§ 83. The grand change advocated by Pestalozzi was a change ofobject. The main object of the school should not be toteachbut todevelop.
§ 84. This change of object naturally brings many changes with it. Measured by their capacity for acquiring school knowledge and skill young children may be considered, as one of H.M. Inspectors considered them, “the fag-end of the school.” But if the school exists not to teach but to develop, young children, instead of being the “fag-end,” become the most important part of all. In the development of all organisms more depends on the earlier than on the later stages; and there is no reason to doubt that this law holds in the case of human beings. On this account, from the days of Pestalozzi educational science has been greatly, I may say mainly, concerned with young children. For the dominating thought has been that the young human being is an undeveloped organism, and that in education that organism is developed. So the essence of Pestalozzianism lies not so much in its method as in its aim, not more in what it does than in what it endeavours to do.
§ 85. And thus it was that Pestalozzi (in Raumer’s words) “compelled the scholastic world to revise the whole of their task, to reflect on the nature and destiny of man, and also on the proper way of leading him from his youth towards that destiny.” And it was his love of his fellow-creatures that raised him to this standpoint. He was moved by “the enthusiasm of humanity.” Consumed with grief for the degradation of the Swiss peasantry, he never lost faith in their true dignity as men, and in the possibility of raising them to a condition worthy of it. He cast about for the best means of thus raising them, and decided that it could be effected, not by any improvement in their outward circumstances, but by an education which should make them what their Creator intended them to be, and should give them the use and the consciousness of all their inborn faculties. “From my youth up,” he says, “I felt what a high and indispensable human duty it is to labour for the poor and miserable; ... that he may attain to a consciousness of his own dignity through his feeling of the universal powers and endowments which he possesses awakened within him; that he may not only learn to gabble over by rote the religious maxim that ‘man is created in the image of God, and is bound to live and die as a child of God,’ but may himself experience its truth by virtue of the Divine power within him, so that he may be raised, not only above the ploughing oxen, but also above the man in purple and silk who lives unworthily of his high destiny” (Quoted in Barnard, p. 13).
Again he says (and I quote at length on the point, as it is indeed the key to Pestalozzianism), “Why have I insisted so strongly on attention to early physical and intellectual education? Because I consider these as merely leading toa higher aim, to qualify the human being for the free and full use of all the faculties implanted by the Creator, and to direct all these faculties towards the perfection of the whole being of man, that he may be enabled to act in his peculiar station as an instrument of that All-wise and Almighty Power that has called him into life” (To Greaves, p. 160).
§ 86. Believing in this high aim of education, Pestalozzi required a proper early training for all alike. “Every human being,” said he, “has a claim to a judicious development of his faculties by those to whom the care of his infancy is confided” (Ib.p. 163).
§ 87. Pestalozzi therefore most earnestly addressed himself to mothers, to convince them of the power placed in their hands, and to teach them how to use it. “The mother is qualified, and qualified by the Creator Himself, to become the principal agent in the development of her child; ... and what is demanded of her is—athinking love.... God has given to thy child all the faculties of our nature, but the grand point remains undecided—how shall this heart, this head, these hands, be employed? to whose service shall they be dedicated? A question the answer to which involves a futurity of happiness or misery to a life so dear to thee.... It is recorded that God opened the heavens to the patriarch of old, and showed him a ladder leading thither. This ladder is let down to every descendant of Adam; it is offered to thy child. But he must be taught to climb it. And let him not attempt it by the cold calculations of the head, or the mere impulse of the heart; but let all these powers combine, and the noble enterprise will be crowned with success. These powers are already bestowed on him, but to thee it is given to assist incalling them forth” (To Greaves, p. 21). “Maternal love is the first agent in education.... Through it the child is led to love and trust his Creator and his Redeemer.”
§ 88. From the theory of development which lay at the root of Pestalozzi’s views of education, it followed that the imparting of knowledge and the training for special pursuits held only a subordinate position in his scheme. “Education, instead of merely considering what is to be imparted to children, ought to consider first what they may be said already to possess, if not as a developed, at least as an involved faculty capable of development. Or if, instead of speaking thus in the abstract, we will but recollect that it is to the great Author of life that man owes the possession, and is responsible for the use, of his innate faculties, education should not simply decide what is to be made of a child, but rather inquire what it was intended that he should become. What is his destiny as a created and responsible being? What are his faculties as a rational and moral being? What are the means for their perfection, and the end held out as the highest object of their efforts by the Almighty Father of all, both in creation and in the page of revelation?”
§ 89. Education, then, must consist “ina continual benevolent superintendence, with the object of calling forth all the faculties which Providence has implanted; and its province, thus enlarged, will yet be with less difficulty surveyed from one point of view, and will have more of a systematic and truly philosophical character, than an incoherent mass of ‘lessons’—arranged without unity of principle, and gone through without interest—which too often usurps its name.”
The educator’s task then is to superintend and promotethe child’s development, morally, intellectually, and physically.
§ 90. “The essential principle of education is not teaching,” said Pestalozzi; “it is love” (R.’s G., 289). Again he says, “The child loves and believes before it thinks and acts” (Ib.378). And in a very striking passage (Ib.329), where he compares the development of the various powers of a human being to the development of a tree, he says, “These forces of the heart—faith and love—are in the formation of immortal man what the root is for the tree.” So, according to Pestalozzi, a child without faith and love can no more grow up to be what he should be than a tree can grow without a root. Apart from this vital truth there can be no such thing as Pestalozzianism.
“Ah yet when all is thought and saidThe heart still overrules the head.”
“Ah yet when all is thought and saidThe heart still overrules the head.”
“Ah yet when all is thought and said
The heart still overrules the head.”
It is our hearts and affections that lead us right or wrong far more than our intellects. In advocating the training of the minds of the people, Lord Derby once remarked that as Chairman of Quarter Sessions he had found most of the culprits brought before him were stupid and ignorant. It certainly cannot be denied that the commonest kind of criminal is bad in every way. He has his body ruined by debauchery, his intellect almost in abeyance, and his heart and affections set on what is vile and degrading. If you could cultivate his intellect you would certainly raise him out of the lowest and by far the largest of the criminal classes. But he might become a criminal of a type less disgusting in externals, but in reality far more dangerous. The most atrocious miscreant of our time, if not of all time, was a man who contrived a machine to sink ships in mid-ocean, his only object being to gain a sum of money on afalse insurance. This man was a type of theéliteof criminals, had received an intellectual training, and could not have been described by Lord Derby as ignorant or stupid.
