Froebel as a pioneer in modern psychology

by E. R. Murray

But Froebelians are not prepared to admit the premises of any of these critics. It seems to many of us that these and all similar criticisms are due to misunderstanding. This is sometimes clearly due to careless reading, and consequent want of attention to the context, but even where this is not the case, misunderstandings occur. Few, of late years, have made any real study of Froebel’s writings as a whole, such as is necessary to get at his real meaning, which is often obscured by prolixities and repetitions, and sometimes hidden among apparent trivialities.

Professor O’Shea, for example, does not seem to be aware to what extent Froebel, like himself, derived his educational aim and principles from biology. He has probably never realized the deep interest taken by Froebel in the then all-absorbing question of natural development. Clearly he has no idea that Froebel has given expression to a conception of education, practically identical with that given above which he himself draws from biology,[49] and sets in contrast with the one he unjustly attributes to Froebel.

There is no doubt whatever that Froebel laid much stress on what is innate. In his generation, he tells us the child was looked upon “as a piece of wax, or lump of clay, which man can mould into what he pleases.” Because Froebel was a student of biology he knew better. He knew, as we have seen, that human beings have instincts, innate tendencies or dispositions differing from those of the lower animals chiefly in their indefiniteness. We are not so afraid of the word “innate” nowadays, when both innate ideas and innate faculties are safely buried, and that Froebel had no dealings with these has been amply shown.

But that this stress on innate tendencies implies that the child is to unfold from within, the educator standing by passive[50], or that Froebel imagined that the developing process could go on with little or no reference to the environment, is quite another matter.

Few of Froebel’s critics have taken the trouble to look up the original German before pronouncing condemnation, and this explains part of the injustice that has been done to him. The passage upon which much, perhaps most, of the adverse criticism is based is the one in which Froebel applies to education the term “leidend,” translated “passive” in both the English, or, rather, American editions of “The Education of Man.” The translation of “leidend” as “passive” is not a happy one. Moreover, the translators have endeavoured to help the reader by dividing the text into numbered sections, a proceeding which though often helpful, sometimes tends to break the continuity of Froebel’s thought. This effect is heightened in Hailmann’s translation by the interpolated notes, however valuable as some of these are in themselves. This passage, however, opens with “therefore,” and those who take exception to it ought to have considered the preceding argument. Fair criticism looks back to see why and under what circumstances education is to be “passive or following,” as opposed to “dictating and limiting.”

In the first place, absolutely passive education is a contradiction in terms. Froebel begins by stating that:

“Education consists in leading man as a thinking, intelligent being, growing into self-consciousness, to a pure, conscious and free representation of the law of his being, and in teaching him ways and means thereto.”

He defines the Theory of Education as “the system of directions derived from the knowledge and study of that law to guide human beings in the apprehension of their life-work”; and the Practice of Education as “the self-active application of this knowledge in the direct development and cultivation of rational beings towards the attainment of their destiny.”

To go on from this to say, on the next page but one, that the educator is to do nothing, to stand aside and be truly passive, would be absurd.

That our word “passive” is not the equivalent of Froebel’s word “leidend,” is easily proved, for in another passage where Froebel does mean “passive” he couples “leidend” with “inactive,” and puts passive in a bracket beside it. The passage runs: “wo das Kind äusserlich als unthätig, leidend (passiv) erscheint.” In the passage under discussion “passiv” does not appear at all, and “leidend” is coupled, not with “inactive,” but with “following,” and is contrasted with “dictating, limiting and interfering.”[51]