Education in the Home, the Kindergarten, and the Primary School

by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

His life with us in Salem was perfectly delightful. He had no faults, though a certain pertinacity (which was an expression of inherited firmness of character) sometimes required a little disciplinary conversation, nothing more. I never knew of his being subjected to any punishment, or requiring any, in all his childhood. He had not the usual impetuosity of children; perhaps the effect of his early depression of spirits.

My sister Mary had a day-school in the house, made up of children between six and twelve years of age; he was allowed to have his playthings in the school-room, and loved to listen to her oral instruction of the children in natural history and science, especially in the stories that she told or read to them about human beings, in whom he was always more interested than in animals. I taught him how to read by the word method in The Story without an End, a slower and more laborious way both for him and me than the mixed method detailed in my Kindergarten Guide, of which I have lately published a primer under the title of After Kindergarten, what?

But had I then known of Frœbel's method of employing childish play, organized by the adult with single aim to intellectual development, I should not have taught him to read so early, but something more profitable; I then shared what Professor Agassiz called "the American insanity of teaching children to read before they have learned the things signified by words," which he, like Frœbel, believed would produce habits of mind positively injurious, dropping a veil between the observer and nature, preventing all freshness of thought, and destroying the mind's elasticity and originality. But I had not (at that time) presumed to question the time-honored tradition, that the beginning of education was learning to read.

When, later, my studies with a great philologist gave me a little light upon the subject, and showed me that English had the misfortune to be written by an inadequate alphabet, whose result was to confuse the phonography entirely, by obscuring the original principle of having but one letter for one sound, and a letter for every different sound, I realized the positive disadvantage of children's being forced through a process which baffles all their natural instincts of classification; and it was then I invented a method of separating English words into classes, the phonographic ones to be first made familiar, and the exceptions classified. Yet I could not be insensible to the unnaturalness of beginning with spending so much of the time of very young children upon this work of the imperfect mind of man, as languages are, rather than on the works of Infinite Wisdom. I was therefore well prepared to accept Frœbel's method of first sharpening the senses by examination of things that charm children, and of developing the understanding by first making things according to the laws which constitute the mind, and then naming them in all perceptible relations. First let us form a mind which can apprehend nature as the standard of truth, before we undertake to inform it with what embodies the confusions and errors of men; as, for instance, in a considerable degree the written English language does. For language stands in the same relation to man as nature does in relation to God. The eternal word of Truth makes things before it is made flesh. The confusion of tongues was the inevitable consequence of the fall of man out of that communion with God in which children are born, and our written language is an image of this confusion, especially the English, whose so-called orthography is the most anomalous of all languages; and the acquisition, therefore, ought to be postponed, at least until the understanding is fairly developed by some recognition of so much of the Word of God as is alive in the things we see and can handle. The time comes when the children can understand that exceptions prove the rule, and then those irregularities and anomalies of English writing may be made even entertaining lessons to children; because if its laws and rules are apprehended first, there is something amusing to them in contradictions of law that so many words seem to be. It is the pleasure in the grotesque; children enjoy the funny, as they call it, but it is a different enjoyment from that of the beautiful, and the latter is the highest element for human activity. A predominance of the funny even demoralizes intellectually as well as morally, but it has its own subordinate place in healthy child life.

My little friend had a slate and pencil, and immediately inclined to draw from real objects, but we did not know how to give him any other help than to guess at what were the things he was trying to represent. If we could not guess, I remember he would blush, and go away, saying he would "fix it a little." I had the instinct that he could only be effectually encouraged by success, and I would endeavor to divine what he meant, by looking to see what were the surrounding objects when I saw him drawing, and would point out to him with congratulation any part in which he had at all succeeded, letting the rest go. But without adequate and legitimate guidance he necessarily became discouraged with his failures. What children do not succeed in, becomes distasteful to them, and they turn their attention from what has disappointed them, and thus their natural tastes die, or are starved out. As they have no knowledge of materials, nor judgment in using them, they undertake the impossible, and being baffled, lose courage to undertake the possible. So young artists accumulate difficulties by their unwise choice of subjects, not realizing the limitations of their own powers. It is the part of the educated kindergartner to supply this want of judgment and analysis until the pupil catches the secret of gradualism and the law of opposites. Frœbel's plan of giving the squared slate and paper to ensure straightness of line in children's drawing is like the leading strings by which the mother helps the child to develop his limbs for walking, which cannot be done without his own personal effort. So Frœbel's plan of having the kindergartner suggest a symmetrical drawing of lines in opposites, vivifies the sense of symmetry into a thought, whence springs a plan of making still another symmetry. For by suggesting opposites, and then the connecting of them, the child delightedly sees orderly forms that grow under his hands, and feels that he is acting from his own individual personality (which he is, though the thought was suggested by the words of another). What he does gives him confidence in his own mind, whose fanciful movement suggests other symmetries; for though fancy is a spontaneous play of the free will among impressions passively received, it is amenable to the laws whose exponents are presented to it by nature's works and human suggestion.

