Part 1 (2/2)
where any ”old grey stone” would altogether surpa.s.s, as a stand-point, the bench of the highest cla.s.s of an infant-school. In short, they did not state the problem of infant culture with any breadth, and accomplished nothing of general interest on the subject.
Neither is the primary public school a Kindergarten, though it is but justice to the capabilities of that praiseworthy inst.i.tution, so important in default of a better, to say that in one of them, at the North End of Boston, an enterprising and genial teacher has introduced one feature of Froebel's plan. She has actually given to each of her little children a box of playthings, wherewith to amuse itself according to its own sweet will, at all times when not under direct instruction,--necessarily, in her case, on condition of its being perfectly quiet; and this one thing makes this primary school the best one in Boston, both as respects the attainments of the scholars and their good behavior.
_Kindergarten_ means a garden of children, and Froebel, the inventor of it, or rather, as he would prefer to express it, _the discoverer of the method of Nature_, meant to symbolize by the name the spirit and plan of treatment. How does the gardener treat his plants? He studies their individual natures, and puts them into such circ.u.mstances of soil and atmosphere as enable them to grow, flower, and bring forth fruit,--also to renew their manifestation year after year. He does not expect to succeed unless he learns all their wants, and the circ.u.mstances in which these wants will be supplied, and all their possibilities of beauty and use, and the means of giving them opportunity to be perfected. On the other hand, while he knows that they must not be forced against their individual natures, he does not leave them to grow wild, but prunes redundancies, removes destructive worms and bugs from their leaves and stems, and weeds from their vicinity,--carefully watching to learn what peculiar insects affect what particular plants, and how the former can be destroyed without injuring the vitality of the latter. After all the most careful gardener can do, he knows that the form of the plant is predetermined in the germ or seed, and that the inward tendency must concur with a mult.i.tude of influences, the most powerful and subtile of which is removed in place ninety-five millions of miles away.
In the Kindergarten, _children_ are treated on an a.n.a.logous plan. It presupposes gardeners of the mind, who are quite aware that they have as little power to override the characteristic individuality of a child, or to predetermine this characteristic, as the gardener of plants to say that a lily shall be a rose. But notwithstanding this limitation on one side, and the necessity for a concurrence of the Spirit on the other,--which is more independent of our modification than the remote sun,--yet they must feel responsible, after all, for the perfection of the development, in so far as removing every impediment, preserving every condition, and pruning every redundance.
This a.n.a.logy of education to the gardener's art is so striking, both as regards what we can and what we cannot do, that Froebel has put every educator into a most suggestive Normal School, by the very word which he has given to his seminary,--Kindergarten.
If every school-teacher in the land had a garden of flowers and fruits to cultivate, it could hardly fail that he would learn to be wise in his vocation. For suitable preparation, the first, second, and third thing is, to
”Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.”
The ”new education,” as the French call it, begins with children in the mother's arms. Froebel had the nurses bring to his establishment, in Hamburg, children who could not talk, who were not more than three months old, and trained the nurses to work on his principles and by his methods. This will hardly be done in this country, at least at present; but to supply the place of such a cla.s.s, a lady of Boston has prepared and published, under copyright, Froebel's First Gift, consisting of six soft b.a.l.l.s of the three primary and the three secondary colors, which are sold in a box, with a little manual for mothers, in which the true principle and plan of tending babies, so as not to rasp their nerves, but to amuse without wearying them, is very happily suggested. There is no mother or nurse who would not be a.s.sisted by this little manual essentially. As it says in the beginning,--”Tending babies is an art, and every art is founded on a science of observations; for love is not wisdom, but love must act _according to wisdom_ in order to succeed.
Mothers and nurses, however tender and kind-hearted, may, and oftenest do, weary and vex the nerves of children, in well-meant efforts to amuse them, and weary themselves the while. Froebel's exercises, founded on the observations of an intelligent sensibility, are intended to amuse without wearying, to educate without vexing.”
Froebel's Second Gift for children, adapted to the age from one to two or three years, with another little book of directions, has also been published by the same lady, and is perhaps a still greater boon to every nursery; for this is the age when many a child's temper is ruined, and the inclination of the twig wrongly bent, through sheer _want of resource and idea_, on the part of nurses and mothers.
But it is to the next age--from three years old and upwards--that the Kindergarten becomes the desideratum, if not a necessity. The isolated home, made into a flower-vase by the application of the principles set forth in the Gifts above mentioned, may do for babies. But every mother and nurse knows how hard it is to meet the demands of a child too young to be taught to read, but whose opening intelligence and irrepressible bodily activity are so hard to be met by an adult, however genial and active. Children generally take the temper of their whole lives from this period of their existence. Then ”the twig is bent,” either towards that habit of self-defence which is an ever-renewing cause of selfishness, or to the sun of love-in-exercise, which is the exhaustless source of goodness and beauty.[A]
The indispensable thing now is a sufficient society of children. It is only in the society of equals that the social instinct can be gratified, and come into equilibrium with the instinct of self-preservation.
