Use of theorists. Books.

sound, he may smile at the applications. But the theorists will show him many aspects of his profession, and will lead him to make many observations in it, which would otherwise have escaped him. They will save him from a danger caused by the difficulty of getting anything done in the school-room, the danger of thinking more of means than ends. They will teach him to examine what his aim really is, and then whether he is using the most suitable methods to accomplish it.

Such a theorist is Pestalozzi. He points to a high ideal, and bids us measure our modes of education by it. Let us not forget that if we are practical men we are Christians, and as such the ideal set before us is the highest of all. "Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect."

The Pestalozzian literature in German and even in French is now considerable, but it is still small in English. The book I have made most use of is Histoire de Pestalozzi par R. de Guimps (Lausanne, Bridel), with its translation by John Russell (London: Sonnenschein. Appleton's: N. Yk.). In Henry Barnard's Pestalozzi and Pestalozzianism are collected some good papers, among them Tilleard's trans. from Raumer. We also have H. Kruesi's Pestalozzi (Cincinatti: Wilson, Hinkle, & Co.). I have already mentioned Miss Channing's Leonard and Gertrude. The Letters to Greaves are now out of print. A complete account of Pestalozzi and everything connected with him, bibliography included, is given in M. J. Guillaume's article Pestalozzi, in Buisson's Dictionnaire de Pédagogie. (See also Pestalozzi par J. Guillaume (Hachette) just published.)

XVII.

FRIEDRICH FROEBEL.

(1783-1852.)

1. I Now approach the most difficult part of my subject. I have endeavoured to give some account of the lessons taught us by the chief Educational Reformers. No doubt my selection of these has been made in a fashion somewhat arbitrary, and there are names which do not appear and yet might reasonably be looked for if all the chief Educational Reformers were supposed to be included. But the plan of my book has restricted me to a few, and I am by no means sure that some to whom I have given a chapter are as worthy of it as some to whom I have not. I have in a measure been guided by fancy and even by chance. One man, however, I dare not leave out. All the best tendencies of modern thought on education seem to me to culminate in what was said and done by Friedrich Froebel, and I have little doubt that he has shown the right road for further advance. Of what he said and did I therefore feel bound to give the best account I can, but I am well aware that I shall fail, even more conspicuously than in other cases, to do him justice. There are some great men who seem to have access to a world from which we ordinary mortals are shut out. Like Moses "they go up into the

Difficulty in understanding F.

Mount," and the directions they give us are based upon what they have seen in it. But we cannot go up with them; so we feel that we very imperfectly understand them; and when there can be not the smallest doubt of their sincerity we at times hesitate about the nature of their visions. For myself I must admit that I very imperfectly understand Froebel. I am convinced, as I said, that he has pointed out the right road for our advance in education; but he was perhaps right in saying: "Centuries may yet pass before my view of the human creature as manifested in the child, and of the educational treatment it requires, are universally received." It has already taken centuries to recover from the mistakes made at the Renascence. For the full attainment of Froebel's standpoint perhaps a few additional centuries may be necessary.

§ 2. Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel* was born at Oberweissbach, a village of the Thuringian Forest, on the 21st April, 1783. He completed his seventieth year, and died at Marienthal, near Bad-Liebenstein, on the 21st June, 1852. Like Comenius, with whom he had much in common, he was neglected in his youth; and the remembrance of his own early sufferings made him in after life the more eager in promoting the happiness of children. His mother he lost in his infancy, and his father, the pastor of Oberweissbach and the surrounding district, attended to his parish but not to his family. Friedrich soon had a stepmother, and neglect was succeeded by stepinotherly attention; but a maternal uncle took pity on him, and for

*This short sketch of Froebel's life is mainly taken, with Messrs. Black's permission, from the Encyclopædia Britannica, for which 【 wrote it.

A lad's quest of unity.

some years gave him a home a few miles off at Stadt-Ilm. Here he went to the village school, but like many thoughtful boys he passed for a dunce. Throughout life he was always seeking for hidden connexions and an underlying unity in all things. In his own words: "Man, particularly in boyhood, should become intimate with nature—not so much with reference to the details and the outer forms of her phenomena as with reference to the Spirit of God that lives in her and rules over her. Indeed, the boy feels this deeply and demands it" (Ed. of M., Hailmann's trans., p. 162). But nothing of this unity was to be perceived in the piecemeal studies of the school; so Froebel's mind, busy as it was for itself, would not work for the masters. His halfbrother was therefore thought more worthy of a university education, and Friedrich was apprenticed for two years to a forester (1797-1799). Left to himself in the Thuringian Forest, Froebel now began to "become intimate with nature;" and without scientific instruction he obtained a profound insight into the uniformity and essential unity of nature's laws. Years afterwards the celebrated Jahn (the "Father Jahn" of the German gymnasts) told a Berlin student of a queer fellow he had met, who made out all sorts of wonderful things from stones and cobwebs. This "queer fellow" was Froebel; and the habit of making out general truths from the observation of nature, especially of plants and trees, dated from his solitary rambles in the Forest. No training could have been better suited to strengthen his inborn tendency to mysticism; and when he left the Forest at the early age of seventeen, he seems to have been possessed by the main ideas which influenced him all his life. The conception which in him dominated all others was the unity of nature; and he longed to study

F. wandering without rest.

natural sciences that he might find in them various applications of nature's universal laws. With great difficulty he got leave to join his elder brother at the university of Jena; and there for a year he went from lecture-room to lectureroom hoping to grasp that connexion of the sciences which had for him far more attraction than any particular science in itself. But Froebel's allowance of money was very small, and his skill in the managemect of money was never great; so his university career ended in an imprisonment of nine weeks for a debt of thirty shillings. He then returned home with very poor prospects, but much more intent on what he calls the course of "self-completion" (Vervollkommnung meines selbst) than on "getting on" in a worldly point of view. He was soon sent to learn farming, but was recalled in consequence of the failing health of his father. In 1802 the father died, and Froebel, now twenty years old, had to shift for himself. It was some time before he found his true vocation, and for the next three-and-a-half years we find him at work now in one part of Germany now in another, sometimes land-surveying, sometimes acting as accountant, sometimes as private secretary.

§ 3. But in all this his "outer life was far removed from his inner life." "I carried my own world within me,” he tells us, "and this it was for which I cared and which I cherished." In spite of his outward circumstances he became more and more conscious that a great task lay before him for the good of humanity; and this conscious. ress proved fatal to his "settling down." "To thee may

Fate soon give a settled hearth and a loving wife" (thus he wrote in a friend's album in 1805); "me let it keep wandering without rest, and allow only time to learn aright my true relation to the world and to my own inner being