Letters to a mother on the philosophy of Froebel

Front matter

Letters to a mother on the philosophy of

3 1924 013 392 901

The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library.

Author's Preface

The preface to Symbolic Education contains a promise of which the present volume is a partial fulfillment, although upon further reflection I have abandoned my original plan of publication. All kindergartners who love and appreciate the Mother- Play will realize that it needs more extended comment than that plan provided for, and will, I hope, accept this book as an attempt to show how each motto, song, and commentary should be studied.

As these letters may fall into the hands of some readers not familiar with the Mother-Play, it seems well to mention that they deal with comparatively few of the subjects discussed in that remarkable book. They will do most good to those in whom they quicken a resolution to master not only the Mother-Play, but all the works of Froebel.

There is an old superstition that no arrow goes

straight to its mark unless it has been dipped in the

xvii

Xtiii LETTERS TO A MOTHER.

marksman's blood. The study of the Mother-Play has taught me truths through which, had I known them when I most needed them, I might have avoided many errors and been spared much sorrow. With the hope that my book may help others to avoid my own mistakes, I commit it to the generous judgment of readers, many of whom are already my friends.

Susan E. Blow.

Avon, December 21, 1898.

Contents

LETTER PAGE

I. — Heart insight 1

II. — Self-making 35

Letter I. Heabt Insight

FALLING! FALLING!

MOTTO.

A game to strengthen the whole body. All a mother does or says

Is inspired by thoughtful love.

"Falling! felling!" she is playing, But her hand the fall is staying, So her love to prove.

To her child her life is given,

Thought, and word, and deed, and prayer ; And her hold, an instant broken, To his mind is but a token

Of her constant care.

Soon her arms must loose their hold,

Not, as now, in pretty play — Keeping still their circle round him, That no jar or fright may wound him —

But for all the day.

And for this, her thought and love

Must his little life prepare ;

Teaching first how she is needed,

That through her fond cautions heeded

He may learn self-care.

Henrietta E. Eliot.

SONG. • Down goes baby, Mother's pet ; Up comes baby, Laughing yet.

Baby well may laugh at harm, While beneath is mother's arm.

Down goes baby, Without fear ; Up comes baby, Gayly here.

All is joy for baby while In the light of mother's smile.

Emilie Poulbson.

Your letter, dear old friend, is in the imperative mood. You set my duty so clearly before me that I dare neither evade nor postpone it. So here begins the first of a series of letters upon the Mother-Play. Others shall follow as fast as I have time and strength to write them. I hope they may aid you to bring up my godson in the way he should go, and I shall also try to make them helpful to your sister Helen in her work with the children in her kindergarten.

As I write, I seem to see you and your dear little Harold before me, and recollections of my last long visit to you crowd upon my mind. Do you remember the morning you made your first experiment with the Falling Game, and how happy you were when, after a few repetitions of the play, your boy's look of fear and anxiety changed to one of delight? Do you remember for how many weeks the minutes devoted to this game were the liveliest of our day; how after a time Master Harold found the Falling Play tame, and reserved his crows of delight for the Tossing Game, and how, without a sign of fear, he would let his papa toss him high in the air? Do you remember his advance from the Tossing Game to the Jumping Game, and with what confidence he sprang from the high mantle into your outstretched arms? If these pictures stand out in your memory as they do in mine, they will interpret the first scene in Iroebel's drama of infancy far better than it can be interpreted by any words. Indeed, all that Froebel ever asks of mothers is to watch their own instinctive play, and define to themselves its latent motives.*

Ask yourself, therefore, what impulse incited you to play the Falling Game. Was it not a long-

* The reader must not understand that I am recommending mothers to play the Jumping and Tossing games, both of which are dangerous for babies. I refer to them in order to show that maternal instinct has always played upon the strings which Froebel touches in the Falling Game. He has selected the one play of this type which is free from danger.

ing to speed the moment when Harold should look into your face with recognizing eyes, when faith should spring up in his heart to meet the love in yours, and when the physical union between you and your baby should be transfigured into a union of hearts? Answer these questions, and then read in Froebel's song the lines:

" Baby well may laugh at harm While beneath is mother's arm,"

and you will hold in your thought the key to the Falling Game. Some of the many doors this key unlocks I shall try to show you in this letter.

It has interested me to observe that, differing in this respect from every other game in the book, Falling-Tailing implies no manifestation of the child as its point of departure, but springs unsolicited from the mother's heart. Love working from above downward is the condition of faith striving from below upward, and Froebel is hinting at rich depths of thought and experience when he begins his book with the picture of maternal devotion outrunning all appeal and seeking to call forth an answer to itself.

