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

by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

The hymns of the kindergarten repertory should be entirely free from all that is didactic and denominationally doctrinal. Their object is not to teach any science, whether intellectual, moral, or theological; but to express childish joy in existence, or quicken the original childish faith, which in all ages and nations has expressed itself in music and the dance. Nor should the singing of hymns in kindergarten be ever perfunctory or a thing of course. A good kindergartner begins the day with bringing all the children into company for preliminary conversation, and asking each in turn what is in his mind; or the class as a whole may be asked some general question, perhaps about the weather, which always has something beneficial that can be brought to the attention; then they could be asked, "Could you have made this weather? Who made it? and would you not like to thank the Heavenly Father for it?" Something similar to this should precede all the hymns to rouse their sense of free activity, and prevent routine, and then they will sing with the heart and understanding also. I remember going one day into a kindergarten with Mr. Alcott when such a preliminary conversation was going on, which was followed by this song of the weather, the children making the illustrative gesticulations with their arms. They began with the weather of the day, and continued with several varieties, for it is not often the whole song is sung at one time. The intense delight of the children when themselves personifying the weather, poured itself out in the chorus, which they had first learned to sing with a will,—

"Wonderful, Lord, are all thy works,
Wheresoever falling.
All, their various voices raise;
Speaking forth their Maker's praise
Wheresoever falling."

(See Appendix, [Note F].)

Mr. Alcott, with his eyes full of tears, turned to me, and said, "This must have an immense influence upon character." In religious conversation children have the advantage of us in their as yet uneclipsed original vision of God, and we have an advantage of them in knowledge of outside things and the adaptation of means to ends. By this knowledge of ours we can generally guide them to accomplish their purposes when they are such as will really give them pleasure and do no harm to any one else. They get our knowledge by confidingly doing as we direct, and a confidence in the method which brings about the results they have instinctively foreseen. We save their minds from getting lost or bewildered in the chaos of particulars by winning their attention to the orderly connections of things, and leading them to realize how they connect little things in order to make larger things, and how opposites are connected in the world around about them. To recognize their own little plans and open their eyes to God's methods and plans; and because they cause new effects, they realize that all effects have causes, and in the last analysis realize one personal cause. They must believe in themselves as a preliminary to believing in God. Let them with things create order; and you will have influence with them in proportion to their feeling that you respect their free will, and divine in a genial way what they want; and this you can do if you inform yourself of what is universal in human desire, keeping your eyes open to what modifications their individuality suggests; and it is your cognizance of these individualities which makes your part of the enjoyment. If there are no two leaves alike, much more are there no two human individuals precisely alike, and human intercourse is made refreshing by these various individualities playing over the surface of the universal race-consciousness. If you respect the individuality of a child, and let it have fair play, you gain its confidence. Nothing is so delightful as to feel oneself understood. It is much more delightful than to be admired. But to give a child's individuality fair play in a company of children, you must open children's eyes to one another's individualities, and you will find that if you suggest their respecting each other's rights in the plays, there is something within them that will justify you. The consciousness of individuality is the correlated opposite to the conscience of universality. Justice is an intuition. The opposite poles of a human being are self-assertion or personal consciousness on the one side, and generosity or race consciousness on the other.

We have seen that the maternal instinct, which the kindergartner is to make her own by cultivating it, cherishes the indispensable innocent self-assertion (which is only changed into selfishness by lack of that social cherishing which keeps generosity wide awake to balance self-assertion). We must sympathize with the play instincts of the child, so that it may get knowledge of its body in its parts and its powers of locomotion, manipulation and speech, giving self-respect to the consciousness of power, while the simultaneous knowledge of limitation is prevented from becoming fear by experience of the motherly providence, which is the first comprehensible form of that love which in due time calls forth ideal worship of the Infinite God, if God has been adequately named in natural sympathetic conversation with an earnest self-persuasion but without sanctimonious affectation. Unless you have unaffected spontaneity of faith yourselves, you should not dare to talk about God to the child.

The religious nurture which Frœbel proposes therefore consists simply in so living with children as to preserve their primeval joy by tenderly and reverently respecting it, as that human instinct prompts which is in the highest power in the mother. Sympathetic tenderness is the first of all means for moral culture. The child's faith in God must be cherished into self-reliance. There is a self-distrust that is really a distrust of God, and no harm we can do a child is so great as to lead it to doubt its own spontaneity. The common religious teacher—even a conscientious mother—sometimes does this, and so far from nurturing the child's conscious union with God, starts a morbid self-consciousness, the opposite of religious peace. In order not to make this mistake, let the mother and kindergartner read and ponder Frœbel's Mother Love and Cossetting Songs.[12]

If you ask me what aid the moral culture derives from the religious nurture, I reply, the name Heavenly Father, given to the inmost consciousness, keeps the heart happy and the will self-respecting, by preventing those indefinite fears, incident to a sense of helplessness, which engenders selfishness. Hope and Faith are correlatives, and conscious or necessary means of goodness (which is enacted thereby), not agonies of will in the absence of this support. In the majority of cases moral discouragement is the secret of children's naughtiness; and, as Dr. Channing used to say, "there is nothing fatal to child or man but discouragement," which often exists close beside manifestations of pride and self-will.

