experiences through which the child grows into self-knowledge,
clear observation, and conscious perception of the whole circle of
relationships," and the symbols of his play become at length the truth
itself, bound fast and deep in heart knowledge, which is deeper and
rarer than head knowledge, after all.
To the class occupied exclusively with material things, this phase of
Froebel's idea may perhaps seem mystical. There is nothing mystical
to children, however; all is real, for their visions have not been
dispelled.
"Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen, I now can see no more."
As soon as the child begins to be conscious of his own activities and
his power of regulating them, he desires to imitate the actions of his
future life.
Nothing so delights the little girl as to play at housekeeping in her
tiny mansion, sacred to the use of dolls. See her whimsical attention
to dust and dirt, her tremendous wisdom in dispensing the work and
ordering the duties of the household, her careful attention to the
morals and manners of her rag-babies.
The boy, too, tries to share in the life of a man, to play at his
father's work, to be a miniature carpenter, salesman, or what not. He
rides his father's cane and calls it a horse, in the same way that
the little girl wraps a shawl about a towel, and showers upon it the
tenderest tokens of maternal affection. All these examples go to show
that every conscious intellectual phase of the mind has a previous
phase in which it was unconscious or merely symbolic.
To get at the spirit and inspiration of symbolic representation in
song and game, it is necessary first of all to study Froebel's "Mutter
und Kose-Lieder," perhaps the most strikingly original, instructive,
serviceable book in the whole history of the practice of education.
The significant remark quoted in Froebel's "Reminiscences" is this:
"He who understands what I mean by these songs knows my inmost
secret." You will find people who say the music in the book is poor,
which is largely true, and that the versification is weak, which is
often, not always, true, and is sometimes to be attributed to faulty
translation; but the idea, the spirit, the continuity of the plan, are
matchless, and critics who call it trifling or silly are those who
have not the seeing eye nor the understanding heart. Froebel's wife
said of it,--
"A superficial mind does not grasp it,
A gentle mind does not hate it,
A coarse mind makes fun of it,
A thoughtful mind alone tries to get at it."
"Froebel[1] considers it his duty to picture the home as it ought to
be, not by writing a book of theories and of rules which are easily
forgotten, but by accompanying a mother in her daily rounds through
house, garden, and field, and by following her to workshop, market,
and church. He does not represent a woman of fashion, but prefers one
of humbler station, whom he clothes in the old German housewife style.
It may be a small sphere she occupies, but there she is the centre,
and she completely fills her place. She rejoices in the dignity of
her position as educator of a human being whom she has to bring into
harmony with God, nature, and man. She thinks nothing too trifling
that concerns her child. She watches, clothes, feeds, and trains it in
good habits, and when her darling is asleep, her prayers finish the
day. She may not have read much about education, but her sympathy
with the child suggests means of doing her duty. Love has made her
inventive; she discovers means of amusement, for play; she talks and
sings, sometimes in poetry and sometimes in prose. From mothers in his
circle of relations and friends, Froebel has learned what a mother can
do, and although he had no children of his own, his heart vibrated
instinctively with the feelings of a mother's joy, hope, and fear. He
did not care about the scorn of others, when he felt he must speak
with an almost womanly heart to a mother. His own loss of a mother's
tender care made him the more appreciate the importance of a mother's
love in early infancy. The mother in his book makes use of all the
impressions, influences, and agencies with which the child comes in
contact: she protects from evil; she stimulates for good; she places
the child in direct communication with nature, because she herself
admires its beauties. She has a right feeling towards her neighbors,
and to all those on whom she depends. A movement of arms and feet
teaches her that the child feels its strength and wants to use it. She
helps, she lifts, she teaches; and while playing with her baby's hands
and feet she is never at a loss for a song or story.
[Footnote 1: Eleonore Heerwart.]
"The mother also knows that it is necessary to train the senses,
because they are the active organs which convey food to the intellect.
The ear must hear language, music, the gentle accents and warning
voices of father and mother. It must distinguish the sounds of the
wind, of the water, and of pet animals.
"The eyesight is directed to objects far and near, as the pigeons
flying, the hare running, the light flickering on the wall, the calm
beauty of the moon, and the twinkling stars in the dark blue sky."
Of the effect of Froebel's symbolic songs and games, with
melodious music and appropriate gesture, kindergartners all speak
enthusiastically. They know that--
First: The words suggest thought to the child.
Second: The thought suggests gesture.
Third: The gesture aids in producing the proper feeling.
