Dickens As an Educator

by James L. Hughes

A box containing six soft balls, differing in colour, is given to the child. It is Froebel’s “first gift.” Long before it can speak the infant can hold one of these little balls in its fingers, become familiar with its spherical shape and its colour. It stands still, it springs, it rolls. As the child grows, he can roll it and run after it, watch it with sharp eyes, and compare the colour of one ball with the colour of another, prick up his ears at the songs connected with his various games with it, use it as a bond of playfellowship with other children, practise with it first efforts at self-denial, and so forth. One ball is suspended by a string, it jumps—it rolls—here—there—over—up; turns left—turns right—ding-dong—tip-tap—falls—spins; fifty ideas may be connected with it. The six balls, three of the primary colours, three of the secondary, may be built up in a pyramid; they may be set rolling, and used in combination in a great many ways giving sufficient exercise to the young wits that have all knowledge and experience before them.

Froebel’s “second gift” is a small box containing a ball, cube, and roller (the last two perforated), with a stick and string. With these forms of the cube, sphere, and cylinder, there is a great deal to be done and learned. They can be played with at first according to the child’s own humour: will run, jump, represent carts, or anything. The ancient Egyptians, in their young days as a nation, piled three cubes on one another and called them the three Graces. A child will, in the same way, see fishes in stones, and be content to put a cylinder upon a cube, and say that is papa on horseback. Of this element of ready fancy in all childish sport Froebel took full advantage. The ball, cube, and cylinder may be spun, swung, rolled, and balanced in so many ways as to display practically all their properties. The cube, spun upon the stick piercing it through opposite edges, will look like a circle, and so forth. As the child grows older, each of the forms may be examined definitely, and he may learn from observation to describe it. The ball may be rolled down an inclined plane and the acceleration of its speed observed. Most of the elementary laws of mechanics may be made practically obvious to the child’s understanding.

The “third gift” is the cube divided once in every direction. By the time a child gets this to play with he is three years old—of age ripe for admission to an Infant Garden. The Infant Garden is intended for the help of children between three years old and seven. Instruction in it—always by means of play—is given for only two or three hours in the day; such instruction sets each child, if reasonably helped at home, in the right train of education for the remainder of its time.

An Infant Garden must be held in a large room abounding in clear space for child’s play, and connected with a garden into which the children may adjourn whenever weather will permit. The garden is meant chiefly to assure, more perfectly, the association of wholesome bodily exercise with mental activity. If climate but permitted, Froebel would have all young children taught entirely in the pure, fresh air, while frolicking in sunshine among flowers. By his system he aimed at securing for them bodily as well as mental health, and he held it to be unnatural that they should be cooped up in close rooms, and glued to forms, when all their limbs twitch with desire for action, and there is a warm sunshine out of doors. The garden, too, should be their own; every child the master or mistress of a plot in it, sowing seeds and watching day by day the growth of plants, instructed playfully and simply in the meaning of what is observed. When weather forbids use of the garden, there is the great, airy room which should contain cupboards, with a place for every child’s toys and implements; so that a habit of the strictest neatness may be properly maintained. Up to the age of seven there is to be no book work and no ink work; but only at school a free and brisk, but systematic strengthening of the body, of the senses, of the intellect, and of the affections, managed in such a way as to leave the child prompt for subsequent instruction, already comprehending the elements of a good deal of knowledge.

We must endeavour to show in part how that is done. The third gift—the cube divided once in every direction—enables the child to begin the work of construction in accordance with its own ideas, and insensibly brings the ideas into the control of a sense of harmony and fitness. The cube divided into eight parts will manufacture many things; and, while the child is at work helped by quiet suggestion now and then, the teacher talks of what he is about, asks many questions, answers more, mixes up little songs and stories with the play. Pillars, ruined castles, triumphal arches, city gates, bridges, crosses, towers, all can be completed to the perfect satisfaction of a child, with the eight little cubes. They are all so many texts on which useful and pleasant talk can be established. Then they are capable also of harmonious arrangement into patterns, and this is a great pleasure to the child. He learns the charm of symmetry, exercises taste in the preference of this or that among the hundred combinations of which his eight cubes are susceptible.

