“We must love children in order to know them, and we divine them less by the intelligence than by the heart.”
Thanks to the pronounced taste for the study of child nature, the most just psychological observations are ever mingled, in the Progressive Education, with the precepts of education, and it has been truly said that “this book is almost a journal of domestic education which takes the proportions of a theory.”
586. Division of the Progressive Education.—The Progressive Education appeared in 1836 and 1838 in three volumes. The first three books treat of the history of the soul in infancy; the fourth examines the general principles of teaching, independently of the age of the pupil; the fifth studies the child of from five to seven years of age; the sixth takes us to the tenth year; the seventh shows “the distinctive marks of the character and the intellectual development of boys, during the years which immediately precede adolescence.” Finally, the last four books form a complete whole, and treat of the education of women during the whole course of life.
587. Development of the Faculties.—We cannot attempt in this place to analyze a work so rich in ideas as the work of Madame Necker. Let us limit ourselves to indicating the essential points in her system of education. First, it is the preoccupation of training the will, a faculty which is too much neglected by teachers, but which, nevertheless, is the endowment which dominates life. Madame Necker treats this subject in a masterly way in a chapter to which she prefixes these words as a superscription:—
“Obedience to law constrains the will without enfeebling it, while obedience to man injures it or enervates it.
“It is, above all, to place the interior education of the soul above superficial and formal instruction.
“To instruct a child is to construct him within; it is to make him become a man.”
588. Culture of the Imagination.—Whatever importance she attaches to the active powers, Madame Necker does not neglect the contemplative faculties. The imagination, next to the will, is the faculty of the soul which has most often engrossed her attention.
“She has made it appear,” says a distinguished writer, “that this irresistible power, when we believe it to have been conquered, takes the most diverse forms; that it disguises its power and arouses with a secret fire the most miserable passions. If you refuse it space and liberty, it slinks away in the depths of selfishness, and under vulgar features it becomes avarice, cowardice, and vanity.”
“So it is necessary to see with what tender anxiety Madame Necker watches its first movements in the soul of the child; with what intelligent care she seeks to make of it from entrance upon life, the companion of truth; how she surrounds it with everything which can establish it within the circle of the good. The studies which extend our intellectual horizon, the spectacle of nature in her marvelous diversities, the emotions of the arts,—nothing seems to her superfluous or dangerous for directing the imagination in the way that is good. She fears to see it escape, through the lack of pleasures that are intense enough, in the direction of other routes.”[249]