§ 91. Pestalozzi then, much as he valued the development of the intellect, put first the moral and religious influence of education; and with him moral and religious were one and the same. He protested against the ordinary routine of elementary education, because “everywhere in it the flesh predominated over the spirit, everywhere the divine element was cast into the shade, everywhere selfishness and the passions were taken as the motives of action, everywhere mechanical habits usurped the place of intelligent spontaneity” (R.’s G., 470). Education for the people must be different to this. “Man does not live by bread alone; every child needs a religious development; every child needs to know how to pray to God in all simplicity, but with faith and love” (R.’s G., 378). “If the religious element does not run through the whole of education, this element will have little influence on the life; it remains formal or isolated”[160](Ib.381). And Pestalozzi sums up the essentials of popular education in the words: “The childaccustomed from his earliest years to pray, to think, and to work, is already more than half educated” (Ib.381).
§ 92. Here we see the main requisites. First the child must pray with faith and love. Next he mustthink.
“The child must think!” exclaims the schoolmaster: “Must he not learn?” To which Pestalozzi would have replied, “Most certainly he must.” Learning was not in Pestalozzi’s estimation as in Locke’s, the “last and least” thing, but learning was with him something very different from the learning imparted by the ordinary schoolmaster. Pestalozzi was very imperfectly acquainted with the thoughts and efforts of his predecessors, but the one book on education which he had studied had freed him from the “idols” of the schoolroom. This book was theEmileof Rousseau, and from it he came no less than Rousseau himself to despise the learning of the schoolmaster. But when he had to face the problem of organizing a course of education for the people, Pestalozzi did not agree with Rousseau that the first twelve years should be spent in “losing time.” No, the children must learn, but they must learn in such a way as to develop all the powers of the mind. And so Pestalozzi was led to what he considered his great discovery, viz., that all instruction must be based on “Anschauung.”
§ 93. The Germans, who have devoted so much thought and care and effort to education, greatly honour Pestalozzi,[161]and as his disciples aim at making all elementary instruction“anschaulich.” We English have troubled ourselves so little about Pestalozzi, or, I might say, about the theory of education, that we have not cared to get equivalent words forAnschauungandanschaulich. ForAnschauung“sense-impression” has lately been tried; but this is in two ways defective; for (1) there may be “Anschauungen” beyond the range of the senses, and (2) there is in an “Anschauung” an active as well as a passive element, and this the word “impression” does not convey. The active part is brought out better by “observation”—the word used by Joseph Payne and James MacAlister; but this seems hardly wide enough. Other writers of English borrow words straight from the French, and talk about “intuition” and “intuitive,” words which were taken (first I believe by Kant) from the Latinintueri, “to look atwith attention and reflection.”
§ 94. I think we shall be wise in following these writers. On good authority I have heard of a German professor who when asked if he had read some large work recently published in the distressing type of his nation, replied that he had not; he was waiting for a French translation. If the Germans find that the French express their thoughts more clearly than they can themselves, we may think ourselves fortunate when the French will act as interpreters. I therefore gladly turn to M. Buisson and translate what he says about “intuition.”
“Intuition is just the most natural and most spontaneous action of human intelligence, the action by which the mind seizes a reality without effort, hesitation, or go-between. It is a ‘direct apperception,’ made as it were at a glance. If it has to do with some matter within the province of the senses, the senses perceive it at once. Here we have the simplest case of all, the most common, themost easily noted. If the thing concerned is an idea, a reality, that is, beyond the reach of the senses, we still say that we seize it by intuition when all that is necessary is that it present itself to the mind, and the mind at once grasps it and is satisfied with it without any need of proof or investigation. We advance by intuition whenever our mind, acting by the senses, or by the judgment, or by the conscience, knows things with the same amount of evidence and the same amount of speed that a distinct view of an object affords the eye. So intuition is no separate faculty; it is nothing strange or new in the mind of man. It is just the mind itself ‘intuitively’ recognising what exists in it or around it” (Les Conférences Péd. faites aux Instituteurs, Delagrave, 1879, p. 331). So the “intuitive method” (to keep the French name for it) is of very wide application. “It appeals to this forcesui generis, to this glance of the mind, to this spontaneous spring of the intelligence towards truth.” It sets the pupil’s mind to work in following his own intellectual instincts. If in our teaching we can use it, we shall have gained, as M. Buisson says, the best helper in the world, viz., the pupil. If he can be got to take an active part in the instruction all difficulty vanishes at once. Instead of having to drag him along, you will see him delighted to keep you company.
§ 95. According to M. Buisson there are three kinds of intuition—sensuous, intellectual, and moral. Similarly M. Jullien (Esprit de Pestalozzi, 1812, vol. j, p. 152) says that there are “intuitions” of the “internal senses” as well as of the external: the “internal senses” are four in number: first, the sense for the true; second, the sense for the beautiful; third, the sense for the good; fourth, the sense for the infinite.
§ 96. Without settling whether this analysis is complete we shall have no difficulty in admitting that both body and mind have faculties by means of which we apprehend, lay hold of, what is true and right; and it is on the use of these faculties that Pestalozzi bases instruction. No Englishman may have found a good word to indicateAnschauung, but one Englishman at least had the idea of it long before Pestalozzi. More than a century earlier Locke had called knowledge “the internal perception of the mind.” “Knowing is seeing,” said he; “and if it be so, it is madness to persuade ourselves we do so by another man’s eyes, let him use never so many words to tell us that what he asserts is very visible” (Suprap. 222).
§ 97. Thus in theory Pestalozzi was, however unconsciously, a follower of Locke. But in practice they went far asunder. Locke’s thoughts were constantly occupied with philosophical investigations, and he seems to have made small account of the intellectual power of children, and to have supposed that they cannot “see” anything at all. So he cared little what was taught them, and till they reached the age of reason the tutor might give such lessons as would be useful to “young gentlemen,” the avowed object being to “keep them from sauntering.” His follower Rousseau preferred that the child’s mind should not be filled with the traditional lore of the schoolroom, and that the instructor, when the youth reached the age of twelve, should find “an unfurnished apartment to let.” Then came Pestalozzi, and he saw that at whatever age the instructor began to teach the child, he would not find an unfurnished apartment, seeing that every child learns continuously from the hour of its birth. And how does the child learn? Not by repeating words which express the thoughts, feelings, andexperiences of other people,[162]but by his own experiences and feelings, and by the thoughts which these suggest to him.
