“A new life stage has begun, and you, dear Mother, must use your best and most watchful care, when first the child listens to a stranger.”
In the same connection he writes:
“The child must be roused to good by inclination, love and respect, through the opinion of others around him, and all this must be strengthened and developed.… When, therefore, Mother, observation as to the judgment of others awakes in your child—when, separating himself and on the watch he brings himself before the judgment of others, then you really have a double task to perform.…”—M., p. 190.
The Love of Approbation cannot be separated from what Mr. Kirkpatrick calls the Regulative, i.e. the Moral and Religious Instincts, for it is both social and regulative, and in the social instincts Froebel sees the foundation of the religious instincts or tendencies, to which we shall come presently. But he also notes a “sense of order,” as Mr. Sully does in his delightful “Studies of Childhood,” and this he traces back to very early beginnings, connecting it with the tendency towards rhythm.
“That disorder and rough wilfulness may never enter the games, it is a good plan wherever it is possible to accompany each change in the play by rhyme and song; so that the latent sense of rhythm and song, and above all the sense of order in the human being and child, may be aroused and strengthened to an impulse for social cooperation.”—P., p. 267.
One of the earliest Mother Plays, “Tic-tac,” deals with rhythmic movement, and in “The Education of Man” Froebel takes the beginning of “conscious control” still further back. His ideal mother fosters “all-sided life,” that is, she fosters the cognitive, emotional and conative, the first by calling the child’s attention to his own body and his immediate surroundings, and the second by “seeking to awaken and to interpret the feeling of community between the child and the father, brother and sister,” and Froebel goes on:
“In addition to the sense of community as such, the germ of so much glorious development, the mother’s love seeks also through movements to lead the child to feel his own inner life. By regular rhythmic movements—and this is of special importance—she brings this life within the child’s conscious control when she dandles him up and down on her hand or arm in rhythmic movements and to rhythmic sounds. Thus the genuine natural mother cautiously follows in all directions the slowly developing all-sided life in the child, strengthening and arousing to ever greater activity, and developing the all-sided life within. Others suppose the child to be empty and wish to inoculate him with life, and thus make him as empty as they think him to be.”—E., p. 69.
It is surprising to find that Froebel, writing so early, has nothing at all resembling any special “moral faculty.” His references to “Conscience” are decidedly interesting, though given in quaint connection with games and rhymes for mere babes. He asks why the “Where’s Baby?” game gives such delight, and shows his psychological insight in the answer he finds, viz. that it is the feeling or recognition of self, of personality, which gives such joy.