At that date, the idea of Kindergartens had not yet taken form in his mind; and The Education of Man was not so much the exposition of the practical applications of Frœbel’s method, as a nebulous and tumid development of his metaphysical principles. It is a book little read, and, let it be confessed, partly illegible! We have ventured to speak of the nonsense written by Pestalozzi. What shall be said of the mystical dreams of Frœbel? The pedagogy of the Germans, like their philosophy, has for a century often lost its way in strange theories which absolutely surpass the comprehension of the French mind. From a mass of vague and pretentious speculations on universal nature, there are culled with difficulty some ideas which are well founded. However, let us try to gather up the obscure idea of Frœbel, made still more obscure by the exterior form of the work. In the first edition Frœbel had omitted to introduce into the text any division into chapters and paragraphs. The reading of this uninterrupted text could not fail to be laborious; even with the somewhat artificial divisions which were subsequently introduced, The Education of Man remains difficult to read and to analyze.
531. Analysis of the Work.—The introduction is the most interesting part of the work. We might reduce the somewhat confused ideas which it contains to three essential points, to three general ideas, of philosophy, of psychology, and of pedagogy.
The idea of general philosophy is this: “Everything comes solely from God. In God is the unique principle of all things.”
It is a vague pantheism which consists in believing that all the objects of nature are the direct manifestations of the divine activity.
“The end, the destiny of each thing, is to publish abroad its being, the activity of God which operates in it, and the manner in which this activity is combined with the thing.” From these premises Frœbel is logically brought to this psychological statement, that everything is good in man, for it is God who acts in him. He pushes his optimism so far as to say:—
“From his earliest age the child yields himself to justice and right with a surprising tact, for we rarely see him avoiding them voluntarily.”
The pedagogical conclusion is easy to guess: Education shall be essentially a work of liberty and of spontaneity. It ought to be indulgent, flexible, supple, and restricted to protecting and overseeing.
“The vocation of man, considered as a reasonable intelligence, is to let his nature act in manifesting the action of God, who operates in him; to publish God outwardly, to acquire the knowledge of his real destiny, and to accomplish it in all liberty and spontaneity.”
These last two words are repeated ad nauseam. Frœbel goes so far as to say that there can be no general form of education to impose or even to recommend, because account must be taken of the nature of each child, and the free development of his individuality provoked by inviting him to action and to personal exertion. The choice in the manifestation of the exterior form of education ought to be left to the intelligence of the educator, and there ought to be almost as many ways of educating men as there are individuals, with their own natures aspiring to a personal development.