§ 98. Elementary education then on its intellectual side is teaching the child to think. The proper subjects of thought for children Pestalozzi held to be the children’s surroundings, the realities of their own lives, the things that affect them and arouse their feelings and interests. Perhaps he did not emphasizeinterestas much as Herbart has done since; but clearly anAnschauungor “intuition” is only possible when the child is interested in the thing observed.
§ 99. The art of teaching in Pestalozzi’s system consists in analyzing the knowledge that the children should acquire about their surroundings, arranging it in a regular sequence, and bringing it to the children’s consciousness gradually and in the way in which their minds will act upon it. In this way they learn slowly, but all they learn is their own. They are not like the crow drest up in peacock’s feathers, forthey have not appropriated anydeadknowledge (“angelernte todte Begriffe,” as Diesterweg has it), and it cannot be said of them, “They know about much, butknownothing (Sie kennen viel und wissen nichts).” Their knowledge is actual knowledge, for they are taught notwhatto think butto think, and to exercise their powers of observation and draw conclusions from their own experience. The teacher simply furnishes materials and occasions for this exercise in observing, and as it goes on gives his benevolent superintendence.
§ 100. They learn slowly for another reason. According to Pestalozzi the first conceptions must be dwelt upon till they are distinct and firmly fixed. Buss tells us that when he first joined Pestalozzi at Burgdorf the delay over the prime elements seemed to him a waste of time, but that afterwards he was convinced of its being the right plan, and felt that the failure of his own education was due to its incoherent and desultory character. “Not only,” says Pestalozzi, “have the first elements of knowledge in every subject the most important bearing on its complete outline, but the child’s confidence and interest are gained by perfect attainment even in the lowest stage of instruction.”[163]
§ 101. We have seen that Pestalozzi would have children learn to pray, to think, and towork. In schools for thesoi-disant“upper classes” the parents or friends of a boy sometimes say, “There is no need for him to work he will be very well off.” From this kind of demoralization Pestalozzi’s pupils were free. They would have to work, and Pestalozzi wished them to learn to work as soon as possible. In this way he sought to increase their self-respect, and to unite their school-life with their life beyond it.[164]
§ 102. Pestalozzi was tremendously in earnest, and he wished the children also to take instruction seriously. He was totally opposed to the notion which had found favour with many great authorities ase.g., Locke and Basedow, that instruction should always be given in the guise of amusement. “I am convinced,” says he, “that such anotion will for ever preclude solidity of knowledge, and, for want of sufficient exertions on the part of the pupils, will lead to that very result which I wish to avoid by my principle of a constant employment of the thinking powers. A child must very early in life be taught the lesson that exertion is indispensable for the attainment of knowledge”[165](To G., xxiv, p. 117). But he should be taught at the same time that exertion is not an evil, and he should be encouraged, not frightened, into it. Healthy exertion, whether of body or mind, is always attended with a feeling of satisfaction amounting to pleasure, and where this pleasure is absent the instructor has failed in producing proper exertion. As Pestalozzi says, “Whenever children are inattentive and apparently take no interest in a lesson, the teacher should always first look to himself for the reason”[166](Ib.).
§ 103. But though he took so serious a view of instruction, he made instruction include and indeed give a prominent place to the arts of singing and drawing. In the Pestalozzian schools singing found immense favour with both the masters and the pupils, and the collection of songs by Nägeli, a master at Yverdun, became famous. Drawing too was practised by all. As Pestalozzi writes to Greaves (xxiv, 117), “A person who is in the habit of drawing, especially from nature, will easily perceive many circumstances which are commonly overlooked, and will form a much more correct impression even of such objects as he does not stop to examine minutely, than one who has never been taught to look upon what he sees with an intention of reproducing a likeness of it. The attention to the exact shape of the whole and the proportion of the parts, which is requisite for the taking of an adequate sketch, is converted into a habit, and becomes productive both of instruction and amusement.”
§ 104. I have now endeavoured to point out the main features of Pestalozzianism. The following is the summing up of these features given by Morf in his Contribution to Pestalozzi’s Biography:—
1. Instruction must be based on the learner’s own experience. (Das Fundament des Unterrichts ist die Anschauung.)2. What the learner experiences and observes must be connected with language.3. The time for learning is not the time for judging, not the time for criticism.4. In every department instruction must begin with the simplest elements, and starting from these must be carried on step by step according to the development of the child, that is, it must be brought into psychological sequence.5. At each point the instructor shall not go forward till that part of the subject has become the proper intellectual possession of the learner.6. Instruction must follow the path of development, not the path of lecturing, teaching, or telling.7. To the educator the individuality of the child must be sacred.8. Not the acquisition of knowledge or skill is the main object of elementary instruction, but the development and strengthening of the powers of the mind.9. With knowledge (Wissen) must come power (Können), with information (Kenntniss) skill (Fertigkeit).10. Intercourse between educator and pupil, and school discipline especially, must be based on and controlled by love.11. Instruction shall be subordinated to the aim ofeducation.12. The ground of moral-religious bringing up lies in the relation of mother and child.[167]
1. Instruction must be based on the learner’s own experience. (Das Fundament des Unterrichts ist die Anschauung.)
2. What the learner experiences and observes must be connected with language.
3. The time for learning is not the time for judging, not the time for criticism.
4. In every department instruction must begin with the simplest elements, and starting from these must be carried on step by step according to the development of the child, that is, it must be brought into psychological sequence.
5. At each point the instructor shall not go forward till that part of the subject has become the proper intellectual possession of the learner.
6. Instruction must follow the path of development, not the path of lecturing, teaching, or telling.
7. To the educator the individuality of the child must be sacred.
8. Not the acquisition of knowledge or skill is the main object of elementary instruction, but the development and strengthening of the powers of the mind.
9. With knowledge (Wissen) must come power (Können), with information (Kenntniss) skill (Fertigkeit).
10. Intercourse between educator and pupil, and school discipline especially, must be based on and controlled by love.
11. Instruction shall be subordinated to the aim ofeducation.
12. The ground of moral-religious bringing up lies in the relation of mother and child.[167]
§ 105. Having now seen in which direction Pestalozzi would start the school-coach, let us examine (with referenceto England only) the direction in which it is travelling at present.
