FOOTNOTES:
[216] Besides Basedow, there should be mentioned among the educators who have become noted in Germany under the name of Philanthropists, Salzman (1744-1811) and Campe (1746-1818).
[217] What a painstaking soul to be so exact in his accounts! Doubtless he had an eye to the future publication of his record as a maître de fouet! This account is rather too exact to be trustworthy. (P.)
[218] See interesting quotations from the “Journal d’un père,” in the excellent biography of Pestalozzi, by Roger de Guimps.
[219] See [Chap. XIX.]
[220] A second edition appeared in the lifetime of the author, in 1820, with some important modifications. The French translation published in 1882 by Dr. Darin was made from the first edition.
[221] See [the following chapter].
[CHAPTER XIX.]
THE SUCCESSORS OF PESTALOZZI.—FRŒBEL AND THE PÈRE GIRARD.
THE PEDAGOGY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY; FRŒBEL (1782-1852); YOUTH OF FRŒBEL; DIFFERENT EMPLOYMENTS; CALL TO TEACH; FRŒBEL AND PESTALOZZI; TREATISE ON THE SPHERICAL; NEW STUDIES; INSTITUTE OF KEILHAU; THE EDUCATION OF MAN; ANALYSIS OF THAT WORK; LOVE FOR CHILDREN; UNITY OF EDUCATION; DIFFERENT STAGES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF MAN; NATURALISM OF FRŒBEL; NEW EXPERIMENTS IN TEACHING; KINDERGARTENS; ORIGIN OF THE KINDERGARTENS; THE GIFTS OF FRŒBEL; APPEAL TO THE INSTINCTS OF THE CHILD; IMPORTANCE OF SPORTS; PRINCIPAL NEEDS OF THE CHILD; FAULTS IN FRŒBEL’S METHOD; THE LAST ESTABLISHMENTS OF FRŒBEL; FRŒBEL AND DIESTERWEG; POPULARITY OF FRŒBEL; THE PÈRE GIRARD (1765-1850); LIFE OF THE PÈRE GIRARD; PLAN OF EDUCATION FOR HELVETIA; LAST YEARS OF THE PÈRE GIRARD; TEACHING OF THE MOTHER TONGUE; GRAMMAR OF IDEAS; DISCREET USE OF RULES; EDUCATIVE COURSE IN THE MOTHER TONGUE; ANALYSIS OF THAT WORK; MORAL ARITHMETIC; MORAL GEOGRAPHY; INFLUENCE OF GIRARD; ANALYTICAL SUMMARY.
521. The Pedagogy of the Nineteenth Century.—Pestalozzi really belongs to our century by the close of his career, and especially by the posthumous glory of his name. With Frœbel and the Père Girard, we enter completely upon the nineteenth century; both, in different degrees and with characteristics of their own, continue the work of Pestalozzi.
522. Frœbel (1782-1852).—It may be said of Frœbel as of Pestalozzi, that in France at least, he is more praised than known, more celebrated than studied. We have been tardy in speaking of him,—it is scarcely twenty years since; but it seems that our admiration has sought to atone for the slowness of its manifestation by its vivacity and its ardor. The name of the founder of Kindergartens has become almost popular, while his writings have remained almost unknown.
An impartial and thorough study of Frœbel’s work will abate rather than encourage this excessive infatuation and this somewhat artificial enthusiasm. Assuredly, Frœbel had grand qualities as a teacher; but he lacked a profound classical culture and also the sense of proportion. Like most of the Germans of this century, he has ventured on the conceptions of a nebulous philosophy, and following the steps of Hegel, he has too often deserted the route of observation and experiment, to strike out into metaphysical divagations. Frœbel’s imagination magnifies and distorts everything. He cannot see objects as they are, but lends them a symbolical meaning, and wanders off into transcendental and obscure considerations. But his practical work is worth more than his writings, and he cannot be denied the glory of having been a bold and happy innovator in the field of early education.
523. The Youth of Frœbel.—Frœbel was born in Thuringia in 1782. He lost his mother almost at birth, and was educated by his father and his uncle, both village pastors. We recollect that by a contrary destiny, Pestalozzi was brought up by his mother. From his earliest years he manifested remarkable traits of character, and also mental tendencies which were a little singular. He was dreamy and wholly penetrated with a profound religious sentiment. Thus, the day when he believed that he was assured by peremptory reasoning that he was not doomed to eternal flames, was an event in his life. Ardently enamored of nature, he considers her as the true inspirer of humanity. This had also been the conception of Rousseau and of Pestalozzi, but it exhibits itself with much more power in the case of Frœbel.
It is difficult to comprehend the exaggeration of his thought when he says that nature, attentively observed, appears to us as the symbol of the highest aspirations of human life.
“Entire nature, even the world of crystals and stones, teaches us to recognize good and evil, but nowhere in a more living, tranquil, clear, and evident way than in the world of plants and flowers.”
Morality, thus understood, is a little vague. We do not deny that the calm life of the fields contributes to surround us with a pure atmosphere, and to beget within us wholesome and elevated aspirations; but one must have a singularly sentimental temperament to believe that nature can give us “the clearest and the most obvious” lessons in morals.
524. Different Occupations.—The first part of Frœbel’s life gives evidence of a certain unsteadiness of mind. Inconstant in his tastes, he cannot settle on a fixed mode of life. Improvident and poor, like Pestalozzi, he is in turn forester, intendant, architect, preceptor; he feels his way up to the day when his vocation as a teacher is suddenly revealed to him. Moreover, he studies everything,—law, mineralogy, agriculture, mathematics.
