Sketches of Froebel's life and times

Contents

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Education: Froebel, John Jay Chapman 1 From "Causes and Consequences."

In Keilhau, Georg Ebers 28

Introduction

SEEK ye first the Kingdom of God." — On his first Monday morning in school, the boy Friedrich Froebel heard the children, all standing, repeat these words. They were the words of the text of the sermon to which the children had listened on Sunday. Every morning of the week they were repeated over and over again, by individual children and by the whole group, until they made an impression upon him," as none had ever done before and none had ever done after." Writing of this event forty years later, he says, "Perhaps even then, the simple boy heard and felt that these words would be the foundation and the salvation of his life, bringing to him that conviction which was to become later on to the working, striving man, a source of incomparable courage, of unflinching, ever-ready, and cheerful self-sacrifice. In short, my introduction into that school was my birth into the higher, spiritual life." He who would understand Froebel's life and philosophy of education must bear this statement in mind, vili INTRODUCTION

and remember that for Froebel, the Kingdom of God meant the realization of the divine spirit in the individual man and woman, and of the divine order in human society.

No other educator has realized so fully the unity of nature, man, and God. No other has seen more clearly the vision of redeemed humanity, living in harmony with nature, governed by love, and rejoicing in ever-progressing creative work. No other has ever understood better that the Kingdom of God is the Kingdom of love, of light, of life, of truth, and of intelligent, skillful, effective service. For him, all roads lead to God. For him, God is the all-pervading, creative spirit of the Universe. The soul of man is a part of the divine essence. The education of man consists in the unfolding and revelation of this divine essence, through wellguided, spontaneous, creative activity. God is a creator, and man, made in his image, is a creator also. Education does not consist alone or chiefly in instruction or training, but rather — development and growth. The teacher is therefore a gardener, watching patiently and intelligently for the budding points of the soul, the nascent stages of interest, supplying suitable environment — food, light, and air — and protecting the child against those who, in their ignorance and ruthless zeal, would hamper and restrain, dwarf and warp, or unduly stimulate

INTRODUCTION ix

the child by untimely prescription. The school is a garden in which children live and grow through healthy, happy, vigorous, active childhood, to strong purposeful manhood. Man, the child, is an active animal, a struggler alive and happy only in activity.

With a full understanding of the importance of spontaneous activity and the dangers of narrow prescription, Froebel avoided the dangers and absurdities of leaving the child, without guidance, to the unlicensed freedom of the savage. "The development of the child's inner being must be on the one hand spontaneous, and, on the other, in accord with the universal trend of life." To know, interpret, and apply the trend of life in guiding the spontaneous activities of the child, is a task worthy the understanding and skill of the wisest and best. "Would there might be for the human being, for my child, even from its first advent into the world, a correct comprehension of its being, a suitable fostering and management, an education truly leading to the all-sided attainment of its destiny." That there might be such loving fostering, such intelligent leading, he plead "that we live with our children, live for them, and give our lives to them."

And this is not mere sentiment, it is the highest statesmanship and the truest principle of economics. Charles Dickens, the advocate

X INTRODUCTION

of the kindergarten in England, was right when he declared, "there would be fewer sullen, quarrelsome, dull-witted men and women, if there were fewer children starved and fed improperly in heart and brain. Society can be improved only by making men and women better by wholesome education in childhood and infancy." When this principle is fully recognized in our democracy there will be a new perspective in legislation and a new adjustment of the agencies of government.

It has been said that Froebel discovered infancy as the most important part of the life of the individual and its proper treatment as the most important problem in education. Truly a great discovery, and probably his most important contribution to education and his surest guarantee of immortality. Out of this discovery came the kindergarten which in some form must continue as an integral part of the world's system of education. Much of the program of the kindergarten grows out of the fact that the child cannot be developed alone, in contact only with nature, or even in contact with older people. The child is a social being and must have the society of other children. This social contact is most useful in play and co-operative work — a principle too often forgotten even by scientific students of the child and its education. "We are not wholesome

INTRODUCTION »

unless we are self-forgetting" and we are most self-forgetting in spontaneous social activity. Life is the child's greatest teacher and it cannot teach its best lessons unless it be full and varied.

"Turning the attention upon selfish ends, no matter how remote or momentary, hurts the organization, contracts the intellect, dries up the emotions, and is felt as unhappiness. Turning the attention toward public ends benefits the organism, enlarges the intellect, and is felt as happiness." The social life of the kindergarten effectively directs the attention of the child toward unselfish ends.