§ 106. For educational purposes we may, with Lord Beaconsfield, regard the English as composed of two nations, the rich and the poor. Let us consider these separately.
In the case of the rich we find that the worst part of our educational course—the part most wrong in theory and pernicious in practice—is the schooling of young children, say between six and twelve years old. Before the age of six some few are fortunate enough to attend a good Kindergarten; but the opportunity of doing this is at present rare, and for most children of well-to-do parents there is, up to six years old, little or no organised instruction. Pestalozzi would have every mother made capable of giving such instruction. Froebel would have every child sent to a skilled “Kindergärtnerin.” It seems to me beyond question that children gain immensely from joining a properly-managed Kindergarten; but where this is impossible, perhaps the mother may leave the child to the series of impressions which come to its senses without any regular order. According to the first Lord Lytton, the mother’s interference might remind us of the man who thought his bees would make honey faster if, instead of going in search of flowers, they were shut up and had flowers brought to them. The wayin which young children turn from object to object, like the bees from flower to flower, seems to show that at this stage their intellectual training goes on whether we help it or not. There is no doubt an education for children however young, and the mother is the teacher, but the lessons have more to do with the heart than the head.
§ 107. But the time for regular teaching comes at last, and what is to be done then? Let us consider briefly whatisdone.
Hitherto, the only defence ever made of our school-course leading up to residence at a University, has been that it aims not at giving knowledge but at training the mind. Youths then are supposed to be engaged, not in gaining knowledge, but in training their faculties for adult life. But when we come to provide for the “education” of children, we never think of training their faculties for youth, but endeavour solely to inculcate what will then come in useful. We see clearly enough that it would be absurd to cram the mind of a youth with laws of science or art or commerce which he could not understand, on the ground that the getting-up of these things might save him trouble in after-life. But we do not hesitate to sacrifice childhood to the learning by heart of grammar rules, Latin declensions, historical dates, and the like, with no thought whatever of the child’s faculties, but simply with a view of giving him knowledge (so-called) that will come in useful five or six years afterwards. We do not treat youths thus, probably because we have more sympathy with them, or at least understand them better. The intellectual life to which the senses and the imagination are subordinated in the man has already begun in the youth. In an inferior degree he can do what the man can do, and understand what the mancan understand. He has already some notion of reasoning, and abstraction, and generalisation. But with the child it is very different. His active faculties may be said almost to differ in kind from a man’s. He has a feeling for the sensuous world which he will lose as he grows up. His strong imagination, under no control of the reason, is constantly at work building castles in the air, and investing the doll or the puppet-show with all the properties of the things they represent. His feelings and affections, easily excited, find an object to love or dislike in every person and thing he meets with. On the other hand, he has only vague notions of the abstract, and has no interest except in actual known persons, animals, and things.
§ 108. There is, then, between the child of eight or nine and the youth of fourteen or fifteen a greater difference than between the youth and the man of twenty; and this demands a corresponding difference in their studies. And yet, as matters are carried on now, the child is too often kept to the drudgery of learning by rote mere collections of hard words, perhaps, too, in a foreign language: and absorbed in the present, he is not much comforted by the teacher’s assurance that “some day” these things will come in useful.
§ 109. How to educate the child is doubtless the most difficult problem of all, and it is generally allotted to those who are the least likely to find a satisfactory solution.
The earliest educator of the children of many rich parents is the nursemaid—a person not usually distinguished by either intellectual or moral excellence.[168]At an early agethis educator is superseded by the Preparatory School. Taken as a body, the ladies who open “establishments for young gentlemen” cannot be said to hold enlarged views, or, indeed, any views whatever, on the subject of education. Their intention is not so much to cultivate the children’s faculties as to make a livelihood, and to hear no complaints that pupils who have left them have been found deficient in the expected knowledge by the master of the next school. If anyone would investigate the sort of teaching which is considered adapted to the capacity of children at this stage, let him look into a standard work still in vogue (“Mangnall’s Questions”), from which the young of both sexes acquire a great quantity and variety of learning; the whole of ancient and modern history and biography, together with the heathen mythology, the planetary system, and the names of all the constellations, lying very compactly in about 300 pages.[169]
Unfortunately, moreover, from the gentility of these ladies, their scholars’ bodies are often treated in preparatory schools no less injuriously than their minds. It may be natural in a child to use his lungs and delight in noise, butthis can hardly be consideredgenteel, so the tendency is, as far as possible, suppressed. It is found, too, that if children are allowed to run about they get dirty and spoil their clothes, and do not look like “young gentlemen,” so they are made to take exercise in a much more genteel fashion, walking slowly two-and-two,with gloves on.[170]
§ 110. At nine or ten years old, boys are commonly put to a school taught by masters. Here they lose sight of their gloves, and learn the use of their limbs; but their minds are not so fortunate as their bodies. The studies of the school have been arranged without any thought of their peculiar needs. The youngest class is generally the largest, often much the largest, and it is handed over to the least competent and worst paid master on the staff of teachers. The reason is, that little boys are found to learn the tasks imposed upon them very slowly. A youth or a man who came fresh to the Latin grammar would learn in a morning as much as the master, with great labour, can get into children in a week. It is thought, therefore, that the best teaching should be applied where it will have the most obvious results. If anyone were to say to the managerof a school, “The master who takes the lowest form teaches badly, and the children learn nothing”; he would perhaps say, “Very likely; but if I paid a much higher salary, and got a better man, they would learn but little.” The only thing the school-manager thinks of is, How much do the little boys learn of what is taught in the higher forms? How their faculties are being developed, or whether they have any faculties except for reading, writing, and arithmetic, and for getting grammar-rules, &c. by heart, he is not so “unpractical” as to enquire.
§ 111. With reference to the education of the first of our “two nations,” it seems then pretty clear that Pestalozzi would require that the school-coach should be turned and started in a totally different direction.
