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Education in the Home, the Kindergarten, and the Primary School

by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody · English · Gutenberg #35677 · 448,197 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Education in the Home, the Kindergarten, and the Primary School

Author: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

Author of introduction, etc.: E. Adelaide Manning


        
Release date: March 25, 2011 [eBook #35677]

Language: English

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LECTURES

IN THE

TRAINING SCHOOLS

FOR

Kindergarten Teachers.




EDUCATION

IN

THE HOME, THE KINDERGARTEN,

AND

THE PRIMARY SCHOOL.

BY

ELIZABETH P. PEABODY.


_WITH AN INTRODUCTION_

BY

E. ADELAIDE MANNING.

    "Come, let us live _with_ our children."--FROEBEL.

          LONDON:
          SWAN SONNENSCHEIN, LOWREY & CO.,
          PATERNOSTER SQUARE.
          1887.




INTRODUCTION.


AMONG those who in the last twenty years have helped to spread a
knowledge of the educational principles of Froebel beyond the limits of
his native country, Miss Elizabeth Peabody's name deserves to be
specially remembered. It is mainly owing to her enthusiastic efforts
that the value of the Kindergarten was early recognised in the United
States, and that its first American promoters were encouraged to
maintain, amid many difficulties, a standard of real efficiency for the
teachers of Froebel's system. Miss Peabody had long occupied herself,
theoretically and practically, with educational subjects. Not satisfied
by merely intellectual methods of instruction, and impatient of the
superficiality which was too often approved, she made it her great aim
to train character, and, by a simultaneous development of children's
mental capacities and of their moral nature, to prepare them for the
responsible duties of life. It was not surprising that when Miss
Peabody, holding such views of education, came in contact with the ideas
and the work of Froebel, she at once experienced the delight always
attached to the discovery that the problems exercising our own minds
have been successfully solved by some one who has started from
principles such as ours, and who has cultivated the same ideal. She
found that Froebel had carried into practice that very kind of training
of which she had realized the immense importance, and that he had placed
in a clear light truths which she had already more dimly perceived.
Eager to inform herself about the new system, Miss Peabody travelled, in
1868, to Europe, on purpose to visit in Germany the Kindergartens
established by Froebel, who was no longer living, and by his best
pupils. On her return to America, she devoted herself for many years to
the introduction and improvement of Kindergartens and of training
institutions, and to enlightening, by her writings and addresses,
mothers and educators respecting the value and simplicity of Froebel's
methods. Miss Peabody has the satisfaction of witnessing a good measure
of success from her generous exertions, in the increasing number of
advocates of the Kindergarten in America, in its adoption as a first
department of many State primary schools, and in the numerous private
and charity Kindergartens founded from North to South, and from New York
to San Francisco. Advanced now in years, this warm-hearted lady is
engaged in other lines of philanthropic work, but she retains, and still
manifests, her earnest interest in the educational progress which she
has laboured so actively to secure.

Ever since Miss Peabody's zeal was kindled for Froebel's ideal as to
young children's education, her help and criticism have been sought by
the trainers of Kindergarten students in America, and by all who, with
serious purpose, have thus worked for the movement. Hence she has often
delivered lectures at the opening of the session at Normal Colleges, and
on other occasions when she saw an opportunity of exercising influence
in favour of rational principles of education. This book, which appeared
only lately at Boston, consists of a few of such lectures. It is now,
with Miss Peabody's consent, published in England, where many parents
and teachers will be glad to profit by the author's wise and loving
study of little children, and her sympathetic insight into Froebel's
methods for their development. During the last few years various
thoughtful writers on education have drawn attention here to the subject
of infant management, and it is remarkable how widely the principles of
Froebel and Pestalozzi are now recognised and accepted. But books are
still greatly needed which, especially addressed to those who have
charge of children, urge in a convincing manner how essential it is
that the first few years should be rightly guided, and indicate certain
defined educational aims. I think that Miss Peabody's lectures are
likely to prove very useful in this direction. Though her readers will
perhaps contest some of her psychological deductions, they cannot fail
to be impressed and benefited by the high tone of her reasoning, by her
evidently tender and reverent love of children, and by her excellent
suggestions in regard to their harmonious development.

Amongst its other merits, this book tends to correct the still too
prevalent notion, that the Kindergarten is a peculiar--an almost
magical--institution, which provides a sure remedy for children's
imperfections, apart from their home conditions. Doubtless, in the case
of poor neglected little ones, the contrast between their treatment at
the Kindergarten and their ordinary experience, is necessarily striking
and decided, because the parents are careless and ignorant. But
Froebel's view of the Kindergarten was, that it should be a
supplementary help to the loving and judicious mother, who, owing to her
many household and other duties, might be unable to give, through the
whole day, to her younger children the regular attention which their
awakening faculties need. It was to be a portion of the home pattern and
web of training, not a patch of a new texture. He saw that a child
requires to have about it, as Miss Peabody says, "love and thought in
practical operation," and this not now and then, but always. And as the
mother may have at times to transfer her children to the charge of
others, he organised the Kindergarten--a higher nursery, under refined
and motherly influences, for those that have passed out of babyhood.
There, on the same principles as at home, they may be gently tended for
two or three hours of the day, and developed in body, mind, and
character. Froebel's object also was to provide companionship for these
children, adapted to their age and attainments, which could only be done
by including some from outside the family circle. But again, he desired
to give the opportunity to inexperienced mothers of observing the
patient and resourceful guidance carried out by even young teachers, who
had been trained to study children, and had learnt how to occupy them
suitably. Here we see another link with the home. Now Miss Peabody
entered so much into Froebel's ideas that she helps to remove the
Kindergarten out of its supposed exceptional sphere, and to show that
the teachers represent temporarily the mother, doing that which the
mother also aims, or ought to aim, at doing, for the children's good.

These Lectures are also useful in presenting a high ideal of
Kindergarten teaching. Miss Peabody sees that the work of educating
requires special qualifications in those who undertake it, and that such
as are not fitted for it, had better take up a different career. At the
same time placing, as always, character above intellect, she considers
that most women, whose religious and moral nature is well cultivated,
and who take pains to develop their mental powers, may hope for success
in devoting themselves to the training of young children. Her writings
are calculated to inspire the teacher with hearty zest for her labour,
and yet with an abiding feeling that even years of practice leave her
far behind her ever advancing standard. Miss Peabody encourages no
exaggerated estimate of Froebel's thoughts and methods. She freely
recognises that he gained many truths from fellow-students of children's
nature and faculties; but she claims for him the originality which
belongs to those who with unselfish aims bestow close attention on a
subject of deep human interest. To teachers, therefore, as well as to
all who love children, she says--and with this quotation I will close my
few introductory remarks--"You will not be wise if you do not look out
of Froebel's window."

                                            E. A. MANNING.




LECTURE I.

THE KINDERGARTNER.


WHOEVER proposes to become a kindergartner according to the idea of
Froebel, must at once dismiss from her mind the notion that it requires
less ability and culture to educate children of three, than those of ten
or fifteen years of age. It demands more; for, is it not plain that to
superintend and guide accurately the _formation_ of the human
understanding itself, requires a finer ability and a profounder insight
than to listen to recitations from books ever so learned and scientific?
To form the human understanding is a work of time, demanding a knowledge
of the laws of thought, will, and feeling, in their interaction upon the
threshold of consciousness, which can be acquired only by the study of
children themselves in their every act of life--a study to be pursued in
the spirit that reveals what Jesus Christ _meant_, when he said: "He
that receiveth a little child in my name, receiveth _me, and Him that
sent me_;" "Woe unto him who offends one of these little ones, for their
spirits behold the face of my Father who is in heaven."

Not till children who have been themselves educated according to
Froebel's principles, grow up, will there be found any adult persons who
can keep kindergartens without devoting themselves to a special study of
child-nature in the spirit of devout humility. For we are all suffering
the ignorance and injury inevitable from having begun our own lives in
the confusions of accidental and disorderly impressions, without having
had the clue of reason put into our hands by that human providence of
education, which, to be true, must reflect point by point the Divine
Providence, that according to the revelations of history is educating
the whole race, and which may find hints for its procedure in observing
the spontaneous play of children fresh from the hands of the Creator.

The education of children by a genial training of their spontaneous
playful activities to the production of order and beauty within the
humble sphere of childish fancy and affection, was a fresh idea with
Froebel; but, like every universal idea, it was not absolutely new in
the world. Plato says, in his great book on _Laws_:--

"Play has the mightiest influence on the maintenance and non-maintenance
of laws; and if children's plays are conducted according to laws and
rules, and they always pursue their amusements in conformity with order,
while finding pleasure therein, it need not be feared that when they are
grown up they will break laws whose objects are more serious."

And again, in his _Republic_, he says:--

"From their earliest years, the plays of children ought to be subject to
strict laws. For if their plays, and those who mingle with them, are
arbitrary and lawless, how can they become virtuous men, law-abiding and
obedient? On the contrary, when children are early trained to submit to
laws in their plays, love for these laws enters into their souls with
the music accompanying them, and helps their development."

You will observe Plato's association of music with the laws that are to
regulate play. Music, with the Greeks, had indeed a broader meaning than
attaches to the word with us, who confine it to that subtle expression
of the sense of law and harmony which is made in the element of sound,
and addressed to the imagination through the ear. All knowledge and art
inspired by the sacred Nine, they named _music_. Singing was no more
music than dancing, drawing, the harmonizing of colors, plastic art,
poetry, and science, which is nothing less than thinking according to
the rhythmic laws of nature. To learn to commune with the Muses,
daughters of Memory and Jove, who were led by the god Apollo,
symbolizing the moral harmony of the universe, and expressing the mind
of the Father of gods and men, by oracle, was learning _music_ or how to
live divinely; a process which may commence before children leave the
nursery, if their plays are regulated according to artistic principles.

It is common to speak of the Greeks, as if they were of exceptional
organization. I think their organization was only exceptional, because
it was more carefully treated in infancy than ours is apt to be. I do
not believe that in Greece, or anywhere in the world, there were ever
more beautiful little children than there are in America; and the beauty
would not be so transient as it unquestionably is with us, if truly
cultivated persons took our children in hand from babyhood for the care
of their bodies and minds, instead of leaving this work to the most
ignorant class of the community, such as the general run of the servants
who have the education of them during their earliest infancy. Even many
parents who take care of their own children do not make it an object to
study physiology or psychology, and seem to think that there is nothing
in little children which requires special study, except indeed at the
very first, when the child is put into the mother's arms more helpless
than the lowest form of animal life (for the very insect is endowed by
nature, as the child is not, with enough absolute knowledge--we call it
instinct--to fulfil its small circle of relations without help of its
parents). It seems mysterious, at first sight, that the child, whose
duty and whose destiny it is to have dominion over nature, should be
endowed least of all creatures with any absolute knowledge of it. But
the mystery is solved when we consider that the happiness which is
distinctively human, is only to be found in the discovery and enjoyment
of ever-widening relations to our kind, with the fulfilment of the
duties belonging to them. It is the absolute helplessness of the human
infant which challenges the maternal instinct to rush to his rescue,
lest he should die at once. And to continue to study his manifestations
of pleasure and discontent with obedient respectfulness, is the
perfection of the maternal nursing. But when the child has got on so far
as to know the simplest uses of its own body, and especially after it
has learned enough words to express its simplest wants and sensations,
even parents seem to think it can get on by itself, so that children
from about two to five years of age are left to self-education, as it
were; this virtual abandonment being crossed by a capricious and
arbitrary handling of them--mind and body--on the part of those around
them, which is even worse than the neglect; for when are children more
unable, than between three and five years old, to guide their own
thoughts and action? How would a garden of flowers fare, to be planted,
and then left to grow with so little scientific care taken by the
gardener, as is bestowed upon children between one and five years old?

Froebel, in the very word kindergarten, proclaimed that gospel for
children which holds within it the promise of the coming of the kingdom,
in which God's will is to be done on earth as it is in heaven--a
consummation which we daily pray for with our lips, but do not do the
first thing to bring about, by educating our children in the way of
order, which is no less earth's than "heaven's first law," and makes
earth heaven so far as it is fulfilled.

A kindergarten means a guarded company of children, who are to be
treated as a gardener treats his plants; that is, in the first place,
studied to see what they are, and what conditions they require for the
fullest and most beautiful growth; in the second place, put into or
supplied with these conditions, with as little handling of their
individuality as possible, but with an unceasing genial and provident
care to remove all obstructions, and favor all the circumstances of
growth. It is because they are living organisms that they are to be
_cultivated_--not _drilled_ (which is a process only appropriate to
insensate stone).

I think there is perhaps no better way of making apparent what this
kindergartning is, which makes such an importunate demand on your
consideration, than to tell you how the idea germinated and grew in the
mind of Froebel himself; for thus we shall see that it would be
unreasonable to expect that it could be improvised by every teacher; but
that here, as elsewhere in human life, God has sent into the world a
gifted person to guide his fellows, according to the law enunciated by
St. John in the 38th verse of the 4th chapter of his Gospel.

We have the materials of this history on Froebel's own authority, in an
autobiographical letter that he wrote to the Duke of Meiningen, whose
interest in him was excited by an incident so characteristic of Froebel,
that I will relate it. Having heard of a cruel and stupid opposition
made to the ardent educator by the unthinking officials of a region
where he was making a martyr of himself, the duke made inquiries, which
resulted in his offering him the situation of head-tutor to his only
son. But Froebel astonished him with a refusal of the place, sending the
duke word that it would be impossible to educate, in a perfect manner, a
child so isolated by conventional rank and circumstances that he must
inevitably conceive himself to be intrinsically superior to other
children. The duke was so much struck that a poor man, struggling with
every difficulty, should refuse one of the highest posts in a royal
household, with all its emoluments, from a purely conscientious scruple
of this kind, that his curiosity was piqued. He sent for Froebel, and
they had a conversation upon the principles and spirit of a truly human
education, by which Froebel convinced him that a noble moral
development was indispensable to a truly intellectual one, so that the
duke was actually persuaded to send his son as an equal with other boys
to a neighboring school. One day, some little time after, the boy came
home _roaring_, on account of a beating he had received from one of his
playmates. The duke, in a transport of rage, asked the name of the
offender, and said that he should be immediately expelled from the
school. Then was Froebel's advice justified. The young prince dried his
tears, refused to tell the boy's name, and declared that "the beating
was all fair!" It is quite consistent with these facts, that the duke
should ask Froebel how his idea grew in his mind. Froebel's answer is
still extant. I have not been able to get the original text, but I can
give you the substance of it, as it was given to me.