Understood as a typical experience, the lesson of the Falling Game is that the nurture of childhood must be rooted and grounded in faith. If this truth seem to you so self-evident that you doubt the necessity of stating it, look within and around you, and you will find that every day and every hour force upon you instances of its violation. Do you know no parents who attempt to guide their children by explaining and justifying their own commands? Do you not know others who rule by mere brute force? Can you deny that you are yourself constantly betrayed into adopting one or the other of these false and futile methods? Are you clearly conscious that the method of force means to its victims a life oscillating between slavery and anarchy, while the method of explanation fosters irreverence and conceit, and is practically an appeal to the ignorant and inexperienced child to sit in judgment upon the actions of his parents?

According to Kousseau, the method of appeal to childish reason was the one upheld by Locke. It may be questioned whether in this matter he did justice to the English reformer, but his strictures upon the method itself are admirable. "Mr. Locke's maxim," he writes, " was to educate children by reasoning with them, and it is that which is now most in vogue. The success of it, however, doth not appear to recommend it, and, for my own part, I meet with no children so silly and ridiculous as those with whom much argument hath been held. Of all the faculties of man, that of reason, which is, in fact, only a compound of all the rest, unfolds itself the latest, and with the greatest difficulty; and yet this is what we would make use of to develop the first and easiest of them. The great end of a good education is to form a reasonable man, and we pretend to educate a child by the means of reason! This is beginning where we should leave off, and making an implement of the work we are about."

The antithesis to government by argument and explanation is government by force, and, as I have said, parents who avoid the former error are often betrayed into the latter. In like manner Rousseau, reacting against Locke, announces as the first principle of control that the child " be made sensible that he is weak and you are strong, and that from your situation and his he lies necessarily at your mercy. Let him know this fact, and early feel on his aspiring crest the hard yoke Nature hath imposed on man. By this method you will render his disposition patient, equable, resigned, and peaceable."

From the ninety degraded children whom he mothered at Stanz the gentle Pestalozzi learned that not in force and not in appeals to reason, but in quickening faith must be sought the point of contact between the nurturing and the nurtured life. His experience is a classic one in the history of educational reform, and from its theoretical outcome, as given in his most important book, How Gertrude Teaches her Children, I have often thought Froebel may have received the impulse which flowered into the Mother-Play. But be this as it may, the Palling Game condenses into one revealing example the whole range of experience described by Pestalozzi, and defining to the mother her own elemental impulse enables her to discover consciously the true point of departure for the nurture of childhood.

Faith presupposes experience. Baby is frightened when he begins to play the Falling Game; he learns to trust the mother's arm because he finds it strong. In like manner he must learn to trust her wisdom and her love. He can not believe in them if they do not exist; he can only half believe them

8 LBTTEES TO A MOTHER.

if they are inconsistent and vacillating. Hence Froebel's insistence upon the need of a mother's being all she would have her children believe her to be, and the solemn warnings which he introduces into his commentaries on Beckoning the Pigeons, and the Knights and the Bad Child. We fail to inspire faith because we fail to deserve it, and a regenerate motherhood is the one indispensable condition of a regenerate childhood.

If you can win and hold Harold's faith, you will find that you have practically solved the problem of nurture. For if he trusts you he will obey you; he will hide nothing from you; he will not resent your punishments, and when he asks you questions whose true answers are beyond his comprehension he will humbly accept your simple statement that they can not be explained to him until he is older. The conversation between mother and child iu Froebel's commentary on the Weathervane is conceived in this spirit, and presupposes a firmly tethered cord of faith.

