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

by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

Mons. A. Guyard, a Parisian author writes:

June 14, 1857.

The more I hear you about Frœbel's method, the more my interest increases, and the deeper my conviction becomes that by this means a basis is laid for a new education for the salvation of humanity. Accept my warmest and most sincere wishes for the propagation of Frœbel's method. He is great, perhaps the greatest philosopher of our time, and has found in you what all philosophers need, that is, a woman who understands him, who clothes him with flesh and blood, and makes him alive. I think, I believe, indeed, that an idea in order to bear fruit, must have a father and a mother. Hitherto, all ideas have had only fathers. As Frœbel's ideas are so likely to find mothers, they will have an immense success. When the ideas of the future have become alive in devoted women, the face of the world will be changed.

Lamarche of Paris, philanthropist and writer on social and religious subjects, after listening to the lectures upon Frœbel given by Madam Marenholtz in Paris, wrote on:—

Paris, March 4, 1856.

Your last lecture has unmistakably shown that Frœbel's method, in a religious point of view, surpasses everything that has hitherto been done in education. And this is the main point from which a method of education is to be judged for its aim is to awaken love to God and man—the foundation upon which Christianity rests. Education has hitherto done little to awaken this love of man in the young soul, from which all piety flows. This is the reason we find so much skepticism and indifference in human society, and which is the source of most of the existing misery, and of the want of order and lawfulness. These sad results are the condemnations of those methods of education that suppress the human faculties, or force them into wrong channels, or arbitrarily superimpose something instead of aiding free development. It is the sad mistake of our moralists who, without faith in a Heavenly Father, do not understand human nature, and replace revealed religion with human tenets.... Frœbel has found the missing truth, in first awakening the child's senses and capacities by the simplest means, and making him feel in nature the loving Creator, before he taxes his intellect with religious dogmas, which are beyond the intellect of childhood, and only confuse it. To lead it through the love of God, the Heavenly Father of us all, to the love of the neighbor, by acting and doing, is the natural and simple way which Frœbel has pointed out, and we shall owe it to him, if before our children are four or five years old, before they can read books, they learn the great law of humanity, Love to God and the neighbor.

Again: Frœbel's discovery, or invention, furnishes the means to follow the natural order of all development for human beings, by which alone they will come to the knowledge of, and at last to union with, their Heavenly Father. This is the way which Christianity prescribed eighteen hundred years ago, but into which education has not understood how to lead us, because it has put statutes instead of actual experience, and has not let the study of nature, as the work of God, precede statutes. Frœbel leads education again into the path intended by God, which, in the course of universal development, will lead to the happiness of the individual, as well as of the whole of society. In the human being itself are the rich mines, the development of which our false modes of education have hitherto made impossible. May mothers have faith in God, the Heavenly Father of their children, and that he has given them the capacity for good, which will crush the head of the serpent, and bring the kingdom of God upon earth.

Note C, to [Page 84].

In the second part of my Guide to Kindergarten and Moral Training of Infancy, published by E. Steiger, 25 Park Place, New York, is an account of how I actually first began to teach to read on this method, that may be of practical aid to one teaching After Kindergarten—what? The first kindergartner who tried the method, in the course of the first half-hour led her children to write on their slates (in imitation of what she wrote on the blackboard, letter by letter, giving the power, not the name, of each as she wrote) words enough to involve the whole alphabet; namely, cars, go, bells, sing, dizzy, old, hen, fixes, vest, jelly, jars, puss, kitty. The words were in a column, and after they were written, the children recognized each word, pronouncing it right when she pointed to it on the blackboard. But she was surprised the next day to find they remembered every one, and they had so clear an idea of the correspondence of the letters and sounds, that, long before they had finished writing at her dictation the words of the first vocabulary, they read at sight any word of it, no matter how many syllables it had. In fact, at the end of the first week she wrote and asked me for the groups of exceptions, and, beginning with the smallest group, which is most exceptional, in a few weeks they could all read.

But I would not advise this rapid acquisition of the whole language in so short a time. It is better to pause on the meaning of the words,—not asking them to define them by other words, but asking them to make sentences in which they put the word, which will show whether or not they understand its meaning. A great deal more than mere pronunciation may be taught children while learning to read.