Self-love, and love of others, are equally natural; and before reason is developed, and the proper spiritual life begins, sweet and beautiful childhood may bloom out and imparadise our mortal life. Let us only give the social instinct of children its fair chance. For this purpose, a few will not do. The children of one family are not enough, and do not come along fast enough. A large company should be gathered out of many families. It will be found that the little things are at once taken out of themselves, and become interested in each other. In the variety, affinities develop themselves very prettily, and the rough points of rampant individualities wear off. We have seen a highly-gifted child, who, at home, was--to use a vulgar, but expressive word--pesky and odious, with the exacting demands of a powerful, but untrained mind and heart, become ”sweet as roses” spontaneously, amidst the rebound of a large, well-ordered, and carefully watched child-society. Anxious mothers have brought us children, with a thousand deprecations and explanations of their characters, as if they thought we were going to find them little monsters, which their motherly hearts were persuaded they were not, though they behaved like little sanchos at home,--and, behold, they were as harmonious, from the very beginning, as if they had undergone the subduing influence of a lifetime. We are quite sure that children begin with loving others quite as intensely as they love themselves,--forgetting themselves in their love of others,--if they only have as fair a chance of being benevolent and self-sacrificing as of being selfish. Sympathy is as much a natural instinct as self-love, and no more or less innocent, in a moral point of view. Either principle alone makes an ugly and depraved form of natural character. Balanced, they give the element of happiness, and the conditions of spiritual goodness and truth,--making children fit temples for the Holy Ghost to dwell in.
A Kindergarten, then, is children in society,--a commonwealth or republic of children,--whose laws are all part and parcel of the Higher Law alone. It may be contrasted, in every particular, with the old-fas.h.i.+oned school, which is an absolute monarchy, where the children are subjected to a lower expediency, having for its prime end quietness, or such order as has ”reigned in Warsaw” since 1831.
But let us not be misunderstood. We are not of those who think that children, in any condition whatever, will inevitably develop into beauty and goodness. Human nature tends to revolve in a vicious circle, around the idiosyncrasy; and children must have over them, in the person of a wise and careful teacher, a power which shall deal with them as G.o.d deals with the mature, presenting the claims of sympathy and truth whenever they presumptuously or unconsciously fall into selfishness. We have the best conditions of moral culture in a company large enough for the exacting disposition of the solitary child to be balanced by the claims made by others on the common stock of enjoyment,--there being a reasonable oversight of older persons, wide-awake to antic.i.p.ate, prevent, and adjust the rival pretensions which must always arise where there are finite beings with infinite desires, while Reason, whose proper object is G.o.d, is yet undeveloped.
Let the teacher always take for granted that the law of love is quick within, whatever are appearances, and the better self will generally respond. In proportion as the child is young and unsophisticated, will be the certainty of the response to a teacher of simple faith:
”There are who ask not if thine eye Be on them,--who, in love and truth, Where no misgiving is, rely Upon the genial sense of youth.
”And blest are they who in the main This faith even now do entertain, Live in the spirit of this creed, Yet find another strength, according to their need.”
That ”other strength” is to be found in recognition of the Eternal laws of order, and reverent application of them to human action. But children must receive this from the Kindergartner, who shall give them such help in embodying their ever-springing fancies as shall prevent ”the weight of chance desires,” and issue in a tangible success, by entering into and carrying forward their total, spontaneous activity, without destroying its childishness.
One of the most important exercises for children in the Kindergarten is block building. A box of eight little cubes is so managed that it will unfold in the child's mind the law of symmetry, by means of series of forms which the children are led to make in a way rather difficult to describe here. So quick are the fancies of children, that the blocks will serve also as symbols of every thing in Nature and imagination. We have seen an ingenious teacher a.s.semble a cla.s.s of children around her large table, to each of whom she had given the blocks. The first thing was to count them, a great process of arithmetic to most of them. Then she made something and explained it. It was perhaps a light-house,--and some blocks would represent rocks near it to be avoided, and s.h.i.+ps sailing in the ocean; or perhaps it was a hen-coop, with chickens inside, and a fox prowling about outside, and a boy who was going to catch the fox and save the fowls. Then she told each child to make something, and when it was done hold up a hand. The first one she asked to explain, and then went round the cla.s.s. If one began to speak before another had ended, she would hold up her finger and say,--”It is not your turn.” In the course of the winter, she taught, over these blocks, a great deal about the habits of animals. She studied natural history in order to be perfectly accurate in her symbolic representation of the habitation of each animal, and their enemies were also represented by blocks. The children imitated these; and when they drew upon their imaginations for facts, and made fantastic creations, she would say,--”Those, I think, were fairy hens” (or whatever); for it was her principle to accept everything, and thus tempt out their invention. The great value of this exercise is to get them into the habit of representing something they have thought by an outward symbol. The explanations they are always eager to give, teach them to express themselves in words. Full scope is given to invention, whether in the direction of possibilities or of the impossibilities in which children's imaginations revel,--in either case the child being trained to the habit of embodiment of its thought.
Froebel thought it very desirable to have a garden where the children could cultivate flowers. He had one which he divided into lots for the several children, reserving a portion for his own share in which they could a.s.sist him. He thought it the happiest mode of calling their attention to the invisible G.o.d, whose power must be waited upon, after the conditions for growth are carefully arranged according to _laws_ which they must observe. Where a garden is impossible, a flower-pot with a plant in it, for each child to take care of, would do very well.
But the best way to cultivate a sense of the presence of G.o.d is to draw the attention to the conscience, which is very active in children, and which seems to them (as we all can testify from our own remembrance) another than themselves, and yet themselves. We have heard a person say, that in her childhood she was puzzled to know which was herself, the voice of her inclination or of her conscience, for they were palpably two; and what a joyous thing it was when she was first convinced that one was the Spirit of G.o.d, whom unlucky teaching had previously embodied in a form of terror on a distant judgment-seat. Children are consecrated as soon as they get the spiritual idea, and it may be so presented that it shall make them happy as well as true. But the adult who enters into such conversation with a child must be careful not to shock and profane, instead of nurturing the soul. It is possible to avoid both discouraging and flattering views, and to give the most tender and elevating a.s.sociations.
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