In many other passages Froebel shows plainly that he had no thought of the “gratifying of every youthful impulse” in the sense of individual caprice.
In his plea for monetary help to establish Kindergartens and training establishments connected with them, he complains that in existing institutions children are either “repressed and their energies crippled, or else we are confronted with the wild and uncontrollable character which results when children are uncared for and are left altogether to their own impulses.”—L., p. 159.
“Life has no room for wilfulness and whims,” he says in his Mother Songs; “Boyhood is the age of Discipline” he states in “The Education of Man.” But, as he himself sums up this discussion:
“All true education is double-sided, prescribing and following, active and passive, positive yet giving scope, firm and yielding.… Between educator and pupil should rule invisibly a third something to which both are equally subject. The third something is the right, the best … the child, the pupil has a very keen apprehension whether what father or teacher requests is personal and arbitrary or the expression of general law and necessity.”—E., p. 14.
The proof of whether or not the educator has succeeded in rightly adjusting the claims of freedom and authority, Froebel expresses in words recalling Kant’s, “When the ‘Thou Shalt’ of the Law becomes the ‘I will’ of the doer, then we are free.”
“In good education, in genuine instruction, in true teaching, necessity must and will call forth freedom, law will call forth self-determination, and outer compulsion inner free-will.
“Where necessity produces bondage, where law brings fraud and crime, and outer compulsion causes slavery, there every effect of education is destroyed. There oppression destroys and debases, severity and harshness bring obstinacy and deceit, and the burden is more than can be borne.”—E., p. 14.
To emphasize the fact that Froebel did realize the importance of environment, and to anticipate the criticism that this shortened rendering is an interpretation in the light of modern educational theories, of Froebel’s somewhat cumbrous phrases, we can turn to a passage in his later writing, part of which has been quoted elsewhere:
“Through the child’s efforts to repel that which is contrary to the needs of his life, indignation and discontent are awakened; and on the other hand, from the fact that his normal desires are ungratified, they become inordinate and mischievous. How may parents avoid these evil results? Most satisfactorily through a threefold yet single glance at life. Let them look into themselves, and their own course of development and its requirements, let them recall their own earliest years, then later stages of development, and look deeply into their present life. Next, let them look equally deeply into the life of the child and what he must require for his present stage of development. Having scrutinized what the child needs, let them scrutinize his environment, and first observe what it offers and does not offer for the fulfilment of such requirements. Let them utilize all offered possibilities of meeting normal needs; and when such needs cannot be met, let them recognize this fact, and show the child plainly the impossibility of their fulfilment. Finally, let them clearly recognize whatever in the child’s environment tends to awaken antagonism and discontent, remove it if it be removable, and admit its defect if it be not removable.”[53]—P., p. 167.