525. Vocation to Teach.—It was in 1805, at Frankfort, that Frœbel began to teach. He was then twenty-three. The teacher Gruner offered him a position as instructor in the model school which he directed; Frœbel accepted, but he was of that number who do nothing artlessly.
“An accidental circumstance determined my decision. I received news that my certificates were lost [certificates that he had sent to an architect to secure a position with him]. I then concluded that Providence had intended, by this incident, to take from me the possibility of a return backward.”
At the end of a few days he wrote to his brother Christopher:—
“It is astonishing how my duties please me. From the first lesson it seemed to me that I had never done anything else, and that I was born for that very thing. I could no longer make it seem to me that I had previously thought of following any occupation but this, and yet I confess that the idea of becoming a teacher had never occurred to me.”
526. Frœbel and Pestalozzi.—At the school in Frankfort, Frœbel, still a novice in the art of teaching, attempted scarcely more than scrupulously to apply the Pestalozzian methods.
And upon many points Frœbel remained to the end a faithful disciple of Pestalozzi. Intuition is the fundamental principle of his method, and we might say that his effort in pedagogy consists chiefly in organizing into a system the sense intuitions which Pestalozzi proposed to the child somewhat at random and without plan.
Frœbel had had direct relations with Pestalozzi. In 1808 he went to Yverdun with three of his pupils, and there spent two years, taking part in the work of the institute, and becoming acquainted with the methods of the master. He declares that it was a “decisive” epoch in his life.
But let us note, in passing, the difference in character between Pestalozzi and Frœbel. While Pestalozzi is ever ready to accuse himself with a touching humility, Frœbel regards himself as almost infallible. He never attributes failure to his own insufficiency, but lays the blame on destiny or on the ill-will of others. Pestalozzi is ever forgetting himself, and he is so neglectful as to be uncouth in his attire. “He never knew how to dress,” say his biographers; “his distraction made him forget sometimes his cravat, and at others his garters.” Frœbel, on the contrary, affected an elegant and theatrical bearing. He studied effect. At certain periods, as we are told, he wore Hessian boots and a Tyrolese cap with high plumes.
527. The Treatise on Sphericity (1811).—It was about 1811 that the peculiar originality of Frœbel manifested itself, and this was done, it must be confessed, in an unfortunate way, by the publication of his Treatise on Sphericity.
Pestalozzi somewhere wrote: “If my life is entitled to any credit, it is that of having placed the square at the basis of an intuitive instruction which has never yet been given to a people.”[222] This language coming from Pestalozzi is certainly calculated to surprise us; but at least Pestalozzi meant square in the proper sense of the term, as a geometrical figure, or as a form for drawing. When Frœbel speaks to us of the sphere, and makes of it the basis of education, it is a wholly different thing.
In reading the Treatise on Sphericity, we are sometimes tempted to inquire whether we have to do with a well-balanced mind, or whether an exuberant imagination has not caused the author to lose the consciousness of reality.
According to Frœbel, the sphere is the ideal form:—
“The sphere seems like the prototype or the unity of all bodies and of all forms. Not an angle, not a line, not a plane, not a surface, is shown in it, and yet it has all points and all surfaces.”
Let this pass; but besides this, the sphere has mysterious relations with spiritual things; it teaches the perfection of the moral life.
“To labor conscientiously at the development of the spherical nature of a being, is to effect the education of a being.”
An incident borrowed from the life of Frœbel will complete the picture. He enlisted as a volunteer in 1812, and made the campaigns of 1812-1813, with Langethal and Middendorf, who were afterward to be his colleagues. After the war, he returned to Berlin, passing through the whole of Germany. During the whole journey, he says, “I was seeking something, but without reaching a definite idea of what I was in quest of, and nothing could satisfy me. Wholly engrossed in this thought, I entered one day into a very beautiful garden, ornamented with plants the most various. I admired them, and yet none of them brought relief to my inmost feeling.
“Passing them in review, at a glance, in my soul, I suddenly discovered that among them there was no lily.... Then I knew what was lacking in that garden, and what I was looking for. How could my inmost feeling have manifested itself to me in a more beautiful way? You seek, I said to myself, tranquil peace of heart, harmony of life, and purity of soul, in the image of the lily, that peaceful flower, simple and pure. The garden, with all its varied flowers, but without the blossoms of the lily, was for me like life agitated and variegated, but without harmony and without unity.”
528. New Studies.—Frœbel returned to Berlin in 1814, and there obtained an assistant’s place in the mineralogical museum. He there studied at leisure the geometrical forms of crystals, and reflected anew on their symbolical meaning. Perhaps he derived from these studies the idea of the first gifts which he afterwards introduced into his Kindergartens. It was not till two years afterwards that he formed the definite resolution to devote himself to the education of youth (1816). He first established himself at Griesheim, and then at Keilhau (a league’s distance from Rudolstadt), where, with five pupils, all his nephews, he opened a school which he called by a pompous title, and one hardly justifiable at the beginning, the General German Institute of Education. He succeeded in associating with himself Langethal and Middendorf. The establishment was administered at first on a very modest scale, as the resources were slender; but it prospered little by little, and in 1826 it numbered more than fifty pupils.