Friedrich Froebel was the son of a laborious pastor of seven villages in
Thuringia. He lost his mother before his remembrance, and fell into the
care of hard-worked domestic servants, with no light upon his infant
life except what came from the love and sympathy of two older brothers,
who cherished him when they were at home from boarding-school. The
parsonage was in the shadow of the church, and into it no ray of
sunshine ever came; and the child was kept drearily in the house. He
tells of seeing workmen building a part of the church that had become
dilapidated, and how he longed to imitate them; and traces to this
desire of employing the time that hung so heavily on his hands, his
discovery of the building instinct, so universal in childhood, and which
he thought should always have simple materials afforded it with which to
express itself. At last his father married again, and at first the
stepmother petted the young child of her husband, and awakened in him a
hope of a satisfying love, which he reciprocated with all the energies
of his long-starved heart. But when the merely instinctive woman had a
child of her own, a certain jealousy arose in her, and she repulsed poor
little Friedrich, and "no longer"--as he pathetically remarks--"called
him _thou_," (du) which is an endearing expression in German, but _he_
(er), which has a rough association. It is plain that the child was
endowed with an immense sensibility to, or more than ordinary
presentiment of the Divine Order of Nature, and with the extreme
tendency to reflection always involved in this gift. As he was so poorly
developed physically, he became in his joyless early life perhaps
morbidly nervous. Disappointed in his timid efforts to please, all the
sweet bells of his nature were jangled, and he was miserable--he knew
not why. He says he always found himself doing the wrong thing--the too
much, or the too little--and was complained of to his father, who
treated him as a naughty boy. But sometimes the pastor took him out of
his stepmother's way, to accompany himself in his parochial visits, in
which Froebel says he seemed continually to be settling family quarrels.
This made on the child's mind an impression of things that was rather
ludicrously expressed, when he one day asked of his oldest brother, who
happened to come home from boarding-school, why it was that God had not
made people all men, or all women, so that there should not be so much
quarrelling in the world. In order to divert him from such premature
consideration of social questions, the posed elder brother undertook to
teach him botany according to the sexual system, revealing to him the
law of contrasts conciliated with each other for the production of
harmony and beauty. The child was delighted with what he was shown; but
still his exceptionally moral genius importunately asked, why may not
human differences be thus harmonized, to produce happiness and goodness?
The presentiment of the great truth which was felt in his heart, though
not yet caught by his mind, was signalized by another anecdote that he
tells of himself. There was a rumor among the peasants of North Germany
(it was about the year 1792) that the world was coming to an end; but
Froebel declares that he could not make himself feel alarmed. He says
he was sure it could not be true, because the will of God had not yet
been brought about in human life. This extraordinary reflection of a
child of ten years old was preceded, probably, by a happy change that
came over him in consequence of the visit of his maternal uncle to his
father's house; who, seeing that the child was not happy, invited him to
go home with him to live with his grandmother. His uncle's house was
bright and sunny, and he was received by his grandmother with joy and
tenderness. Immediately the freedom of the fields was given him,
provided only that he should come home punctually to the meals. He soon
became so healthy and happy, that his uncle put him into a day school in
the neighborhood, to the child's great delight. The school was opened,
the first day he went into it, with a little sermon of the master's upon
the text: "Seek first the kingdom of heaven and its righteousness, and
all other things shall be added unto you." It must have been a wise and
good discourse, for it left a life-long impression upon the mind of the
little Froebel. There was a law then, for human beings as well as for
plants; human beings might consciously realize in happiness and virtue,
the harmony and beauty unconsciously manifested by the vegetable world.
For God was the Ever-present Friend and Lawgiver! He tells the duke how
happy he felt himself in his new circumstances and opportunities, and
blessed with this inspiring faith. After school, he went out to play
with his schoolmates; but, alas! poor starveling of nature as he was, he
found he could not play with his athletic companions, and had to sit on
one side and look on; and then and there he distinctly came to a
conclusion, which is a first principle of the kindergarten, that every
child should have free exercise of his limbs in play, in order to get
entire command of all the physical strength and agility they are capable
of.

After a few years of this happy home and school life, which he
continually reflected upon in contrast with what he had suffered for so
many years, the good grandmother died, and he was sent back to his
stepmother. The question now came up, whether he should study for the
university, where his brothers had gone; but the stepmother, in the
interest of her younger child, opposed his father's spending the money,
and he went to a farmer to learn practical agriculture. But he was
physically so incompetent to the labor of a farm life, that it did not
pay; and being sent home by the farmer, he was finally apprenticed to a
forester, where he found genial occupation in wood-lore, and in studying
geometry for the purpose of surveying. Here he became a thorough and
ardent mathematician. But his friend the forester died, or was removed,
which brought this occupation to a premature close. At that moment,
however, a maternal relation died, and left him a little money, so that
he went to the University of Jena, where he devoted himself principally
to the physical sciences; and by and by we find him curator of the
Mineralogical Museum of Berlin. Here he made a great impression on the
mind of a young lady who frequented the museum, by the "sermons" that he
found "in stones," for he read them out to her, showing that in
inorganic nature, so called, could be traced not only laws of decay,
that threw into stronger light those laws of life that he had learned to
see in vegetation, but those of crystallization. Everywhere he read
God's revelation of the processes of life and death, which also make
human development and happiness, or its deterioration and misery.

The trumpet call of patriotism, to rescue Germany from French despotism,
made by the good Queen Louise of Prussia, called him from these peaceful
studies to partake in the great national act of delivering his country;
and he obeyed it by volunteering his service. Though his regiment was
never called into battle, he always rejoiced in the effects upon himself
of learning the military drill, as well as in the life-long friendships
he made in camp. After the war was over, a legacy received at the death
of his uncle Hoffman gave him the means to enter an architect's office, to
which he had a great attraction. He was boarding at Frankfort-on-the-Main,
where Middendorf and other of his late military friends were boarding,
who had just engaged themselves as teachers in the city, waiting to
perfect this arrangement. It was a moment when there was a great
uprising of education in Germany, and that system was beginning to
germinate, which has turned out to make Prussia the effective power in
Europe that she has lately proved herself to be; and whose first
principle is, that the primary is the most important stage of education.
In connection with this general movement, there was about to be
established a new school in Frankfort; and Grüner, its principal, who
was one of the boarders, talked over with Froebel and the others the new
plan. Whatever Froebel said was so striking and vital, that Grüner at
last exclaimed: "Plainly this is your vocation! Give up the
architecture, and come in with us, and help to build men." Strange to
say, though Froebel had all his life been meditating upon the secret of
human education, this was the first time it occurred to him to make it
his own business. The more he thought of Grüner's suggestion, the more
he liked it; and the issue was, that he took one of the younger classes
in the new school. Immediately afterwards he wrote to his brother that
at last he had found his element--he "felt like a bird in air, a fish in
water." But the teachers were hampered in their action by the
proprietors of the school; and after a season Grüner said to Froebel,
"You should lead; not be led. I release you from your engagement. Set up
independently, and carry out your own ideas unhindered."

When his purpose of leaving was known, one of the parents who patronized
the school, gave him his two sons to educate, just as he should think
best; and because he now heard of Pestalozzi, he took them to Yverdun,
where he remained as pupil with them, for a season. But he was not quite
satisfied with Pestalozzi's methods. He saw there was a process to be
attended to, anterior to the observation of objects; namely, to employ
and discipline the activity of children yet too young to attend except
to what they are themselves doing. Education was to begin, as he saw, in
doing, and thence proceed to knowing. In returning from Yverdun, his
elder brother, and his younger brother's widow, offered him their
children to add to the two young Frankforters; and the widow offered,
besides, a small house that she owned in Keilhau, if he would fit it up.
He and Middendorf and another friend united together and accepted this
offer; and, with their own hands repaired the house, living in the
outbuildings meanwhile and subsisting on rations most carefully
economized. They then, for one thing, went to work on the land, which
they taught the children to cultivate, and deduced their lessons out of
the objects into which they were putting their life and labor. To these
six children three cultivated men devoted themselves; and Froebel also
wrote to the lady that used to study with him in the Mineralogical
Museum of Berlin, and she took her fortune, and left her rank, to help
the poor schoolmaster in his life work, as the most devoted of wives.

Working on the land was not all that they did. They began with it,
because the children of the city had been rather starved of the
gratification of that instinct to work in the earth, which very soon
appears in all children--though, as Froebel says, it will die out by
being left uncultivated. He found that his pupils had been already
injured by their artificial city life, and in many ways they had things
to unlearn. It was not a perfectly easy thing to determine how much
liberty to give to individual tendencies that had been exaggerated by
the reactions of disorder, or of an artificial order. Froebel thought
the educator should give full play to all that is universal in human
nature without pampering human idiosyncrasy, to do which was the vicious
point of Rousseau's system that Froebel has happily avoided. It was
natural that he should first bring before his pupils the processes of
vegetable growth, because it was in observing them that he had himself
first found the laws of God. But he was older than any child in the
kindergarten when he learned that lesson. Observation of anything
outward is not the first thing in human development, but exertion of
powers from within, which provokes the reaction of the outward and makes
it known.

I cannot follow out, in this introductory lecture, all his studies of
the nature of man in these children, and all his experiments of
cultivation. But I hope to do so in those which follow. The school
founded in Keilhau exists to this day; but Froebel ever found himself
going back till at last he came to the infant in the mother's arms. Then
he went into the huts of the peasantry to observe the mother's
instinctive ways, reason upon them, purify them of her individual
caprices and selfishness, and eliminate everything inconsistent with the
divine idea and method of procedure, indicated by the instinct to the
intelligence. He did not confine himself to Keilhau, where Middendorf
steadily lived, though always keeping in relation with it; but went at
times to other places, and once, for a year or two, left all, to go to
the University of Göttingen to study philology. There he made himself
acquainted with Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, studying out those laws of
mind exemplified in the formation and decay of languages. For it was the
secret of a perfect development that he sought, and how to keep his
pupils at the height they "were competent to gain." After half a century
of the study of childhood in the living subject, and elaboration of the
means of discipline, he settled in his old age into the conviction, that
the most important period of human education was before the child was
seven years old. And his last years were spent in preparing teachers
for kindergartens at Rudolstadt and at Hamburg--which he did by teaching
before them as well as by lecturing to them. Now it is what he
discovered and elaborated, and has left, not in logical formulas, though
he has certainly stated principles in words and embodied them in songs,
but in processes of work and play, that is to be taught in our training
schools. It took a Newton to discover gravitation and other principles
of nature, but men without genius can comprehend and apply these
principles, which they could not, like him, discover. So it took a
Froebel's genius to discover the first principles of education, and his
sensibility to apply them without mistake; but intelligent and heartful
young women can learn them and apply them, if--and only if--they will
study devoutly and faithfully what he has taught; and in doing so they
will find themselves--_not_ becoming artificial, but more profoundly
natural than ever; for the true educational process is but the mother's
instinct and method, clearly understood in all its bearings, and acted
out. To be a kindergartner is the perfect development of womanliness--a
working with God at the very fountain of artistic and intellectual power
and moral character. It is therefore the highest finish that can be
given to a woman's education, to be educated for a kindergartner; and it
is from the most advanced classes of high and normal schools, public and
private, that the pupils of our training schools should come, and from
the most refined circles of private life--remembering that these are not
identical with wealthy and fashionable ones, for in the latter we often
find the vulgar and coarse. The refinement of feeling and thought which
is always attended with gentle and courteous manners is a religious
quality, that not seldom glorifies humble homes whose inmates escape the
sometimes hardening effect of poverty by "seeing Him who is invisible,"
while those "the imagination of whose hearts are evil continually," and
even the merely frivolous, betray that they have "faculties that they
have never used" though they dwell in palaces.

Ever since the normal teaching of kindergartners was begun in America,
in 1868, letters have been received from teachers, already at work in
the old routine of primary instruction, asking for knowledge of the
plays and occupations invented by Froebel; in order that, by means of
them, they may give such prestige to their infant schools as the name of
kindergarten may. But this superficial, inappreciative use of Froebel's
processes, is as fatal to his reform as was _judaizing_ to the primitive
Christian Church. Froebel's method is a radical change of direction. It
changes the educator's point of view. Instead of looking down upon the
child, the kindergartner must clear her mind of all foregone arbitrary
conclusions, and humbly look up to the innocent soul, which in its turn
sees nothing but the face of the Father in heaven--(for thus Christ
explains children's being "of the kingdom of heaven"). This is difficult
for her to do, because--not seldom--a shadow has fallen on the original
innocence of the children confided to her care, from those human beings
in relation to them, who have not done for them what every human being
needs by reason of the essential dependence of individuals upon their
race.

The child is doubtless an embryo angel; but no less certainly a possible
devil. If the immortal will, impassioned by the heart, which never rests
permanently satisfied till the mind recognizes God, be puzzled, it may
be turned in a wrong direction by what it meets, and then the
manifestation will be ugly and more or less hateful. Evil is the
inevitable effect of an ignorant, disorderly action of the will; of its
not adopting the laws of order, by which God creates the universe, and
of which the universe is the unconscious exponent. But knowledge of the
laws of order must come to guide the will, from outside the child's
conscious individuality, _through the human providence of education_,
in which the heavenly Father veils His infinite power, in order that the
child may be free to make the choice of good, that shall lift him from
the state, of merely instinctive being, into that union of Love and
Thought, which characterizes a spirit _creative_, _i.e._, causing
effects.

Perhaps you will say that if human influence must embody Divine
Providence, in order to educate, then children never will be educated.
Well! Except in one instance I admit that children never have been
educated up to the ideal standard. But the one instance of the perfectly
Divine Son of the perfectly holy Mother; and the partial successes of
such fitful good education as history and tradition report, forbid us to
despair of making human education a worthy image of Divine Providence.
_To despair of this_ is want of the proper action of human free
will,--Faith.

The first qualification of the true kindergartner, then, is Faith, which
can be based only on the abiding conviction that God is with us "_to
will and to do_," if we will only have the courage to take for granted
that if _we are willing_, He will make of us divine guides to others.
That He is calling them to be so, whoever feels a strong love of
children, sympathy with their life, and sensibility to their beauty, may
have a reasonable assurance; and that such as shall faithfully qualify
themselves for the work will not fail of the divine help. But observe my
proviso. Their love must not be a passing emotion, grounded on the
children's superficial beauty. It must be a love that involves patience,
that can stand the manifestation of ugly temper, and perverse will, and
never lose sight of the embryo angel that wears for the moment the
devilish mask. In children, evil is actual, but always superficial and
temporary, if the educator does not become party to it by losing her own
temper and idea. Also she must have resources by means of a cultivated
understanding and imagination, to command the child's imagination and
heart.