While the Falling Song accentuates trust in the mother, the motto and commentary expressly state that the object of the game is the nurture and development of force. Is there then a contradiction between the song and the commentary, and if not, what is the tie which binds together the seemingly contradictory statements? Look again into your own heart, and observe if it be not always faith which inspires the effort through which strength is won. If the answer is not conclusive, seek the verdict of that larger experience of which your own is but a fragment. Kecall those heart-inspired words, " Frederick, is God dead? " with which old Sojourner Truth revived the dying courage of Fred Douglass. Remind yourself of the noblest motto which has sprung from our national system of universal suffrage : " One with God is a majority." Send your imagination backward through the centuries and call forth the image of the great defender of Christian truth defying triumphant heresy with the words " Athanasius against the world! " Remember how hordes of faithless Christians fled before Saracen armies inspired by the words of the Koran: " O true believers, if ye assist God in fighting for his religion he will assist you against your enemies." Picture Luther summoned to the Diet of Worms, warned by anxious friends to disobey the summons, declaring stoutly, " "Were there as many devils in "Worms as there are roof tiles I would on," and revealing the secret of his courage in his paraphrase of the 46th Psalm. Listen to the Huguenots singing as they march into battle, " The truth of the Lord endureth forever," and hear the same words shouted by Cromwell and his soldiers at Dunbar. Ask yourself why the ancient Israelites and the English Puritans are the most resolute and unyielding personalities known to history, and read the answer written in their every word and deed that it was because they believed themselves to be fighting with and for the eternal and unconquerable Power "which makes for righteousness." The secret of strength is always the same, and the very words of our Falling Song,

" Baby well may laugh at harm While beneath is mother's arm,"

are but one feeble echo of the faith which has nerved the heroes of all ages: "The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms." V

Froebel had insight into the " fine secret that' little explains large and large little." Hence he discerned how the child out of weakness is made strong. The Falling, Jumping, Tossing Games

HEART INSIGHT. n

are baby's first acts of faith. Waxing faith nerves him to totter toward his mother's outstretched arms. Later it is again faith which inspires him to attempt the task she believes he can do, and attack the problem she believes he can solve. Trusting her trust in him he puts forth all his strength, and through faith-inspired effort wins strength and self-reliance. It is one of the happy paradoxes of spirit that without dependence there can be no independence, and that precisely in proportion to our faith will be our intellectual and moral activity. All individual relationships and all corporate life rest upon pillars of faith. Children must trust parents, the husband must trust his wife, friend must trust friend, we must all trust the tradesman with whom we deal, the corporations and officials upon whose care depends our safety in travel, the physician to whose integrity, skill, and devotion we appeal in illness, the lawyer to whom we submit vexed questions of justice; the economic system upon which depends the fair participation of each man in the labor of all men; the government which orders and protects other institutions; the church, which discerns, declares, and develops in individual consciousness the ideals which have created our special type of family life, our forms of civil society, and our republican state.

You need only recall our studies of Dante to revive your realizing sense of the truth that faith is the beating heart of the body corporate. What a revelation it was to us when we understood why the circles of fraud were placed lower in the Inferno than the circles of violence ! Were robbery, tyranny, murder, suicide really less heinous offences than flattery, hypocrisy, thieving, simony, and political prostitution? Was fraud so hateful to God because it "dissevers the bond of love which Nature makes," and striking at combination breaks the tie that unites the world? Was treachery the blackest of sins because it not only loosed the tie of universal brotherhood, but sundered the closer and more spiritual cords woven by free choices of the will? Was all sin in essence the attack of will upon will, and was violence a sin of less degree than fraud because its attack was merely external? Was fraud the slaughter of will by will, the murder of spirit by spirit? Conversely, if faith were the living cord which bound all individuals into one great humanity, and made possible the hierarchy of human institutions, was not the nurture of faith the beginning of all true education, and was it not tlie prime duty of the educator to win faith by deserving it?

You will remember how with whole hearts we learned to affirm these truths as we studied the great poet who has painted every deed of man in the perspective of its consequences, but I think you will agree with me that we did not in those old days fully realize that faith in fellowmen is as necessary to our intellectual as it is to our ethical life. How very few of the myriad objects in the world does any one individual have the opportunity to perceive! How misleading must be his perceptions even of these numerically insignificant objects unless by comparing his own results with those of others he learns to subtract the errors and exaggerations he has unwittingly contributed. A child's unguided examination of the simplest object will almost invariably center about non-essential qualities, and leading him to search for essential qualities simply means that you are helping him to correct his own perceptions, by the perceptions and reflections of others. We depend upon reports of our fellowmen for by far the greater part of our knowledge of sensible objects, and it is also through our fellows that we learn to perceive aright even the few with which we come into immediate contact. Unless we believed their reports we should not try to verify them. So rising to higher planes of mental activity it is because we believe that men are able to draw from experience valid inferences, and to discover beneath experience valid presuppositions, that we exert our powers of understanding and strive to recreate their insights. In their light we see light, and through seeing our intellectual eye grows strong. Evidently, therefore, faith is both the condition of mental enlargement and the source of mental activity.*

The dialectic of faith forces us to higher planes of thought, and I want you now to consider that the active pursuit of knowledge has a root deeper even than trust in f ellowmen. Have you ever wondered why Asia has no science? or connected this defect with the fact that to the Oriental mind Nature is Maia or illusion — a phenomenon without a noumenon, a manifestation without any essence which it manifests? The apparent universe is only an evil dream. Why, then, give oneself the trouble to learn anything aboiit it. Rather let the

* Psychologic Foundations of Education, by W. T. Harris, Int. Edu. Series, pp. 74, 75.