529. Institute at Keilhau.—The principles of Pestalozzi were applied at Keilhau. Langethal and Middendorf passed their apprenticeship in the Pestalozzian method under the direction of Frœbel. The three professors met in the common hall, and there were frequently heard as echoes from their discussion the words: intuition, personal initiative, proceeding from the known to the unknown. “They are learning the system,” said the children who heard them.
At Keilhau, physical, intellectual, and moral education marched abreast. The master was to attempt to penetrate the individuality of each child, to the end that he might thence provoke the free development of that individuality. The government was austere and the fare frugal. The system of physical hardening was carried to an extreme. The pupils, winter and summer, wore a blouse and cotton trousers. A considerable time was devoted to religious exercises. Frœbel always remained attached to the Lutheran Church, though his orthodoxy might have seemed open to suspicion, and he always thought that education ought to be essentially religious.
“All education that is not founded on religion is sterile.” And he adds, “All education that is not founded on the Christian religion is defective and incomplete.”[223]
530. The Education of Man.—It was at Keilhau in 1826, that Frœbel published his principal work, The Education of Man.[224]
At that date, the idea of Kindergartens had not yet taken form in his mind; and The Education of Man was not so much the exposition of the practical applications of Frœbel’s method, as a nebulous and tumid development of his metaphysical principles. It is a book little read, and, let it be confessed, partly illegible! We have ventured to speak of the nonsense written by Pestalozzi. What shall be said of the mystical dreams of Frœbel? The pedagogy of the Germans, like their philosophy, has for a century often lost its way in strange theories which absolutely surpass the comprehension of the French mind. From a mass of vague and pretentious speculations on universal nature, there are culled with difficulty some ideas which are well founded. However, let us try to gather up the obscure idea of Frœbel, made still more obscure by the exterior form of the work. In the first edition Frœbel had omitted to introduce into the text any division into chapters and paragraphs. The reading of this uninterrupted text could not fail to be laborious; even with the somewhat artificial divisions which were subsequently introduced, The Education of Man remains difficult to read and to analyze.
531. Analysis of the Work.—The introduction is the most interesting part of the work. We might reduce the somewhat confused ideas which it contains to three essential points, to three general ideas, of philosophy, of psychology, and of pedagogy.
The idea of general philosophy is this: “Everything comes solely from God. In God is the unique principle of all things.”
It is a vague pantheism which consists in believing that all the objects of nature are the direct manifestations of the divine activity.
“The end, the destiny of each thing, is to publish abroad its being, the activity of God which operates in it, and the manner in which this activity is combined with the thing.” From these premises Frœbel is logically brought to this psychological statement, that everything is good in man, for it is God who acts in him. He pushes his optimism so far as to say:—
“From his earliest age the child yields himself to justice and right with a surprising tact, for we rarely see him avoiding them voluntarily.”
The pedagogical conclusion is easy to guess: Education shall be essentially a work of liberty and of spontaneity. It ought to be indulgent, flexible, supple, and restricted to protecting and overseeing.
“The vocation of man, considered as a reasonable intelligence, is to let his nature act in manifesting the action of God, who operates in him; to publish God outwardly, to acquire the knowledge of his real destiny, and to accomplish it in all liberty and spontaneity.”
These last two words are repeated ad nauseam. Frœbel goes so far as to say that there can be no general form of education to impose or even to recommend, because account must be taken of the nature of each child, and the free development of his individuality provoked by inviting him to action and to personal exertion. The choice in the manifestation of the exterior form of education ought to be left to the intelligence of the educator, and there ought to be almost as many ways of educating men as there are individuals, with their own natures aspiring to a personal development.
532. Love for Children.—Frœbel, and this is perhaps his best quality, loves children tenderly. He speaks of them with touching accents, but he does not fail to mingle with his affection for them his habitual symbolism. The child is not for him simply the little real being that he has under his eyes. He sees him through mystic veils, so to speak, and, as it were, crowned with an aureole:—
“Let the child always appear to us as a living pledge of the presence, of the goodness, and of the love of God.”
533. Unity of Education.—Frœbel is always bitterly complaining of the fragmentary and scrappy character of the ordinary education. His dream was to introduce unity into it. In this respect he separates himself squarely from Rousseau. The different stages of life form an uninterrupted chain. “Let life be considered as being but one in all its phases, as forming one complete whole.”
534. Different Stages in the Development of Man.—Frœbel, in The Education of Man, considers in succession the different periods of life. The first three chapters treat of the first stages of development in man,—the nurseling, the child, the young boy. We here find pages full of charm, upon the education of the child by the mother, and upon the progress of the faculties; but pretentious considerations and whimsical interpretations too often come to spoil the psychology of Frœbel.
“The child,” he says, “scarcely knows whether he loves the flowers for themselves, for the delight which they give him, ... or for the vague intuition which they give him of the Creator.”
Farther on he speaks of introducing the child to colors, and from this exercise he at once draws moral conclusions: the child loves colors because he comes by means of them “to the knowledge of an interior unity.”
535. The Naturalism of Frœbel.—The elements of education according to Frœbel are, with religion; the artistic studies, mathematics, language, and, above all, nature. “Teachers should scarcely let a week pass without taking to the country a part of their pupils. They shall not drive them before them like a flock of sheep.... They shall walk with them as a father among his children, or a brother among his brothers, in making them observe and admire the varied richness which nature displays to their eyes at each season of the year.”