We all believe thoroughly in the influence of mind on body, the inward
working outward, but we are not as ready to see the influence of body
on mind. Yet if mind or soul acts upon the body, the external gesture
and attitude just as truly react upon the inward feeling. "The soul
speaks through the body, and the body in return gives command to the
soul." All attitudes mean something, and they all influence the state
of mind.
Fourth: The melody begets spiritual impressions.
Fifth: The gestures, feeling, and melody unite in giving a sweet and
gentle intercourse, in developing love for labor, home, country,
associates, and dumb animals, and in unconsciously directing the
intellectual powers.
Learning to sing well is the best possible means of learning to speak
well, and the exquisite precision which music gives to kindergarten
play destroys all rudeness, and does not in the least rob it of its
fun or merriment.
"We cannot tell how early the pleasing sense of musical cadence
affects a child. In some children it is blended with the earliest,
haziest recollection of life at all, as though they had been literally
'cradled in sweet song;' and we may be sure that the hearing of
musical sounds and singing in association with others are for the
child, as for the adult, powerful influences in awakening sympathetic
emotion, and pleasure in associated action."
Who can see the kindergarten games, led by a teacher who has grown
into their spirit, and ever forget the joy of the spectacle? It brings
tears to the eyes of any woman who has ever been called mother,
or ever hopes to be; and I have seen more than one man retire
surreptitiously to wipe away his tears. Is it "that touch of nature
which makes the whole world kin"? Is it the perfect self-forgetfulness
of the children? Is it a touch of self-pity that the radiant visions
of our childhood days have been dispelled, and the years have brought
the "inevitable yoke"? Or is it the touching sight of so much
happiness contrasted with what we know the home life to be?
Sydney Smith says: "If you make children happy now, you will make them
happy twenty years hence by the memory of it;" and we know that virtue
kindles at the touch of this joy. "Selfishness, rudeness, and similar
weedy growths of school-life or of street-independence cannot grow in
such an atmosphere. For joy is as foreign to tumult and destruction,
to harshness and selfish disregard of others, as the serene, vernal
sky with its refreshing breezes is foreign to the uproar and terrors
of the hurricane."
For this kind of ideal play we are indebted to Friedrich Froebel, and
if he had left no other legacy to childhood, we should exalt him for
it.
If you are skeptical, let me beseech you to join the children in a
Free Kindergarten, and play with them. You will be convinced, not
through your head, perhaps, but through your heart. I remember
converting such a grim female once! You know Henry James says, "Some
women are unmarried by choice, and others by chance, but Olive
Chancellor was unmarried by every implication of her being." Now, this
predestinate spinster acquaintance of mine, well nigh spoiled by
years of school-teaching in the wrong spirit, was determined to think
kindergarten play simply a piece of nauseating frivolity. She tried
her best, but, kept in the circle with the children five successive
days, she relaxed so completely that it was with the utmost difficulty
that she kept herself from being a butterfly or a bird. It is always
so; no one can resist the unconscious happiness of children.
As for the good that comes to grown people from playing with children
in this joyous freedom and with this deep earnestness of purpose, it
is beyond all imagination. If I had a daughter who was frivolous, or
worldly, or selfish, or cold, or unthoughtful,--who regarded life as a
pleasantry, or fell into the still more stupid mistake of thinking it
not worth living,--I should not (at first) make her read the Bible, or
teach in the Sunday-school, or call on the minister, or request
the prayers of the congregation, but I should put her in a good
Kindergarten Training School. No normal young woman can resist the
influence of the study of childhood and the daily life among little
children, especially the children of the poor: it is irresistible.
Oh, these tiny teachers! If we only learned from them all we might,
instead of feeling ourselves over-wise! I never look down into the
still, clear pool of a child's innocent, questioning eyes without
thinking: "Dear little one, it must be 'give and take' between thee
and me. I have gained something here in all these years, but thou hast
come from thence more lately than have I; thou hast a treasure that
the years have stolen from me--share it with me!"
Let us endeavor, then, to make the child's life objective to him. Let
us unlock to him the significance of family, social, and national
relationships, so that he may grow into sympathy with them. He loves
the symbol which interprets his nature to himself, and in his eager
play, he pictures the life he longs to understand.
If we could make such education continuous, if we could surround
the child in his earlier years with such an atmosphere of goodness,
beauty, and wisdom, none can doubt that he would unconsciously grow
into harmony and union with the All-Good, the All-Beautiful, and the
All-Wise.