Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

bid adieu to dress and finery for ever." This determination on the part of an infant between six and eight years old leaves but little for formal educators to effect.

No account of ideas current as to children in the first half of the century would be even outlined which omitted the work of Wordsworth. To most of us he is known in this connection by his immortal Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from recollections of early childhood and by little else. The first four stanzas of the Ode were written two years before the rest and the whole dates from 1803-6. A new conception of childhood is here presented,-one entirely different from that which filled the minds of Dr Watts, Mrs Sherwood and the Taylors,though the genius of Jane Taylor, if left to itself, would probably never have bowed before the sombre teaching of Dr Watts. "Simplification was the keynote of the Revolutionary time," says Mr John Morley in his introduction to the complete edition of Wordsworth, and he proceeds to show how Wordsworth was affected by it: "Simplification of life and thought and feeling was to be accomplished without summoning up the dangerous spirit of destruction and revolt." Of this simplification Wordsworth stands out as the literary and philosophic type and in the Prelude, begun in 1799, finished in 1805, and published in 1850, we have, as a recent writer' has pointed out, a very pregnant and significant study in education.

From poems such as "We are Seven," "To H. C., Six Years Old," the Ode already mentioned, Book III. of the Excursion and the lines entitled "Characteristics of a Child three years old," written in 1811, no less than from the Prelude, we may gather a new and consoling conception of childhood. Education to Wordsworth is no longer une tempête de l'esprit; nor is it necessarily, as with Rousseau, a war on society. By 1803, Pestalozzi, that well-nigh divinely-inspired worker, had stumbled on to his best work. Between 1799-1804, while at

1 Wordsworth's Prelude as a Study of Education. James Fotheringham.

Burgdorf, he had found the true lines of his activity and had definitely decided that the elements of knowledge were three,— number, form, language. It was to simplify these, and by so doing "to psychologise instruction" that he worked for the rest of his life, which ended in 1827. In 1799 Herbart, then a keen, young philosopher, visited Burgdorf and instantly saw the value of Pestalozzi's method and the significance of teaching by Anschauung. This, as bringing the child face to face with real objects, and as appealing directly to innate power, was, in the Pestalozzian School, to replace the older rotelearning—the learning, that is, of other people's thoughts in other people's words. It was thus that the irresistible scientific movement of the Encyclopædists came to influence the schoolroom curriculum of the younger pupils, and it was thus that Rousseau's phrase, "the return to Nature," came to have a direct and fruitful bearing on the work of Pestalozzi. His poverty, his enthusiasm, his zeal, his imaginative conception of citizenship, all helped. Here were the poor and needy; here was the Fatherland: how unite them? Both suffered in isolation united they might both prosper. It is partly this enlightened view of teaching as a work which tends as no other does to solidify and raise the Fatherland, and partly that tender love for children which impelled him that makes Pestalozzi so grand and yet so pathetic a figure. Nothing quite spoilt him, -not even success,-not even crowds of visitors, -among whom we English may reckon Miss Edgeworth and Dr Bell. He still stands there, indefatigably striving "to simplify the elements" for little children,--recording his conviction that "the leading principle of education is not instruction: it is love."

The Pestalozzian method seems to have reached England early in the century, and to have influenced schoolroom traditions in the direction of teaching from things instead of merely by words. But, in education, as we all know, a method is one thing in one pair of hands and quite different in another. We

can all testify to the occasional stupefying effect of what are called Object lessons. And yet the idea that, innate power once developed, the child would teach himself from his surroundings was a very valuable idea for the schoolmaster to apply in the schoolroom, and this became possible, if not inevitable, to those who studied Pestalozzi. The main revolution thus created was the destruction of the partition wall between real life and schoolroom life. The child, in the Pestalozzian School, learnt that the selfsame powers and activities which made "mischief" so entrancing out of school-the desire to observe, to investigate, to experiment for himself—were the very same powers and activities which would avail him most in the schoolroom.

