Froebel as a pioneer in modern psychology

by E. R. Murray

“To realize his aims, man, and more particularly the child, requires material, though it be only a bit of wood or a pebble with which he makes something or which he makes into something.”—P., p. 235.

And although his opinion of the importance of that particular series of playthings, which he chose from among those he saw in general use, may have been exaggerated, still there is a good deal of sound psychology in what he says about them. In speaking of imitative action and construction, we have already touched upon what were perhaps the most important ideas underlying this series.[42]

“What presents are most prized by the child? Those which afford him a means of unfolding his inner life most freely and of shaping it in various directions.”—P., p. 142.

But Froebel also writes of his Gifts that “they will cover the whole ground of training in sense perception,” and he has managed to think out a very fair number of the points which Dr. Ward, in his Analysis of Perception, notes as important.

One of Froebel’s frequent Reviews of his play-material begins:

“How has the child developed up to this point? How has the world, the objects and things around him developed? How has the child developed himself especially through the toys—the means of play and employment—which have thus far been given him? The brightening light in the child’s mind illuminates the objects around him. In proportion as the inner light increases, the nature of external objects grows clear to him … the law of development is that of progress from the unlimited to the limited, from the whole to the part, from an undifferentiated to a membered totality … the outer world comes to meet the inner world, it does not hinder, but helps the inner world.

“The man advanced in insight should be clear about all this before he introduces his child to the outer world. Even when he gives his child a plaything he must make clear to himself its purpose, and the purpose of playthings and occupation material in general. This purpose is to aid the child freely to express what lies within him—to bring the phenomena of the outer world nearer to him, and thus to serve as mediator between the mind and the world.”—P., pp. 169-171.

Then Froebel explains in so many words the really psychological aim or meaning of his sequence of “Gifts,” so well known by name—and even better known in most un-psychological practice—but little understood in their real and original significance, as a means of perception, the earlier ones at least, for children much below even Kindergarten age.

“Recognizing the mediatorial character of play and playthings, we shall no longer be indifferent either to the choice, the succession, or the organic connection of the toys we give children. In these I offer them, I shall consider as carefully as possible, how the child may in using them develop his nature freely and yet in accordance with law (laws of mind), and how through such use he may also learn to apprehend external things correctly and to employ them justly. As the child’s first consciousness of self was born of physical opposition to and connection with the external world, so through play with the ball, the external world itself began to rise out of chaos and to assume definiteness. In recognizing the ball the child moved from the indefinite to the definite, from the universal to the particular, from mere externality (compare Prof. Ward’s ‘mere thing stuff’) to a self-included space-filling object. In the ball, especially through movement, through the opposition of rest and motion, through departing and returning, the object came forth out of general space as a special space-filling object, as a body: just as the child by means of his life (activity) also perceives himself, his bodily frame, as a space-filling object, as a body. The child has thus obtained two important terms of comparison for his first intellectual development; body and body, object and object.… At the same time there begins in the child, as in a seed-corn, a development advancing towards manifoldness. For this reason he should receive a corresponding seed-corn in the object which he first detaches as object from the external chaos. Such object should, like himself, include an indefinite manifoldness, and be susceptible of a progressive development. Such an object is the ball (Gift I).”—P., p. 171.

The very first “intimation of an intellect,” Froebel writes, is when the child is seen to “keep his gaze fixed upon the motion of a bright object. This begins a few weeks after birth.” The ball is to be given to the baby “when the starting-point of recognition and knowledge (Erkennens und Erkenntniss), viz. perceiving, noticing, thinking (das Gewahrwerden, das Bemerken und Beachten) becomes perceptible”: when the child “can freely move its little arms and hands, when it can perceive and distinguish tones, and can turn its attention and gaze in the direction from which these tones come.”