Froebel's philosophy of education did not end with the development of the individual child, however important that may be. It includes the race. "Humanity is not fixed and stationary, but is steadily and progressively growing, in a state of ever-living development, ever ascending from one stage of culture to another, its goal partaking of the infinite and eternal." The welfare and happiness of the race is not less important than the welfare and happiness of the individual. The education of each must have regard to that of the other.

The value of the vocational and practical in education was understood by Froebel, and he is not the least among the forces that have given modern education its industrial tendency. But xii INTRODUCTION

his philosophy comprehends also the life that cannot live by bread alone. In a time when there is danger of over-emphasis on the trade school and narrow preparation for vocational efficiency alone, there is need that we refresh ourselves with the call of his high aim "to make the man whose feet shall stand on God's earth, rooted fast in nature, while his head towers up to heaven and reads its secrets with steady gaze, whose heart shall embrace both earth and heaven, shall enjoy the life of earth and nature with all its wealth of form and at the same time shall recognize the purity and peace of heaven, that unites in its love, God's earth with God's heaven."

To this end the publication of the matter making up the four sections of this book will render valuable service. Henrietta Schrader's "Girlhood Days at Keilhau," and Georg Ebers' recollections of his school days at Froebel's school, give the personal touch, while the selections from Dickens and Chapman present Froebel's philosophy of education from different points of view.

P. P. CLAXTON.

Preface

THIS volume is the first of a series which the National Kindergarten Association has undertaken to prepare for the use of teachers and students.

During the three quarters of a century which spans the life of the kindergarten, book after book has made its appearance, its pages filled with descriptions and interpretations of this or that aspect of Froebel's system of education, and we are grateful for the steady output of helpful and attractive literature. More numerous, however, than the entire books on the subject are the significant single essays and sketches and studies of kindergarten philosophy and practice which have been contributed from time to time by well known educators and writers, and which have been published in educational magazines or records or reports.

Scattered thus over a wide range of space and time, this valuable literary material is inaccessible except to those who live within reach of the large city and university libraries. It is therefore the purpose of the National Kindergarten Association to gather such material into perxiv PREFACE

manent and convenient form and offer it to the public. Such articles as have been selected have abiding value and therefore are never out of season.

The subsequent volumes of the series will deal with the Program or Course of Study in the Kindergarten: Kindergarten Philosophy and Psychology: The Kindergarten and Society: Kindergarten and the Arts: Games: Excursions: Gardening, and other related topics.

Reprinted by permission from Causes and Consequences, by John Jay Chapman. (Mofifat, Yard & Co., Publishers.)

I HAVE two boys, aged seven and four. They required a governess and I got one. After a couple of months, during which the usual experiences in the training of young children were gone through, I discovered that it was I who was being educated. My mind was being swayed and drawn to a point of view. I was in contact with a method so profound that it seemed as if I were dealing with, or rather being dealt with by, the forces of nature. I was in the presence of great genius. What was it? The text-book on Froebel by Hughes in the International Series on Education made the matter clear.

Froebel was an experimental psychologist who used the terms of the German philosophy of his day. But the facts of life, the thing he was studying, was never for a moment absent from his mind. He lived in an age when the ideas of evolution were in the air, and before they had received their conclusive proof by being applied to morphology.

This application has for a time killed philosophy, for it has identified the new ideas with the physical sciences, and led men to study the human mind in psychology and from without, whereas the mind and its laws can, in the nature of things, be studied only through introspection. Froebel had a scientific intellect of the very first caliber; he had the conception of flux, of change, of evolution, to start with; and he took up introspectively the study of the laws of the human mind, choosing that province of the universe where they are most visibly and typically exposed, — the mind of the growing child.

The "laws" which he states are little more than a description of the phenomena that he observed. They are statements of the results of his experiments, and the language he employs can be translated to suit the education of almost any one. His attention was so concentrated upon fact that his terminology does not mislead. It can be translated into the language of metaphysics, of Christian theology, or of modern science, and it remains incorruptibly coherent.

His method of study was the only method which can obtain results in philosophy, self-study unconsciously carried on. He observed the child, and guessed at what was going on in its mind by a comparison with what he knew of himself. He was anxious to train young children intelligently, and he found it necessary to describe and formulate his knowledge of the operation of their minds. It turns out that he made a statement of the universe more comprehensive, a philosophy more universal, than any other of which we have any record.

