SONG. Down goes baby, Up comes baby, Laughing yet. Baby well may laugh at harm, Down goes baby, Gayly here. All is joy for baby while In the light of mother's smile. EMILIE POULSSON. YOUR letter, dear old friend, is in the imperative mood. You set my duty so clearly before me that I dare neither evade nor postpone it. So here begins the first of a series of letters upon the Mother-Play. Others shall follow as fast as I have time and strength to write them. I hope they may aid you to bring up my godson in the way he should go, and I shall also try to make them helpful to sister Helen in her work with the children in her kindergarten. your As I write, I seem to see you and your dear little Harold before me, and recollections of my last long visit to you crowd upon my mind. Do you remember the morning you made your first experiment with the Falling Game, and how happy you were when, after a few repetitions of the play, your boy's look of fear and anxiety changed to one of delight? Do you remember for how many weeks the minutes devoted to this game were the liveliest of our day; how after a time Master Harold found the Falling Play tame, and reserved his crows of delight for the Tossing Game, and how, without a sign of fear, he would let his papa toss him high in the air? Do you remember his advance from the Tossing Game to the Jumping Game, and with what confidence he sprang from the high mantle into your outstretched arms? If these pictures stand out in your memory as they do in mine, they will interpret the first scene in Froebel's drama of infancy far better than it can be interpreted by any words. Indeed, all that Froebel ever asks of mothers is to watch their own instinctive play, and define to themselves its latent motives.* Ask yourself, therefore, what impulse incited you to play the Falling Game. Was it not a long *The reader must not understand that I am recommending mothers to play the Jumping and Tossing games, both of which are dangerous for babies. I refer to them in order to show that maternal instinct has always played upon the strings which Froebel touches in the Falling Game. He has selected the one play of this type which is free from danger. ing to speed the moment when Harold should look into your face with recognizing eyes, when faith should spring up in his heart to meet the love in yours, and when the physical union between you and your baby should be transfigured into a union of hearts? Answer these questions, and then read in Froebel's song the lines: "Baby well may laugh at harm While beneath is mother's arm," and you will hold in your thought the key to the Falling Game. Some of the many doors this key unlocks I shall try to show you in this letter. It has interested me to observe that, differing in this respect from every other game in the book, Falling-Falling implies no manifestation of the child as its point of departure, but springs unsolicited from the mother's heart. Love working from above downward is the condition of faith striving from below upward, and Froebel is hinting at rich depths of thought and experience when he begins his book with the picture of maternal devotion outrunning all appeal and seeking to call forth an answer to itself. Understood as a typical experience, the lesson of the Falling Game is that the nurture of childhood must be rooted and grounded in faith. If this truth seem to you so self-evident that you doubt the necessity of stating it, look within and around you, and you will find that every day and every hour force upon you instances of its violation. Do you know no parents who attempt to guide their children by explaining and justifying their own commands? Do you not know others who rule by mere brute force? Can you deny that you are yourself constantly betrayed into adopting one or the other of these false and futile methods? Are you clearly conscious that the method of force means to its victims a life oscillating between slavery and anarchy, while the method of explanation fosters irreverence and conceit, and is practically an appeal to the ignorant and inexperienced child to sit in judgment upon the actions of his parents? According to Rousseau, the method of appeal to childish reason was the one upheld by Locke. It may be questioned whether in this matter he did justice to the English reformer, but his strictures upon the method itself are admirable. "Mr. Locke's maxim," he writes, was to educate children by reasoning with them, and it is that which 66 is now most in vogue. The success of it, however, doth not appear to recommend it, and, for my own part, I meet with no children so silly and ridiculous as those with whom much argument hath been held. Of all the faculties of man, that of reason, which is, in fact, only a compound of all the rest, unfolds itself the latest, and with the greatest difficulty; and yet this is what we would make use of to develop the first and easiest of them. The great end of a good education is to form a reasonable man, and we pretend to educate a child by the means of reason! This is beginning where we should leave off, and making an implement of the work we are about." The antithesis to government by argument and explanation is government by force, and, as I have said, parents who avoid the former error are often betrayed into the latter. In like manner Rousseau, reacting against Locke, announces as the first principle of control that the child "be made sensible that he is weak and you are strong, and that from your situation and his he lies necessarily at your mercy. Let him know this fact, and early feel on his aspiring crest the hard yoke Nature hath imposed on man. By this method you will render his |