§ 112. What about the education of the other “nation,” a nation of which the verb “to rule” has for many centuries been used in the passive voice, but can be used in that voice no longer? A century ago, with the partial exception of Scotland and Massachusetts, there was no such thing as school education for the people to be found anywhere in Europe or America. But from 1789 onwards power has been passing more and more from the few to the many; and as a natural consequence folk-schools (for which we have not yet found a name) have become of vast importance everywhere. The Germans, as we have seen, have been the disciples of Pestalozzi, and their elementary education in everything bears traces of his ideas. The English have organised a great system of elementary education in total ignorance of Pestalozzi. As usual, we seem to have supposed that the right system would come to us “in sleep.” But has it come? The children of the poor are now compelled by the law to attend an elementary school. Whatsort of an education has the law there provided for them? The Education Department professes to measure everything by results. Let us do the same. Suppose that on his leaving school we wished to forecast a lad’s future. What should we try to find out about him? No doubt we should ask what he knew; but this would not be by any means the main thing. His skill would interest us, and still more would his state of health. But what we should ask first and foremost is this, Whom does he love? Whom does he admire and imitate? What does he care about? What interests him? It is only when the answers to these questions are satisfactory, that we can think hopefully of his future; and it is only in so far as the school-course has tended to make the answers satisfactory, that it deserves our approval. Schools such as Pestalozzi designed would have thus deserved our approval; but we cannot say this of the schools into which the children of the English poor are now driven. In these schools the heart and the affections are not thought of, the powers of neither mind nor body are developed by exercise, and the children do not acquire any interests that will raise or benefit them.
§ 113. An advocate of our system would not deny this, but would probably say, “The question for us to consider is, not what is the best that in the most favourable circumstances might be attempted, but what is the best that in very restricted and by no means favourable circumstances, we are likely to get. The teachers in our schools are not self-devoting Pestalozzis, but only ordinary men and women, and still worse, ordinary boys and girls.[171]It would be ofno use talking to our teachers (still less our pupil-teachers) about developing the affections and the mental or bodily powers of the children. All such talk could end in nothing but silly cant. As for character, we expect the school to cultivate in the children habits of order, neatness, industry. Beyond this we cannot go.”
And yet, though this seems reasonable, we feel that it is not quite satisfactory. If so much depends in all of us on “admiration, hope, and love,” we can hardly consider a system of education that entirely ignores them to be welladapted to the needs of human nature. If Pestalozzi was right, we must be wrong. We have never supposed the object of the school to be the development of the faculties of heart, of head, and of hand, but we have thought of nothing but learning—learning first of all to read, write, and cipher, and then in “good” schools, one or more “extra subjects” may be taken up, and a grant obtained for them. The sole object, both of managers and teachers, is to prepare for the Inspector, who comes once a year, and from an examination of five hours or so, pronounces on what the children have learnt.
§ 114. The engineer most concerned in the construction of this machine, the Right Hon. Robert Lowe, announced that there could be “no such thing as a science of education;” and as when we have no opinion of our own we always adopt the opinion of some positive person, we took his word for it. But what if the confident Mr. Lowe was mistaken? What if thereissuch a science, and the aim of it is that children should grow up not so much toknowsomething as tobesomething? In this case we shall be obliged sooner or later to give up Mr. Lowe and to come round to Pestalozzi.[172]Science is correct inferences drawn from the facts of the universe; and where such science exists, confident assertions that it does not and cannot exist are dangerous for the confident persons and for those who follow them. Evenif “there is no such thing as a science of education,” such a thing aseducationthere is; and this is just what Mr. Lowe, and we may say the English, practically deny. They make arrangements for instruction and mete out “the grant” according to the results obtained, but they totally fail to conceive of the existence ofeducation, education which has instruction among its various agents.
§ 115. In one respect the analogy between the educator and child and the gardener and plant, an analogy in which Pestalozzi no less than Froebel delighted, entirely breaks down. The gardener has to study the conditions necessary for the health and development of the plant, but these conditions lie outside his own life and are independent of it. With the educator it is different. Like the gardener he can create nothing in the child, but unlike the gardener he can further the development only of that which exists in himself. Hedraws outin the young the intelligence and the sense of what is just, the love of what is beautiful, the admiration of what is noble, but this he can do only by his own intelligence and his own enthusiasm for what is just and beautiful and noble. Even industry is in many casescaughtfrom the teacher. In a volume of essays (originally published in theForum), in which some men, distinguished as scholars or in literature in the United States, have given an account of their early years, we find that almost in every case they date their intellectual industry and growth from the time when they came under the influence of some inspiring teacher. Thus even for instruction and still more for education, the great force isthe teacher. This is a truth which all our “parties” overlook. They wage their controversies and have their triumphs and defeats about unessentials, and leave the essentials to “crotchety educationists.” In such questions as whether the ChurchCatechism shall or shall not be taught, whether natural science shall or shall not figure in the time-table (without scientific teachers it can figure nowhere else), whether the parents or the Government shall pay for each child twopence or threepence a week, whether the ratepayers shall or shall not be “represented” among the Managers in “voluntary” schools, in all questions of this kindeducationis not concerned; and yet these are the only questions that we think about. In the end it will perhaps dawn upon us that in every school what is important for education is not the time-table but the teacher, and that so far as pupil-teachers are employed education is impossible. Elsewhere (infrap. 476) I have told of a man in the prime of life (he seemed between 40 and 50 years old) whose time was entirely taken up in teaching a large class of children, boys and girls, of six or seven years. He most certainly could and did educate them both in heart and mind. He made their lessons a delightful occupation to them, and he exercised over them the influence of a good and wise father. Here was the right system seen at its best. I do not say that all or even most adult teachers would have exercised so good an influence as this gentleman; but so far as they come up to what they ought to be and might be they do exercise such an influence. And this of course can be said of nopupil-teacher.