But this is not the most important thing he did. He devised a method based upon his experiments and set agoing the kindergarten upon its course in conquest of the world. If it had not been for this, he might never have been heard of, for the world has small use for systems of philosophy, however profound, expressed in terms which have been superseded and are become inexpressive. But Froebel started a practice. He showed the way. He put in the hands of persons to whom his philosophy must ever remain a mystery, the means of working out those practical ends for which that philosophy was designed.

The greatness of Froebel lies in this, that he saw the essential. What sort of an animal is man? asks the morphologist, for he is beginning to reach this point in his studies; and before he has asked it, Froebel has answered him.

"Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength."

It may be said at once that the substance of everything Froebel says was known before. Solomon and Orpheus, Marcus Aurelius, Emerson, and all of us have known it. Otherwise Froebel would be unimportant. It is his correlation and his formulation of the main facts about human life that make him important. It is as a summary of wisdom, as a focus of idea, as a lens through which the rest of the ideas in the world can be viewed, that he is great.

The laws he discovered may be stated in a paragraph. The child is a growing organism. It is a unity. It develops through creative activity. It is benefited by contact with other children and is happy in proportion as it is unselfishly employed.

Let us assume for a moment that these things are true, that they are the most important truths about the child ; and let us see how they must affect our views of life, of politics, sociology, art, religion, conduct. There is of course no moment at which the child ceases to be a child. The laws of its growth and being are not at any discoverable time superseded by any new laws, Man as a creature, as an organism, has here by Froebel, and for the first time in history, been ingenuously studied, and the main laws of him noted. With the discovery that he is a unity, there vanishes every classification of science made since the days of Aristotle. They are convenient dogmas, thumb rule distinctions, useful as aids in the further pushing of our studies into the workings of this unity. Take up now a book of political economy, a poem, a history: this thought of Froebel's runs through it like quicksilver. The scheme of thought of the writer is by it dissolved at once into human elements. You find you are studying the operation of the mind of some one, whom you picture to yourself as a man, as a unit; you are interpreting this by your own experience. It is all psychology, you are pushing your analysis. The universe is receiving its interpretation through you yourself. We are thus brought to the point of view of the mystic, as the only conceivable point of view.

"That the organism develops by creative activity," This might have come as a deduction from Darwin. It is an expression in metaphysical language of the "struggle for life." Froebel discovered it independently. The consequences of a belief in it are so tremendous, that no man who is not prepared to spend the rest of his life completely dominated by the idea, ought even to pause to consider it.

Your capacities, your beliefs, your development, your spiritual existence, are the result of what you do. Active creation of some sort, occupation which takes your entire attention and calls upon you, merely incidentally and as a matter of course, for thought, resource, individual or original force; this will develop you and nothing else will.

The connection between this thought and the previous one is apparent. It is only by such creative activity that the organism as a unit gets into play. If you set a man copying or memorizing, you have occupied only a fraction of him. It you set him to making something, the minute he begins, his attention is concentrated. Willy nilly he is trying to make something significant, he is endeavoring to express himself, the forces and powers within him begin coming to his succor, offering aid and suggestion. Before he knows it, his whole being is in operation. The result is a statement of some sort, and in the process of making it the creature has developed. But when you say "significant" you have already implied the existence of other organisms. He is not expressing himself only, he is expressing them all, and here comes Froebel with his third great discovery, that it is by constant personal intercourse with others that the power to express is gained. And on top of this comes the last law, so closely related to the third as to be merely a new view of it, but discovered by experiment, tested by practice, announced empirically and as a fact, that the child is unselfish and only really happy when at work creatively and for the use and behoof of others.

This conclusion throws back its rays over the course of the argument, and we are compelled to see, what we have already known, that unselfishness and intellectual development are one and the same thing, that there is no failure of intellect which cannot be expressed in terms of selfishness, and no selfishness that cannot be expressed as intellectual shortcoming. Criminology has reached the same point by another route.

The matter is really very simple, for anything self-regardant means a return of the organism upon itself, a stepping on your own toes, and brings self-consciousness, discomfort, pain. Self-sacrifice on the other hand brings fulfillment. The self-sacrifice is always illusory, and the development real. This becomes frightfully apparent in ingenuous and unhappy love affairs, for the organism robbed of fulfillment returns upon itself.

