To sum up, then, there is mysticism in Froebel’s writings as addressed to the adult, and with this no one has any right to quarrel even if it should not appeal to him or her personally. But an undue preponderance has been given to this side of Froebel by those to whom it appeals, or so it seems to me. It does not appeal to me, nor can I perceive that it affects to any appreciable extent the educational theories based on the psychological grounds so carefully considered by Froebel. To writers like Miss Blow, the author of “Symbolic Education,” such a statement would no doubt seem outrageous. With intellectual people possessed of Miss Blow’s philosophic insight, children may be safe from artificiality and sentimentality. But the average teacher is incapable of philosophy, and when the uncultured mind is supplied with food it cannot digest, that mind is starved. The teacher who glibly uses phrases which she does not understand has reached a state of mind immeasurably below plain ignorance, for it is destructive of honest thought and common sense.[47] The main business of the Froebelian is to forward the cause to which Froebel devoted his life “to bring about a more general use of progressive development in the culture and education of children. We must throw overboard everything that hampers action and set before ourselves, as in his day Froebel tells us he attempted to do, the definite task of “founding anew the practical methods of actual teaching so as to bring them into satisfactory relation with the needs of our life of to-day.”
CHAPTER X
Some Criticisms Answered
Professor Adams ends the first chapter of his delightfully witty “Herbartian Psychology” with a challenge to all educational thinkers to come out of their caves and defend their idols. Throughout the book, there is many a side-thrust at Froebel, all of a more or less disparaging nature, in spite of the humorous twinkle which has a fairly permanent abode in the eye of the writer.
Some of the accusations are tolerably sweeping, for example, that Froebelianism “as a psychology is simply non-existent”; that Froebel has failed to correlate theory and practice; that although in “The Education of Man” “we have beautiful, if obscurely expressed, truths about education,” yet the Kindergarten cannot be evolved from it, in fact “between the two there is a great gulf fixed, a gulf that Froebel has not bridged.”
But the main contention is that Froebel disapproves in theory of any interference with the natural course of development. The Froebelian teacher is thus, according to Professor Adams, reduced to the position of a “humble under-gardener” who merely watches with interest and admiration, and education becomes “a general paralysis.”
Mr. Graham Wallas, whose objections to Froebel, or at least to Froebelianism[48], as he understands it, are well known, bases these on the ground that because he was a pre-Darwinian evolutionist, Froebel was bound to overrate the importance of the innate as a factor in development, and to undervalue the other factor of environment.
Professor O’Shea disposes of Froebel in one sentence and in much the same way, as an advocate of what he calls “the doctrine of Unfoldment,” where “everything is inner and self-relating,” as opposed to the conception gained from Biology, which “implies that the business of a human being is to get properly related to the world—religious, social and physical—of which he is an integral part.”
If Froebel really believed that development is entirely from within, as stated by Professor O’Shea, or if he failed to realize the importance of the surroundings, as Mr. Graham Wallas expresses it, he would naturally disapprove of any interference, as Professor Adams says he does. The Froebelian, being thus reduced to passive watching, the mere provision of a Kindergarten would be an interference with the surroundings and a contradiction in practice of the theory of non-interference. If non-interference is really the theory propounded in “The Education of Man,” there certainly is a gulf between it and the Kindergarten, a gulf it would be difficult to bridge.