It may be said that everybody cannot have, at will, imagination and
culture. This is true; but such persons should not undertake to keep a
kindergarten. Let them do something else; keep shop, cultivate
vegetables, work the sewing machine; even keep those schools for older
children, in which books are the main teachers. There are multitudes of
things to be done; the greatest variety of functions to be performed in
human life. But of all things to do, the cultivation of human beings at
that period of life when they are utterly at the mercy of those who
teach them, is the most sacred. Why rush into that, impelled by any
motive below the highest?

On the other hand, I do not wish to produce any artificial
sentimentality on this subject. It is my belief that the average woman
is sufficiently gifted by nature to make a good kindergartner, if she
will give her nature fair play, by cultivating religious and moral
sentiment; and will take pains to develop her intellect by the study of
nature's laws in at least one department of science--that of vegetable
physiology for instance, the materials of which are everywhere. One who
_could not_ be educated to become a kindergartner, should never dare to
become a mother; for she would not know even how to choose the
assistance necessary to her for the work that ought to be done for every
child by somebody. While I would discourage, and if possible effectually
frighten every one from professing kindergartning who is morally
disqualified by sordid aims, or by making it a means to another end than
itself, I welcome the young and ardent to this beautiful womanly work,
which, to do well, requires of them to do the very best thing for their
own intellect and heart, and which, more certainly than anything else,
will give them the secret of Power and Beauty.

It was my privilege, a year or two since, to pass a week in one of the
schools of the feeble-minded; and I there saw six women, some of them
quite young girls, devoted to the terrible work of waking up Will and
Perception in those poor prisoners of mal-organization, so many of them
frightful to look upon. They were doing their work under the strongest
sense of humanity and religion. It would have been impossible to do it
at all, as they were doing it, had they had no other inspiration than
the pay they were receiving. The main reward was in their having some
success in waking up the mind. In their countenances something angelic
was dawning; and this was not my fancy merely, for I heard the same
remark made again and again, by persons who went there as I did. I do
not think one of these women wished to leave the good work; and if
acting on a mind-cherishing principle was so interesting, and productive
of such reactive effects, in such sad circumstances, how much more may
be expected from working upon children fairly gifted! The charm of the
sadder work was, that, like kindergartning, it stimulated to profound
study of the laws of mental nature, in order to work reverently among
them, instead of arbitrarily, in defiance or irreverence of them. To do
this made these women feel that they were working with God; and this
made them practical saints. But why cannot we believe that God is
present, and acting with us, and wooing us to act with Himself, in the
joyous paradise of life, as well as in chambers of disease, and among
the wretched? Is He not the God of the living and joyful, as well as of
the dying and sad? Why is the church-yard only a grave-yard? Why should
it not always be a kindergarten?

One of the pleasantest observations that I made of the kindergartens of
Germany--and I went to the very best ones, those kept by the
kindergartners whom Froebel had trained--was the happy absorption of the
teachers in the children; their sympathy with them; the utter
companionship between them. I never saw a punishment; I never heard a
Don't (or its German equivalent); but when anything went wrong, there
was always a pause, and sometimes questions were asked; and all seemed
to wait till the inward guide had been brought out into consciousness
(whether the thing in hand was social action or artistic work). Perhaps
it might be harder work to govern American children. Their vivacious
temperament, their lively energies, need "conscious law" as a curb,
rather than as a spur. But all the more is it necessary for the American
kindergartner to vivify the invisible guide; she should present order to
the mind, by her genial questioning and conversation over the work in
hand, rather than exert an arbitrary power which might stimulate the
reaction of obstinacy or the subterfuges of cunning. To _govern_ is not
the whole thing. The question is _how_ we govern; whether we so govern
as to make a cringing slave, a cunning hypocrite, or an intelligent,
law-abiding, self-respecting, _willing_ servant of God. I have seen a
magnetic teacher produce a marvellous obedience, and apparent order, by
his imposing presence and keen satire. He imagined that he governed by
moral power; but as soon as he was out of the schoolroom, the children
were the victims of their own impulses, to which seemed given a stronger
spring by the enforced repression. There is no order which is more than
skin deep, unless it be the free, glad obedience of the child to a law,
which he perceives to be creative because it enables him to do something
real. Nothing short of the union of love and thought can produce
spiritual power, _i.e._, creativeness. It is only spiritual power that
inaugurates order--the Eternal Beauty may be inaugurated in childhood
and among childish toys.

There is reason, on their own account, why we want our pupils, in this
art of kindergartning, to be in their disposition and circumstances
above merely pecuniary motive for entering on the work; and that is,
because it will be long before the work will pay much in money. I need
not adduce any other proof of this than our experience in Boston; where,
for four years, the rarely gifted, thoroughly educated, religiously
devoted Alma Kriege poured out her young energies on classes of less
than a score of children; bringing her a pittance so small that she had
to fill up the rest of her hours, which ought to have been given to
recreation and culture, with other work, in order to pay for rent and
necessary bread. Our rich and cultivated people will not forego a little
more upholstery than is necessary, or a style of dress that makes the
laundry bill--to say nothing of the mantua-maker's and milliner's--larger
than the school bill, in order to give the required remuneration to the
kindergartner for spending herself on their children in exhausting study
and labor. But the truth is, people do not really believe that anything
better can be done for children than to kill the time between the
mother's arms and the season when they are to be taught to read; and so
this precious interval, when the habits of thought and affection are
forming, is given up to be filled by chance, risking life-long
difficulties for the child.

Now, what is to reform this state of things? Nothing but the
self-sacrificing work of kindergartners, who, for the sake of
enlightening these benighted parents, will do their work faithfully,
steadily refusing to undertake the care of those whom their parents will
not trust to Froebel's system. The refusal will not seldom force the
truth on the parents--who, when they know it, will be glad to know it. I
do not say to any particular person, it is your duty to wear yourself
out and half starve, for the sake of keeping a kindergarten. It is only
you who are sufficiently free from other obligations, to give yourselves
the privilege and luxury of working with God, on the paradisaical ground
of childhood, who should enter this field. If you can make it your
object to study how to avoid offending those who are beholding the face
of the Father in heaven, by not hindering, but bringing them to Christ,
which means helping them to grow as He did, in grace as in stature, and
in favor with God and man, till like Him they become redeemers of their
brethren from bondage, and can help to make earth the kingdom of
heaven; then you may hope, in your day and generation, to initiate
kindergartning, and make the way smooth for those that follow. When the
true thing is initiated, it will pay even in money; for parents will see
that it is invaluable.

It is twenty-two years since Froebel died. He had made a band of
kindergartners, and set them at work. They all began with small
pecuniary reward. It was at first a starving business. In Europe it is
more difficult than it is here, to induce women of culture and position
to undertake any work which is paid for with money. Froebel's genius had
overcome this prejudice in a few instances. The ladies of one wealthy
family in Hamburg became his pupils, one of whom introduced it into
England, though under some great disadvantages. The Baroness
Marenholtz-Bülow is the most important person inspired by Froebel; and
the circumstances of her introduction to him are even picturesque. Being
in feeble health, she went into an obscure village for rest and
retirement; and one day asked the woman with whom she boarded, if
anything interesting was going on among the villagers. The woman replied
that there was "one queer thing, a natural fool who played about among
the children, who followed him, and were very much taken up with him."
The Baroness hardly heeded this singular assertion; but some time after,
being abroad for exercise, she saw a white-haired man under a tree, with
a group of children around him; and, thinking this might be the "natural
fool," she drew near, and was soon arrested by what she heard, and
joined the little throng herself. Subsequent interviews with
Froebel--for it was he--made a new era in her life, and she corresponded
with him closely till his death. She has since been his chief apostle.
After years of earnest work, with tongue and pen, she succeeded in
getting rid of the injunction against his schools, made by the Prussian
Government, which was jealous of what claimed to be an improvement on
their world-renowned Reform. Since this injunction was taken off, she
has worked, by means of a normal school which she helped to found in
Berlin, in which she lectured gratuitously many years, fighting
earnestly against just such deteriorations of the system as have already
begun to appear in this country. Some of the pseudo-kindergartens use
the plays and occupations there, as here, in the most superficial way.
When children work by patterns, or are shown--instead of being told in
words--how to do things, they merely imitate, with as little
accompaniment of intellectual action as a monkey; and neither the mind
nor the character will be developed, but rather dissipated and weakened.
Others, especially in this country, use the plays in the intervals
between lessons or reading,--which, being taught before the mind has
been regularly developed by success in doing things, and before the
meaning of words has been learned in an adequate manner, are confused
with a chaos of unrelated particulars, that it will take years of
self-education, by and by, to grow out of; and, in short, only a few
vigorous natures fortunately situated ever surmount the difficulty.

But the work of the Baroness has not been in vain; and she writes in a
late letter that a government decree has just been made in Austria,
ordering that all the children between four and six years of age should
be sent to kindergartens; and that every normal school must give
kindergarten training, and every teacher, whether of that or the
following stages of education, must be made acquainted with Froebel's
principles and practices. This great step is the final result of the
agitation of the subject for the last few years in Europe, which began
in the first Philosophers' Congress at Prague, in 1867. The dying out of
the teachers instructed by Froebel himself was manifestly producing a
deteriorating effect in the quality of kindergartners; and his most
intelligent and devoted disciples proposed to the Congress an effort for
the revival of his science and art in its pristine purity and power.

It is most desirable that such falsification and deterioration do not
get ahead in America. But there is impending danger of it, and it can
only be prevented by establishing and keeping up adequate
training-schools, and so informing public opinion, that it shall not be
tolerated in the community to call by the sacred name of kindergarten
anything short of it. There will necessarily be infant schools of an
inferior quality for a long time, because it will take time to make
common an adequate education in the art of kindergartning; but let such
be _called_ play-schools. _Pretenders_ in this profession should be
frowned upon by all good people, as pretenders in the clerical
profession are. They do more harm than bad clergymen can, because the
subjects of their teaching are more helpless and undefended, and can do
nothing for themselves.

The experience I have had in my apostolate in this cause, has brought me
to the conclusion that in America the best way to proceed is, to induce
the public authorities to have kindergartning taught in the State and
city normal schools, and to open public kindergartens as fast as there
are adequate teachers for them.

Everything depends on the quality of the first kindergartners we
train--their spiritual, moral and intellectual quality--which must be
such as to operate in two ways: first, to do for the children the right
thing; secondly, to educate the community to require it done as a
general thing. Many characteristics of America give great encouragement.
We are not dragged back, as they are in Europe, by old customs, whose
roots are intertwined with the heart-strings of inherited sentiment. Our
patriotic hearts fasten themselves on the great future that our fathers
died to inaugurate. We must justify their ideal of universal equality,
by an equal education, an equal opportunity for development of all our
people. "The spirit that makes all things new," as the heart of
childhood craves, and its hand is eager to enact, is "_every_ word that
proceedeth out of the mouth of God," to make alive the human heart.
Therefore we leave behind us--more and more--those conventions of the
Old World that have made even the great work of educating rank as
inferior to that which wields the sword of war. Some people groan at
seeing how the growing facilities of getting money, which our
institutions give to every man and woman of energy, is effacing the old
distinctions of rank. But if our Culture may be made universal, by
employing part of this money in making public education adequate, what
ground will be left for _distinction of rank_? What pretext for
exclusion will there be, when there are none rude and uncultivated to be
excluded? That any distinction of ranks came among the children of God
is incidental to free agency. Children know nothing of them--till we
profane their golden age of innocence by revealing them. (Appendix, Note
A.)




LECTURE II.

THE NURSERY.


IT is my object to inspire, if I can, an enthusiasm for educating
children strictly on Froebel's method, and no other; and I wish to
justify myself by giving reasons for this; for I know that, at first
sight, Americans start back from putting faith in any leader;
immediately exclaiming, that they must be free to follow the light of
their own minds.

This sounds large and liberal, certainly; and no one sees the danger of
yielding to any individual authority more than I do; but it is certain
that nothing may make us so narrow, as a bigoted adherence to the rule
of following the light of our own mind condignly. The light of our own
individual mind may be darkness; it must, in any case, be that of a
farthing candle, compared with Eternal Reason, "the light that lighteth
every man that cometh into the world." The question is, do we
distinguish between that greater light and our own idiosyncrasy, with a
becoming and discriminating humility? I once heard a lady, whose name
was Gurley, say to a witty gentleman, that she believed "in the total
depravity of human nature from the experience of her own heart." Ah! but
that is not quite fair, he replied, "for how do you know what is human
nature and what is Gurleyism?" Here is tersely suggested the danger of
the individualistic philosophy, which has developed itself into a new
kind of bigotry in these later days, not less denunciatory in its
_animus_ than any other; and which shuts up its votaries in a dungeon
from the light of Universal experience. I acknowledge the legitimacy of
the philosophy of individualism, as a protest against the glittering
generality which theological philosophy had become, at the time when it
arose; and as affirmation that God makes every man separately an eye,
and if he would see into the Infinite Over-soul, he must look with it
out of his own window. But this is only the way to begin to search for
truth. If he is not self-intoxicated, every man soon learns that his
window does not command the whole horizon, that God not only has given a
window to him, but to every other man; that we are all free to look out
of each others' windows, some being higher up in the tower of the common
humanity than our own, commanding wider views; in fine that it is with
_all_ the sons of man that "wisdom dwells," and they must
inter-communicate with mutual reverence if they would know her well.
Froebel had not been so wise, had he not, with reverent humility, sought
what God says immediately to mothers and babes. You will not be wise if
you do not look out of Froebel's window.

The story I told you, in my last lecture, of the growth of Froebel's
mind from his boyhood, suggested the fact that the common motherly
instinct, purified of individual passion and caprice, and, understanding
itself as the presence of the Living God overshadowing her, is the
social atmosphere necessary to be breathed by every child who is to grow
in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.

Froebel learned this primal fact or truth, first negatively, as it were,
by lacking it in his own childish experience; and he verified it
positively afterwards, by studying the method of unsophisticated
mothers, at that earliest period of their children's lives, when, in
order to keep them alive merely, the nurse must take the rule of her
nursing from the needs which her heart divines, aided by the nursling's
own expression of want and content--its tears and smiles.

Let us then determine first, as he did, the nursery art, which is
preliminary to that of the Kindergarten.

By the primal miracle (_i.e._, wonder working) of nature, the mother
finds in her arms a fellow-being, who has an immeasurable susceptibility
of suffering, and an immeasurable desire of enjoyment, and an equally
immeasurable force intent on compassing this desire, already in
activity, but with no knowledge at all of the material conditions in
which he is placed, to which he is subject, and by which he is limited
in the exercise of this immense nature.