536. New Experiments in Teaching.—The institute of Keilhau did not long prosper. In 1829 it was necessary to close it for lack of pupils. Frœbel lacked the practical qualities of an administrator. In 1831 he tried in vain to open a new school at Wartensee in Switzerland. The attacks of the clerical party obliged him to abandon his project. After several other attempts he was elected director of an orphan asylum at Burgdorf; and it was there that he resolved to devote his pedagogical efforts to the education of early childhood.
The little village of Burgdorf had the honor, within a period of thirty-five years, of offering an asylum to Pestalozzi and to Frœbel, and of being the scene of their experiments in pedagogy.
537. The Kindergartens.—The master conception of Frœbel, the creation of the Kindergarten, was only slowly developed in his mind. It was only in 1840 that he invented the term. Of course, given the imagination of Frœbel, and his tendency to symbolism, children’s garden ought to be taken in its allegorical sense. The child is a plant, the school a garden, and Frœbel calls teachers “gardeners of children.”[225]
But before giving a name to his school for early childhood, Frœbel had long cherished the idea of it. In 1835, at Burgdorf, he attempted to realize it; in 1837, at Blankenburg, near Rudolstadt, he founded his first infant school.
538. Origin of the Kindergarten.—Without wishing to belittle the originality of Frœbel’s creation, it is right to say that it was suggested to him in part by Comenius. The philosopher Krause had pointed out to him the importance of the writings of the Slavic educator. He studied them, and the Kindergarten certainly has some relations of parenthood with the schola materni gremii. There is, however, one essential difference between the idea of Comenius and that of Frœbel,—the first confided to the mother the cares which the second relegates to the teachers of the children’s gardens.
It is said that it was from seeing a child playing at ball that Frœbel conceived the first idea of his system. We know what importance he attached to the spherical form and to play. The first principle of his Kindergarten was then that the child ought to play, and to play at ball.
But Frœbel enveloped the simplest ideas in prolix and whimsical theories. If he recommends the ball, it is not for positive reasons, nor because it is an inoffensive play, very appropriate to the need of movement which characterizes the child. It is because the ball is the symbol of unity. The cube, which was to succeed the ball, represents diversity in unity. It is also because the word ball is a symbolic word, formed from letters borrowed from the German words Bild von all, picture of the whole.
Frœbel came to attribute an occult meaning to the different letters of words. He thought he found in the figures of the year 1836, the date of his first conception of the Kindergarten, the proof that that year was to open to humanity a new era, and he expressed his views in an essay entitled: The Year 1836 requires a Renovation of Life. In this we read such things as these: “The word marriage (German Ehe) represents by its two vowels e-e, life; these two vowels are united by the consonant h, thus symbolizing a double life which the spirit unites; again, the two halves thus united are similar and equal each to each: e-h-e.” And farther on: “What does the word German (Deutsch) signify? It is derived from the word deuten (signifying to manifest), which designates the act by which self-conscious thought is clearly manifested outwardly.... To be a German is then to raise one’s self as an individual and as a whole, by a clear manifestation of one’s self, to a clear consciousness of self.”
539. The Gifts of Frœbel.—Under the graceful name of gifts, Frœbel presents to the child a certain number of objects which are to serve as material for his exercises. The five gifts are contained in a box from which they are taken in succession, as the children are in a condition to receive them. In the original plan of Frœbel, these gifts were: 1. the ball; 2. the sphere and the cube; 3. the cube divided into eight equal parts; 4. the cube divided into eight rectangular parallelopipeds, in the form of building-bricks, which the child will use as material for little constructions; 5. the cube divided in each of its dimensions, that is, cut into twenty-seven equal cubes; three of them are subdivided into two prisms, and three others into four prisms, by means of an oblique section, single or double.[226] And to these gifts Frœbel added other objects, such as thin strips of wood and little sticks for constructing figures; and bits of paper for braiding, folding, dotting, etc.
The conception of Frœbel does not rest, as one might think, on the adaptation of the objects which he chooses in succession, to the faculties of the child. It is not this at all which interests him. The order which he has adopted is derived from another principle. According to him, the form of bodies has an intimate relation with the general laws of the universe. There is, consequently, a methodical gradation to be observed, according to the intrinsic character of the objects themselves, for the purpose of initiating the child into the laws of the divine thought symbolized in the sphere, in the cube, in the cylinder, etc. Frœbel was greatly irritated at those of his scholars who misunderstood the philosophical import of his “gifts,” and who saw in them only plays. “If my material for instruction possesses some utility,” he said, “it does not owe it to its exterior appearance, which has nothing striking and offers no novelty. It owes it simply to the way in which I use it, that is, to my method and to the philosophical law on which it is founded. The justification of my system of education is entirely in this law; according as this law is rejected or admitted, the system falls or continues with it. All the rest is but material without any value of its own.”
It is this “material,” however, which for Frœbel had no value, that his admirers have above all preserved of his method, without longer caring for the allegorical sense which he attached to it.
540. Appeal to the Instincts of the Child.—That which makes, notwithstanding so much that is whimsical, the lasting merit of Frœbel’s work, that which justifies in part the admiration which it has excited, is that he organized the salle d’asile, the infant school, and that he realized for it that which Pestalozzi had attempted for the elementary school. He knew how to make an appeal to the instincts of the youngest child, to combine a system of exercises for the training of the hand, for the education of the senses, to satisfy the need of movement and activity which develops itself from the first day of life, and, finally, to make of the child a creator, a little artist always at work.
