Froebel as a pioneer in modern psychology

by E. R. Murray

At the same time it does seem as if one, if not two, psychological errors lie at the root of certain practices which the modern Froebelian has discarded.

It would be most unfair to Froebel not to emphasize what is often overlooked, viz. that the “Gifts” were important in his eyes solely because he believed that in them he was presenting toys, or “play-material,” exactly suited to the succeeding stages of the child’s development, bodily and mental. “The new gift,” he says, “corresponds both to the child’s increasing constructive ability, and to his growing capacity to comprehend the external world.” And he writes:

“But such a course of training and occupations for children answering to the laws of development and the laws of life, demanded a thoroughly expressive medium in the shape of materials for these occupations and games for the child: therefore to meet this point I have arranged a series of play materials under the title of: ‘A complete series of gifts for play.’”—P., p. 250.

It should also be noted that Froebel did not commit the mistake of inventing new toys. What he attempted to do was what we are all attempting now, viz. to use what natural instinct has already selected, as a basis for conscious educational work. Balls and building blocks, coloured tablets and papers, sand and clay, are all spontaneously appropriated by normal children. Even these materials which seem to us unchildlike are not so in different surroundings. For instance, in the Black Forest, one may watch children playing with long slivers of wood exactly like Froebel’s laths, and these they take from the cut logs which are being hauled up for winter storage.

Again, it is only fair to point out that Froebel’s followers have appropriated material which he suggested as suited to children aged from three months to five or six years, and have used them with children from four or five to six or seven and even older.[45] Teachers have also found it convenient to disregard Froebel’s frequent warnings not to interfere, to let the child “bang and pound” when he wants to, to let him “play quietly and thoughtfully by himself as long as he will,” to give him “the greatest possible freedom of expression.” In some, at least, of the original text-books on Kindergarten practice, written by Froebel’s early disciples, this advice is totally disregarded, and we find prescribed the most formal of object lessons, dealing with the properties of the ball in set questions and answers; only at the end comes “If there is time, the children may be allowed to roll the ball.”

Still, when all due allowance is made, there remains the fact that Froebel attributed far too much importance to the series of toys he arranged, and in addition to this he must be held in large measure responsible for the extraordinary amount of mathematical perceptions of which young children have been considered capable, and beneath which many gleams of intelligence may have been extinguished.

The psychological error which seems to underlie both these mistakes in pedagogy seems to have been that of making too much of the outer factor in the process of perception. Froebel was quite right and quite modern in refusing to draw any hard and fast line between sense perception and thinking, in saying that the child moves “from perception of a thing, joined with thought about it, up to pure thought.” But he must have failed somehow, sufficiently to grasp the fact that all that is present to sense is not necessarily perceived, that perception depends not merely upon what is presented, but upon previous mind content. The word “apperception,” though apparently somewhat fallen into disfavour of late, has certainly been of service in emphasizing this point.

What seems strange is that in the very book, in which we find the theory disregarded in practice, we find Froebel stating the theory itself in the plainest of terms:

“The properties and nature of the outer world unfold themselves in exact proportion to the capacities of the child.”—P., p. 120.

“The child creates his own world for himself; it is at once the expression of his inward realization of the external world and its surroundings, and also the outward representation of his internal mental world, the world of his own subjectivity.”—L., p. 141.