As I have said before, every form of animal existence _but_ the human,
is endowed with some absolute knowledge, enabling it to fulfil its
limited sphere of relationship as unerringly as the magnetized needle
turns to the pole, and, even with more or less of enjoyment; yet with no
forethought. But the knowledge that is to guide the blind will of the
human being, even to escape death in the first hour of its bodily life,
exists substantially outside of its own individuality in the mother, or
whoever supplies the mother's place.

And throughout the existence of the human being, the forethought that is
to enable him to appreciate his ever multiplying relations with his own
kind, and which grows wider and sweeter as he fulfils the duties they
involve, is essentially outside of himself as a mere individual; being
found first in those who are in relation with him in the family,
afterwards in social, national, cosmopolitan relationship; till at last
he realizes himself to be in sonship with God, in whom all humanity,
nations, families, individuals, "live and move and have their being."
There is no absolute isolation or independency possible for a spiritual
being. This is a truth involved in the very meaning of the word spirit,
and revealed to every family on earth, by the ever recurring fact of the
child born into the arms of a love that emparadises both parties, on
which he lives more or less a pensioner throughout his whole existence,
so far as he lives humanly, finding fullness of life at last in the
clear vision and conscious communion of an Infinite Father, who has been
revealing Himself all along, in the love of parent and child, brother
and sister, husband and wife, friend, fellow-citizen and fellow-man.
Christ said, that little children see the Father face to face, but
surely not with the eyes of the body or of the understanding! They see
him with the heart. And is it not true, that we never quite forget the
child's vision in turning our eyes on lower things? for what but
remembrance of our Heavenly Father's face is hope, "that springs eternal
in the human breast?" What but this remembrance are the ideals of
beauty, that haunt the savage and the sage? the sense of law that gives
us our moral dignity, and in the saddest case, what but this are the
pangs of remorse, in which, as Emerson has sung in his wonderful sphinx
song, "lurks the joy that is sweetest?"

Froebel has authority with me, because, in this great faith, making
himself a little child, he received little children in the name (that
is, as germinating forms) of the Divine humanity, with a simple
sincerity, such as few seem to have done since Jesus claimed little
children as the pure elements of the kingdom he came to establish on
earth; and exhorted that, as they were such, they should be brought to
him as the motherly instinct prompted, and declared that they were not
to be forbidden (that is, hindered as all false education hinders.)

As an American then, and more--as a human being, I acknowledge no
authority except the union of love and thought in practical operation.
But whenever I see this union in any one, to a greater degree than I
have it in myself, I bow before that person, and _feel_ (which is the
subtlest kind of knowing) that I am larger wiser, freer, more effective
for good, by following and obeying him as a master for the time being.

Therefore, after the study I have made of Froebel, and of the method
with little children that he was fifty years discovering and elaborating
into practical processes, whose _rationale_ and creative influence I
perceive; I feel, as it were, _Divinely authorized_ to present him to
you as an authority which you can reverently trust; and so be delivered
from the uncertainties of your own narrow and crude notions,
inexperienced and ignorant as you undoubtedly are, however talented.

It is quite necessary for me to say, and for you to accept this now, or
our short time together will be wasted. There is a time for criticism
undoubtedly, and nothing is true that can not make itself good against
"honest doubt." But as Sterne has said, "of all the cants that are
canted in this canting world, though the cant of hypocrisy may be the
worst, the cant of criticism is the most provoking. I would go fifty
miles on foot to kiss the hand of that man, whose generous heart will
give up the reins into his author's hands, for the time being, and let
him lead him where he will." I am quoting from memory, and may forget
the exact words; but the idea is, that the mood of self-surrendering
reverence is the mood for profitable study, for it is to "become a
little child," which Christ told his disciples was the condition of any
one's becoming the greatest in the kingdom of Divine Truth.

Let us begin, then, with reverently considering the new born child, as
Froebel did; for that is to be "the light of all our seeing."

A child is a living soul, from the very first; not a mere animal force,
but a person, open to God on one side by his heart, which appreciates
love, and on the other side to be opened to nature, by the reaction upon
his sensibility of those beauteous forms of things that are the analysis
of God's creative wisdom; and which, therefore, gives him a growing
understanding, whereby his mere active force shall be elevated into a
rational, productive will. For heart and will are, at first, blind to
outward things and therefore inefficient, until the understanding shall
be developed according to the order of nature.

But during this process of its development, adult wisdom must supply the
place of the child's wisdom, which is not, as yet, grown; that is--an
educator must point out the way, genially, not peremptorily; for in
following the educator's indications, the child must still act in a
measure from himself. As he is irrefragably free, he will not always
obey; he will try other paths--perhaps the contrary one--by way of
testing whether he has life in himself. But unless he shall go a right
way, he will accomplish nothing satisfactory and reproductive; and it is
Froebel's idea to give him something to do, within the possible sphere
of his affection and fancy, which shall be an opportunity of his making
an experience of success, that shall stimulate him to desire, and
thereby make him receptive of the guidance of creative law, which is the
only true object for the obedience of a spiritual being.

To the new born child, his own body is the whole universe; and the first
impression he gets of it seems to come from his need of nutriment. But
it is the mother, not the child, that responds to this want, by
presenting food to the organ of taste, and producing a pleasurable
impression which arouses the soul to _intend itself_ into the organ,
which is developed to receive impression more and more perfectly, by the
child's seeking for a repetition of the pleasure. For a time, whatever
uneasiness a child feels, he attempts to remove by the exercise of this
organ, through which he has gained his first pleasant impression of
objective nature. Therefore is it, that his lips and tongue become his
first means of examining the outward world into which he has been
projected by his Creator.

The ear seems to be the next organ of which the child becomes conscious,
or through which he receives impressions of personal pleasure and pain;
and here it is noticeable, that _rhythmical_ sound seems, from the very
first, to give most pleasure; and is wonderfully effective to soothe the
nerves, and remove uneasiness. All mothers and nurses sing to babies,
as well as rock them, (which is _rhythmical_ motion,) and this pleasant
impression on the ear diverts the child from intending himself
exclusively into the organ of tasting. He now stretches himself into his
ears, whose powers are developed by gently exercising their function of
hearing.

The child seems to taste and hear, before he begins to see anything more
definite than the difference between light and darkness. By and by a
salient point of light, it may be the light of a candle, catches and
fixes his eye, and gives a distinct visual impression, which is
evidently pleasurable, for the child's eye follows the light, showing
that the soul intends itself into the organ of sight. Soon after, gay
colors fix its gaze and evidently give pleasure. The eye for color is
developed gradually, like the ear for music, by exercise, which being
pleasurable becomes spontaneous.

The whole body is the organ of touch; but as the hands are made
convenient for grasping, to which the infant has an instinctive
tendency, and the tips of the fingers are especially handy for touching,
they become, by the intension of the mind into them, the special organ
for examining things by touch, and getting impressions of qualities
obvious to no other sense. When, as it sometimes happens, by
malformation or maltreatment of them, the eyes fail to perform their
functions, it is wonderful how much more the soul intends itself into
the special organs of touch, developing them to such a degree, that a
cultivated blind person seems almost to see with the tips of the
fingers. This fact proves what I have been trying to impress on your
minds, that the soul which spontaneously desires and wills enjoyment,
takes possession and becomes conscious of its organs of sensuous
perception, partly by an original impulse, given to it by the Creator,
and partly, (which I want you especially to observe,) by the genial,
sympathetic, intelligent, careful co-working of the mother and nurse;
who, by what we call nursery play, gives a needed help to the child to
accomplish this feat in a healthy and pleasurable manner. And we shall
be better convinced of the virtue of this nursery play, if we consider
the case of the neglected children of the very poor, so pathetically
described by Charles Lamb. See essays on Popular Fallacies, No. 12.

Madame Marenholtz-Bülow has happily remarked, in her preface to Jacob's
Manual, _Le jardin des Enfans_, that "to develop and train the senses is
not to pamper them." The organs of tasting and smelling do not require
so much exercise by the duplicate action of the mother, as those of
seeing and hearing. The former have for their end to build up the body;
the latter to lead the child's mind out of the body, to that part of
nature which connects him with other persons. The functions of both are
equally worthy; but those of the latter belong to the child as a social
and intellectual being. It is the mother's office to temper the
exercises of each sense, so that they may limit and balance each other.
And in order to limit those which are building up the body, so that they
shall not absorb the child, the action of the others must be helped out.
"Our bodies feel--where'er they be--against or with our will;" but to
see and hear all that children can, requires exertion of will and this
is coaxed out by the sympathetic action of others. Yet the functions of
tasting or smelling are not to be banned. The Creator has made them
delightful; and if others do their proper part, their exercise will
never become harmful. To enjoy tasting and smelling is no less innocent
than to enjoy seeing and hearing. There is no function of mind or body
but may be performed Divinely. Milton shows insight into this truth by
making Raphael sit and eat at table with man in Paradise; and he says
some wonderful things upon the point, which will bear much study. And
have we not in sacred tradition a symbol, still more venerable, of the
truth, that the fire of spirit burns without consuming, and may
transform the body without leaving visible residue? There are in Brown's
philosophy (which does not penetrate into _all_ the mysteries of the
rational soul and immortal spirit) some very instructive chapters on the
social and moral relations of the grosser senses, (as taste, smell and
touch are sometimes called.) It is the part of rational education to
understand all these things thoroughly, and adjust the spontaneous
activities by subordinating them to the end of a harmonious and
beneficent social life. The Lord's Supper may be made to illustrate this
general human duty.

There is doubtless marked difference in the original energy of life, in
different children. Young--but not too young, happy, healthy, loving
parents, have the most vigorous, lively and harmoniously organized
children; but in all cases, the impulse of life must be met and
cherished by the tender, attractive, inspiring force of motherly love;
which with caressing tone and invoking smile, peers into the infant's
eyes, and importunately calls forth the new person, who, as her
instinctive motherly faith and love assure her, is there; and whom she
yearns to make conscious of himself in self-enjoyment. The time comes
when the little body has become so far subject to the new soul, that an
answering smile of recognition signalizes the arrival upon the shores of
mortal being of "that light which never was on sea or land," another
immortal intelligence! It is only the smile of the intelligent human
face, that can call forth this smile of the child in the first instance;
but let this glad mutual recognition of souls take place once, and both
parties will seek to repeat the delight, again and again. Few persons,
indeed, get so chilled by the sufferings and disappointments, and so
hardened by the crimes of human life, but on the sight of a little
child, they are impelled to invoke this answering smile by making
themselves, for the moment, little children again; seeking and finding
that communion with our kind which is the Alpha and Omega of life.

Do not say that I am wandering, fancifully, from the serious work which
we are upon: I am only beginning at the beginning. We can only
understand the child, and what we are to do for it in the Kindergarten,
by understanding the first stage of its being--the pre-intellectual one
in the nursery. The body is the first garden in which God plants the
human soul, "to dress and to keep it." The loving mother is the first
gardener of the human flower. Good nursing is the first word of
Froebel's gospel of child-culture.

The process of taking possession of the organs, that I have just
described, is never performed perfectly unless children are nursed
genially. If bitter and disagreeable things are presented to the organ
of the taste, they are rejected with the whole force of a will, which is
too blind in its ignorance to find the thing it wants, but vindicates
its irrefragable freedom of choice by uttering cries of fright, pain and
anger, as it shrinks back, instead of throwing itself forward into
nature. If the cruel thing is repeated, the nerves are paralyzed, or at
least rendered morbid, especially when rude untender handling outrages
the sense of touch. When rough and discordant sounds assail the ear, or
too sharply salient a light, the eye, these organs will be injured, and
may be rendered useless for life. The neglected and maltreated child is
dull of sense, and lifeless, or morbidly impulsive, possibly savagely
cruel and cunning, in sheer self-defence. The pure element and first
condition of perfect growth, is the joy that responds to the electric
touch of love.

Underlying and outmeasuring all this delicate development of the organs
of the five senses, is the whole body's instinct of motion, which is the
primal action of will. The perfectly healthy body of a little child,
when it is awake, is always in motion--more or less intentionally. When
asleep, there is the circulation of the blood, and pulsation of the
solids of the body, corresponding to the act of breathing, which is
involuntary; and any interruption of these produces disease--their
suspension, death. But the motion which makes the limbs agile, and the
whole body elastic, and gradually to become an obedient servant, is
voluntary, intentional, and can be helped by that sympathetic action of
others, which we call _playing with the child_. Froebel's rich
suggestions on this play are contained in his mother's cossetting songs;
and I am glad to tell you that two English ladies, a poet and a
musician, have translated and set to music this unique book; and that
just now it has been published by Wilkie, Wood & Co., in London. It
suggests all kinds of little gymnastics of the hands, fingers, feet,
toes and legs, for these are the child's first play things; and also the
first symbols of intelligent communication, giving the core and
significance to all languages.[1]

I think that a baby never _begins_ to play, in the first instance, but
responds to the mother and nurse's play, and learns thereby its various
members and their powers and uses; and when at last it jumps, runs,
walks by itself, which it cannot begin to do without the help of others,
it is prepared to say _I_, with a clear sense of individuality.

In analyzing the process of a child's learning to walk, we see most
clearly the characteristic difference between the human person and the
animals below man in the scale of relation. The little chicken runs
about of itself, as soon as it is out of the shell; but the human child,
even after all its limbs are grown, and though he has been moving
himself on all fours by means of the floor, and supporting himself by
means of the furniture to which he clings, _does not walk_. He will only
stand alone, unsupported, when he sees that there are guarding arms
round about him, all ready to catch him if he should fall. He seems to
know instinctively, that all the force of the earth's gravitation is
against him. He does not know that he may balance it by his personal
power. His body weighs upon his soul like a mountain, precisely because
he is intelligent of it as an object, loves it as a means of pleasure,
and dreads its power of giving pain to him. The little darling stands,
perhaps between the knees of his father, whose arms are round about him;
the mother opens her loving arms to receive him, and calls him to her
embrace; the way is short between, and three steps will be sufficient,
but where is the courageous faith to say to this mountain of a body, "be
removed to another place?" It is not in himself; he cannot produce it
any more than he can take himself up by his own ears. It is in the
mother; for it is she, not he, who has the knowledge of the yet
unexerted power which is flowing into the child from the Creator. Only
by the electric touch of her faith in him does his faith in himself
flash out in answer to her look and voice of cheer, and he rushes to her
arms. It is the doing of the deed which gives to himself the knowledge
of the power that is in him. He repeats it again and again, seeming to
wish to be more and more certain of his being the cause of so great
effect. Thus cause and effect are discriminated, and "to him that hath"
a sense of individuality, "shall be given," forevermore, a growing power
over the body, to which no measure can be stated. Even on the vulgar
plane of the professional tumbler, a man's power over his body seems,
sometimes, to be absolute and miraculous. But the annals of heroism and
martyrdom are full of facts that go to prove to all who consider them
profoundly, that the immaterial soul is sovereign, when, by recognizing
all its relations, it subjects the individual to the universal, and
becomes thereby entirely spiritual, (which is man reciprocating with
God; becoming more and more conscious forever.[2])

From what has been said of the soul's taking possession of the body and
its several organs, by exercising the functions of tasting, hearing,
seeing, smelling, touching, grasping, moving the limbs, and at last
taking up the whole body into itself in the act of walking, we see that
it is all done, even the last, by virtue of the social nature.