For the old education, which he calls “a hot-house education,” and in which the instruction, premature through language, smothers in their germs the native powers of the child, in order to excite his memory and his judgment by artificial means,—for this education he substitutes a free and cheerful education which cultivates the faculties of the child by love, and which makes a just estimate of his instincts. Books are suppressed, and lessons also. The child freely expands in play.
541. The Importance of Play.—With Frœbel, play became an essential element of education. This ingenious teacher knew how to make of it an art, an instrument for the development of the infant faculties.
“The plays of the child,” he said, “are, as it were, the germ of the whole life which is to follow, for the whole man develops and manifests itself in it; in it he reveals his noblest aptitudes and the deepest elements of his being. The whole life of man has its source in that epoch of existence, and whether that life is serene or sad, tranquil or agitated, fruitful or sterile, whether it brings peace or war, that depends on the care, more or less judicious, given to the beginnings of existence.”
542. Principal Needs of the Child.—Gréard, in a remarkable study on the method of Frœbel, reduces the aspirations of the child to three essential instincts:—
1. The taste for observation:—
“All the senses of the child are on the alert; all the objects which his sight or his hand encounters attract him, interest him, delight him.”
2. The need of activity, the taste for construction:—
“It is not enough that we show him objects; it is necessary that he touch them, that he handle them, that he appropriate them to himself.... He takes delight in constructing; he is naturally geometrician and artist.”
3. Finally, the sentiment of personality:—
“He wishes to have his own place, his own occupation, his own teacher.”
Now Frœbel’s method has precisely for its object the satisfaction of these different instincts.
“To place the child before a common table,” says Gréard, “but with his own chair and a place that belongs to him, so that he feels that he is the owner of his little domain; to excite at the very beginning his good will by the promise of an interesting game; to develop in succession under his very eyes the marvels of the five gifts: to teach him in the first place, from concrete objects exposed to his sight, balls of colored worsted and geometrical solids, to distinguish color, form, material, the different parts of a body, so as to accustom him to see, that is, to seize the aspects, the figures, the resemblances, the differences, the relations of things; then to place the objects in his hands, and to teach him to make with the balls of colored worsted combinations of colors agreeable to the eye, to arrange, with matches united by balls of cork, squares, angles, triangles of all sorts, to set up little cubes in the form of crosses, pyramids, etc.;—then, either by means of strips of colored paper placed in different directions, interlaced into one another, braided as a weaver would make a fabric, or with the crayon, to drill him in reproducing, in creating, designs representing all the geometrical forms, so that to the habit of observation is gradually joined that of invention; finally, while his hand is busy in concert with his intelligence, and while his need of activity is satisfied, to take advantage of this awakened and satisfied attention to fix in his mind by appropriate questions some notions of the properties and uses of forms, by relating them to some great principle of general order, simple and fruitful, to mingle the practical lesson with moral observations, drawn in particular from the incidents of the school—this, in its natural progress and its normal development, is the method of Frœbel.”
543. Defects in Frœbel’s Method.—There is ground for thinking, notwithstanding all, that Frœbel’s method is a little complicated, a little artificial, and that it sometimes proceeds in opposition to the natural disposition of children. Their soul, he said, cannot in the first period of its development, recognize itself, apprehend itself, save in the perception of the simplest forms of the exterior world, presented in a concrete manner. Now nature of herself does not offer these elementary forms; it is necessary to know how to extract them from the infinite diversity of things. And Frœbel found these simple forms in the sphere, the cube, and the cylinder.
But these forms, we reply, are but abstractions; it does not suffice to say that the cube and the sphere are material and palpable,—they are none the less the product of abstract thought on this account; nature does not present these simple geometrical forms; everything in them is complex. Now the nascent thought is employed at first on real things, on the living and irregular forms of animals and vegetables; then in this case, the mind proceeds naturally from the complex to the simple, from the concrete to the abstract. It seems, on the contrary, that Frœbel begins with the abstract in order to arrive at the concrete.
In the school of Frœbel other defects have been developed. An abuse has been made of the exercises in imitation and invention. The child has been made to produce marvels of construction which take too much of his time and demand of him too much effort. It has been forgotten that these employments should be preparatory exercises,—means, and not the end of education.
544. The Last Establishments of Frœbel.—Towards 1840, the ideas of Frœbel began to become popular. His methods attracted attention. Then he wished to transform his school at Blankenburg into a model establishment. He addressed an appeal to the German nation in favor of his work, but it was only slightly successful. Obliged in 1844 to close his institute, through lack of resources, he then travelled through Germany in order to make known his methods. He did not derive from his journey the profit that he expected from it, and, discouraged, he returned once more to Keilhau, where he opened a course in method, or a normal course, for the use of young women who were preparing themselves for the education of infants. This association with women, in which Frœbel lived till his death, exercised a profound influence on the development of his system. A much greater share of attention was given to the practical exercises, and the mathematics was put in the background.
In 1850 he obtained through the intervention of the Baroness von Marenholtz, one of his most ardent admirers, the lease of the Castle of Marienthal, and to this he transferred his establishment. A long period of activity seemed opening before him. He personally directed the games of the children, and trained the teachers; but he died suddenly in 1852.