When I kept school, in my earlier life, I became the confidante of many cases of wrong-doing and conscious wrong feeling. Sometimes the confidentialness was altogether spontaneous on the part of the children, and in other cases I took the initiative, drawing out the confidence, by intervening on occasion to console and help, especially when I saw that the sensibility had been wounded, or there was moral puzzle. And my experience and observation in this line justified the faith in which I began to keep school; viz., that children are all but perfectly good, in all cases, and are never so grateful for anything else, when they find themselves naughty, as for spiritual and moral help, given as God gives, "upbraiding not."

When they are not grateful for moral help, it is the fault or mistake of the grown-up counsellor. Even in the worst cases I always took it for granted that nevertheless they loved goodness better than the naughty self which for the hour had got the victory over the better self. Spiritual being, whether finite or infinite, is only to be discerned by aspiring faith. Yet I do not think it right or wise to suggest to little children that their wrong-doings, which are more weaknesses than presumptions, are sins against God. Children can comprehend their relations to each other, and the violation of each other's rights to happiness, and can be easily led to sympathize with the pain or inconvenience of those they make suffer, which touches their sense of justice and generosity; they can appreciate wrong and its consequences to their equals and to themselves in the present life. But God is too great to be injured by them; and to bring God to their imagination as personally angry with them, overwhelms thought, and annihilates all sense of responsibility, with all self-respect. Children can comprehend perfectly that wrong-doing, in particular cases, is an injury to themselves, as well as a harm to their neighbor; also that they forfeit, for the time being, their privilege of being, as it were, in partnership with God in making others happy, as well as being companions with Him in making things grow; and an occasional hint of this, when they are very happy and successful, is well. But to suggest that they are forfeiting this privilege of divine companionship and partnership, is quite painful enough, be this forfeiture ever so partial. Old sinners are to be disciplined, perhaps, by that love of God which speaks in the thunder, the earthquake, and fire, breaking through the crust of selfish habit to awaken attention to the still, small voice of conscience, in which alone the Lord is in person. But the naughty child, at his worst, needs only to think of God as sorry for him, and "waiting to be gracious," like the father of the prodigal son.

I can illustrate this by anecdotes of a child to whose moral life I was obliged to call in the aid of the religious sentiment, and even of the specific Christian revelation of pardon for all past wrong repented. It was the case of a very sensitive child of nine years of age, whose mother was gifted with the finest imagination and moral instincts, but was married to a cold, Dombey-like husband, whom she unfortunately thought superior to herself, whom she idealized, and endeavored to make her children satisfactory to his worldly ideal. The result in their characters was more or less disastrous to each, ending with the suicide of one. This child's conscience of the duty of satisfying both parents I soon found to be abnormal; and her sense of her father's contempt for her intellect, and her mother's painstaking that she should satisfy him, so worked on her sensibility that it suspended her reasoning powers; and no matter what it was she failed in, whether in missing an answer to a question in arithmetic, or in failure of good temper when tormented, she fell into despair. I endeavored to show her that a mistake in any school exercise was no crime, but only made an occasion for her learning more thoroughly the thing in hand, and to show her that, unless she had fortitude to bear failures, and courage and hope to overcome them, I could not help her out of them; and I never rebuked any naughty manifestation of a moral character of any one in her presence, but she would burst into tears, and tell me how much naughtier she was. One Monday morning I asked my children, as I was wont to do, if there was anything interesting that they had heard at church or Sunday-school the day before, when, almost with a shriek, she cried out, "Oh, don't ask me that." I said gently, "Come with me into my chamber," which she did, crying all the while. "Mr. Greenwood preached about the prayers, and he said we should not look about the church, or think of anything else, while the service was being read; and I always do, and I can't help it, because I am so bad." I took her into my arms, and said, "It is a sure proof that you are not bad, that you are so distressed at the thought of doing wrong. Bad people do not care, and so they grow worse and worse; but your conscience seems to forget the Heavenly Father, who did not give it to you to discourage you, but to help you to see what way you must not go, and to remind you that He is close by to help your good resolution, which is the prayer of your will."