§ 116. As regards schools then, schools for the rich and schools for the poor, the great educating force is the personality of the teacher. Before we can have Pestalozzian schools we must have Pestalozzian teachers. Teachers must catch something of Pestalozzi’s spirit and enter into his conception of their task. Perhaps some of them will feel inclined to say: “Fine words, no doubt, and in a sense very true, that education should be the unfolding of thefaculties according to the Divine idea; but between this high poetical theory and the dull prose of actual school-teaching, there is a great gulf fixed, and we cannot attend to both at the same time.” I know full well the difference there is between theories and plans of education as they seem to us when we are at leisure and can think of them without reference to particular pupils, and when all our energy is taxed to get through our day’s teaching, and our animal spirits jaded by having to keep order and exact attention among veritable schoolboys who do not answer in all respects to “the young” of the theorists. But whilst admitting most heartily the difference here, as elsewhere, between the actual and the ideal, I think that the dull prose of school-teaching would be less dull and less prosaic if our aim was higher, and if we did not contentedly assume that our present performances are as good as the nature of the case will admit of. Many teachers (perhaps I may say most) are discontented with the greater number of their pupils, but it is not so usual for teachers to be discontented with themselves. And yet even those who are most averse from theoretical views, which they call unpractical, would admit, as practical men, that their methods are probably susceptible of improvement, and that even if their methods are right, they themselves are by no means perfect teachers. Only let thedesireof improvement once exist, and the teacher will find a new interest in his work. In part, the treadmill-like monotony so wearing to the spirits will be done away, and he will at times have the encouragement of conscious progress. To a man thus minded, theorists may be of great assistance. His practical knowledge may, indeed, often show him the absurdity of some pompously enunciated principle, and even where the principles seemsound, 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 isHistoire de Pestalozzi par R. de Guimps(Lausanne, Bridel), with its translation by John Russell (London: Sonnenschein. Appleton’s: N. Yk.). In Henry Barnard’sPestalozzi and Pestalozzianismare collected some good papers, among them Tilleard’s trans. from Raumer. We also have H. Kruesi’sPestalozzi(Cincinatti: Wilson, Hinkle, & Co.). I have already mentioned Miss Channing’sLeonard and Gertrude. TheLetters to Greavesare now out of print. A complete account of Pestalozzi and everything connected with him, bibliography included, is given in M. J. Guillaume’s articlePestalozzi, in Buisson’sDictionnaire de Pédagogie. (See alsoPestalozzipar J. Guillaume (Hachette) just published.)
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 isHistoire de Pestalozzi par R. de Guimps(Lausanne, Bridel), with its translation by John Russell (London: Sonnenschein. Appleton’s: N. Yk.). In Henry Barnard’sPestalozzi and Pestalozzianismare collected some good papers, among them Tilleard’s trans. from Raumer. We also have H. Kruesi’sPestalozzi(Cincinatti: Wilson, Hinkle, & Co.). I have already mentioned Miss Channing’sLeonard and Gertrude. TheLetters to Greavesare now out of print. A complete account of Pestalozzi and everything connected with him, bibliography included, is given in M. J. Guillaume’s articlePestalozzi, in Buisson’sDictionnaire de Pédagogie. (See alsoPestalozzipar J. Guillaume (Hachette) just published.)
§ 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 theMount,” 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[173]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 stepmotherly attention; but a maternal uncle took pity on him, and forsome 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 half-brother 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 theunity of nature; and he longed to studynatural 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 lecture-room 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 management 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 consciousness 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.Do thou give bread to men; be it my effort to give men to themselves” (K. Schmidt’sGesch. d. Päd., 3rd ed. by Lange, vol. iv, p. 277).
§ 4. As yet the nature of the task was not clear to him, and it seemed determined by accident. While studying architecture in Frankfort-on-the-Main, he became acquainted with the director of a model school who had caught some of the enthusiasm of Pestalozzi. This friend saw that Froebel’s true field was education, and he persuaded him to give up architecture and take a post in the model school. “The very first time,” he says, “that I found myself before thirty or forty boys, I felt thoroughly at home. In fact, I perceived that I had at last found my long-missed life-element; and I wrote to my brother that I was as well pleased as the fish in the water: I was inexpressibly happy.”
§ 5. In this school Froebel worked for two years with remarkable success; but he felt more and more his need of preparation, so he then retired and undertook the education of three lads of one family. Even in this he could not satisfy himself, and he obtained the parents’ consent to his taking the boys to Yverdun, and there forming with them a part of the celebrated institution of Pestalozzi. Thus from 1807 till 1809 Froebel was drinking in Pestalozzianism at the fountain head, and qualifying himself to carry on the work which Pestalozzi had begun. For the science of education had to deduce from Pestalozzi’s experience principles which Pestalozzi himself could not deduce; and “Froebel, the pupil of Pestalozzi, and a genius like his master, completed the reformer’s system; taking the results at which Pestalozzi had arrived through the necessities of his position, Froebel developed the ideas involvedin them, not by further experience but by deduction from the nature of man, and thus he attained to the conception of true human development and to the requirements of true education” (Schmidt’sGesch. d. Päd.).
§ 6. Holding that man and nature, inasmuch as they proceed from the same Source, must be governed by the same laws, Froebel longed for more knowledge of natural science. Even Pestalozzi seemed to him not to “honour science in her divinity.” He therefore determined to continue the university course which had been so rudely interrupted eleven years before, and in 1811 he began studying at Göttingen, whence he proceeded to Berlin. In his Autobiography he tells us: “The lectures for which I had so longed really came up to the needs of my mind and soul, and made me feel more fervently than ever the certainty of the demonstrable inner connexion of the whole cosmical development of the universe. I saw also the possibility of man’s becoming conscious of this absolute unity of the universe, as well as of the diversity of things and appearances which is perpetually unfolding itself within that unity; and then when I had made clear to myself, and brought fully home to my consciousness the view that the infinitely varied phenomena in man’s life, work, thought, feeling, and position were all summed up in the unity of his personal existence I felt myself able to turn my thoughts once more to educational problems” (Autob.trans. by Michaelis and Moore, p. 89).
But again his studies were interrupted, this time by the king of Prussia’s celebrated call “To my people.” Though not a Prussian, Froebel was heart and soul a German. He therefore responded to the call, enlisted in Lützow’s corps, and went through the campaign of 1813. His militaryardour, however, did not take his mind off education. “Everywhere,” he writes, “as far as the fatigues I underwent allowed, I carried in my thoughts my future calling as educator; yes, even in the few engagements in which I had to take part. Even in these I could gather experience for the task I proposed to myself.” Froebel’s soldiering showed him the value of discipline and united action, how the individual belongs not to himself but to the whole body, and how the whole body supports the individual.
Froebel was rewarded for his patriotism by the friendship of two men whose names will always be associated with his, Langethal and Middendorff. These young men, ten years younger than Froebel, became attached to him in the field, and were ever afterwards his devoted followers, sacrificing all their prospects in life for the sake of carrying out his ideas.