545. Frœbel and Diesterweg.—However, before his death, Frœbel was able to witness the growing success of his work. Each day he received eminent adhesions; for example, that of Diesterweg.[227] It was through the mediation of the Baroness von Marenholtz that Frœbel and Diesterweg, the celebrated director of the normal school of Berlin, became acquainted. Diesterweg was a strong and practical spirit, who contributed much to the development of instruction in Prussia. At first he had a contempt for Frœbel, whom he treated as a charlatan; but on his first conversation with him he changed his opinion. He was taken to the school-room in which Frœbel was teaching; but wholly intent on his work, Frœbel did not observe the presence of the visitor. Diesterweg was impressed by seeing this old man devoting himself entirely to his little pupils, and his prejudices disappeared. To a certain extent he became the propagator of Frœbel’s ideas. He agreed with him on his general conception of the needs of the child, and of the province of woman as the earliest educator.
546. Success of Frœbel’s Work.—Frœbel had other imitators. Like Pestalozzi, he inspired a large number of minds by his writings, and through the zeal of Madame von Marenholtz, and of some other disciples, his practical work prospered. The Kindergartens have been multiplied in many places, and particularly in Austria.
547. The Père Girard (1765-1850).—The Père Girard is the most eminent educator of modern Switzerland. Less celebrated than Pestalozzi and Frœbel, he yet has this advantage over them, of having been better prepared for his profession as an educator. After having finished a thorough and complete course of classical study, he for a long time taught the same subjects in the same school. He acquired experience and wrote his treatises only in an advanced age, at a time when he was in complete possession of his ideas. He was in fact seventy-nine years old when he published his book On the Systematic Teaching of the Mother Tongue. It is a work of mature thought, and sums up a whole lifetime of labor. Less addicted to system than Frœbel and Pestalozzi, the Père Girard still carries mere system too far, and makes a misuse of the principle which consisted in making of all the parts of instruction the elements of moral education.
548. Life of the Père Girard.—Girard was born in Friburg in 1765. His pedagogic instinct manifested itself at an early hour. While still very young he aided his mother in instructing his fourteen brothers and sisters. Like Frœbel, he was passionately fond of religious questions. One day as he had heard his preceptor say that there was no salvation outside of the Roman Church, he sought his mother in tears, and asked her if the Protestant tradesman who brought her fruit each day would be damned. His mother reassured him, and he always remained faithful to what he called “the theology of his mother,”—a tolerant and broad theology which brought on him the hatred of the Jesuits.
At the age of sixteen he entered the order of the Gray Friars, and completed his novitiate at Lucerne. He then taught in several convents, in particular at Wurtzburg, where he remained four years (1785-1788). He returned to Friburg in 1789, and for ten years he devoted himself almost exclusively to his ecclesiastical functions.
But his vocation as an educator was even then indicated by some things that he had written.
In 1798, under the influence of the ideas of Kant, whose philosophical doctrine he had ardently studied, he published a Scheme of Education for all Helvetia, addressed to the Swiss minister Stapfer, who was also the patron of Pestalozzi.
It was only in 1804, that Girard devoted himself entirely to teaching, the very year in which Frœbel began his work. He was appointed to direct the primary school at Friburg, which had just been entrusted to the Gray Friars. Girard received the title of “prefect of studies,” and for nineteen years, from 1805 to 1823, he exercised his functions as a teacher in that school. Very small in the beginning, the school had a remarkable growth. There was added to it even a school for girls. At first Girard had Gray Friars for colleagues; but he soon replaced them with lay teachers, who obeyed him better and devoted themselves more entirely to their task. The teacher of drawing was a Protestant.
549. Success of the School at Friburg.—A disciple and an admirer of Girard, the pastor Naville, has related in his work on Public Education[228] the brilliant results obtained by Girard in his school at Friburg.
“He had trained a body of youth the like of which perhaps no city in the world could furnish. It was not without a profound emotion that the friends of humanity contemplated a spectacle so new and so touching. That ignorant and boorish class, full of prejudices, which everywhere abounds, was no longer met with at Friburg.... The young there developed graces of an amiable deportment which were never marred by anything disagreeable in tone, speech, or manner. If, seeing children approaching you covered with rags, you approached them thinking that you were about to encounter little ruffians, you were wholly surprised to have them reply to you with politeness, with judgment, and with that accent which bespeaks genteel manners and a careful education.... You will find the explanation in the school, when you observe the groups where these same children exercise by turns, as in playing, their judgment and their conscience. Three or four hours a day employed in this work gave the young that intelligence, those sentiments, and those manners which delighted you.”
550. The Last Years of the Père Girard.—Notwithstanding the success of his instruction, the Père Girard was obliged to abandon the charge of his school in 1823. His loss of position was the result of the intrigues of the Jesuits, whose college had been re-established in 1818. He left Friburg amid universal regrets, and retired to Lucerne, where he taught philosophy till 1834. At that date he returned to his native city and lived a life of seclusion. It was then that he wrote his pedagogical works. But through his disciples, and particularly through the pastor Naville, the methods of the Père Girard were known before he had published anything.
551. Teaching of the Mother Tongue.—Let us now examine the general spirit of the pedagogy of Girard. It is in the theoretical work which he published in 1844, and which was crowned by the French Academy in the same year, that we must look for the principles of his method. It consisted in “choosing a study which may be considered as one essential part of the instruction common to all the classes of society, and which nevertheless is fit for calling into exercise all the intellectual powers.” This study was the mother tongue, which Girard employed for the moral and religious development of children.