F. liked to watch my sister Sophia at her drawing and painting, but its very perfection discouraged efforts on his own part. It is bad not to do really at once what we conceive of ideally. It was only in the moral and religious sphere that we really lived with him, and he was properly educated by us. We always answered all his questions about what we were doing, and how, and why (I wish now I had asked him more questions).

My sister Sophia had a rare talent for talking with children, whose purity and innocence she comprehended by a sympathetic intuition, and to whose imagination her Christian faith gave ample scope, for it was hampered by no human creeds. We had a circle of acquaintances who were only too much inclined to pet him, and who, knowing something of the history of his mind, liked to talk with him. His mother had been very much beloved by this circle, and I used to tell him that for her sake, they cared for and attended to him, which interested him immensely, and perhaps prevented his considering himself as a person of too much importance comparatively. He would talk of going to see his "mother's friends." If new persons spoke to him kindly, he would ask me immediately if they knew and loved his mother; at all events, the element of personal egotism did not appear, and the affection he at first poured out on me, now freely flowed out in every direction. I remember his saying to me, one day, with an accent of great self-gratulation, "I think I have a great many friends," and in a moment after added, "my mother was so beautiful!" (as if that were the reason of it). A young husband and wife became inmates of our house, and brought a beautiful infant. This was a perennial fountain of delight to F. The singular beauty of the little one was a constant subject of observation. One day he was looking at her, as she lay on her mother's lap, and presently he burst out, "Oh, Ellen, your little bright eyes are shining themselves into a sun!" He was equally delighted with the musical sound of her crowing. His ear for sounds was fastidiously delicate. One day my mother was in the garden, looking at some wild flowers which had been brought to her for transplanting. As she looked at them she said to F., "Run into the house, and get my—" He interrupted her eagerly with, "Don't say that ugly word! I know what you mean," and he ran into the house, and brought back Bigelow's Plants around Boston (Bigelow was the ugly word). But let me hasten from these details, to redeem my promise of telling you how prayer became a thought of his mind, and his spontaneous practice.

It was very early a question of great interest to his mother, and also to me, whether prayer would become spontaneous with him; that is, whether he would think of speaking to God in human words. His intense realization of God's presence seemed to be a cause of his not doing so, and I feared to put God at a distance by suggesting what, in ordinary cases, is a means of bringing Him near. If prayer be defined as a communion of the finite and Infinite, as personal as that of children with earthly parents, his whole conscious life was a prayer; for truly God was in all his thoughts from the day he first accepted Him so joyfully as the Substance and Giver of goodness and love, which involved to the natural logic of his innocent mind the corollary that He was the Giver of everything outward, as well as inward, which gave him any happiness. I did not dare to meddle with the natural evolution of thought in so happy an instance, but watched to learn the true method of life of the little child, as Christ suggested to his disciples to do. One day when his grandmother, who was at the house on a visit, dropped her needle, she called to F., "Come, and look with your little sharp eyes for my needle." He did so, with his usual alacrity in service, and soon found it. Then he ran to me, and said, "When I go into the sky, I shall thank my good Friend for giving me such sharp eyes." I said, "What do you wait so long for?" He gave me a glance of recognition, as it were, and laughed (as if he had been convicted of saying something silly); but he said no more then. From that moment, however, he often came to me to say, "When I go into the sky, I shall thank my Heavenly Father for giving me" this or that; and I would always answer him as before, "Why do you wait?" which would always bring out the same complete expression of satisfaction on his face, showing that he loved to renew the occasion for my uniform reply, "Why do you wait till then?"

On one of these occasions he turned from me, and said very tenderly, "I thank you, God." One day, after he went to Salem, he had been suffering from a bad earache, and my sister had relieved it by putting a little tuft of cotton dipped in arnica into his ear. Then she asked him to go to the window and look out into "the green garden," and she took up a pencil to draw. Very soon he began, "God, I thank you for making this green garden to put away the dead bodies in. God, I thank you for making these beautiful trees grow out of the ground. God, I thank you for making all the pretty wild flowers grow." He paused between each complete sentence, and my sister, having a pencil in her hand, wrote down his words till she had covered a sheet of letter paper with his thanksgivings; for he went on naming everything he could think of; and it was quite wonderful to hear the minuteness of his grateful appreciation of life.

One sentence was: "I thank you, God, for making medicine to put into my ear when it aches." He also thanked God for his father, and his father's letters to him, for his mother in heaven, for many friends whom he loved, naming them. I hope that sometime I shall find my sister's paper, which I have mislaid with the other memoranda of this interesting psychological observation. The pauses between the thanksgivings became longer and longer, and at last, after one for which he seemed to have searched his inmost mind, in despair of finding anything else, he closed with, "My dear God, I love you very much."