Froebel took his clue from this fact, a primal one, and never let it go,
and it is of the greatest importance that it be understood clearly, that
conscious individuality, which gives the sense of free personality, the
starting point, as it were, of intelligent will, is perfectly consistent
with and even dependent on the simultaneous development of the social
principle in all its purity and power.

We see a sad negative proof of this, in asylums for infants abandoned by
their mothers, or given up by them through stress of poverty. There is
one of these in New York city, into which are received poor little
things in the first weeks of their existence. Every thing is done for
their bodily comfort which the general human kindness can devise. They
have clean warm cradles and clothes, good milk, in short everything but
that caressing motherly play, which goes from the personal heart to the
personal heart. That is one thing general charity cannot supply; it is
the personal gift of God to the mother for her child, and none but she
can be the sufficient medium of it, and therefore, undoubtedly it is,
that almost all new-born children in foundling hospitals die; or, if
they survive, are found to be feeble-minded or idiotic. They seem to
sink into their animal natures, and belie the legend man written on
their brows, showing none of that beautiful fearlessness and courageous
affectionateness that characterise the heartily welcomed, healthy,
well-cared-for human infant. On the contrary, they show a dreary apathy,
morbid fearfulness, or a belligerent self-defence, anticipative of other
forms of the cruel neglect which has been their dreary experience.

Taking a hint from observations of this kind, together with the bitter
experiences of his own childhood, Froebel supplied to the mother or
nurse some playthings for the baby, which might continue to improve the
various organs of its body, by making the exercise of their functions a
social delight.

What is called the first gift, he proposes should be used in the nursery
first. It consists of six soft balls, not too large to be grasped by a
little hand, and the use of which in the nursery, is suggested by a
little first book for mothers, that has been translated from Jacob's _Le
jardin des Enfans_.[3] I think it is important for the Kindergartner to
know what Froebel thought could be done for the development of the
infant in the nursery, since if it has not been done there, she must
contrive to remedy the evil in the Kindergarten. You will bear with me,
therefore, if I go quite into the minutiæ of this matter. It will open
your eyes to observe delicately, as Froebel did.

He proposed that the red ball should be first presented. He had observed
that a bright light concentrated, as in a candle, first excited the
organ of sight and stimulated its action. Hence he inferred that a
bright color would do the same, a neutral tint would not be seen at all
probably. The red ball is not quite so salient and exciting as the light
of a candle, but on that account it can be gazed at longer, without
producing a painful re-action. The child will have a pleasure in
grasping it, and will probably carry it to his lips; but as it is
woolen, it will not be especially agreeable to the delicate organ of
taste. It will all the more be looked at therefore, and give the
impression of red. Froebel proposes that it shall be called the red
ball, in order that the impression of the word _red_ on the ear, shall
blend in memory with the impression of the color on the eye. As long as
the child seems amused with the red ball, he would not have another
color introduced, because he thought it took time for the eye to get a
clear and strong impression of one color, and this should be done before
it was tried with a contrasted impression. But by and by the blue ball,
as the greatest contrast, may be given and named; and all the little
plays suggested in the mother's book be repeated with the blue ball; and
then the yellow ball should be given with its name; and then the three
be given together, and the baby be asked to choose the blue, or red, or
yellow one. By attaching a string to them, and whirling them, or letting
the infant do so, it is surprising how long the child will amuse itself
with these balls, and what pleasure colors alone give, especially when
combined with motion.

The secondary colors may afterwards be added to the treasury for the
eye, with the same carefulness to secure completeness and distinctness
of impression; and to associate the color with the word that names it;
for language, the special organ of social communion, should be
addressed to the child from the first, though its complete attainment
and use is the crown of all education.

Smiles and sounds, proceeding out of the mouth, are the first languages,
and begin to fix the little child's eyes and attention upon the mouth of
the mother, from which issue the tones that are sweetest to hear, and
especially when in musical cadence. But the child understands the words
addressed to him long before he himself begins to articulate; for
language is no function of the individual, but only of the consciously
social being, yearning to find himself in another.

There is a reciprocal communication between infants and adults that
precedes the difficult act of articulation. This we call the natural
language, and it is common to all nations, being mutually intelligible,
as is proved by deaf mutes from remote countries who understand each
other at once. But this natural language has a very narrow scope. It
serves to communicate instinctive wants of body and heart, but does not
serve the fine purposes of intellectual communication, nor minister any
considerable intellectual development. These signs are very general,
while every word in its origin has represented a particular object in
nature. In analyzing any language, we find that the names given to the
body and its members, and to the actions and facts of life, without
which no human society can exist, are the nucleus or central words that
characterize it, and from which the whole national rhetoric is derived.
Hence there is a value for the mind in associating the words and action
of even such a little play as "here we go up, up, up, and here we go
down, down, down, and here we go backwards and forwards, and here we go
round, round, round," with other rhymes and plays of an analogous
character that are found wherever there are mothers and children.

We have observed that the moment of first accomplishing the feat of
running alone, seemed to be that of the child's beginning to realize
himself to be a person, but that even, in this act, he was dependent
upon his mother; that his bodily independence was the gift of her faith
in that within him, which is essentially superior to the body and can
command it as instrumentality. To make it instrumentality is, more and
more, a delight to the child, in which his mother sympathises; and by
this sympathy aids him. All his plays involve exercise of the power of
commanding his body. As soon as a child can move it from place to place,
his desire to exercise power on nature outside of himself increases, and
he is prompted to measure strength with other children. If children were
mere individuals they would merely quarrel, as Hobbes says; but being
social beings also, they tend to unite forces and aid one another to
compass desired ends. By so doing, they rise to a greater sense of life,
and brotherly love is evolved. But in the development of the social
life, the more developed and cultivated elder must come in, to keep both
parties steady to some object outside of themselves, which it takes
their union to reach. Children can be taught to play together, by
engaging their powers of imitation, and addressing their fancy. Every
mother knows, that in the first opening of children's social life, their
bodily energies are stimulated to such a degree, that it is quite as
much as she or one nurse can do, to tend two or three children together;
and by the time they are three years old, the family nursery becomes too
narrow a sphere for them. It is then that they are to be received into a
Kindergarten, whose very numbers will check the energy of activity a
little, by presenting a greater variety of objects to be contemplated;
and because social action must be orderly and rhythmical, in order to be
agreeable. This, a properly prepared Kindergartner knows, and by her
sympathetic influence and power over the childish imagination, she will
bring gradually all the laws of the child's being to the conscious
understanding, beginning with this rhythmical one at the center.

The movement plays which Froebel invented, express, in dramatic form,
some simple fact of nature or some childish fancy, for which he gives,
as accompaniment, a descriptive song set to a simple melody. The
children learn both to recite and to sing the words of the song, and
then the movements of the play. To them the whole reason for the play
seems to be the delight it gives, the exhilaration of body, the
amusement of mind. But the Kindergartner knows that it serves higher
ends, and that it is at least always a lesson in order, enabling them to
begin to enact upon earth "Heaven's first law."

Do not say I am making too solemn a matter of these movement plays, to
the Kindergartner. Unless she remembers that this very serious aim
underlies every play which she conducts, she will not do justice to the
children. Law or order is one and the same thing with beauty; and play
is hindrance if it is not beautiful. When she insists upon the children
governing themselves, so far as to keep their proper places in relation
to each other; to forbear exerting undue force, and to seek to give the
necessary aid to others by exerting sufficient force, the beautiful
result justifies her will to the minds of the children, and commands
their ready obedience. She must call forth by addressing the sense of
personal responsibility in each child; and this, if done tenderly and
with faith, it is by no means difficult to do. The reward to the
children is instant in the success of the play, and therefore not
thought of as reward of merit. It is a form of obedience that really
elevates the little one higher in the scale of being as an individual,
without danger of the re-action of pride and self-conceit; for self is
swallowed up in social joy.

When I was in Germany, I went, as I believe I told you, to those
Kindergartens, which were taught by Froebel's own pupils, and I found
that in these the movement plays were the most prominent feature of the
practice. More than one was played in the course of the three or four
hours, and especially when the session was as much as four hours. It was
done in a very exact though not constrained manner, and much stress
seemed to be laid upon every part. The singing was not done by three or
four, but all the children were encouraged to sing. Often the little
timider ones were called on to repeat the rhyme alone, without singing
it, and then to sing it alone with the teacher. Thus the stronger and
abler were exercised (as they must be so much in real life) in waiting,
sympathetically, for the weaker. A great deal of care was also exercised
in regard to the form and character of the play itself. Those of
Froebel's own suggestion and invention were the preferred ones. They
consisted in imitating, in rather a free and fanciful manner, the
actions of the gentler animals, hares and rabbits, fishes, bees and
birds. There were plays in which children impersonated animals,
evidently for the purpose of awakening their sympathies and eliciting
their kindness towards them. Many of the labors of human beings, common
mechanics, such as cooperage, the work of the farmer, that of the
miller, trundling the wheelbarrow, sawing wood, &c., were put into form
by simple rhymes. The children sometimes personated machinery, sometimes
great natural movements. In one instance I saw the solar system
performed by a company of children that had been in the Kindergarten
four years, but none of them were over seven years old. Mere movement is
in itself so delightful and salutary for children that a very little
action of the imitative or fanciful power is necessary, just to take the
rudeness out of bodily exercise without destroying its exhilaration.

My Kindergarten Guide, the revised edition of which is published by E.
Steiger, of New York, contains some of the principal plays, set to
Froebel's own music. I would gladly have printed all that Madame Ronge
published in her Guide, which is out of print, but for the expense.

But it is by no means merely a moral discipline that is aimed at in the
Kindergarten, as you will see when the bearings upon their habits of
thought, of all that the children do, are pointed out to you, in the
various occupations, which are sedentary sports, though the moral
discipline is the paramount idea, and never must be lost sight of one
moment by the Kindergartner. We mean by moral discipline, exercising the
children to _act_ to the end of making _others_ happy, rather than of
merely enjoying _themselves_. If the individual enjoyment is not a
social enjoyment, it is disorderly and vitiating. But the individual is
lifted into the higher order for which he is created, by merely
enjoying, whenever his enjoyment is _social_. I am of course speaking of
that season of life under seven years of age, when the mind is yet
undeveloped to the comprehension of humanity as a whole; when the good,
the true and the beautiful are nothing as abstractions, and can only be
realized to their experience and brought within the sphere of their
senses, by being embodied in persons whom they love, reverence or trust.
The words _good_, _beautiful_, _kind_, _true_, get their meaning for
children by their intercourse with such persons. Specific knowledge of
God cannot be opened up in them by any words, unless these words have
first got their meaning by being associated with human beings who bear
traces that they can appreciate of His ineffable perfections. To liken
God's love to the mother's love, brings home a conception of it to
children, for _hers_ they realize every day.

The connecting link between the nursery and Kindergarten is the First
Gift of Froebel's series, being used in both. The nursery use will have
taught the names of the six colors, red, orange, yellow, green, blue and
purple, and made it a favorite play thing. It is all the better if the
child has had no other playthings prepared for him. He has doubtless
used the chairs, footstools, and whatever else he could lay his hands
on, to embody his childish fancies; and it is to be hoped he has been
allowed to play out of doors with the earth, and has made mud pies to
his heart's content--not tormented with any sense of the--at his
age--artificial duty of keeping his clothes clean. That duty is to be
reserved for the Kindergarten age, and will come duly, by proper
development of the mental powers.

In the Kindergarten, the ball-plays are to become more skillful, and the
teacher must see that the child learns to throw the ball so that it may
bound back into his own hands; so that it may bound into the hands of
another who is in such position as to catch its reflex motion. The
children must learn to toss it up and catch it again themselves. When
standing in two rows they can throw it back and forwards to each other.
When standing in a circle, the balls may be made to circulate with
rapidity, passing from hand to hand, the children singing the
accompanying song.

"Who'll buy my eggs?" is a good play to exercise them in counting. And
all these movement plays with the ball are admirable for exercising the
body, giving it agility, grace of movement, precision of eye and touch.
These things will accrue all the more surely if it is kept play, and no
constraining sense of duty is called on. As most of these plays are not
solitary, they become the occasion for children's learning to adjust
themselves to each other, and the teacher must watch that hilarity do
not become violence or rudeness to each other, but furtherance of one
another's fun; and occasionally, in enforcing this harmony, a child must
be removed from the play, and made to stand in a corner alone, or even
outside the room, till the desire of rejoining his companions shall
quicken him to be sufficiently considerate of them to make pleasant play
possible. All children in playing together learn justice and social
graces, more or less, because they find that without fair play their
sport is spoilt; but this play must be supervised by the Kindergartner,
in order that there may not be injustice, selfishness and quarreling. A
Kindergartner, who is not a martinet, and who is herself a good
play-fellow, will magnetize the children, and inspire such general good
will that unpleasantness will be foreclosed in a great measure; but a
company of children are generally of such variety of temperament and
different degrees of bodily strength, have so often come from such
inadequate nursery life, that the regulating Kindergartner has a good
deal to do to prevent discords and secure their kindness to each other,
and the reasonable little self-sacrifices of common courtesy. But she
will find a word is often enough; the question, Is that right? Would you
like to have any one else do so? It is sometimes necessary to bring all
the play to a full stop, in order to bring the common conscience to
pronounce upon the fairness of what some one is doing. I would suggest
that the question be asked not of the class, but of the individual
culprit, whether what is being done wrong, is right or wrong? The child,
with the eyes of the class upon him, will generally be eager to confess
and reform, because the moral sense is quite as strong as self-love, and
especially when re-inforced by the presence of others. It is not worth
while to make too much of little faults, and the first indication of
turning to the right must be accepted; the child is grateful for being
believed in and trusted, and the wrong doing is a superficial thing; the
moral sentiment is the substantial being of the child.