HEAET INSIGHT. 15

devout mind waken from its nightmare and learn the restful truths that Brahma is nothingness and Nirvana extinction.

We owe to Professor Huxley a candid admission of the fact that all science presupposes belief in the reality and intelligibility of Nature. In his view, " the one act of faith in the convert to science is confession of the universality of order, and the absolute validity in all times and under all circumstances of the law of causation." Differently stated, we search for law and order in Nature because we believe they will be found there, and to believe that law and order exist in Nature is implicitly to affirm that Nature is the product of an ordering intelligence. Sir John Herschel once said, " It is but reasonable to regard the force of gravitation as the direct or indirect result of a consciousness or will existing somewhere." His remark applies not only to all forces, but to all laws which are really only the forms under which forces act, and unless we are ready to admit that scienec is merely a " lucid madness occupied in tabulating its own necessary hallucinations," we must recognize in the outer world the expression of an outer mind. All poetry, art, and philosophy imply the same truth, and it was because Greece attained first to the faith and later to the insight that there is a personal core to the universe, that she became the fountain head of these highest forms of spiritual activity.

I have said nothing about faith as the prompting motive of religion, both because in this sphere its paramount importance is generally admitted, and because I believe that by recognizing its power in other domains of life we shall the more readily understand why without faith it is impossible to please God. Is there a keener stab than distrust, and if we who merit only partial faith are so hurt by doubt what must He feel who alone is worthy of absolute confidence? God has been called "the great Misunderstood," and we begin to comprehend His eternal cross and passion when we reflect that every doubt is a mortal thrust at the heart of love.

I said in the beginning of this letter that faith presupposes experience. I must now add that it is a generous venture of the soul beyond experience. It is the divination of a secret of which all experience is but a partial disclosure. It is the active instinct of sonship and brotherhood. It is heart insight, an impulsive leap of the individual toward the universal spirit, and by its very nature it points toward the perfect communion of man with man and of humanity with God. It is the afferent and efferent nerve of the soul — the electric line over which spiritual life is both communicated and discharged. Waxing faith means a heightened receptivity to inflowing divinity — waning faith means the rupture of the individual from his own abysmal self, and hence the shrinkage of his powers and the shriveling of his life.

Do you see whither my letter is tending? If faith is the miracle by which the soul invades the realm of miracles, if it is the core of love and friendship, if it incites activity, develops force, and creates heroes, if it originates "and sustains institutions and is the antecedent condition of literature, science, art, and religion, if, finally, it seeks and justifies its own presuppositions in philosophy, then may it not be because the little child possesses in larger measure than the man that ardor of trust which overleaps the strict bounds of evidence that we are enjoined to learn from him how to enter the kingdom of heaven, and conversely, must not the terminus ah quo of child nurture be sought in that primordial impulse of motherhood which seeks to awaken faith? It seems to me Pestalozzi and Froebel have given no higher proof of their wisdom than in their recognition of this impulse as the point of departure for education, and if you will bear with a very long letter I should like to give you Pestalozzi's insight in his own touching words:

" I am unwilling to bring these letters to an end without touching on what I may call the keystone of my whole system. Is the love of God encouraged by these principles, which I hold to be the only sound basis for the development of humanity?

" Once again I look into my own heart for an answer to my question, and ask myself: ' How does the idea of God take root in my soul? Whence comes it that I believe in God, that I abandon myself to Him, and feel happy when I love Him and trust Him, thank Him and obey Him? '

" Then I soon see that the sentiments of love^ trust, gratitude, and obedience must first exist in my heart before I can feel them for God. I must love men, trust them, thank them, and obey them, before I can rise to loving, thanking, trusting, and obeying God. ' For he who loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love his Father in heaven, whom he hath not seen? '

" I next ask myself, ' How is it that I come to love men, to trust them, to thank them, and obey them? How do these sentiments take root in my heart? ' And I find that it is principally through the relations which exist between a mother and her infant child.

