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

by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

"Shades of the prison-house begin to close around the growing boy."

For, as the same poet has it in that ode which is as much inspired as anything in the sacred oracles of the Hebrew or the Christian:—

"Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And even with something of a mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her foster-child, her innate man,
Forget the glories he hath known
And that Imperial Palace whence he came.
* * * * *
Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither;
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."

The "not unworthy aim" of the "humble nurse" is to give the child the sense of "having life in himself" as an individual free agent, so that he may come into intellectual consciousness of the laws of God by going counter to them, which reveals to him that he is separating from God in his activity. This separation is sin, which is a short word for separation, and the first step in the development of individuality, and therefore pardonable, because it is finite.

Now the true religious nurture is to keep the child in the mood of ineffable joy in which he was created, while he is evolving his sense of individuality and free agency by experimenting freely, but more or less painfully, so that he shall not lose sight of the central Sun, to which everything he is slowly learning through his senses and his reflection is related; and this must be begun by giving a name to the central Sun that shall express the character of his inmost consciousness of joy and love, which is his vision of God, and needs to be recognized as God in the understanding.

In the Old Testament we see that it is the name of the Lord which is set forth as the only means of escaping that idolatry which is destructive of progressive spiritual religion. The name of the Lord, or Ruler, with the Hebrews was Jehovah, a word made up of the three tenses of the substantive verb to be, "was, is, and shall be," and which Philo, the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher, translates The Eternal. It was understood by the worshippers to be the ineffable Creative Reality, so that when they came to the word in their sacred ritual they did not speak it, but reverently bowed their heads in a moment's silence, or paraphrased it, The Lord God.

But Jesus, the bright, consummate flower of the Hebrew race, used the name Father (my and our Father), which you may observe was original with him. That word expressed the whole of his theology. He made no disquisitions on God's being, but simply recognized the vital relation of mankind to its Creator by this word, which any child who has come to see that he and his mother are two can understand and will love.

Frœbel has proved by his nursery method that the child shall get this idea and name of God from his mother; and at all events when children come to the kindergarten they will generally already have heard some name for God, adequate or inadequate. Now all you have to do—but that is a great deal, indeed the greatest thing—is not to cloud the child's intuitive knowledge of God by your inadequate words as was done in the case of M. D., who was afraid of the omnipresence of God, as I mentioned in my narrative of F. H., and in the case of his unfortunate mother at her mother's funeral. In the case of little F. the mistake was not to have given any name before his sense perceptions had made "a prison house for the growing boy." But you have seen how the shades were dispelled by my taking it for granted with him that a Heavenly Father existed, which he joyfully accepted at once, for I knew that

"In the embers was something that did live,
And Nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive."

The naming of God in the kindergarten should be in music, which is the natural language of spirituality (or aspiration), lifting the soul above the cold level of the intellect that cognizes the correlations of the natural universe. Frœbel finds support of his faith in the efficacy of song, that puts devout expression into the works of nature, in the historical fact that the civilizing literature of all nations begins in religious hymns. The different characteristics and the different destinies of nations are seen in germ in the national songs, which are in large degree and sometimes exclusively addressed to the Powers above. The Li-king of the Chinese, the Rig Veda of the old Aryans, the Puranas of the Hindus, the Garthas of the Iranians, the recently discovered early poetry of the Egyptians, and even the magical formulas of the Babylonians, all express with more or less exaltation of spirit the primeval intuition of Supreme Being, and use the particulars of material nature as words of God pointing to that unity of all life that is the music of the spheres. Is it not heard in the voice of the healthy infant, which is the most exquisite music on earth, and later seen in the pictures made by the imagination before language that is coined by the human understanding has introduced prosaic, that is, analytic definitions, and drawn the human individual away from feeding its heart on the fruits of the Tree of Life (which are music and poetry) to the fruits of the tree of knowledge, which are evil as well as good. The kindergarten exercises should begin and end with spiritual songs and hymns; indeed, they should come in any time at the call of the children, who, it will be found, will oftener call for hymns of praise than for any other songs.