Of all the materials used in Kindergarten, the colored balls are most
purely _playthings_; and there are none of the plays so liable to be
riotous as the ball plays. There is the greatest difficulty in keeping
children from being _too_ noisy, and it is not wise to make too much of
a point of it. The ball seems a thing of life. It is very difficult for
them to get good command of it. It excites them to run after it; and
shouts and laughter are irrepressible. But there are reasonable limits.
The Kindergartner, in conversation before hand, should make them see
that they may get too noisy, and tire each other, and she will easily
induce them to agree to stop short when she shall ring the bell, and be
willing to stand still while she counts twenty-five, or watches the
second hand of her watch go around a quarter, a half, or a whole minute,
as may be agreed upon. This can be made a part of the play, and to pause
and be perfectly still in this way, will give them some conception of
the length of a minute, and teach self-command, as well as make a
pleasant variety.

The ball plays should always be accompanied and alternated, in the
Kindergarten, with conversations upon the ball, naming the colors,
telling which are primary, which secondary, and illustrating the
difference by giving them pieces of glass of pure carmine, blue and
yellow, and letting them put two upon each other, and hold them towards
the window, and so realize the combinations of the secondary colors. Ask
them, afterwards, to tell what colors make orange, or purple, or green;
and what color connects the orange and green; or the purple and orange,
or the green and purple.

One of the other exercises, on the day of using the First Gift may be
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.

In the earlier years, the growth of the religious life is merely
germinal. And as it is involved within the mothers at the beginning, it
must be cherished _sympathetically_ by her removing all occasion for
self-care and self-defence, and thus prevent the sense of individuality
from degenerating through fear into inordinate self-will and self-love.
The child should be treated with unvarying tenderness and consideration,
without having his senses pampered into morbid excess by
over-indulgence, but above all things, never wounding nor frightening
his heart, nor repressing the simple and healthy expression of his
feelings and thoughts. For enforced repression tends to produce ugly
temper, baseness, or subtlety, according to the child's temperament,
which is also in imperfect social harmony, if not absolutely
quarrelsome. It must be her work, therefore, not only to complete the
child's organic education, but to take him, as it were, into her own
affectionate spirit by using the methods which Froebel has suggested to
the mother for the discipline of her infants. (I use this word
_discipline_ in its true sense of teaching; not in the sense of
_punishment_. That the word _discipline_ should ever have come to mean
punishment is a severe commentary on the ideas and modes of education
that have hitherto prevailed in Christendom.)

The kindergartner, as well as the mother, must be thoroughly grounded in
the faith that God has done His part in the original endowment of
children; and that He is truly present with her, helping her to remedy
the effects of the mother's shortcomings. She will certainly succeed in
her work if she studies His laws with an earnest purpose to carry them
out, first in the government of herself, and then in leading the
children to self-government. Wordsworth in his _Ode to Duty_, sings:--

          "There are who ask not if Thine eye
           Be on them, who, in love and truth,
           Where no misgiving is, rely
           Upon the genial sense of youth.
           _Glad hearts!_ without reproach or blot,
           Who do Thy work, and know it not!
           And blest are they who in the main
           This happy faith still entertain,
           Live in the spirit of this creed,
           Yet find another strength according to their _need_.
           May joy be theirs while life shall last,
           And _Thou_, if they should totter, teach them to stand fast."

Little children certainly, of all persons, are oftenest found in this
condition when

          "Love is an unerring light,
           And joy its own security."

And that "other strength," which must come by reflection on and study of
the unfolding nature of the child in the felt presence of the Inspirer
of Duty, will certainly be needed by the kindergartner who will receive
children not always from the hands of natural and faithful mothers, but
of uncultured servant-maids. (It is but justice to the latter to say
that there are occasionally found among the Irish nurses those who could
teach many mothers. The Irish nature is not altogether bad material for
the production of good motherly nurses; but it must not be left _wild_;
it needs a great deal of discipline; and I hope the time may come when
schools for the education of children's nurses, such as Froebel
established in Hamburg, which still exist, may be founded in all our
cities.) Though I think the education of _mothers_ is still more
important and the first thing to aim at, as it would render nursery
maids comparatively unnecessary. It is so short a period of a mother's
life when she _has_ young children, and the book of nature which these
few years open to her _is so rich_, that, for her own being's sake as
well as for the children's, it seems to me a terrible loss for her to
delegate her maternal cares to others during the nursery period. On the
other hand, when the age for the kindergarten comes, the mother needs to
be relieved of the increasing care; and children, in their turn, need
other influences than can be had in a family, especially in families
where parents have work to do outside of their homes. It is, indeed, "a
consummation devoutly to be wished," that the time may come when labor
may be so organized that no mothers may be obliged to leave their
children's souls uncared for in order to get the wherewithal to sustain
their bodies.

The deepest reason why a child should be taken care of in its earliest
infancy _by its mother_ rather than by a person comparatively
uninterested in its personality, is this, that _only_ a mother can
respect a child's personality sufficiently. All others regard the child
for its manifested qualities; but with the mother, it is the child
itself that she loves, quite irrespective of any qualities that he
manifests. Phenomenally, a little child is a complex of self-assertion
and generosity (or a desire for union with its kind); a desire or a
feeling of finiteness in strange contrast with that instinct to "have
dominion" which gives vitality to self-assertion. We call this primal
desire for union his heart, and this primal self-assertion his will. The
will expresses itself in efforts to change its environments, putting
what is at rest in motion, knocking down, tearing up, because it does
not yet know how to put in order, or to change things artistically. The
child acts without external motive,--doing things merely because it
_can_. Even after a child is old enough to think and talk, and has done
some act for which you see no reason or motive, when you ask him why he
did it, he not unfrequently will say, "_because_." I remember when I was
a child of six or seven, that I would give this answer with a perfect
sense of satisfaction that it was _an answer_; and when it would
sometimes be said, "_because_ is no reason," or "_because_ is an old
woman's reason," I recollect my feeling of surprise. I seemed to myself
to have given the most substantial reason. The word meant to me a great
deal. And I now think I was truly philosophical in this, for I affirmed
the primal truth, that a self-determining person in spontaneous action,
if only of some instinct, is a first _cause_[4]--an _absolute cause_--to
the extent of consciousness. It was an intuition.

Now to retain the sense of this causal personality is at the root of
all stability of character, all nobleness of manifestation. But
self-assertion in an ignorant child is more apt than otherwise to be
disorderly, discordant, and perhaps destructive; it therefore provokes
resistance in the unthinking, but challenges the thoughtful to give
guidance. It is of life-and-death importance to the child whether this
force shall meet mere hard resistance, which shall utterly crush it or
increase it by reaction, or whether it shall meet with a genial
sympathetic guidance to which it will voluntarily and gladly surrender
itself. A mother _loves_ this little ignorant force of self-will and
wants it to have free course. She cannot help desiring to have her child
have its own way. She does not want it to be opposed by others. She
will, as far as possible, further or humor it, as we say. And when she
finds it necessary to control it, she will try to do it by awakening the
child's affectionateness, and so captivating its fancy as to make it
feel it is doing as it likes, though it be something different from what
it was impelled to do at first; in short, she inspires him to will the
better thing, and so educates the blind instinct of self-assertion into
a harmonizing and beneficent power, and preserves the child's dignity
and nobleness instead of crushing its personality. We hear of "breaking
the child's will." A child's will should never be broken, but opened up
into harmony with God's will through a lower harmony with the will of
its loving and loved mother or kindergartner. But a mother will be more
sure than any one else to bring about this result, because she acts from
an impulse of the heart deeper than all thought, while the kindergartner
by thought must cultivate in herself the impulse.

There are those who deprecate motherly indulgence as if it were the
greatest evil. Doubtless it will become a great evil if it be not
properly subordinated to the wisdom which appreciates the divinity of
order, or if it is alternated with capricious severities; in short, if
the indulgence proceeds from indolence or self-love instead of love of
the child. The indulgence that really comes from the last is a
recognition (unconscious, it may be) of the divine possibilities of the
child,--a spark of the divine creativeness! Of the two evils, extreme
indulgence is not so deadly a mistake as extreme severity. Indulged
children return from afar. The prodigal of the Gospel story may have
been over-indulged, perhaps, in being allowed to take his portion of
goods, and go off by himself, out of the reach of his father's counsel
and authority, and left to his own uneducated self-will. But the sinner,
when he _came to himself_ (observe that expression), recognized the
self-forgetting, fatherly love in that very indulgence; and it was the
immeasurableness of that love that revived his self-respect and hope,
and saved him; for the hope was not disappointed. Love giveth,
"upbraiding not."

The one fatal thing is to wound the child's heart. It is better to give
up the point of controlling its will to righteousness for the moment,
than to do that; and a parent is the least likely of all persons to
wound his child's heart.

When nothing can be done without wounding, the parent who trusts his own
heart will leave the rebel to the consequences which God holds in his
gracious hands for the final salvation of every one of his children.

Besides, to _choose_ to give up one's own will is the only complete and
salutary giving up, enabling the soul to mount up spiritually like the
eagle and renew its strength. There are families in which the act of
disobedience is absolutely unknown, in earlier or in later life; where
there is no necessity for uttered commands, because expressed wishes are
enough. The most perfect, if not the only real, obedience I have ever
seen, has been that of strong men to an unexacting, tender mother.

This is a subject on which I feel very strongly, for it seems to me that
the greatest social disorders that exist in the nations among which the
"order that reigns in Warsaw"[5] is foremost, is the consequence of
_unreasoning obedience_ to wills _not_ infinitely wise and good. The
worth and duty of obedience is precisely in ratio with the validity of
the command; and a command is valid only so far as it is inspired by a
disinterested and proper respect for the being who is commanded.
Children should only obey their parents, _in the Lord_; and parents
should never "provoke their children to wrath."

I may be told that the important element of self-assertion (which gives
strength to character) may be weakened by being always disarmed, and
killed by the mother's sympathy; and that to provoke it into conscious
strength, direct antagonism is necessary. But the best antagonism is
that quiet, inevitable one, that comes from the inexorableness of
material nature which the child must needs feel, the more disorderly he
is, but which he sees is insensate and impersonal; whose antagonism,
therefore, does not grieve his heart, and disappoint his hope as human
oppression does, making him sad or bitter, but stimulates his mind to
conquer and subdue it, or develops a dignified patience. The appointed
domain for kingly man is not the brotherhood, but material nature; and
gradually he is to learn that nature's inexorable laws are the
expression of a Supreme Personality as benignant as it is august, who
takes up His human child into Himself, not without his concurring will;
for mankind mounts on the nature which he gradually subdues into a
stepping-stone, by knowledge, and the use of it. The mother must
remember that though the first, she is not the only instrumentality by
which the Divine Providence works. The time comes when she is compelled
to deliver her cherished darling up to other influences; when the child
bursts out of the nursery, not only self-asserting and affectionate,
but putting forth energies, and seeking satisfaction of sensibilities
that cannot be met within that narrow precinct.

The kindergarten must, then, succeed by complementing the nursery; and
the child begin to take his place in the company of his equals, to learn
his place in their companionship, and still later to learn wider social
relations and their involved duties. No nursery, therefore, not even a
perfect one, can supersede the necessity of a kindergarten, where
children shall come into cognizance of the moral laws which are to
restrain and guide their self-assertion, and quicken and enlarge their
social affections, leading them to self-denials for the sake of
opportunities for themselves of useful and creative art, beneficence,
and heroism.

The time for transition from the nursery to the kindergarten is
definitely indicated by two facts. Firstly, Divine Providence has so
arranged general family events that every mother must give up having the
child live, as it were, entirely within _her_ life, because she has
other children to nurse, or other social duties to do. And, secondly,
every child's growth in bodily strength and conscious individuality
makes him too strong a force of will for so narrow a scope of relation
as is afforded by one family. While hitherto, to be outside of the
single family influence was an evil, it would now be an evil to confine
the child entirely to it, narrowing his heart and mind, and deforming
his character. He needs to be brought into relation with equals who have
other personal characteristics, other relations with nature and the
human race than his own family. The instinct of the growing child, at
this period, to get out of doors to play with other children, is
unmistakable. To check it vexes or depresses him. In getting possession,
first of his body, and then of his personal and social consciousness, he
has become an object to himself, and feels himself a power among other
powers affecting each other. But he is still more or less consciously a
prisoner (if not a slave) of nature, by reason of his ignorance of the
laws of the universe,--_that body_ outside of his own body,--which he is
destined, in alliance with others, to take possession of, by action
_upon_ and _within_ it, giving him knowledge of it, and enabling him to
make it into instrumentality for the expression and embodiment of great
ideas and a noble will.

All government worthy of the name begins in self-government, a free
subordination of the individual in order to form the social whole.
Subordination is something higher than subjection. We subject mere
animals; intelligent moral agents must be subordinated. It is still the
mother's part rather to inspire; the kindergartner's part is to
subordinate, not to check childish, spontaneous talk, though, of course,
it must be regulated so far as not to let the children interrupt each
other _impolitely_, and to keep it to some main subject. Some
kindergartners begin the session by asking each in turn what is
interesting to him. Mrs. Kraus-Boelte generally receives each one as he
or she comes in. They go to her for the morning kiss, and have something
to say, in which she expresses due sympathy, and later recurs to and
connects with what others say, and thus produces general conversation.
Mrs. Van Kirk is very happy in her introductory conversations.

