“It is my firm conviction that whenever you find anything that gives children lastingly and ever freshly a joy belonging to a true pure life—anything where innocence and mirth predominate—you have found something which has at the bottom of it a higher and more important meaning for a child’s life.”—M., p. 172.
We cannot always tell why children enjoy the game, or what they gain from it. Such games are at least the earliest and simplest introduction to “the rules of the game,” and they contain the elements of choosing sides and of whispered secrets. These things may seem small to the ordinary onlooker, but not to the real observer, who sees the amount of self-control required by a child of four or five, that he may not proclaim the secret aloud, the difficulty he has in whispering, and the importance to him of the choice between oranges and lemons or whatever it may be. There are certainly some which most thinking persons, Froebelian or otherwise, would wish to discourage. As Froebel himself said of some that he found in use:
“I thought some were too empty and silly and some said a great deal that I would not willingly have said to children. Yet the counting games themselves seemed to me important in many ways, as I hope will appear from comparing the way I have dealt with them, and above all, as the mottoes are meant to point out. I even wished to keep the sound of the well-known popular words, at least in the opening words.…”—M., p. 157.
Certainly, Froebel would have had no dealings with either work or play which would interfere with progressive development, he wanted recapitulation because he regarded that “great necessary highway” as the road to sure progress.
“Only if in each particular we tread again the great necessary highway of humanity as a whole, does the great and vigorous early life of humanity come back to us in and through the children.”—E., p. 222.
“Education must be much more tolerating[39] and following than predetermining and prescribing, for by the full application of the latter method of instruction we should entirely lose the characteristic, the sure and steady progressive development of mankind.”—E., p. 10.
Some educators who have made much of the “culture epochs” might have avoided mistakes and exaggerations if they had taken to heart Froebel’s repeated warning that the child has “living relations” not only with the past, but with the future, besides being at the same time the child of the present generation.
“Parents should view their child in his necessary connection, in his obvious and living relations to the past, present, and future development of humanity, in order to bring the education of the child into harmony with the past, present and future requirements of the development of humanity and of the race.… Man, humanity in man, as an external manifestation, should therefore be looked upon not as perfectly developed, not as fixed and stationary, but as steadily and progressively growing, in a state of ever-living development, ever ascending from one stage of culture to another toward its aim, which partakes of the infinite and eternal.
“It is unspeakably pernicious to look upon the development of humanity as stationary and completed and to see in its present phases only repetitions and greater generalizations of itself. For the child, as well as every successive generation, becomes thereby exclusively imitative, an external dead copy—a cast, as it were, of the preceding, and not a living ideal of the stage which it has attained in human development considered as a whole, to serve future generations in all time to come.”—E., p. 17.
Underlying all that Froebel has to say of play, is the idea that it is a preparation for future life activities. This is implied even in the definition given of the play of the child of three years old, viz. that it is “spontaneous self-instruction”; it is most evident in the passage: