A gentle intellectual exercise, involved in learning by rote, reciting, and singing the songs that direct the plays, takes the rudeness out and puts intelligence into that exhilaration of the animal spirits which healthy children crave, and prevents it from exhausting the body or disordering the mind; the joyous association of the children with each other aiding this effect. In the sedentary plays, which are called "occupations," and in which the child is genially drawn into producing symmetrical effects to the eye, by making things (albeit only little toys) which begin their artistic life, Frœbel has had equal regard to the moral as to the intellectual influences. When the child has gone beyond the age in which he is satisfied with making transient forms and gathering the materials back into boxes, and desires to make something that will last, a legitimate sense of property arises. He feels that what he has made is his own, for the thought and work which he knows that he has put into it are his own. Frœbel, therefore, would have him, before he begins to make anything, pause and appropriate it intentionally to some object of his love, reverence, or pity. This will check the otherwise rampant propensity to hoard, and prevent the passions of avarice, vanity, and jealousy from making their appearance. In our common school life, the pride of showing off their powers, and excelling others, is regularly cultivated in children by competition, as a stimulus to industry. But this is as unnecessary as it is deleterious. For disinterested desire to confer pleasure, and express gratitude and love of others, is found by experience to be a surer stimulus to industry than the baser passions, and has the additional value of cultivating positive sweetness and active benevolence. It is desirable, and really produces the greatest practical humility, for children to regard themselves as embryo powers of beneficence, learning to do the Heavenly Father's business from the beginning, like the child Jesus. Then may they grow "in favor with God and men," as they grow "in stature," and all their knowledge will prove a divine wisdom unto the salvation of others and themselves. To go into a truly ordered and well governed child-garden, and see all the little children busy making things for the Christmas tree, or for birthday and new year's gifts, for all the friends they know or fancy, we shall see sufficient proofs that love is the truest quickener of industry, and love-inspired industry the true sweetener of the disposition and temper.
Moreover, such industry is the special desideratum to temper the spirit of the present age, which is so keen and energetic that it hurries our young men into pursuits in their amusements which take on the character of gambling; and hence gambling in business, gambling in politics, where even human beings, instead of being regarded as brothers to be kept, are used as dice, to be recklessly thrown in our game. The only preventive or cure for this passion for gambling is industry, and the only industry that is attractive is artistic; and why should not all industry become artistic, now that the great cosmic forces are suborned, by our advancing civilization, as the legitimate slaves of men, to do all the hard work for men? I have already set forth this view of the subject in the Plea for Frœbel's Kindergarten as the Primary Art-School, which I appended to Cardinal Wiseman's lecture on the relation of the arts of design with the arts of production (which I published in 1869, under the title of The Artist and the Artisan Identified,—the Proper Object of American Education).
Before I leave these general remarks for more specific explanation of Frœbel's method of intellectual development, I would make one more observation. It is in the social and moral character of the kindergarten that Frœbel has shown himself so much superior to Rousseau, whose method was to cultivate individualities exclusively, the teacher pretending to know no more than the child, but taking his idiosyncrasy for his only guide in discovery and invention. In the first place, Rousseau's method has been found an impracticable one, for it requires a separate teacher for every child; and in the only instance, perhaps, in which it was ever carried out with perfect fidelity, that of Maria Edgeworth's eldest brother (we have in her memoirs of her father all the facts), the ultimate effect was to make a monstrosity. He was utterly strange, so odd and unsocial, nobody but his father, who educated him, could have any practicable relation with him. He might be said to be conscientiously unsocial, and therefore immoral; and, though not ungifted, he was an utter failure in human life. We see similar effects produced measurably, in all cases where the main object is to cultivate the individual rather than the universal characteristics of humanity. Frœbel was tender, and gave freedom to individualities, but he took great care not to pamper them. They are the results of the free-will, irrefragable, and will take care of themselves sufficiently, if not cruelly snubbed, but tenderly respected.
What is to be intentionally cultivated in earliest infancy, are the general affections and faculties, which relate us to our kind, insuring common sense and common conscience with a reasonable self-respect. Therefore, what is done in the kindergarten is necessary for all children, their idiosyncrasies being left free to play on the surface and give variety and piquancy to life, freedom and dignity to the individual.
All minds seem to be divided into two classes. In one class, the primal tendency is to observe single objects; and these are the so-called smart children, interesting the spectator by their vivacity and precocity. In the other class, children seem to be dull in sense, unobserving, but dreamy, as if they had an over-mastering presentiment of that connection of things which binds them into wholes. It has been remarked that this latter class turns out the great men,—the poets, the philosophers, the inventors, high artists, great statesmen, and law-givers,—while the precocious children disappoint expectation; probably because they have accumulated such a chaos of single impressions of disconnected things, that it quite overwhelms the classifying and generalizing powers of the intellect. Frœbel's method equally meets the respective wants of both these classes of minds, supplying by specific culture the other side of their practical endowment. By its discipline of production, it gives the lively and restless ones the wand of the Fairy-Order, in discovering to them the connections of things, and the conditions as well as laws of organization; while for those of the dreamy, poetic, philosophic temperament, it sharpens the senses to individual things, supplying the definite and sensuous impressions, and suggesting the corresponding words that enable them to give an account of their own thinking, and illustrate to others the struggling ideal; which, like conscience and the love of order and rhythm, is perhaps the yet persistent vision of that Heavenly Father's face, which Jesus Christ has told us we are created beholding.
Jesus evidently is quoting a familiar proverb, when he says "for their angels behold the face of my Father who is in heaven." Does it not refer to the Persian mythology current in Judea after the captivity? However neglected and eclipsed, that primeval vision can never be quite lost. It persists in the love of order and beauty; in the desire to be loved infinitely; in hope "that springs eternal in the human breast"; in the ideals of imagination, that haunt both the savage and the sage, and, at worst, in remorse, in which, as Emerson says, "there is a certain sweetness," whether it be gentle as in what the Quakers call "the reproof of truth," or felt as the reproachful strivings within us of our neglected infinite nature.
This brings me to speak of Frœbel's superiority to Pestalozzi. The kindergarten is not mainly object-teaching, though of course a constant object-teaching is involved; all the materials of their work and all the surroundings of the children become objects of examination in their individualities of form, size, number, etc., and in their possible connections with each other and with the child. If Frœbel proposes to give the fruits of the tree of life, before he gives those of the tree of knowledge, it is only that the latter may prove, not a curse, but a blessing. The world's history and the present state of civilization in the foremost nations of the world shows us that knowledge may be a power without being a good (a snakish subtlety not Divine Wisdom). It begins to be realized in Europe as well as in America, that Frœbel's idea of education, in making character the first thing, and knowledge the hand-maiden of goodness, is the desideratum of the age, and promise of the millennium.
I should like to read you some letters of eminent men in France, addressed to Frœbel's most earnest disciple and apostle, the Baroness Marenholtz-Bülow, which I have translated from the appendix of her Work in Relation to Education (see Appendix, [Note B]).
In an address to the school committee of Boston in 1868 I gave the call addressed in 1867 by the Philosophers' Congress in Prague to the convention of teachers in Berlin, and the call of the latter to the second convention of this congress at Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1869. The burden of all these papers is the paramount necessity of religious and moral education, begun in earliest infancy, in order that the modern intellectual activity may not land us in licentious vices and heartless atheism, our nearest dangers. They all accept Frœbel's method of education by work and experience (beginning with the work and experience of the child of three years old) as the first condition of the regeneration of the human race.
It is the office of the kindergartner to awaken the intellect, which the child does not bring into the world, like its heart and will, full-grown. The infant suffers and enjoys as keenly, and wills as energetically, at first as ever in its life, but apparently begins and lives for some time, unconscious of a world without as a not me. It is purely subjective, i.e., feeling its material environment to be a part of itself. As Emerson says:—