In playing with the gifts, the teacher dictates certain movements and
arrangements, for the purpose of the children's getting into the habit
of listening and quickly catching the directions given; and the children
should be encouraged to follow _her words_ in what they do, rather than
to imitate each other. In their spontaneous work they often make a new
symmetrical form, which is really beautiful; and then it is well to call
on the child to direct his companions how to make it; for children
delight in the dignity of _directing_, and learn to be very precise in
the use of all the words expressing relation of all kinds,--prepositions,
adjectives, and adverbs,--_precisely_ as well as nouns and verbs.
Language does not merely transfer the outward inward, but soon begins to
transfer the inward outward. Love, and other sentiments of the soul,
good and bad, are named, as well as sensible objects. Even the
instinctive search after proximate causes leads children to infer the
substantiality of _wind_ and the other invisible forms of matter; and
the spiritual senses inherent in the "Me," which is the most essential
of all substances, verifies the ideal world to children, as truly as the
bodily senses verify the material world, and even _more so_; for
children live in God before they _exist_ out of God. The Italian
philosopher Gioberti says that the soul is a _spiritual activity_; that
is, it sees God as the first act of its life. God says, "_Be thou_" and
the soul--before it is put into the sleep of nature (the deep sleep that
came upon Adam)--looks back and says, "_Thou art_." We have the memory
of this primeval vision, and act in our sense of holiness (wholeness?),
right, justice, pure love from the uncalculating delight of loving, the
ideals of beauty, and the sense of accountability to God and man, which
forever haunt us, sometimes giving us pain, as _remorse_, whose sting is
in the comparison of our outward manifested self with our inward sense
of "being increate" (as Milton expresses it). It is this supernatural
pre-intellectual _soul_ which distinguishes man from the animal
creation, and is symbolized by his form, which looks upward to the
symbol of infinity made by the sky, with which the human being
instinctively _communes_, and towards which the child wants to fly,--and
delights in and loves the birds, beyond all other forms of animal life,
because they _can_ fly. Gioberti goes on, in his psychology, to say that
when the soul, which has recognized its Divine Source as the first act
of its life, is put to sleep in nature, it is gradually waked up by the
individual forms of nature, which are so many syllables of the Divine
Word that are echoed in human words, which describe matter and its
evolutions; then the understanding begins, and (which is the point I
want you to observe especially at this moment) the words of even a very
young child soon bring to its understanding spiritual realities. And it
is the office of education to see that the relations of things,--the
laws of order among things,--the adjustment of external cause and
effect, be _accurately worded_; and especially that the _spiritual_
consciousness gets a happy symbolization; that is, that the best words
are used to _do justice_ to the Ideas of God and the sentiments of the
heart of man.

A materialistic educator (or no less a mere dogmatist in religion, who
does not see that the logical formulas and abstract terms of scientific
theology cannot possibly _wake up_ the primeval vision) may do an all
but infinite mischief to the character and heart, by the words he uses
in talking to children; and the theologian a greater mischief than the
materialist, because the forms and evolutions of matter are, as I have
said, _syllables of the Word_ that was in the beginning with God and, in
a certain sense, _God_, while the abstractions of the human mind are the
refuse of finite spirit, infinitely superficial, mere limitations of
thought which become stumbling-blocks to the mind when not used as
stepping-stones to new outlooks, or rather, inlooks. Never should
children be talked to in the language of theological science, but wholly
in imaginative symbolization, and the symbols should be chosen with
great care, and we should be on our guard against rousing the faculty of
abstraction which is a sleeping danger in the nature, whose premature
development is injurious in strict proportion to ignorance and
sensitiveness. The symbols of the spiritual should be human because
human consciousness involves substance outside the physical, and,
therefore, did the Word which had not been comprehended in its creation
of "everything which it had made," though "without it nothing was made,"
take flesh and dwell among us, in order that we might apprehend the
glory of God and perfection of man with our whole nature. That it would
do so, was the insight of the Hebrew genius, whenever by worthy
soul-action the law-giver, king, and whoever entered into "the liberty
of prophesying" was raised to the height of his nature. Now a child is
"on its being's height," "mighty prophet," "seer blest,"

          "On whom those truths do rest
           That we are toiling all our lives to find,"

and therefore a child can supply a substantial meaning to any name for
God adequate to awaken the living echo of the soul that

          "Cometh from afar
           Trailing clouds of glory from God,"

whose voice sent it forth, as Gioberti says, "to suffer and to be for a
season on earth."

I hope you follow me in my thought, for I think I am looking into the
child, which is the thing that ought to be done if one undertakes to
teach it. That the child really knows God before God is even named to
him is not a speculative theory with me but a fact of my experience. It
is one of my earliest remembrances, that I was sitting in the lap of a
young lady, whose name and countenance I have forgotten, who was
caressing me, and calling me sweet, beautiful, darling, etc., when all
at once she seized me into a closer embrace and exclaimed, rather than
asked, Who made you?

I remember my pleased surprise at the question, that I feel very sure
had never been addressed to my consciousness before. At once a Face
arose to my imagination,--only a Face and head,--close to me, and
looking upon me with the most benignant smile, in which the kindness
rather predominated over the intelligence; but it looked at me as if
meaning, "Yes, I made you, as you know very well." I was so thoroughly
satisfied, that I replied to the question decisively, "A man."

The lady said to another who sat near us, "Only think! this great girl
does not know who made her!"

I remember I was no less sure of my knowledge, notwithstanding she said
this. Though it was the first time I had thought God and given the name
"man" to the thought, it seemed not new to me. I had felt God before.

I _was_ a rather large girl, more than four years old, as I know from
the fact that we were living in a certain house, to which we went on my
fourth birthday. My next recollection is of going into a room of this
house, where my mother was sitting, working at an embroidery frame that
hung against the wall. I went up to her and said, "Mamma, Eliza asked me
who made me, and I told her a man, and she said he didn't!" I stated
this reply as a grievance and outrage.

Since I came to the age of reflection, I have always regretted the
conversation that followed. It was not judicious, and seems to me a
little out of character for my mother, who was of strong religious
sentiment and quick imagination, and all other conversation on religious
subjects that I remember of hers was very good. She was rather thrown
off her guard by my unexpected theology and lost her presence of mind. I
was her oldest child, and she had waited to see some enquiry raised
before speaking on the subject. I had seemed more stupid than I was, for
I belong by nature rather to the reflective than perceptive class, and
so had very little language. At this distance of time I cannot, of
course, remember the details of the conversation, but I came out of it
with another image of God in my mind, conveying not half so much of the
truth as did that kind Face, close up to mine, and seeming to be so
wholly occupied with His creature. The new image was of an old man,
sitting away up on the clouds, dressed in a black silk gown and cocked
hat, the costume of our old Puritan minister. He was looking down upon
the earth, and spying round among the children to see who was doing
wrong, in order to punish offenders by touching them with a long rod he
held in his hand, thus exposing them to everybody's censure. Of course
my mother said no such thing to me, but what she did say, by subtle
associations with the words she used, gave me this image, which I need
not say rather checked than promoted my spiritual advancement.

This experience has been of value to me as a teacher since, for it has
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]

When people ask me if kindergartning is not a method especially adapted
to German children, I reply that it seems to me to encounter as great
obstacles in that nationality as in any other. It is not a _national_
method, but the _human_ method; and I would remark in this place that it
strikes me as especially desirable for Irish children. The natural
predominance in them of fancy needs the check of accurate perception,
associated with accurate expression; accurate perception, first, of the
individuality of objects, their form, size, color, direction, their
mutual resemblances and contrasts, and the no less accurate perception
of their relations to each other and to the child. These things can only
be made objects of perception by children's being accustomed to _make_
things, which employ the activities that otherwise will play at random
and divert their attention from the matter in hand. In my observations
of Irish servants, I am struck with their never seeming to see what is
before their eyes, or to hear what is said to them, on account of the
predominance of their creative faculties. Accurate perception of the
things children play with, and successful manipulation of them to
produce effects, would also help them to moral integrity; for order
moralizes just in proportion as disorder demoralizes. Successful action
cures idle dissipation, while unsuccessful efforts discourage and
paralyze industry. Froebel wishes the child to be started at something
he can certainly accomplish, though perhaps not without direction in
words. When the child sees an effect produced by himself, he will repeat
it until he can produce the effect without direction, and, if asked,
will be delighted to show another child how he has done it. It is a
necessary step to put his action into words, and raises it from mere
mechanical into intellectual work; from Chinese imitation into European
and American invention. By and by, when he has learned a little
steadiness of attention by doing successfully what pleases his fancy, he
will make some motion of his own, and proceed according to the law of
symmetry (whose virtue he has learned) to discover and make new forms of
beauty and use; but he should still be carefully overlooked, and saved,
by timely suggestions, from making mistakes. These suggestions he will
crave and not resist, _if they are not peremptory_, but are put in the
form of a question, which seems to respect his power to choose, which is
his _personality_, the image of God within him. In proceeding in this
way, both teacher and child are led more and more to realize that there
is a mysterious third Being present, who is neither the teacher nor the
child, but in whom they meet, through whom they communicate, and who
gives the law they both must respect; that there is, in short, One "in
whom they live and move and have their being"; that is the God who
"worketh in them to will and to do"; that He enables them to create
beauty, not at random, but with a certain freedom which is not
lawlessness. He is the Creator of the Beauty they do not make, and of
the Good they love, and gives the Laws which they obey, and in obeying
become powers of good and inventors of beauty; for the laws of order are
truly God's thought revealed to their thought. To be active powers of
good and beauty is to be religious, and also to be free from
superstition; to love God instead of being afraid of Him; to make their
lives a reasonable service, and thus become free from priestcraft and
spiritual tyranny. Inefficiency, still more than ignorance, is the
mother of fetich worship, and reduces man to slavery; and to be
surrounded by natural and artistic beauty does not cultivate the mind,
unless it is already an active power. Reverie is not thinking. But the
mind can only become active by the electric touch of a sympathetic mind
which is already in motion. It is the destiny of men to become one in
that same sense that the Divine Father and Son are one. God has made
human communion a moral necessity, and does nothing for man, except by
the instrumentality of man. "By man came death, by man also cometh the
resurrection from the dead." In short, education, that "mysterious
communion of wisdom and innocence," is presupposed in reasonable
religion. I once heard an eloquent man, who was speaking of education,
say, "The Archangel is born upon earth; we may know him by the many
difficulties that he has found and surmounted, and his consequent power
to educate; for _education_ is the highest function of humanity in earth
and heaven, cementing the links of the chain of love which binds us all
to one another and to God." We are always either educating or hindering
the development of our fellow-creatures; we are always being uplifted or
being dragged down by our fellow-creatures. Education is always mutual.
The child teaches his parents (as Goethe has said) what his parents
omitted to teach him. Every child is a new thought of God, whose
individuality is significant and interesting to others, though it is his
own limitation; and to appreciate a child's individuality is the
advantage the teacher gets in exchange for the general laws which he
leads the child to appreciate. It is this variety of individuals that
makes the work of education fascinating, and takes from it all wearisome
monotony. Those persons who feel that education is wearisome work have
not learned the secret of it. I have never seen a good kindergartner who
was not as fond of the work as a painter of his painting, a sculptor of
his modelling. Teachers who are not conscious of learning from their
pupils, may be pretty sure they teach them very little.

It is because kindergartning is this true education, which is mutual
delight to the adult and the child, that I have faith it will prevail,
and its prevalence is my hope for humanity. By the infinite mercy of
God, no human being is hopeless of redemption into God's perfect image
at last; but humanity will not be redeemed as a whole,--will not become
the image of God, or live the life of God,--until little children are
suffered to go unto Christ while they are yet of the kingdom of heaven,
and are blessed from the first and continually, by those who shall take
them in their arms to bless them. Those are only perfect kindergartners
who are "hidden in Christ," receiving every child in his name, and
humbly learning of them the secrets of greatness in the kingdom of
heaven, which is to be established on earth. Kindergartning is not a
craft, it is a religion; not an avocation, but a vocation from on High.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] For details of manipulating the gifts and occupations, see _The
Florence Handbook_, published by Milton Bradley; or Mrs. Kraus-Boelte's
_Manual in Eight Parts_, which is being published by Steiger.




LECTURE V.

LANGUAGE.


TEACHING, which in the common sense of the word is the suggestion of
thoughts by words, is not the kindergartner's special work, but the _a
priori_ process of drawing out into the individual consciousness of a
child those latent powers whose free activity gives him conscious
relations, first, with his kind; secondly, with material nature,
including his own body; and, thirdly, with God. He is unconsciously in
this threefold relation already, but to become conscious of these
relations severally, in his own growth builds up the human
understanding, which is not born with him like his sensibility and force
of will. The human understanding, a creation in time of the free will,
creates language as the element of a life not shared with animals; an
intellectual life using the symbolism of nature as a means of
intercommunication, and which is correspondent and bearing a relation to
its creator, man, similar to the relation of the material universe to
God, being in both instances an image, as in a mirror, of what is
necessary and immutable in the self-consciousness, though without entity
itself. Hence, as the material universe expresses the wisdom of God,
human languages express the imperfect wisdom of man. Language is the
element in which the intellectual nature makes a sphere wherein to live
and move and have its being. What breath is to the material body, making
man alive in nature, language is to the social body, making it alive in
history.

A word is both spiritual and material, being an articulate form of the
voice which, as Goethe has happily said, is the nearest spiritual of
our bodily powers, taking significance from the articulating organs,
which are symbolical, like everything else in material nature, which, as
I said before, is but an image, as reflected in a mirror, without
absolute entity, but bearing witness of an entity progressively
apprehended by the finite spirits of men, who are the children of the
Infinite Spirit inheriting creative power forevermore.

The _in_articulate sound of the voice is the scream of pain or the shout
of joy, mutually intelligible to all human hearts; and this aerial basis
of language continues to be more or less intelligible to all souls, when
modulated as in poetry into melody and rhythm by emotion and character.
The first human language was, perhaps, music of the deepest character,
of which phase there is historic trace in the spoken Chinese, which has
been perishing for ages on the lips of a nation whose origin is lost in
the depths of antiquity. This spoken language is monosyllabic, and even
the initial consonant often only a semivowel, while the whole word takes
its significance from the _tone_ of the vowel; thus _lu_ in a low tone
would have one meaning, LU in the tone of a musical third another
meaning, and so on as the tone ascends through the octave. The inception
of such a language implies an original equipoise of a brain not yet
despoiled of its first vigor through moral delinquency which is incident
to the freedom to will of a finite spirit, and consequently the Chinese
language was inevitably lost. It would be interesting to enquire if
those rare individuals among the Chinese who are expert in the spoken
Chinese, are not of finest musical temperament.

Not till after thinking had begun could articulation by the organs of
speech begin. Thinking is the free individual act which associates the
mind's activity and the sensibility of the heart with material things,
and must precede the use of words.

A time comes to every intelligent child when it wonders how words
should express thoughts. Victorious analysis has never yet penetrated
the whole mystery of language to the complete satisfaction of men,
though I think philologists and metaphysicians are on the way to it, and
have reached some fundamental facts. For instance, that _in_significant
sounds and articulations could not make significant words, and that
vocal sounds (vowels) get their meaning from feeling, while
articulations get theirs from the symbolism of the organs of speech.

