Gifts III to VI are boxes of building blocks, intended to present sequence in difficulty of manipulation, and also increasing variety of form. Because of the stress he laid on self-expression, Froebel thought very highly of the educational possibilities of a box of bricks. In “The Education of Man” he writes:
“Look into this education room of eight boys, seven to ten years old. On the large table stands a chest of building blocks, in the form of bricks, each side about one-sixth of the size of actual bricks, the finest and most variable material that can be offered a boy for purposes of representation. Sand or sawdust, too, have found their way into the room, and fine green moss has been brought in abundantly from the last walk in the beautiful pine forest. It is free time, and each one has begun his own work. There in a corner stands a chapel … there a building which represents a castle.…”—E., p. 108.
After the bricks come the coloured tablets of Gift VII, which children from four and upwards, if left free, often highly appreciated as material for making patterns; and the Sticks or splints of various lengths of Gift VIII, with which they used to lay outlines of familiar objects. English children often use burnt matches for this, sometimes they do the same thing with “mother’s pin-box,” and a child quite innocent of Kindergarten ideas has been seen to appropriate the various nails of a tool-box to the same purpose. Along with the sticks Froebel supplied rings of metal or paper; the little English child who used the nails took small curtain rings for the petals of her flower and screw nails for its stalk. In Gift IX the child is presented with very small articles for stringing or arranging—beads, coloured beans, pebbles, etc. A child’s pleasure in this material and in the sticks and rings probably shows that he is ready to practise movements of the thumbs and forefingers. Froebel said that the use of these sticks called the child’s attention to “linear phenomena,” and I have already mentioned that many years ago, when we were still using Froebel’s play-material, I heard a child call out, “Oh, I’m making lines!” just after he had been using the sticks. The other children contentedly went on rubbing with the crayons; but this young discoverer continued to make laborious lines, always from left to right, till the work was completed to his satisfaction.
The remaining “Gifts” include coloured paper to fold and cut either to produce such objects as boats, boxes, purses, chairs, etc., or to form patterns, or to weave together for the well-known paper mat; drawing and paper materials; modelling clay and sand, and so on.
The weakness of the series is the semi-psychological semi-mathematical arrangement, which has been dealt with in the following chapter. What Froebel meant to do was to pick out from among the material he saw given to children, or appropriated by them, those things which seemed to him best adapted to call out the activities of children at various ages or stages, in accordance with his idea that “the man advanced in insight should make clear to himself the purpose of playthings, viz. to help the child to express himself, and to bring the phenomena of the outer world nearer to him.”
Surprise has often been expressed that Froebel did not include such toys as dolls in his series.
One reason is that he did not live long enough, for he does speak of doll-play and says that later the time will come “when we shall speak of the doll and the hobby-horse as the plays of the awakening life of the girl and of the boy.” In his brief reference he does speak of the child’s own nature becoming objective through the doll-play, and he adds that by such play she “anticipates and feels her destiny.” He notes, too, with interest that:
“Little girls make their favourite dolls of the heavy bootjack or like piece of wood. I was informed by a mother that a heavy sandbag which she accidentally found became her most cherished doll, because it had in it the weight of an actual child, and so she gave herself up to the illusion and imagined herself to be carrying a real child.”
Undoubtedly Froebel was right in demanding simple toys and in characterizing the “too complex toy” as a “viper under the roses,” and also in demanding that toys should be carefully considered and chosen so as to meet the needs of the child’s developing mind. But the plays and the toys of a developing child cannot be definitely prescribed, and every similar attempt is likely to fail, as Froebel’s has done. In his choice, Froebel was biased by the great idea which obsessed him, the idea of development. Like all human beings, he had the defects of his virtues, and it is to these defects that we must now turn our attention.