§ 7. At the peace of Fontainebleau (signed in May, 1814) Froebel returned to Berlin, and became curator of the Museum of Mineralogy under Professor Weiss. In accepting this appointment from the Government he seemed to turn aside from his work as educator; but if not teaching he was learning. The unity of nature and human nature seemed more and more to reveal itself to him. Of the days past in the museum he afterwards wrote: “Here was I at the central point of my life and strife, where inner working and law, where life, nature, and mathematics were united in the fixed crystaline form, where a world of symbols lay open to the inner eye.” Again he says: “The stones in my hand and under my eye became speaking forms. The world of crystals declared to me the life and laws of life of man, and in still but real and sensible speech taught the true life of humanity.” “Geology and crystallographynot only opened for me a higher circle of knowledge and insight, but also showed me a higher goal for my inquiry, my speculation, and my endeavour. Nature and man now seemed to me mutually to explain each other through all their numberless various stages of development. Man, as I saw, receives from a knowledge of natural objects, even because of their immense deep-seated diversity, a foundation for and a guidance towards a knowledge of himself and life, and a preparation for the manifestation of that knowledge” (Autob.ut supra, p. 97). More and more the thought possessed him that the one thing needful for man was unity of development, perfect evolution in accordance with the laws of his being, such evolution as science discovers in the other organisms of nature.
§ 8. He at first intended to become a teacher of natural science, but before long wider views dawned upon him. Langethal and Middendorff were in Berlin, engaged in tuition. Froebel gave them regular instruction in his theory, and at length, counting on their support, he resolved to set about realising his own idea of “the new education.” This was in 1816. Three years before one of his brothers, a clergyman, had died of fever caught from the French prisoners. His widow was still living in the parsonage at Griesheim, a village on the Ilm. Froebel gave up his post in Berlin, and set out for Griesheim on foot, spending his very last groschen on the way for bread. Here he undertook the education of his orphan niece and nephews, and also of two more nephews sent him by another brother. With these he opened a school, and wrote to Middendorff and Langethal to come and help in the experiment. Middendorff came at once, Langethal ayear or two later, when the school had been moved to Keilhau, another of the Thuringian villages, which became the Mecca of the new faith. In Keilhau, Froebel, Langethal, Middendorff, and Barop, a relation of Middendorff’s, all married and formed an educational community. Such zeal could not be fruitless, and the school gradually increased, though for many years its teachers, with Froebel at their head, were in the greatest straits for money, and at times even for food. Karl Froebel, who was brought up in the school, tells how, on one occasion, he and the other children were sent to ramble in the woods till some of the seed-corn provided for the coming year had been turned into bread for them. Besides these difficulties the community suffered from the panic and reaction after the murder of Kotzebue (1819), and were persecuted as a nest of demagogues. But “the New Education” was sufficiently successful to attract notice from all quarters; and when he had been ten years at Keilhau (1826) Froebel published his great work,The Education of Man.
§ 9. Four years later he determined to start other institutions in connexion with the parent institution at Keilhau; and being offered by a private friend the use of a castle on the Wartensee, in the canton of Lucerne, he left Keilhau under the direction of Barop, and with Langethal made a settlement in Switzerland. The ground, however, was very ill chosen. The Catholic clergy resisted what they considered as a Protestant invasion, and the experiment on the Wartensee and at Willisau in the same canton, to which the institution was moved in 1833, never had a fair chance. It was in vain that Middendorff at Froebel’s call left his wife and family at Keilhau, and laboured for four years in Switzerland without once seeing them. The Swiss institutionnever flourished. But the Swiss Government wished to turn to account the presence of the great educator; so young teachers were sent to Froebel for instruction, and finally he removed to Burgdorf (a town already famous from Pestalozzi’s labours there thirty years earlier) to undertake the establishment of a public orphanage, and also to superintend a course of teaching for schoolmasters. The elementary teachers of the canton were to spend three months every alternate year at Burgdorf, and there compare experiences, and learn of distinguished men such as Froebel and Bitzius.
§ 10. In his conferences with these teachers Froebel found that the schools suffered from the state of the raw material brought into them. Till the school age was reached the children were entirely neglected. Froebel’s conception of harmonious development naturally led him to attach much importance to the earliest years, and his great work onThe Education of Man, published as early as 1826, deals chiefly with the education of children. At Burgdorf his thoughts were much occupied with the proper treatment ofyoungchildren, and in scheming for them a graduated course of exercises modelled on the games in which he observed them to be most interested. In his eagerness to carry out his new plans he grew impatient of official restraints; and partly from this reason, partly on account of his wife’s ill health, he left Burgdorf without even actually becoming “Waisenvater” (father of the orphans).[174]After a sojourn of some months in Berlin, where he was detained through family affairs, but used theopportunities thus afforded of examining the recently founded infant schools, Froebel returned to Keilhau, and soon afterwards opened the firstKindergarten, or “Garden of Children,” in the neighbouring village of Blankenburg (A.D.1837). Not only the thing but the name seemed to Froebel a happy inspiration, and it has now become inseparably connected with his own. Perhaps we can hardly understand the pleasure he took in it unless we know its predecessor,Kleinkinderbeschäftigungsanstalt.
§ 11. Firmly convinced of the importance of the Kindergarten for the whole human race, Froebel described his system in a weekly paper (hisSonntagsblatt) which appeared from the middle of 1837 till 1840. He also lectured in great towns; and he gave a regular course of instruction to young teachers at Blankenburg.
§ 12. But although the principles of the Kindergarten were gradually making their way, the first Kindergarten was failing for want of funds. It had to be given up; and Froebel, now a widower (he had lost his wife in 1839), carried on his course for teachers first at Keilhau, and from 1848, for the last four years of his life, at or near Liebenstein, in the Thuringian Forest, and in the duchy of Meiningen. It is in these last years that the man Froebel will be best known to posterity; for in 1849 be attracted within the circle of his influence a woman of great intellectual power, the Baroness von Marenholtz-Bülow, who has given us in herRecollections of Friedrich Froebelthe only life-like portrait we possess. In these records of personal intercourse we see the truth of Deinhardt’s words: “The living perception of universal and ideal truth which his talk revealed to us, his unbounded enthusiasm for the education and happiness of the human race, his willingness to offer up everything hepossessed for the sake of his idea, the stream of thoughts which flowed from his enthusiasm for the ideal as from an inexhaustible fountain, all these made Froebel a wonderful appearance in the world, by whom no unprejudiced spectator could fail to be attracted and elevated.”