" The mother must care for her child, feed it, protect it, amuse it. She can not do otherwise; her strongest instincts impel her to this course. And so she provides for its needs, and in every possible way makes up for its powerlessness. Thus the child is cared for and made happy, and the first seed of love is sown within him.

" Presently the child's eyes fall on something he has never yet seen; seized with wonder and fear, he utters a cry; his mother presses him to her bosom, plays with him, diverts his attention, and his tears cease, though his eyes long remain wet. Should the unfamiliar object be seen again, the mother shelters the child in her arms, and smiles at him as before. This time, instead of crying, he answers his mother's smile by smiling himself, and the first seed of trust is sown.

" His mother runs to his cradle at his least sign; if he is hungry, she is there; if thirsty, she satisfies him; when he hears her step, he is content; when he sees her, he stretches out his hand and fastens his eyes upon her bosom; to him his mother' and the satisfaction of his hunger are one and the same thing; he is grateful.

" These germs of love, trust, and gratitude soon develop. The child knows his mother's step; he smiles at her shadow; he loves whatever is like her; a creature of the same appearance as his mother is, in his eyes, a good creature. Those whom his mother loves, he loves; those whom she kisses, he kisses. This smile at the likeness of his mother is a smile at humanity, and the seed of brotherly love, the love of his fellowmen, is sown.

" Such are the first elements of moral development awakened by a mother's relations with her infant. They are also the elements of religious development, and it is by faith in its mother that the child rises to faith in God."

Credo ut intelligam, wrote St. Anselm, and his confession not only suggests the process by which religious truth is apprehended, but has a range of meaning coextensive with our entire spiritual activity. Again applying the fine secret that little explains large and large little, we realize that out of the child's faith in his mother must spring aspiration for companionship with her, while on her side the yearning for her baby's trust deepens into yearning for her child's comprehension. You know that you can not be content with a blind obedience even though it be a loving obedience. As the physical union between you and Harold has been transfigured into emotional union, so you demand that this unity of feeling shall deepen into unity of thought, and heart insight ripen into the insight of intellect. Tour earlier effort was directed toward making your baby physically self-reliant in order that you might win the higher dependence of faith; now your effort must be directed toward making your boy intellectually and morally self-reliant in order that you may realize in him that highest dependence of comprehending sympathy which is the goal of spiritual intercourse.

That Froebel has well understood you he proves by showing you, in the concluding paragraph of his Commentary, how you may aid your boy to become master of himself. Notice with what precision he attacks the defects which must be overcome before the child can be safely committed to his own care.

The skater tumbles because be is beedless; tbe cbild falls from bis sledge because bis eye is not sure, bis band not strong; tbe boy and girl drop goblet and plate because tbey are overanxious. In inattention, untrained powers, and anxiety mated with weakness, lie tbe sources of inability to rule oneself. Tbe tie between these several defects is obvious. Strength implies training, training implies attention, and whoso lacks strength must alternate between presumption and over-anxiety. Not only for tbe children, but for ourselves there is a mine of wisdom in these suggestions. Why are so many mothers and so many kindergartners wavering and inconsistent in conduct? Is it not because they are doubtful what they ought to do? Why are they thus doubtful? Because they lack insight? Why do tbey lack insight? Evidently because they have undertaken tbe most solemn and responsible duties with insufficient preparation. « One word more. Harold can not develop without trust in you, but neither can he develop as he ought unless you trust him. I do not mean that you should ignore his faults or exaggerate his merits, for this would only destroy his confidence in you. But I do mean that you should be alert to recognize the utmost limit of his power and attainment, that you should let no cowardly fear deter you from granting him freedom to do and dare, and when you are forced to reprove and punish him you should never fail to appeal from his actual to his ideal self. " Could there be," asks Thoreau, " an accident so sad as to be respected for something better than we are? " As applied to the actual self this question admits of only one answer, but it needs the supplementary question, " Could there be a greater incentive to effort than the generous faith which expects of us to become better than we are? " This kind of trust the heavenly Father has in all his erring children; this kind of trust you must never fail to feel in your boy.

When we understand that faith is the thrill of fellowship we are ready to pass from the aim of Froebel's first play to its method, and to observe by what process the mother wakens the slumbering feeling of trust. Remember we are studying a Falling Game. Notice in Froebel's Commentary the twice repeated statement that the child shall fall with sufficient force to experience a slight shock. He must feel his fall and have some vague instinct that he is slipping away from his mother's care. Out of the fear born of this sense of withdrawn protection rises his joy in the assurance that a loving power watches over his fall and makes it safe.