It makes little difference what province of thought we begin with in applying these views to the world. They give results like a table of logarithms. They do more than this, they unravel the most complex situations, they give the key to conduct and put a compass in the hands of progress. They explain history, they support religion, they justify instinct, they interpret character. They give the formula for doing consciously what mankind has been doing unconsciously in so far as it has been doing what any one of us in his soul approves of or cares to imitate.

Let us take up the most obvious deductions. If people develop according to their activities, their opinions will be a mere reflex of their conduct. What they see in the world comes out of what they do in the world. Here in a mere niche of Froebel we find the whole of Emerson.

The power and permanence of Sainte-Beuve are due to his having applied this theory to the interpretation of literature. He is not content till he has seen the relation between the conduct and the opinions, the conduct and the art of a character.

Or take Emerson himself, why was it that being so much he was not more? How came it that after his magnificent prologue in the Phi Beta Kappa address, which is like the opening of a symphony, he relapsed into iteration and brilliant but momentary visions of his own horizon? He kept repeating his theme till he piped himself into fragmentary inconsequence. The reason is that he had learned all he knew before he retired to Concord and contemplation. Active life would have made him blossom annually and last like Gladstone.

Or take Goethe: all that is questionable in him results from his violation of two of Froebel's laws of psychology. He fixed his attention upon self-development and thereby gradually ossified. Every moment of egotism was an intellectual loss. His contact with people, meanwhile.

became more and more formal as he grew older, and his work more and more inexpressive.

Give me a man's beliefs, and I will give you his occupation. What has happened to that radical that he seems to have become so moderate and reasonable? You find that for six months he has been clerk to the Civil Service Reform Club. Why is the mystical poetry of this intellectual man as vacant as the fashion print he edits for his daily bread? His employment has tracked his mind to these unearthly regions. He is dead here too.

There is no such thing as independent belief, based on evidence and reflection. The thing we call belief is a mere record left by conduct. If you sincerely go through the regimen of Loyola's manual, you will come out a Jesuit. You can no more resist it than you can resist the operation of ether. This man is an optimist. It means that he has struggled. That man is a pessimist. It means that he has shirked. Here is one who has been in touch with all movements for good during a dismal era of corruption, and yet he has no faith. It means that the whole of him has not been enlisted. His conscience has drawn him forward. It is not enough. There is compromise in him. He is not an absolute fighter.

Here is the most excellent gentleman in America, an old idealist untouchably transcendental, an educated man. To your amazement he thinks that it is occasionally necessary to subsidize the powers of evil. He was bred a banker.

Here is a village schoolma'am who from a rag of information in a county paper has divined the true inwardness of a complicated controversy at Washington which you happen to know all about. She has been reforming a poorhouse.

A is a clergyman, good but ineffective. He relies on beneficence and persuasion. He does not know the world better than a club loafer knows it. The only entry to it is by attack, the only progress by action.

B is a good fellow, yet betrays a momentary want of delicacy which gives you a shock, and which you forgive him, saying: "It is a coarseness of natural fiber." It is no such thing. There is in every man a natural fiber as fine as a poet's. His coarseness is the residuum of an act.

You meet a man whom you have known as a court stenographer, and whom you have supposed to be drowned in worldly cares. At a chophouse he gives you a discourse on Plato's Phaedrus, which he interprets in a novel way. The brains of the man surprise you. This man, though he looks sordid, positively must have been sending a younger brother to college during many years. There is no other explanation of him.

The nemesis of conduct then stalks about in the form of a natural law, not as the pseudo science of fancy, but as a mode of growth, modestly formulated by a great naturalist.

Take the matter up on its other side. You can only discover in the universe, try how you will, strain your eyes how you please, you can only see what you have lived. Out of our activity comes our character, and it is with this that we see beauty or ugliness, hope or despair. It is by this that we gauge the operation of economic law and of all other spiritual forces. It is with this that we interpret all things. What we see is only our own lives.

We are all more or less in contact with human life. We live in a pandemonium, a paradise of illustrations, and if we have only eyes to see, there is enough in any tenement house to-day to lay bare the heart and progress of Greek art.

But the worst is to come — the horror that makes intellect a plaything. By a double consequence the past fetters the future. Once take any course and our eyes begin to see it as right, our hearts to justify it. Only lighting can save us, and we see nothing to fight for. Thraldom enters, and night like death where no voice reaches. The eternal struggle is for vision.

