It is in connection with the child’s earliest investigations that Froebel brings in the learning to speak. In “The Education of Man,” he notes how the young child brings all his discoveries, “his treasures,” to the mother’s lap, and she is warned to give the right kind of help and at the right time.
“It is the longing for interpretation that urges the child to appeal to us, it is the intense desire for this that urges him to bring his treasures to us and to lay them in our laps. The child loves all things that enter his small horizon and extend his little world. To him the least thing is a new discovery; but it must not come dead into the little world, nor lie dead therein lest it obscure the small horizon and crush the little world.”—E., p. 73.
All the help the mother need give at first is to supply names, since as Froebel says, “the name, as it were, creates the thing for the child.” Later she must help him to compare and classify.
“How little is needed from those around the child to aid him in this tendency (to seek for knowledge). It is only necessary to name, to put into words what the child does, sees and finds.”—E., p. 75.
“It is as well while the child is making these first experiments (at walking about the room) to name the objects—e.g. There is the chair, the table, etc.… The object of giving these names is not primarily the development of the child’s power of speech, but to assist his comprehension of the object, its parts and its properties by defining his sense-impressions. By a rich store of such experiences the capacity for speech develops of necessity, and speech breaks forth of itself, as it were, through heightened mental self-activity in accordance with the nature of mind.”—P., p. 242.
Expression, of course, of which speech is but one form, is to Froebel all-important. “Speech,” he says, is “required and conditioned by the attainment to consciousness,” and as self-consciousness is the characteristic of humanity, so speech is “the first manifestation of mankind.” In his “Autobiography” Froebel writes:
“Mankind as a whole, as one great unity, had now become my quickening thought. I kept this conception continually before my mind. I sought after proofs of it in my little world within and in the great world without me; I desired by many a struggle to win it, and then to set it worthily forth. And thus I was led back to the first appearance of man upon our earth, and to the first manifestation of mankind, his speech.”—A., p. 84.
In talking of the mother’s play with an infant he says that she accompanies every action with words, “even if obliged to confess that there can be no understanding of the spoken word,” as “the general sense of hearing is not yet developed, still less the special sense of hearing words.” Froebel says she is right:
“for that which will one day develop and which must originate, begins and must begin when there is as yet only the conditions, the possibility thereof. Thus it is with the attainment of the human being to consciousness, and the speech required and conditioned by consciousness.”—P., p. 40.