Nothing short of this will do; for none of the manuals which have been written to guide already trained experts, can supply the place of the living teacher. Written words will not describe the fine gradations of the work, or give an idea of the conversation which is to be constantly had with the children. It would be less absurd to suppose that a person could learn to make watches by reading a description of the manufacture in an encyclopædia, than to suppose a person could learn to educate children by mere formulas.
Indeed, it is infinitely less absurd. For a child is not finite mass to be moulded, or a blank paper to be written upon, at another's will. It is a living subject, whose own coöperation—or at least willingness—is to be conciliated and made instrumental to the end in view. Would a Cremona violin be put into the hands of a person ignorant of music, to be tuned and made to discourse divine harmonies? How is it, then, that the "harp of a thousand strings"—which God puts into the hands of every mother, in perfect tune—is so recklessly committed, first to ignorant girl-nurses, and then to the least educated teachers? Looking at children's first schools, it would seem that anybody is thought skilful enough to begin a child's education! It takes a long apprenticeship to learn to play on the instrument with seven strings, in order to bring out music. But it is stupidly thought that anybody can play on the greater instrument, whose strings thrill with pleasure or pain, and discourse good or evil, as they are touched wisely or unwisely!
Froebel struck the key-note of the music of the spheres, which human life is destined to become, when he announced, as a first principle, that the well-thought-out wisdom of the ideal mother's love is the science of education; and that this science of sciences is founded on self-knowledge; by which he did not mean (any more than did Socrates, or that older sage who engraved "know thyself" upon the temple of Delphi) individual idiosyncrasy, but the very self which Jesus Christ said all men must become, when he set a little child in the midst, and declared that no one could enter his kingdom, that did not become as one; and when, another time, he called and blessed little children, because, as he said, of such was the kingdom of heaven; and again, more significantly still, when he warned from "offending (it might be better rendered perverting) these little ones; because," as he added, "their spirits do always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven." To know the soul before it has been warped by individual caprice and circumstance, is the science of sciences, on which is to be founded the art of arts; viz., that of educating the child so that its individuality may develop, not destroy, its sense of universal relations. And here I must pause to say, that it is simply astonishing that when most of us believe, as our religion, that Jesus Christ embodied in himself the wisdom, as well as love, and even power of God,—"without measure,"—his words about children are passed over with so little inquiry into the depths of their meaning. What can it mean—that their spirits always behold the face of the Father—short of the very philosophy of Gioberti,—that the newly-created soul commences its consciousness in the eternal world, with a reciprocal vision of God remembered in the heart through life, and constituting the divine term of conscience, which is the constant, while the human term is of only fitful growth. As Wordsworth says,—
"Our Life's Star
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar!
Not in entire forgetfulness
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy,
But he beholds the light and whence it flows;
He sees it in his joy:
The youth, who daily from the East
Must travel, still is nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended."
But Froebel does not, like Wordsworth, make it strictly inevitable, however it may have hitherto been common, that
"The man perceives it die away
And fade into the light of common day;"
for he teaches that the parental sympathy and instruction of those adults who have attained
"The faith that looks through death
In years that bring the philosophic mind"
should intervene; which is just Kindergarten culture; preserving the heart's vision of the truths that
"We are toiling all our lives to find"