How idiotic are the compliments or the contempt of the inexperienced! Nothing but life teaches, Hallam thinks Juliet immodest, and he had read all the literatures of Europe. If you want to understand the Greek civilization you have got to be Sophocles. If you want to understand the New Testament you have got to be Christ. If you want to understand that most complex and difficult of all things, the present, you must be some or all of it, some of it any way. You must have it ground into you by a contact so wrenchingly close, by a struggle so severe, that you lose consciousness, and afterwards — next year — you will understand.

Here is the reaction familiar to all men since the dawn of history, which makes the man of action the hero of all times. It goes in courage, it comes out power.

This reaction, this transformation, goes forward in the very stuff that we are made of, and if we come to look at it closely, we are obliged to speak of it in terms of consciousness. There are so many different kinds of consciousness that the best we can do is to remind some one else of the kind we mean. The hand of the violinist is unconscious to the extent that it is functioning properly, and as his command over music develops this unconsciousness creeps up his arm and possesses his brain and being, until he, as he plays, is completely wwself-conscious and his music is the mere projection of an organism which is functioning freely.

But this condition of complete concentration makes us in a different sense of the word self-conscious in the highest degree, self-comprehending, self-controlled, self-expressing. And it is in this philosophical sense that the word self-conscious is used by the Germans, and may sometimes be conveniently used by us, if we can do so without foregoing the right to use the words conscious and unconscious in their popular sense at other times.

The discovery of Froebel was that this mastery over our own powers was to be obtained only through creative activity. The suggestion, it may be noted, is destined to reorganize every school of violin playing in Europe. For we have here the major canon of a rational criticism. We find that in the old vocabulary such words as genius, temperament, style, originality, etc., have always been fumblingly used to denote different degrees in which some man's brain was working freely and with full self-consciousness. A deliverance of this kind has always been designated as "creative,' ' no matter in what field it was found.

Approaching the matter more closely, we see that the whole of the man must have responded in real life to every particle of experience which he uses in his work. An imitation means something which does not represent an original unitary vibration.

Goethe puts in the mouth of the mad Gretchen a snatch of German song in imitation of Ophelia. The treatment does not fit the character. It has only been through that part of Goethe's mind with which he read Shakespeare. As a sequel to this suggestion, the peasant of the early scenes has lavished upon her all the various reminiscences of the pathetic that Goethe could muster. It is moving, but it is inorganic. It is not true.

For note this, that while it takes the whole of a man to do anything true, no matter how small, anything that the whole of him does is right. Hence the inimitable grotesques of greatness, the puns in tragedy. These things belong to the very arcana of nature. By and by, when the reasons are understood, nature will be respected. No one will attempt to imitate genius, or to reproduce an artistic effect of any kind.

If we look at recent literature by the light of this canon, we find the reason for its inferiority. It is the work of half minds, of men upon whose intelligence the weight of a dogma is pressing.

The eclipse of philosophy was of course reflected in fiction. There is the same trouble with Herbert Spencer as with Zola. Each of them thinks to wrest the secrets of sociology from external observation. Their books lack objectivity and are ephemeral. Kant and Balzac did better because their method was truer.

Everything good that has been done in the last fifty years has been done in the teeth of current science. The whole raft of English scientists are children playing with Raphael's brushes the moment they leave some specialty. There never lived a set of men more blinded by dogma, blinded to the meaning of the past, to the trend of the future, by the belief that they had found new truth. Not one of them can lift the stone and show what lies under Darwin's demonstration. They run about with little pamphlets and proclaim a New Universe like Frenchmen. They bundle up all beliefs into a great Dogma of Unbelief, and throw away the kernel of life with the shell. This was inevitable. A generation or two v/as well sacrificed, in this last fusillade of the Dogma of Science — the old guard dogma that dies but never surrenders. Hereafter it will be plain that the whole matter is a matter of symbols on the one hand, knowledge of human nature on the other.

Herbert Spencer has been a useful churchwarden to science, but his knowledge of life was so trifling, his own personal development so one-sided, that his sociology is a farce.

This canon of criticism explains in a very simple manner the art ages, times when apparently every one could paint, or speak, or compose. The art which is lost is really the art of courageous action. Neither war nor dogma nor revolution is necessary, for feeling can no more be lost than force, and the power to express it depends upon an interest in life. The past has enriched us with conventions, and whenever a man or a group of men arises who uses them and is not subdued to them, we have art. The thing is easy. To the doers it is a mere knack of the attention.