Villemain, in his report on the books of Girard, has clearly defined the purpose of the common school as conceived by the educator of Friburg:—
“Where the period of instruction is necessarily short and its object limited, a wise choice of method is the thing of first importance, for upon this choice will depend the education itself. If that method is purely technical, if its exclusive object is reading, writing, and the rules of grammar and computation, the child of the common people will be poorly instructed and will not be educated at all. A difficult task burdens his memory without developing his soul. A new process is placed at his disposal, one workshop more is open to him, so to speak; but the trace left by that instruction will not be deep, will sometimes even be lost through lack of application and exercise, and will not have acted on the moral nature, too often absorbed eventually by a monotonous devotion to duty or the excessive fatigue of bodily labor. The only, the real people’s school, is then that in which all the elements of study serve for the culture of the soul, and in which the child grows better by the things which he learns and by the manner in which he learns them.”
552. Analysis of this Work.—The book of Girard is divided into four parts. The first contains general considerations on the manner in which the mother teaches her children to speak, upon the purpose of a course of instruction on the mother tongue, and on the elements which should compose it.
The second part is entitled: The Systematic Teaching of the Mother Tongue considered solely as the Expression of Thought. It is language considered in itself; but Girard desires that the word should always be united to the thought. It is not necessary that the teaching of grammar should be reduced to verbal instruction; it should also serve to develop the thought of pupils.
In the third part, the Systematic Teaching of the Mother Tongue considered as the Means of Intellectual Culture, Girard considers everything which can contribute to the development of the faculties.
In the fourth part, the Systematic Teaching of Language employed for the Culture of the Heart, Girard shows how the teaching of language may assist in moral education.
A fifth part, Use of the Course in the Mother Tongue, is, so to speak, the material part of the book, and, as it were, the outline of the great practical work of Girard, the Educative[229] Course in the Mother Tongue.
553. The Grammarian, the Logician, the Educator.—In other terms, Girard places himself in succession at four different points of view in the teaching of language:—
“Four persons,” he says, “ought to concur in constructing the course in the mother tongue: the grammarian, the logician, the educator, and, finally, the man of letters.”
The task of the grammarian is to furnish the material of the language and its proper forms.
The logician will teach us what must be done in order to cultivate the intelligence of the young.
The educator will ever be inspired by this grand truth: “Man acts as he loves, and he loves as he thinks.” He will try to grave in the souls of children all the beautiful and grand truths which can awaken and nourish pure and noble affections.
Finally, the man of letters has also his part in the course in language, in the sense that pupils, besides being required from the beginning of their studies to invent propositions and sentences, will have a little later to compose narratives, letters, dialogues, etc.
554. The Grammar of Ideas.—Elementary instruction should have for its purpose the development of the mind and the judgment. It is no longer a question of cultivating the memory alone and of causing words to be learned. The Père Girard would have grammar made an exercise in thinking.
“The grammars in use,” he says, “are intended simply to teach correctness in speaking and writing. By their aid we are able finally to avoid a certain number of faults in style and orthography.... This instruction becomes a pure affair of memory, and the child becomes accustomed to pronounce sounds to which he attaches no meaning. The child needs a grammar of ideas.... Our grammars of words are the plague of education.”
In other terms, grammar should be made above all else an exercise in thinking, and, as it were, “the logic of childhood.”
555. Discreet Use of Rules.—The Père Girard does not proscribe rules. The teaching of language cannot do without them; “but there is,” he says, “a proper manner of presenting them to children, and a just medium to hold.”
In the teaching of grammar we must follow the course which the grammarians themselves have followed in order to construct their science: “The rules were established on facts. It is then to facts that they must be referred in instruction, in order that by this means children may be taught to do intelligently what they have hitherto done through blind imitation.... Few rules, many exercises. Rules are always abstract, dry, and for this very reason poorly adapted to please children, even when they can comprehend them. We ought, then, in general, to make a very sparing use of them.”
So the Père Girard particularly recommends practical exercises, oral instruction, the continual use of the blackboard, the active and animated co-operation of all the members of the class, rapid interrogation, the Socratic method, the abuse of which, however, he criticises.[230]
556. Moral Arithmetic.[231]—The Père Girard, like almost all the men who have conceived an original idea, has fallen into the love of systematizing. He believed that not only language, but all the branches of study might contribute to moral education.
“He conceived,” says Naville, “that by means of a selection of problems adapted to the development of the social affections in the family, the commune, and the State, one might give to arithmetic such a wholesome direction that it might be made to contribute, not only to making the child prudent and economical, but even more to extend his views beyond the narrow circle of selfishness, and to cultivate in him beneficent dispositions.”[232]
557. Moral Geography.—It is in the same spirit that he claimed to find in the study of geography a means of contributing to the development of the moral nature.
“According to my honest conviction, every elementary work for children ought to be a means of education. If it is limited to giving knowledge, if it is limited to developing the faculties of the pupil, I can approve the order and the life which the author has known how to put into his work; but I am not satisfied with it. I am even offended to find only a teacher of language, of natural history, of geography, etc., when I expected something much greater,—an instructor of the young, training the mind in order to train the heart.... Geography lends itself as marvellously to this sublime purpose, although in a sphere a little narrower.”[233]
558. Educative Course in the Mother Tongue.—Girard is not content to state his doctrine in his book On the Systematic Teaching of the Mother Tongue; but in the four volumes of his Educative Course (1844-1846) he has applied his method. Full of new and radical views, original in the arrangement of material as in its system of exposition, revolutionary even in its grammatical terminology, this book is a mine from which we may borrow without stint, only we shall not advise wholesale adoption: there is matter to take and to leave.[234]
559. Analysis of this Work.—The title indicates the general character of the work. In his Cours éducatif, Girard does not separate education from instruction. The purpose is to develop the moral and religious sentiments of the child, no less than to teach him his native language.
