At the end of a few days he wrote to his brother Christopher:—
“It is astonishing how my duties please me. From the first lesson it seemed to me that I had never done anything else, and that I was born for that very thing. I could no longer make it seem to me that I had previously thought of following any occupation but this, and yet I confess that the idea of becoming a teacher had never occurred to me.”
526. Frœbel and Pestalozzi.—At the school in Frankfort, Frœbel, still a novice in the art of teaching, attempted scarcely more than scrupulously to apply the Pestalozzian methods.
And upon many points Frœbel remained to the end a faithful disciple of Pestalozzi. Intuition is the fundamental principle of his method, and we might say that his effort in pedagogy consists chiefly in organizing into a system the sense intuitions which Pestalozzi proposed to the child somewhat at random and without plan.
Frœbel had had direct relations with Pestalozzi. In 1808 he went to Yverdun with three of his pupils, and there spent two years, taking part in the work of the institute, and becoming acquainted with the methods of the master. He declares that it was a “decisive” epoch in his life.
But let us note, in passing, the difference in character between Pestalozzi and Frœbel. While Pestalozzi is ever ready to accuse himself with a touching humility, Frœbel regards himself as almost infallible. He never attributes failure to his own insufficiency, but lays the blame on destiny or on the ill-will of others. Pestalozzi is ever forgetting himself, and he is so neglectful as to be uncouth in his attire. “He never knew how to dress,” say his biographers; “his distraction made him forget sometimes his cravat, and at others his garters.” Frœbel, on the contrary, affected an elegant and theatrical bearing. He studied effect. At certain periods, as we are told, he wore Hessian boots and a Tyrolese cap with high plumes.
527. The Treatise on Sphericity (1811).—It was about 1811 that the peculiar originality of Frœbel manifested itself, and this was done, it must be confessed, in an unfortunate way, by the publication of his Treatise on Sphericity.
Pestalozzi somewhere wrote: “If my life is entitled to any credit, it is that of having placed the square at the basis of an intuitive instruction which has never yet been given to a people.”[222] This language coming from Pestalozzi is certainly calculated to surprise us; but at least Pestalozzi meant square in the proper sense of the term, as a geometrical figure, or as a form for drawing. When Frœbel speaks to us of the sphere, and makes of it the basis of education, it is a wholly different thing.
In reading the Treatise on Sphericity, we are sometimes tempted to inquire whether we have to do with a well-balanced mind, or whether an exuberant imagination has not caused the author to lose the consciousness of reality.
According to Frœbel, the sphere is the ideal form:—