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

by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

The child seems to taste and hear, before he begins to see anything more definite than the difference between light and darkness. By and by a salient point of light, it may be the light of a candle, catches and fixes his eye, and gives a distinct visual impression, which is evidently pleasurable, for the child's eye follows the light, showing that the soul intends itself into the organ of sight. Soon after, gay colors fix its gaze and evidently give pleasure. The eye for color is developed gradually, like the ear for music, by exercise, which being pleasurable becomes spontaneous.

The whole body is the organ of touch; but as the hands are made convenient for grasping, to which the infant has an instinctive tendency, and the tips of the fingers are especially handy for touching, they become, by the intension of the mind into them, the special organ for examining things by touch, and getting impressions of qualities obvious to no other sense. When, as it sometimes happens, by malformation or maltreatment of them, the eyes fail to perform their functions, it is wonderful how much more the soul intends itself into the special organs of touch, developing them to such a degree, that a cultivated blind person seems almost to see with the tips of the fingers. This fact proves what I have been trying to impress on your minds, that the soul which spontaneously desires and wills enjoyment, takes possession and becomes conscious of its organs of sensuous perception, partly by an original impulse, given to it by the Creator, and partly, (which I want you especially to observe,) by the genial, sympathetic, intelligent, careful co-working of the mother and nurse; who, by what we call nursery play, gives a needed help to the child to accomplish this feat in a healthy and pleasurable manner. And we shall be better convinced of the virtue of this nursery play, if we consider the case of the neglected children of the very poor, so pathetically described by Charles Lamb. See essays on Popular Fallacies, No. 12.

Madame Marenholtz-Bülow has happily remarked, in her preface to Jacob's Manual, Le jardin des Enfans, that "to develop and train the senses is not to pamper them." The organs of tasting and smelling do not require so much exercise by the duplicate action of the mother, as those of seeing and hearing. The former have for their end to build up the body; the latter to lead the child's mind out of the body, to that part of nature which connects him with other persons. The functions of both are equally worthy; but those of the latter belong to the child as a social and intellectual being. It is the mother's office to temper the exercises of each sense, so that they may limit and balance each other. And in order to limit those which are building up the body, so that they shall not absorb the child, the action of the others must be helped out. "Our bodies feel—where'er they be—against or with our will;" but to see and hear all that children can, requires exertion of will and this is coaxed out by the sympathetic action of others. Yet the functions of tasting or smelling are not to be banned. The Creator has made them delightful; and if others do their proper part, their exercise will never become harmful. To enjoy tasting and smelling is no less innocent than to enjoy seeing and hearing. There is no function of mind or body but may be performed Divinely. Milton shows insight into this truth by making Raphael sit and eat at table with man in Paradise; and he says some wonderful things upon the point, which will bear much study. And have we not in sacred tradition a symbol, still more venerable, of the truth, that the fire of spirit burns without consuming, and may transform the body without leaving visible residue? There are in Brown's philosophy (which does not penetrate into all the mysteries of the rational soul and immortal spirit) some very instructive chapters on the social and moral relations of the grosser senses, (as taste, smell and touch are sometimes called.) It is the part of rational education to understand all these things thoroughly, and adjust the spontaneous activities by subordinating them to the end of a harmonious and beneficent social life. The Lord's Supper may be made to illustrate this general human duty.

There is doubtless marked difference in the original energy of life, in different children. Young—but not too young, happy, healthy, loving parents, have the most vigorous, lively and harmoniously organized children; but in all cases, the impulse of life must be met and cherished by the tender, attractive, inspiring force of motherly love; which with caressing tone and invoking smile, peers into the infant's eyes, and importunately calls forth the new person, who, as her instinctive motherly faith and love assure her, is there; and whom she yearns to make conscious of himself in self-enjoyment. The time comes when the little body has become so far subject to the new soul, that an answering smile of recognition signalizes the arrival upon the shores of mortal being of "that light which never was on sea or land," another immortal intelligence! It is only the smile of the intelligent human face, that can call forth this smile of the child in the first instance; but let this glad mutual recognition of souls take place once, and both parties will seek to repeat the delight, again and again. Few persons, indeed, get so chilled by the sufferings and disappointments, and so hardened by the crimes of human life, but on the sight of a little child, they are impelled to invoke this answering smile by making themselves, for the moment, little children again; seeking and finding that communion with our kind which is the Alpha and Omega of life.