The organs of speech are, first, the throat,--as the guttural organ is
called in English because through it we take our food and send forth our
voice,--is _out of sight_, _covered up_, _hidden_, the _central_ point
where the voice starts; secondly, the lips, which are obvious, movable,
parallel; thirdly, our teeth, against which the voice strikes, are hard,
stiff, and dead in comparison with the flexible lips, and the tongue
which connects all together, the voice rolling over it and hardly
articulated. Hence the hard _c_ and _g_, and the rough aspirate _h_ are
factors in all words signifying the beginning of self-originating motion
(observe _go_ and _kick_, or _cause to go_), the causal, the central,
covered, hidden; while the labials, _p_, _b_, _f_, _v_, are factors in
all words expressing obviously moving phenomena; and the dentals, _d_,
_t_, _s_, _z_, found in words expressive of stiff, hard, dead phenomena
(the word _death_ is all but identical with the word _teeth_);
separation and number being expressed by _s_ and _z_, which are made by
throwing the vocal breath out between the separated teeth. The liquids
_r_ and _l_, _r_ being also a factor of words expressing indefinite
beginning, (as _original_, _auroral_, _arise_, etc.) are made by the
voice moving over the tongue more or less energetically, to express
movements whose difference of energy is exemplified in the words _fry_
and _fly_, _grow_ and _glow_, _M_ closes the lips without preventing the
continuous sound of the voice from being heard; and _n_, negating
limitation by throwing the breath (or voice) out at the nose, symbolize
respectively the positive and negative aspects of Infinity.

Of course I am giving only a hint in order to define what I mean when I
say significant words are not made out of insignificant sounds, and that
articulated sounds get their meaning from the symbolism of the organs of
speech.

The historical origin of language is lost in the depths of antiquity,
when the human race was yet in that equipoise of mind, heart, and
self-activity, which in the process of evolution is only progressively
recovered by the free agent, it being the office of education to restore
it.

The infant (that is, the _non-speaking_ child) in vision of the Eternal,
only gradually becomes aware of the succession of time. For, as Mr.
Emerson sings in his Sphinx song,--

          "The babe by its mother
           Lies bathed in joy,
           _Glide its hours uncounted_."

And Wordsworth says of "the little child,--"

          "On whom those truths do rest,
           That we are toiling all our lives to find;"

          "By the vision splendid
           The youth is still attended;"

and

          "Shades of the prison-house begin to close
           Upon the growing boy,
           Yet he beholds the light and whence it flows;
           He sees it in his joy:
           At length the man perceives it die away,
           And fade into the light of common day."

But this fall from the Ideal is not what Calvinistic theology declares
it to be, reprobation either intellectual or spiritual!

          "Oh, joy that in our embers
           Is something that doth live,
           That nature yet remembers
           What was so fugitive."

True education shall lead out the imprisoned spirit, growingly conscious
of individuality, by means of the symbolism of the prison-house itself
which is that correlation of necessary forces we call the material
universe.

The material universe, as I have already said, is the symbolization of
everything in God except his creativeness which is the spiritual essence
that he shares with Humanity, his only-begotten Son. It is the body of
God, and human language is the body of individualized Humanity, whose
imperfections correspond with its various partial developments and
short-comings. And it is ever growing towards perfection in the form of
poetry, bearing witness to the creativeness (or genius) of man
forevermore. As breath is to the material body, keeping men alive in
nature, so language is to the social body, keeping individuals alive in
history and literature; and as the material universe is symbolical of
God's wisdom, so the echoes of the universe tossed from the lips of men
are symbolic images of the wisdom of man. Language, in short, being of
both natures, spiritual and material, makes an elemental sphere for the
intellectual life, beyond the material; in short, makes a metaphysical
world, in which the finite and infinite spirits commune with other
finite spirits and with the Infinite One; for by words every minutest
shade of individual consciousness may be communicated from one finite
mind to another, making not only an immortal communion of men possible,
but a communion of God and Humanity also that shall have no end. Heaven
and earth pass away, but the Word of the Lord endureth forever.

But I must not be tempted into philosophizing farther upon language at
present, precisely because it takes us into the deepest mysteries of
speculative thought, and our business with it now is practical, and
concerns the nursery and kindergarten processes of culture.

Looking at it superficially, speech is an imitative art, and so far as
our experience goes, is always taught by elders to the young generation
empirically. This teaching of the mother-tongue in the nursery is an
immensely important thing, because it carries on the development of the
understanding towards the fulness of Reason (which is seeing particular
things in their proportionate relation to the whole).

In the whole course of a child's education, nothing is done which so
much involves the totality of his activity as his learning to talk. For
to talk presupposes observation, discrimination, memory, fancy,
understanding. The first three (observation, discrimination, and memory)
are nearly passive reactions from sensuous impressions. But fancy and
understanding are creative acts of the human spirit, almost defying
analysis. In fancy, the mind acts quite reckless and even defiant of
nature's laws and order. In understanding, it observes and uses them
subjectively. That children delight in using words to name things in the
order of nature, and to express qualities and relations in connection,
making an echo-picture within of what they see without, is not so
wonderful as the exaltation of delight produced by a story which is, as
it were, triumphant over nature's laws, and reckless of its order; and
the shocks of laughter with which they catch at a grotesque and
impossible combination of images made in their fancy by means of words.
The predominance of fanciful talk to children which seems to be
instinctive with all peoples, everywhere, is an indication that fancy is
as legitimate an activity as understanding, to say the least. It seems
to me to be an evidence of our being begotten directly by the creative
spirit, sons of a divine Father, who is the complex of Infinite Love,
Infinite Wisdom, and Infinite Power, of which our human feeling, power
of thinking, and executive ability are the shadow, or rather a living
image.

Both fancy and understanding are developed in time by words. We all know
how children are waked up and delighted by Mother Goose absurdities,
and still more by fairy stories that seem to set at naught the facts and
override the laws of nature. It is a stubborn fact, of which
materialistic positivists afford us no explanation, and which I commend
to the consideration of Mr. Mansell, and whoever else talks of the
limitations of religious thought. And I think it will be found that
children who are talked to by Mother Goose and fairy-story tellers learn
to talk more quickly than others, and have more vivacity of mind
generally, with a power of entering into the minds of others
commensurate with their sensibility, and justifying the human sympathies
which are often a burden to the unimaginative, who are nevertheless
kind. A great deal of the misunderstanding of others which causes
unnecessary pain and social bitterness, checking generous furtherance of
one another's good purposes, arises from want of saliency of
imagination, preventing us from being able to put ourselves in another's
place. And of course it is not without the highest reason that the
Father of our Spirits has given fancy the advantage of the first start
in our mental process. That fancy precedes understanding in our
psychological history cannot be denied by any nice observer. I have
known some parents who would not use Mother Goose or fairy stories with
their children, but substituted therefor amusing experiments in
physics,--the metamorphosis of insects and the classification of plants
according to their differences. Their children became scientific when
they grew up, were fine mathematicians, and were interested in
mechanical inventions and natural history; but took comparatively little
interest in political and moral problems, though not at all wanting in
the social and patriotic affections, which also characterized their
parents, who were themselves brought up on the imaginative system not
well modified by studies of nature's phenomena, which was probably the
reason of their strong reaction from the imaginative method.

But I have known as intimately some other parents who made predominant,
perhaps extreme use of Mother Goose and fairy literature. Their children
much earlier and more completely got command of all the resources of
language, had a tendency to art, especially literary art, in their own
activity, and were earlier interested in human history, and all
varieties of human experience reflected in the literature of nations;
but perhaps were slower in attaining practical ability for life's
labors. Each direction of education has its advantages and disadvantages
in the religious relation, and I think it is the better way to mingle
them, especially at the early period of the kindergarten, where the
objective point is to cultivate the understanding, which needs that we
should appreciate the facts and order of external nature as the exponent
of God's wisdom. This will chasten and give substantiality to the
creative action of the human fancy, which is never to be snubbed, but
gently entreated to be reasonable, or we shall have Caliban instead of
Ariel or Prospero, as I have said before.

I cannot find out whether Froebel has anywhere expressed himself
distinctly on this point. There are certainly no grotesque images and no
fairy stories in the mother's prattle with her children over pictures,
and in the out-door walks which are suggested in the _Mütterspiele und
Köse-Lieder_; but children are led to recognize the poetical symbolism
of nature, and its invisible and impalpable substances and forces; the
invisible forces of air, heat, and light are used to lead them out from
the world of matter towards the more substantial spiritual world where
the soul meets and communes with God, the omnipresent Spirit to be
apprehended only by the spirit within us, whose organs are ideas.[9]

In the kindergarten, as in the nursery, children learn language by using
it empirically. To utilize their love of talking as they play is what is
first to be done by the kindergartner. The things seen and done give a
clear definition and precise significance to the words used, which
become the stepping-stones of the mind, by which it mounts up from the
sensuous ground of the understanding into the heaven of invention and
imaginative art, plastic and heroic; and thence to communion with God.
But before children are put to reading, before proceeding from things
through thoughts, and from spiritual experiences through ideas to their
vocal signs, and from vocal signs to their written or printed
representations, it is wise to consider the signs themselves. I do not
mean to go deeply into etymologies or anything that is abstract. It is
not doing so, for instance, to ask children what is the difference
between the words _see_ and _look_. (Can you see without looking? Can
you look without seeing?) It gives precision to the understanding to
discriminate what are often called synonymes, but which seldom mean
precisely the same thing, unless, in our _potpourri_ of a language they
are mere translations, as for instance _morsel_ and _bit_, respective
derivatives from the Latin _morsum_ and the English _bitten_. The little
English-speaking child should not be troubled with the derivation of
_morsel_, but is pleased to be called to notice that of _bit_. We must
be guided here by Froebel's rule of proceeding from the known to the
unknown, and not endeavor to plunge children into the unknown without a
clue.

That children understand and use figurative language readily, shows that
without going out of their childish world we can define symbolic
expression to some degree, and this is a means of regulating fancy. But
I must take another opportunity to speak of the method of doing
this.[10] I can now only affirm that unless children could signify by
words not merely their impressions of material things and their
correlations, but their feelings and thoughts, it would be impossible
for the religious education to be begun in the nursery, or to be
carried on in the kindergarten, as Froebel proposes it shall be.

It is only by naming to the child his own intuition of creative being or
cause, or rather by leading the child to name it, that the understanding
is started upon the religious thinking which is necessary to keep pure
from superstition his religious feeling, while his blind sense of God is
changing from an undefined intuition of the heart into a definite
thought of the mind, which change Froebel would have take place very
early. But this is the most delicate region of consciousness to enter,
and we must take great care that we do not profane instead of
consecrating the process by what we do and say. Words that are adequate
and living names for the spiritual intuition of a very present God,
generate spiritual thoughts in natural relation with them. And this
reminds me of a circumstance in the mental history of Laura Bridgeman,
illustrative of what I mean.

This poor child was deprived, when two years old, of her sight and
hearing, and partially of taste and smell, by the scarlet fever, which
left her but one avenue of knowledge of material things,--the sense of
touch. But through that the practical benevolence of Dr. Howe won a way
to her imprisoned spirit, and opened communication of thought with her
by means of words; and she even learned to read in the raised type for
the blind. The whole story is immensely interesting and important to any
teacher. She had been taught enough of the properties of matter to be
able to work on and with _things_, and moral science could be taught her
through her own and others' activity; but how was she to be taught about
God and spiritual things? Dr. Howe reserved to himself to speak to her
of God, forbidding all others to do so, and watched for his opportunity.

My sister Sophia went over to the asylum to model Laura's bust, and one
day asked her teacher (who was with her always) to translate into spoken
words the conversation that she saw was passing between them by means
of the hand language. Very soon occurred the following:--

_Laura._ I want to go to walk.

_Teacher._ You cannot go to-day, because it rains.

_Laura._ Who makes it rain?

Instead of making a direct reply, the teacher went on to explain how
moisture exhaled from the earth by the action of the sun, and was
collected in masses which were called clouds, and when the clouds were
so full as to be heavier than the air, it fell to the earth in drops of
rain.

Laura said, reverently, "God is very full."

The teacher was startled, and said, "Who told you about God?"

_Laura._ No one told me. The Doctor is going to tell me about him when I
know more words. But I think about God all times.

The teacher said to my sister, "This is very important," and went to
tell the Doctor, who was a good deal moved, but found himself at
somewhat of a loss. That evening he came to a little gathering at our
house to talk about it. He said that nearly a year before, if not
longer, Laura had come upon the word _God_ in her reading, and
immediately stopped and asked the meaning of the word. According to his
directions, she was then sent to him, and he was so anxious not to do
any harm, especially not to frighten her with the idea of Infinite Power
(which is the main element of our conception of God, even eighteen
hundred years after Christ's manifestation of Infinite _Love_), that he
was embarrassed, and said to her that she did not yet know other words
enough to explain the word _God_, but when she had learned more words,
he would tell her, and meanwhile he wished she would not ask any one
else. But now he was pondering what was the best way to proceed. I
suggested that perhaps Laura could teach him more than he could teach
her about God, and asked what was the sentence in which she had found
the word. But this he had never known. It was then suggested that
probably the word had explained itself, for no sentence could possibly
contain the word, not even in an exclamation, that would not suggest to
such a perfectly clear thinking mind as Laura had always shown, the fact
of supreme love or wisdom. The company present proved this by trying to
make sentences. I do not know what he finally concluded to do or say to
Laura. I think certainly that the true way would have been to have drawn
her out, and according to what she said or seemed to need, to have
shaped whatever teaching he had to give, taking great care not to negate
any of her positive assertions; for we could not doubt that God was
manifesting himself to the imagination of her heart, if not yet in the
forms of the human understanding.

If I had known how to use the hand language, I would have solicited the
privilege of going to learn what this hermit soul could have told me
before it was darkened by our traditional theology, which did not
originate in children,--

          "On whom those truths do rest
           That we are toiling all our lives to find,"

but in the minds of old sinners who had lost the original purity of soul
that "sees God." "I think about God all times!" How interesting it would
be to know exactly what she thought! That it was nothing terrific or
painful was evident from her habitual mood, which was even joyous. So
careful had the Doctor been to educate every bodily and mental activity,
that she had none of that discouragement, inelasticity, and indolence of
mind, which comes of want of success in childish effort. A genial,
educating assistance was always around her, but careful not to weaken
her by doing anything for her that she could learn to do for herself.
Obstacles, therefore, only stimulated her efforts, and so delightful was
her sense of overcoming them, that, for instance, she would laugh
exultingly when sewing if her thread became knotted, or if in anything
she was doing there was some little difficulty to be surmounted. Her
faith in herself seemed never to have been broken; but she rested on the
fulcrum of Infinite God, in whom she "lives and moves and has her
being."

The only thing we ought to do in the religious nurture of childhood is
to _preserve_ this faith which comes from the child's seeing G

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