Then follows the “fourth gift,” a cube divided into eight planes cut lengthways. More things can be done with this than with the other. Without strain on the mind, in sheer play, mingled with songs, nothing is wanted but a liberal supply of little cubes, to make clear to the children the elements of arithmetic. The cubes are the things numbered. Addition is done with them; they are subtracted from each other; they are multiplied; they are divided. Besides these four elementary rules they cause children to be thoroughly at home in the principle of fractions, to multiply and divide fractions—as real things; all in good time it will become easy enough to let written figures represent them—to go through the rule of three, square root, and cube root. As a child has instilled into him the principles of arithmetic, so he acquires insensibly the groundwork of geometry, the sister science.

Froebel’s “fifth gift” is an extension of the third, a cube divided into twenty-seven equal cubes, and three of these further divided into halves, three into quarters. This brings with it the teaching of a great deal of geometry, much help to the lessons in number, magnificent accessions to the power of the little architect, who is provided, now, with pointed roofs and other glories, and the means of producing an almost infinite variety of symmetrical patterns, both more complex and more beautiful than heretofore.

The “sixth gift” is a cube so divided as to extend still farther the child’s power of combining and discussing it. When its resources are exhausted and combined with those of the “seventh gift” (a box containing every form supplied in the preceding series), the little pupil—seven years old—has had his inventive and artistic powers exercised, and his mind stored with facts that have been absolutely comprehended. He has acquired also a sense of pleasure in the occupation of his mind.

But he has not been trained in this way only. We leave out of account the bodily exercise connected with the entire round of occupation, and speak only of the mental discipline. There are some other “gifts” that are brought into service as the child becomes able to use them. One is a box containing pieces of wood, or pasteboard, cut into sundry forms. With these the letters of the alphabet can be constructed; and, after letters, words, in such a way as to create out of the game a series of pleasant spelling lessons. The letters are arranged upon a slate ruled into little squares, by which the eye is guided in preserving regularity. Then follows the gift of a bundle of small sticks, which represent so many straight lines; and, by laying them upon his slate, the child can make letters, patterns, pictures; drawing, in fact, with lines that have not to be made with pen or pencil, but are provided ready made and laid down with the fingers. This kind of Stick-work having been brought to perfection, there is a capital extension of the idea with what is called Pea-work. By the help of peas softened in water, sticks may be joined together, letters, skeletons of cubes, crosses, prisms may be built; houses, towers, churches may be constructed, having due breadth as well as length and height, strong enough to be carried about or kept as specimens of ingenuity. Then follows a gift of flat sticks, to be used in plaiting. After that there is a world of ingenuity to be expended on the plaiting, folding, cutting, and pricking of plain or coloured paper. Children five years old, trained in the Infant Garden, will delight in plaiting slips of paper variously coloured into patterns of their own invention, and will work with a sense of symmetry so much refined by training as to produce patterns of exceeding beauty. By cutting paper, too, patterns are produced in the Infant Garden that would often, though the work of very little hands, be received in schools of design with acclamation. Then there are games by which the first truths of astronomy, and other laws of Nature, are made as familiar as they are interesting. For our own parts, we have been perfectly amazed at the work we have seen done by children of six or seven—bright, merry creatures, who have all the spirit of their childhood active in them, repressed by no parent’s selfish love of ease and silence, cowed by no dull-witted teacher of the A B C and the pothooks.

Froebel discourages the cramping of an infant’s hand upon a pen, but his slate ruled into little squares, or paper prepared in the same way, is used by him for easy training in the elements of drawing. Modelling in wet clay is one of the most important occupations of the children who have reached about the sixth year, and is used as much as possible, not merely to encourage imitation, but to give some play to the creative power. Finally, there is the best possible use made of the paint-box, and children engaged upon the colouring of pictures and the arrangement of nosegays are further taught to enjoy, not merely what is bright, but also what is harmonious and beautiful.