The first lessons in grammar ought to be lessons in things. The child is made to name the objects which he knows,—persons, animals, things,—and through these he is made to acquire notions of nouns, common and proper, of gender and number. He is then induced to find for himself the physical, intellectual, and moral qualities of objects, and by this means is made familiar with qualifying adjectives. Care is taken, moreover, while causing each quality to be named, as farther on while causing each judgment to be expressed, to ask the child, “Is this right? Is this wrong?”
The agreement of adjective with noun is learned by practice. The child is drilled in applying adjectives to the nouns which he has found, and vice versa.
Once in possession of the essential elements of the proposition, the child begins the study of the proposition itself, and finally the study of the verb. Girard makes it a principle always to have the conjugations made by means of propositions. At first, however, he employs in simple propositions only the indicative, the infinitive, the imperative, and the participle; he postpones till later the study of the conditional and the subjunctive. It is to be noted, in addition, that he brings forward simultaneously the simple tenses of all the conjugations.
The order followed by Girard is wholly different from that of the ordinary grammars. This is how he explains it:—
“In their first part, the grammars set out in a row the nine sorts of words, and thus give in rapid succession their definitions, distinctions, and variable forms, which introduces a legion of terms wholly unknown to the child. The second part of these grammars takes up these words again in the same order, so as, in an uninteresting way, to regulate their use in construction,—a tedious and arid system, which affords the child no interest.”
Elsewhere, speaking of his own work, he writes:—
“My work differs essentially from the grammars which are put in the hands of children. When we write on language for adults, we may adhere to definitions, distinctions, rules, and exceptions, and formulate statements regarding their proper use; but he who writes for children ought to have the education of the mind and heart in view, and regulate on that basis the course and form of instruction. The course ought to be rigorously progressive, and the pupils ought, from beginning to end, to assist themselves in constructing a grammar of their own.”
“So, instead of making generalizations on the noun, adjective, verb, etc., and of connecting with these parts of speech all that relates to them, we must apply ourselves to the substance of language, passing step by step from the simple to the complex, and teaching children to think, in order to teach them to comprehend and to speak the language of man. The little details cannot appear till later, and as occasion requires. From this there necessarily results a displacement of grammatical material which has been industriously collected and arranged. Hence, also, a great parsimony in definitions and abstract distinctions which repel children.”
560. Educational Influence of the Père Girard.—The influence of the Père Girard was not extended simply to Switzerland. It has radiated abroad. His ideas have been disseminated in Italy, propagated by the Abbé Lambruschini and by Enrico Mayer. A journal even has been founded to serve as the organ of the “Girardists” of the Peninsula. In France, Michel, in the Journal de l’éducation pratique, and Rapet in different works,[235] have commended to public attention the methods of the Swiss educator. Finally, it may be remarked that the principles very recently set forth by the Conseil supérieur de l’instruction publique (1880), on the teaching of French in the elementary classes of the lycées, are in great part the echo of the pedagogical doctrine of the Père Girard.
[561. Analytical Summary.—1. In this study we have the third exposition, in historical order,—Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Frœbel,—of the doctrine of nature as applied to education. This doctrine may be summarized as follows:—
The existing order of things is conceived as an animated organism, and is personified under the term Nature. All living things, such as plants, animals, and men, are products of the creative power that is immanent in nature, and each is predetermined to an upward development in the line of growth. This growth is an unfolding from within outward, and each individual thing, as a child, has reached the term of its development when it has grown into the type of its kind. In the case of the human species, this growth is best when it is natural, and it is natural to the degree in which it takes place without the deliberate intervention of art. This process of development is Nature’s work, and its synonym is education. Education is best when it is most natural, that is, when it suffers least from human interference. The question of the relative parts to be played by Nature and by Art in education has given rise to two schools of educators.
2. In Frœbel’s application of this doctrine, the original conception is obscured by three circumstances: 1. his deism; 2. his mysticism or symbolism; 3. his dependence on artificial agents, his “gifts,” and his belief in the potency of abstractions.
3. The Kindergarten has introduced many ameliorations into primary instruction, and its tendency is to make child-life happy through self-activity. Its shortcomings are that it undervalues the acquisition of second-hand knowledge, obscures the distinction between work and play, and indisposes, and perhaps unfits, the pupil to contend with real difficulties.[236]
4. The effect of this new movement in primary instruction upon educational science has been wholesome. It has induced a closer study of child nature, has enlisted the sympathies and affections in support of elementary instruction, and has profoundly modified the conception of the primary school.
5. Whether the Kindergarten is to be maintained apart, as an institution sui generis, or whether it is to lose its identity by the absorption of its spirit into the primary school, is a question for the future. Probably the latter result will follow.
6. The misuse of a good thought is seen in the attempt of the Père Girard to give a distinct moral value to every school exercise. It is the verdict of experience that the moral value of science is greatest when it is taught simply as science, and that the direct teaching of ethics should be conducted on an independent basis.]