He was never tired of suggesting devices for doing this. The following passage gives in a few words the answer to the most important practical question in life: how we ought to approach another human being. The thing is said so simply, it seems almost commonplace, yet it comes from one greater than Kant.
“Between educator and pupil, between request and obedience, there should invisibly rule a third something to which educator and pupil are equally subject. This third something is the right, the best, necessarily conditioned and expressed without arbitrariness in the circumstances. The calm recognition, the clear knowledge, and the serene, cheerful obedience to the rule of this third something, is the particular feature that should be constantly and clearly manifest in the bearing and the conduct of the educator and teacher, and often firmly and sternly emphasized by him.”
Beneath this statement there lies a law of reaction. The human organism responds in kind. Strike a man and he strikes, sneer and he sneers, forget and he forgets. If you wish to convince him that you are right, concede that from his point of view he is right, then move the point and he follows. If you keep your temper in teaching a child, you teach him to keep his temper, and this is more important than his lesson.
The difficulty we find is to resist the reaction in ourselves to some one else’s initiative. The affair is outside the province of reason, and results from a transfer of force by means which we do not understand. The command to “turn the other cheek” is a picturesque figure for the attitude which will enable you to prevail the quickest and by the highest means, and which Froebel enables us to see in its scientific aspect.
But it is unnecessary to illustrate further what any one who comes in contact with a kindergarten will, through all the mists of dogma and ignorance which overspread the place, discover for himself. We have a science founded upon human nature, applied to education. Mr. Hughes in his closing paragraph uses the language of theology, but he makes no overstatement:—
“When Froebel’s ethical teaching has wrought its perfect work in the homes, the schools, and the churches, then his complete ideal, which is the gospel ideal in practice, will be the greatest controlling and uplifting force in the world.”
One word more about the relation between Froebel’s thought and current science.
The view of man as an active animal, a struggler, alive and happy only in activity, falls in naturally with what we know of the animal kingdom. The philosophers are at war over science and religion, over the origin of the non-self-regarding instincts. By an external consideration of the animal hierarchy they have come to certain conclusions which they strive to apply to the highest animal, man. There is great boggling over him; because these non-self-regarding instincts, which are not very apparent from the outside, seem to conflict with certain generalizations relative to the conservation of species. The scientists look into a drop of water and see animals eating each other up. What they have not seen is that all this ferocity goes forward, subject to customs as rigid as a military code, and that it is this code which conserves the species. The “struggle for existence” as it is commonly conceived would exterminate in short order any species that indulged in it.
Meanwhile Froebel, beginning at the other end of the scale and studying life from the inside, has established certain facts, certain laws, which have as great a weight, and deserve as much to be carried downward in the scale, as the generalizations of the naturalists (very likely imperfect) have to be carried upward.
The animal man is unselfish. It is impossible to make his organism vibrate as a unity except by some emotion which can be shown to be non-self-regarding. At what point in the scale of nature does this quality begin to manifest itself? Is the dog happy when he is selfish; do the laws of psychology outlined by Froebel apply, and to what extent do they apply, to the horse or the monkey? These things must be patiently studied, and the corrections must be made. In the mean time, in dealing with man himself, we are obliged to rely upon the latest scientific report of him, however imperfect, and until Froebel’s laws are destroyed, we need not attempt to adjust our ideas of man to the dogmas developed by the study of the lower animals.