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

by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

In this truth you will find an infinite resource of hope and successful energy. You may think that you apprehend and accept the scope of this pregnant word, because you do not reject it as a proposition; but partial knowledge is often deluding, and not doubting is far from efficient conviction, which a comprehensive and penetrating understanding of a principle gives. Let me illustrate this illusion of thinking we comprehend when we do not, by some of Frœbel's gifts.

Think of the four last gifts of Frœbel in their wholeness of form, as cubes. When these cubes are uncovered and you recognize them as eight, or twenty-seven, or thirty-six wooden, solid, six-sided, eight-cornered, twelve-edged units, and see the relations of their properties in nature, it may seem to you as if you exhaustively knew the cube; but you do not if you have omitted to notice one property inherent in it, more important because pregnant with more consequences than any other property,—I mean its divisibility by means of which its possible transformations are innumerable, every transformation presenting the symmetry of the original in a new variety of beauty, so that if you will give to a child one of these divisible cubes and suggest to him the clue of the law of connecting contrasts, which is the law of all production, he will never tire (except physically) of making the new combinations, and seeking through each and all, that sense of a whole which was the first impression. It is by reason of its divisibility, that the cube can be transformed infinitely. Now you may conceive the nature of man as a whole, and observe a great many of his attributes, and yet not see the greatest,—his creativeness, whose consequences are infinite.

Educational science has, in fact, generally omitted to do this in the past, and treated a child according to the attributes it recognized; but, because before Frœbel's day man had not been recognized by the reflective mind as a creative being, it had not been realized that he can be transformed, or transform himself as well as his surroundings, infinitely, ever producing something new, and hence that there may be, in the lapse of ages, as much variety in human production as there is in God's workings in the Universe.

It is, in short, because education has not hitherto conceived of man as creative, that there has been so much dead uniformity and lifeless repetition on the plane of humanity; and that a general characteristic of educational systems hitherto has been a mechanical running of the human being into certain fixed moulds, not only irrespective of individual tendencies, but antagonistic to the universal creative impulse, which is the profoundest characteristic of man, and which, not being understood, has, in a great measure, proved only a source of disorder, and given a bad name with people of genius to educational art (although it is the highest of all the high arts), its material, if you will forgive the verbal ambiguity, being living spirit.

Richard Wagner has said that "were it not for education, all men would be geniuses, for they are endowed at birth with the passionate pursuit of the new, needing only liberty and opportunity for self-direction."

Liberty and opportunity! There could not be a better description of Frœbel's principle and method of education.

To give liberty and opportunity to the creative principle of the child is just the work you have to do; but observe, this is not to leave him to the caprices of an uneducated will. There is neither liberty nor opportunity in that!

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," moral as well as political; and before the child is old enough to appreciate this, and be vigilant for himself, the educator must do so for him, genially, but firmly intervening to secure to his mind that pause before action on the moral, the artistic, and intellectual plane, that the Friends recognize to be necessary before acting on the spiritual plane.

The ways of caprice are multitudinous,—the way of life is one for each individual, and is pointed out to the pausing attentive mind by the Father, who speaks to us, within, forever; but whose voice can only be heard when listened to by intention; even on the intellectual plane, we do not let the will go storming on, without the guidance of law, which is the voice of the very present Creator heard in the silence of reflection on perceived facts and truths.

There is a right and a wrong way of doing everything,—always. The right way will always produce a thing of use or of beauty, whose reaction on the mind of the producer cultivates his mind, or grows the human understanding; but this right way is only to be discovered in that pause between impulse and action which is the characteristic discrimination of man from all other animals, and must be secured for the child by the care of his educators—even when he is only playing, or the play will tire instead of exhilarate.