Froebel, who visited Pestalozzi in 1805 for a fortnight, and again in 1808-10 for two years, saw the value of this for a stage below that of the schoolroom proper. No less imbued than Pestalozzi with the importance of working at the individual for Society and at Society for the individual, Froebel, though his scope and aims differ from those of Pestalozzi, elaborated his kindergarten system and invented an apparatus which is complete, flexible, adaptable, for giving the child, whatever his race or tongue, elementary notions of number, form, colour and language, the four elements, as Froebel held, of all knowledge. But to say that Froebel's contribution to the problems of Infant Education consists in bricks, in mat-plaiting, in chequer-drawing, and in clay-modelling, is to give proof of signal incapacity for appreciating his true work. In truth, some of us have, in moments of despair, almost regretted that he ever elaborated his concrete instruments. They have no doubt often been stupidly used and allowed to obscure the principles which they should, in part at least, elucidate.

His conception of childhood has much in common with that of Wordsworth, as will be apparent to those who read the Mother's Games and Songs, the Education of Man, and the

poems of Wordsworth, which I have already mentioned'. In part this conception must, as I believe, be discarded by the really observant and devoted teacher: and it must be discarded because it is not borne out by experience. Our modern infants do not always, so far, at least, as I may speak from experience,-trail clouds of glory about them in our infant schoolrooms of to-day. But Froebel and Wordsworth are still wise in bidding us take heed to train and develop that nobler and purer self which no less an authority than Herbart insists does exist in all. It is in training and developing the ideal self that we may make it the real self: and this is specially the right line on which to work in the early and essentially plastic years of life.

The idea that hand-work and head-work should be simultaneous and mutually complementary, stimulating and suggestive, is the root idea of that perpetual realisation of thought in act on which Froebel places such emphasis. His own reminiscences of childhood led him to desire ardently that the wearying sense of contradiction, of fragmentariness, of antagonism, which so often disturbs or even arrests mental development should be provided against. Thus harmony is his great watchword: it is in an atmosphere of harmony that the religious and consoling idea of the unity of all life must become the central truth to the individual.

Students of Froebel find it at times difficult to follow his philosophy, and no doubt he lacks lucidity in exposition; but if we remember that many of his favourite words and phrases are those of contemporary philosophy his meaning will become easier to grasp.

Kindergartens were first opened in England in the early fifties, but England is hard to move in matters educational. Still, two results began, by slow, insidious degrees, to make

1 See also Froebel and Education by Self-activity, by H. C. Bowen, especially Chapter IV.

1 See Education of Man. Trans. by W. N. Hailmann, pp. 30—39.

themselves felt: first, that teaching of all elements should be in the concrete; second, that teachers, especially of little children, should, in addition to receiving a sound, general education, be specially prepared for their work. I am not defending the way in which these ideas were carried out in the past or are carried out in the present: I simply note them as being, in my opinion, mainly due to Froebelian influences. I regard them as blessed ideas both for teachers and children, and I therefore bow reverently before the genius who forced us to give them even that imperfect and halting trial which is all we can claim to-day as having been won for them. The blessedness of getting hold of a vital idea in education is after all this: that no amount of stupidity in application can really kill it. One day, after ages of bungling, of stripes and tears and theories and pedantry, we hit upon the true application, and lo! the idea is there unspoilt, and goes forth blessing and to bless.

In other directions Pestalozzi and Froebel are influencing us; perhaps it would be truer to say that they are beginning at last to influence us. Their influence may be recognised in the happier tone of our schoolrooms, in the greater freedom of our tiny pupils, and in our more effectual knowledge of childnature, in spite perhaps of what is fashionable to-day under the title of Child-Study.

In 1802, Charles Lamb, writing to Coleridge, regretted the substitution of Mrs Barbauld's "stuff" and Mrs Trimmer's “stuff” for all the old classics of the nursery. He deplores the loss of Goody Two Shoes, of which, as we know, Goldsmith was believed to be the author'. Mrs Trimmer, if we judge her from her once widely-read History of the Robins, does really deserve the epithet which Charles Lamb uses: but I demur to it being applied to Mrs Barbauld's Prose Hymns.

"Hang them !" writes Charles Lamb, "I mean the cursed Barbauld crew, those blights and blasts of all that is human in

1 See in Journal of Education, Nov. 1900, a letter from Mr Charles Welsh on this point.

« ForrigeFortsæt »