“The sphere seems like the prototype or the unity of all bodies and of all forms. Not an angle, not a line, not a plane, not a surface, is shown in it, and yet it has all points and all surfaces.”
Let this pass; but besides this, the sphere has mysterious relations with spiritual things; it teaches the perfection of the moral life.
“To labor conscientiously at the development of the spherical nature of a being, is to effect the education of a being.”
An incident borrowed from the life of Frœbel will complete the picture. He enlisted as a volunteer in 1812, and made the campaigns of 1812-1813, with Langethal and Middendorf, who were afterward to be his colleagues. After the war, he returned to Berlin, passing through the whole of Germany. During the whole journey, he says, “I was seeking something, but without reaching a definite idea of what I was in quest of, and nothing could satisfy me. Wholly engrossed in this thought, I entered one day into a very beautiful garden, ornamented with plants the most various. I admired them, and yet none of them brought relief to my inmost feeling.
“Passing them in review, at a glance, in my soul, I suddenly discovered that among them there was no lily.... Then I knew what was lacking in that garden, and what I was looking for. How could my inmost feeling have manifested itself to me in a more beautiful way? You seek, I said to myself, tranquil peace of heart, harmony of life, and purity of soul, in the image of the lily, that peaceful flower, simple and pure. The garden, with all its varied flowers, but without the blossoms of the lily, was for me like life agitated and variegated, but without harmony and without unity.”
528. New Studies.—Frœbel returned to Berlin in 1814, and there obtained an assistant’s place in the mineralogical museum. He there studied at leisure the geometrical forms of crystals, and reflected anew on their symbolical meaning. Perhaps he derived from these studies the idea of the first gifts which he afterwards introduced into his Kindergartens. It was not till two years afterwards that he formed the definite resolution to devote himself to the education of youth (1816). He first established himself at Griesheim, and then at Keilhau (a league’s distance from Rudolstadt), where, with five pupils, all his nephews, he opened a school which he called by a pompous title, and one hardly justifiable at the beginning, the General German Institute of Education. He succeeded in associating with himself Langethal and Middendorf. The establishment was administered at first on a very modest scale, as the resources were slender; but it prospered little by little, and in 1826 it numbered more than fifty pupils.
529. Institute at Keilhau.—The principles of Pestalozzi were applied at Keilhau. Langethal and Middendorf passed their apprenticeship in the Pestalozzian method under the direction of Frœbel. The three professors met in the common hall, and there were frequently heard as echoes from their discussion the words: intuition, personal initiative, proceeding from the known to the unknown. “They are learning the system,” said the children who heard them.
At Keilhau, physical, intellectual, and moral education marched abreast. The master was to attempt to penetrate the individuality of each child, to the end that he might thence provoke the free development of that individuality. The government was austere and the fare frugal. The system of physical hardening was carried to an extreme. The pupils, winter and summer, wore a blouse and cotton trousers. A considerable time was devoted to religious exercises. Frœbel always remained attached to the Lutheran Church, though his orthodoxy might have seemed open to suspicion, and he always thought that education ought to be essentially religious.
“All education that is not founded on religion is sterile.” And he adds, “All education that is not founded on the Christian religion is defective and incomplete.”[223]
530. The Education of Man.—It was at Keilhau in 1826, that Frœbel published his principal work, The Education of Man.[224]