Do not say that I am wandering, fancifully, from the serious work which we are upon: I am only beginning at the beginning. We can only understand the child, and what we are to do for it in the Kindergarten, by understanding the first stage of its being—the pre-intellectual one in the nursery. The body is the first garden in which God plants the human soul, "to dress and to keep it." The loving mother is the first gardener of the human flower. Good nursing is the first word of Frœbel's gospel of child-culture.

The process of taking possession of the organs, that I have just described, is never performed perfectly unless children are nursed genially. If bitter and disagreeable things are presented to the organ of the taste, they are rejected with the whole force of a will, which is too blind in its ignorance to find the thing it wants, but vindicates its irrefragable freedom of choice by uttering cries of fright, pain and anger, as it shrinks back, instead of throwing itself forward into nature. If the cruel thing is repeated, the nerves are paralyzed, or at least rendered morbid, especially when rude untender handling outrages the sense of touch. When rough and discordant sounds assail the ear, or too sharply salient a light, the eye, these organs will be injured, and may be rendered useless for life. The neglected and maltreated child is dull of sense, and lifeless, or morbidly impulsive, possibly savagely cruel and cunning, in sheer self-defence. The pure element and first condition of perfect growth, is the joy that responds to the electric touch of love.

Underlying and outmeasuring all this delicate development of the organs of the five senses, is the whole body's instinct of motion, which is the primal action of will. The perfectly healthy body of a little child, when it is awake, is always in motion—more or less intentionally. When asleep, there is the circulation of the blood, and pulsation of the solids of the body, corresponding to the act of breathing, which is involuntary; and any interruption of these produces disease—their suspension, death. But the motion which makes the limbs agile, and the whole body elastic, and gradually to become an obedient servant, is voluntary, intentional, and can be helped by that sympathetic action of others, which we call playing with the child. Frœbel's rich suggestions on this play are contained in his mother's cossetting songs; and I am glad to tell you that two English ladies, a poet and a musician, have translated and set to music this unique book; and that just now it has been published by Wilkie, Wood & Co., in London. It suggests all kinds of little gymnastics of the hands, fingers, feet, toes and legs, for these are the child's first play things; and also the first symbols of intelligent communication, giving the core and significance to all languages.[1]

I think that a baby never begins to play, in the first instance, but responds to the mother and nurse's play, and learns thereby its various members and their powers and uses; and when at last it jumps, runs, walks by itself, which it cannot begin to do without the help of others, it is prepared to say I, with a clear sense of individuality.

In analyzing the process of a child's learning to walk, we see most clearly the characteristic difference between the human person and the animals below man in the scale of relation. The little chicken runs about of itself, as soon as it is out of the shell; but the human child, even after all its limbs are grown, and though he has been moving himself on all fours by means of the floor, and supporting himself by means of the furniture to which he clings, does not walk. He will only stand alone, unsupported, when he sees that there are guarding arms round about him, all ready to catch him if he should fall. He seems to know instinctively, that all the force of the earth's gravitation is against him. He does not know that he may balance it by his personal power. His body weighs upon his soul like a mountain, precisely because he is intelligent of it as an object, loves it as a means of pleasure, and dreads its power of giving pain to him. The little darling stands, perhaps between the knees of his father, whose arms are round about him; the mother opens her loving arms to receive him, and calls him to her embrace; the way is short between, and three steps will be sufficient, but where is the courageous faith to say to this mountain of a body, "be removed to another place?" It is not in himself; he cannot produce it any more than he can take himself up by his own ears. It is in the mother; for it is she, not he, who has the knowledge of the yet unexerted power which is flowing into the child from the Creator. Only by the electric touch of her faith in him does his faith in himself flash out in answer to her look and voice of cheer, and he rushes to her arms. It is the doing of the deed which gives to himself the knowledge of the power that is in him. He repeats it again and again, seeming to wish to be more and more certain of his being the cause of so great effect. Thus cause and effect are discriminated, and "to him that hath" a sense of individuality, "shall be given," forevermore, a growing power over the body, to which no measure can be stated. Even on the vulgar plane of the professional tumbler, a man's power over his body seems, sometimes, to be absolute and miraculous. But the annals of heroism and martyrdom are full of facts that go to prove to all who consider them profoundly, that the immaterial soul is sovereign, when, by recognizing all its relations, it subjects the individual to the universal, and becomes thereby entirely spiritual, (which is man reciprocating with God; becoming more and more conscious forever.[2])