Froebel as a pioneer in modern psychology

by E. R. Murray

“It is just as important to notice the habits of a child, especially with regard to cause and effect, as it is to notice and to foster its impulse to activity.… As now habit springs from free and spontaneous activity, so too does imitation, and it is no less important for the fostering of child-life to keep in view this origin of imitation, than it is to keep in view the phenomena of habit, custom and independent activity. For we see the whole inner life of the child manifest itself as a tri-unity in the threefold phenomenon of spontaneous activity, habit and imitation. These three phenomena are closely united in early childhood, and give us most important discoveries concerning child-life, as to foundation and result and surest guides for the early correct treatment of the child.”—P., p. 27.

Mr. McDougall notes “at least three distinct classes” of imitative actions. The first class consists of expressive actions, secondary to the sympathetic induction of the emotions they express, as when a child responds to a smile with a smile, and here we remember how Froebel notes the child’s first smile to his mother as the earliest sign of what he calls “the feeling of community.” The third class is the deliberate and voluntary imitation of an admired person, which does not concern us here. The second class are “simple ideo-motor actions evoked by the visual presentation of a movement,” and as a parallel to this we have Froebel’s “working of the inner activity wakened by the sight of outer activity.”

“The smallest child moves joyfully, springs gaily, hops up and down, or beats with his arms when he sees a moving object. This is certainly not merely delight in the movement of the object before him, but it is the working of inner activity wakened in him by the sight of outer activity. Through such vision the inner life has been freed.…”—P., pp. 239-40.

A point to which exception may well be taken is that in the infant Froebel notes what he seems to regard as a fundamental tendency, the impulse or instinct of activity, or as he frequently puts it, the impulse to busy oneself, which, however, soon differentiates into two more specific tendencies, viz. the impulse to investigate and the constructive impulse.

“What formerly the child did only for the sake of activity, the boy now does for the sake of the result or product of his activity. The child’s impulse to activity (Thätigkeitstrieb) has in the boy become a constructive, a formative impulse (Bildungs-Gestaltungstriebe), in which the whole outer life of the boy finds at this stage its outlet.”—E., p. 99.

It may be worth mentioning that Groos would like to assume a “universal impulse to activity,” and though he “can only hold fast to the primal need for activity,” yet according to him Ribot approaches this assumption.—(“The Play of Man,” p. 3).

Even in the infant, however, this instinct or impulse to activity is devoted to “penetrating what is outer,” and the Kindergarten, meant for children from three to six, is intended to foster the three instincts, activity, investigation and construction, as well as to cultivate the social instinct by placing a little child among his equals. Froebel describes it in his plan as:

“An Institution for fostering of family life and for shaping the life of the nation and human life generally, through cultivating the human instincts of activity, of investigation (Forschungstrieb), and of construction in the child, as a member of the family, of the nation, and of humanity.…”—P., p. 6.

As regards the child, the word Trieb, which is exactly equal to impulse, seems to be applied only in one other direction, to what we would call the social instinct, and here again Froebel shows his recognition of the vagueness and indefiniteness of early consciousness. As he attributes to the infant the one impulse to activity which differentiates later into Investigation and Construction, so in the infant he recognizes a “feeling of community” (Gesammtgefühl), but says that it differentiates later into something more definite.[33]

“The development of man constitutes an unbroken whole, steadily and continuously progressing, gradually ascending. The feeling of community (Gemeingefühl) awakened in the infant, develops in the child into impulse, inclination (entwickelt sich in dem Kinde der Trieb, die Neigung).”—E., p. 95.