Child's restlessness: how to use it.

every unknown object within reach.* Children's fondness for using their hands was especially noted by Froebel; and he found that they delighted, not merely in examining by touch, but also in altering whatever they could alter, and further that they endeavoured to imitate known forms whether by drawing or whenever they could get any kind of plastic material by modelling. Besides remarking in them. these various activities, he saw that children were sociable and needed the sympathy of companions. There was, too, in them a growing moral nature, passions, affections, and conscience, which needed to be controlled, responded to, cultivated. Both the restraints and the opportunities incident to a well-organised community would be beneficial to their moral nature, and prove a cure for selfishness.

§ 26. As all education was to be sought in rightly directed but spontaneous action, Froebel considered how the children in this community should be employed. At that age their most natural employment is play, especially as Wordsworth has pointed out, games in which they imitate and "con the parts" they themselves will have to fill in after years. Froebel agreed with Montaigne that the games of children were "their most serious occupations," and with Locke that "all the plays and diversions of children should be directed towards good and useful habits, or else they will introduce.

* "Little children," says Joseph Payne, "are scarcely ever contented with simply doing nothing; and their fidgetiness and unrest, which often give mothers and teachers so much anxiety, are merely the strugglings of the soul to get, through the body, some employment for its powers. Supply this want, give them an object to work upon, and you solve the problem. The divergence and distraction of the faculties cease as they converge upon the work, and the mind is at rest in its very occupation." V. to German Schools.

Employments in Kindergarten.

ill ones" (Th. c. Ed., § 130). So he invented a course of occupations, a great part of which consisted in social games. Many of the names are connected with the "Gifts," as he called the series of simple playthings provided for the children, the first being the ball, "the type of unity." The "gifts" are chiefly not mere playthings but materials which the children work up in their own way, thus gaining scope for their power of doing and inventing and creating. The artistic faculty was much thought of by Froebel, and, as in the education of the ancients, the sense of rhythm in sound and motion was cultivated by music and poetry introduced in the games. Much care was to be given to the training of the senses, especially those of sight, sound, and touch. Intuition (Anschauung) was to be recognised as the true basis of knowledge, and though stories were to be told, and there was to be much intercourse in the way of social chat, instruction of the imparting and "learning-up" kind was to be excluded. There was to be no "dead knowledge; " in fact Froebel like Pestalozzi endeavoured to do for the child what Bacon nearly 200 years before had done for the philosopher. Bacon showed the philosopher that the way to study Nature was not to learn what others had surmised but to go straight to Nature and use his own senses and his own powers of observation. Pestalozzi and Froebel wished children to learn in this way as well as philosophers.

§ 27. Schools for very young children existed before Froebel's Kindergarten, but they had been thought of more in the interest of the mothers than of the children. It was for the sake of the mothers that Oberlin established them in the Vosges more than a century ago, his first Conductrices de l'Enfance being peasant women, Sara Banzet and Louise Scheppler. In the early part of this century the notion was

65

No schoolwork in Kindergarten.

taken up by James Buchanan and Samuel Wilderspin in this country (see James Leitch's Practical Educationists) and by J. M. D. Cochin in France. But Froebel's conception differed from that of the "Infant School." His object was purely educational but he would have no schooling." He called these communities of children Kindergarten, Gardens of children, i.e., enclosures in which young human plants are nurtured.* The children's employment is to be play. But any occupation in which children delight is play to them; and Froebel's series of employments, while they are in this sense play to the children, have nevertheless, as seen from the adult point of view, a distinctly educational object. This object, as Froebel himself describes it, is "to give the children employment in agreement with their whole nature, to strengthen their bodies, to exercise their senses, to engage their awakening mind, and through their senses to bring them acquainted with nature and their fellow-creatures; it is especially to guide aright the heart and the affections, and to lead them to the original ground of all life, to unity with themselves."

§ 28. No less than six-and-thirty years ago Henry Barnard (in his Report to Governor of Connecticut, 1854) declared the Kindergarten to be "by far the most original, attractive, and philosophical form of infant development the world has yet seen." Since then it has spread in all

* I entirely agree with Joseph Payne that where the language spoken is not German, it would be well to discard Kindergarten, Kindergärtner, and Kindergärtnerin. All who have to do with children should master some great principles taught by Froebel, but there is no need for them to learn German or to use German words. The French seem satisfied with Jardin d'Enfants but we are not likely to be with Children Garden. Playschool might do.

Without the idea the "gifts" fail.

civilised lands, and in many of them there are now public Kindergartens, the first I believe having been established in 1873 by Dr. William T. Harris in St. Louis, Mo. Bit Froebel's ideas are not so easily got hold of as his “Gifts,” and the real extension of his system may be by no means so great as it seems. "The Kindergarten system in the hands of one who understands it," says Dr. James Ward, "produces admirable results; but it is apt to be too mechanical and formal. There does not seem room for the individuality of a child, to which all free play possible should be given in the earliest years." (In Parents' Review Ap. 1890.) And Mr. Courthope Bowen has well said: "Kindergarten work without the Kindergarten idea, like a body without a soul, is subject to rapid degeneration and decay." So perhaps it will in the end prove that Froebel in his Education of Man which is "a book with seven seals" has left us a more precious legacy than in his "Gifts" and Occupations which are so popular and so easily adopted.

§ 29. It has been well said that "the essence of stupidity is in the demand for final opinions." How our thoughts have widened about education since a man like Dr. Johnson could assert, "Education is as well known, and has long been as well known, as ever it can be!"* (Hill's Boswell's J. ij, 407.) The astronomers of the Middle Ages might as well have asserted that nothing more could ever be known about astronomy.

Was Froebel what he believed himself to be, the Kepler

* Contrast this with what has been said by an eminent thinker of our time: "No art of equal importance to mankind has been so little investigated scientifically as the art of teaching." Sir H. S. Maine, quoted in J. H. Hoose's M. of Teaching.

The New Education and the old.

or the Newton of the educational system? Whoso is wise will not during the nineteenth century lay claim to a final opinion" on this point. But the "New Education" seems gaining ground. F. W. Farker emphatically declares "the Kindergarten" (by which he probably means Froebel's encouragement of self-activity) to be "the most important farreaching educational reform of the nineteenth century." We sometimes see it questioned whether the "New Education" has any proper claim to its title; but the education which Dr. Johnson considered final and which seems to us old aimed at learning; and the education which aims not at learning, but at developing through self-activity is so different from this that it may well be called New. If we consider the platform of the New Educationists as it stands, e.g., in the New York School Journal, we shall find that if it is not all new in theory it would be substantially new in practice.

§ 30. Let us look at a brief statement of what the "New Education" requires :—

1. Each study must be valued in proportion as it develops power; and power is developed by self-activity.

2. The memory must be employed in strict subservience to the higher faculties of the mind.

3. Whatever instruction is given, it must be adapted to the actual state of the pupil, and not ruled by the wants of the future boy or man.

4. More time must be given to the study of nature and to modern language and literature; less to the ancient languages.

5. The body must be educated as well as the mind.

6. Rich and poor alike must be taught to use their eyes and hands.