§ 13. These seemed likely to be Froebel’s most peaceful days. He married again; and having now devoted himself to the training of women as educators, he spent his time in instructing his class of young female teachers. But trouble came upon him from a quarter whence he least expected it. In the great year of revolutions, 1848, Froebel had hoped to turn to account the general eagerness for improvement, and Middendorff had presented an address on Kindergartens to the German Parliament. Besides this a nephew of Froebel’s published books which were supposed to teach socialism. True the uncle and nephew differed so widely that “the New Froebelians” were the enemies of the “Old.” But the distinction was overlooked, and Friedrich and Karl Froebel were regarded as the united advocates of “some new thing.” In the reaction which soon set in, Froebel found himself suspected of socialism and irreligion; and in 1851 theCultus-ministerRaumer issued an edict forbidding the establishment of schools “after Friedrich and Karl Froebel’s principles” in Prussia. It was in vain that Froebel proved that his principles differed fundamentally from his nephew’s. It was in vain that a congress of schoolmasters, presided over by the celebrated Diesterweg, protested against the calumnious decree. The Minister turned a deaf ear, and the decree remained in force ten years after the death of Froebel (i.e., till 1862). But the edict was a heavy blow to the old man, who looked to the Government of the “Cultus-staat” Prussia for support, andwas met with denunciation. Of the justice of the charge brought by the Minister against Froebel the reader may judge from the account of his principles given below.
Whether from the worry of this new controversy, or from whatever cause, Froebel did not long survive the decree. His seventieth birthday was celebrated with great rejoicings in May, 1852, but he died in the following month, and lies buried at Schweina, a village near his last abode, Marienthal.
§ 14. Throughout these essays my object has been to collect what seemed to me the most valuable lessons of various Reformers. In doing this I have had to judge and decide what was most valuable, and at times to criticise and differ from my authorities. This may perhaps give rise to the question, Do you then think yourself the superior or at least the equal of the great men you criticise? and I could only reply in all sincerity, I most certainly do not. If I am asked further, what then is my attitude towards them? I reply, it differs very much with different individuals. I cannot say I am prepared to sit at the feet of Mulcaster, or Dury, or Petty. In writing of these men I simply point out very early expression of ideas that following generations have developed partially and we are developing still. When we come to the great leaders we see among them men like Comenius who unite a thorough study of what has already been thought and done with a genius for original thinking, men like Locke with splendid intellectual gifts and a power of happy and clear expression, men like Rousseau with a talent for shaking themselves free from “custom”—custom which “lies upon us with a weight, Heavy as frost and deep almost as life,” and besides this (in his case at least) endowed with a voice to be heardthroughout the world. Then again we have men like Pestalozzi who with a genius for investigating, devote their lives to the investigation, and men like Froebel who seem to penetrate to a region above us or at least beyond us, and to talk about it in language which at times only partially conveys a meaning. From all these men we have much to learn; and that we may do this we must come as learners to them. When we thus come we find that the great lessons they teach become clearer and clearer as each takes up wholly or in part what has been taught by his predecessors and adds to it. Some of these lessons we may now receive as established truths and seek to conform our practice to them. But in following our leaders we dare not close our eyes. Before we can know anything we must see it, as Locke says, with our mind’s eye. The great thing is to keep the eye of the mind wide open and always on the lookout for truth. Acting on this conviction I have not blindly accepted the dicta even of the greatest men but have selected those of their lessons which are taught if not by all at least by most of them, and which also seem to evoke “the spontaneous spring of the intelligence towards truth” (see p. 362,supra).
§ 15. In reading Froebel however I am conscious that this “spring” is wanting. Before one can accept teaching one must at least understand it, and this preliminary is not always possible when we would learn from Froebel. At times he goes entirely out of sight, and whether the words we hear are the expression of deep truth or have absolutely no meaning at all, I for my part am at times totally unable to determine. But where I can understand him he seems to me singularly wise; and working in the same lines as Pestalozzi he in some respects advances far beyond his great predecessor.
§ 16. Both these men were devotees of science; but instead of finding in science anything antagonistic to religion they looked upon science as the expression of the mind of God. Their belief was just that which Sir Thomas Browne had uttered more than 200 years before in theReligio Medici: “Though we christen effects by their most sensible and nearest causes yet is God the true and infallible cause of all, whose concourse [i.e., concurrence, co-operation] though it be general, yet doth it subdivide itself into the particular actions of everything, and is that spirit by which each singular essence not only subsists but performs its operation.”[175]With this belief Froebel sought to trace everything back to the central Unity, to God. The author of theDe Imitatione Christihas said: “The man to whom all things are one, who refers all things to one and sees all things in one, he can stand firm and be at peace in God. Cui omnia unum sunt, et qui omnia ad unum trahit, et omnia in uno videt, potest stabilis esse et in Deo pacificus permanere” (De Im. Xti.lib. i; cap. 3, § 2). So thought Froebel, and his great longing was to refer all things to one and see all things in one. However little we may share this longing we must admit that it is a natural outcome from the Christian religion. If there is One in Whom all “live and move and have their being,” everything should be referred to Him. As Froebel says, “In Allem wirkt und schafftEinLeben, Weil das Leben All’ ein einz’ger Gott gegeben. (In everything there works and stirsonelife, because to all One God has given life.)” So long then as we remain Christians we must agree with Froebel that all true education isfounded on Religion. Perhaps in the end we may adopt his high ideal and say with him, “Education should lead and guide man to clearness concerning himself and in himself, to peace with nature, and to unity with God; hence, it should lift him to a knowledge of himself and of mankind, to a knowledge of God and of Nature, and to the pure and holy life to which such knowledge leads.” (E. of M., Hailmann’s t., 5.) “The object of education is the realization of a faithful, pure, inviolate, and hence holy life” (Ib.4).
§ 17. This is indeed a high ideal: and we naturally ask, If we would work towards it what road would Froebel point out to us? This brings us to his theory of development or, as it has been called since Darwin, evolution. The idea of organic growth was first definitely applied to the young by Pestalozzi, but it was more clearly and consistently applied by Froebel. It has gone forth conquering and to conquer; and though far indeed from being accepted by the teaching profession of this age, it is likely to have a vast influence on the practice of those who will come after them. I therefore give the following statement of it, which seems to me excellent:—