The Nursery a UniversityBy C. Josephine Barton(See page 121)
By C. Josephine Barton
(See page 121)
If your child is rightly born, with no prenatal drapery to untangle from, you need concern yourself about his proper guidance, only past the infant age. He will educate, without your insistence. He will be showing you new points wherein your old rhetoric is at fault, or your mental philosophy behind the times. If you are wise, you will get vast lessons from him.
Froebel said: “The nursery was my university.” The child receives there indelible lessons, nor does he judge as to whether a thing is literal or figurative. It is all fact to him. Plato says it is most important that tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thought. Thehighest and grandest that could be said of that strange phase of human experience, the Flesh-birth phase, was said by Friedrich Froebel, substantially as follows: “With the beginning of every new family there is issued to mankind and to each individual human being, the call to represent humanity inpure development; to represent man in hisideal perfection.” Froebel was broad in saying also, “The destiny of nations lies far more in the hands of women, the mothers, than in the possessors of power, or of those innovators who, for the most part, do not understand themselves! Wemust cultivate women, who are the educators of the race, else the new generation cannot accomplish its task.”
Now Froebel was not contending for woman’s rights, but for therace. He speaks of woman, because he saw thather elementin the cause of civilization was in need of accentuation. He was seeking in the race thatbalancewhich is imperative in the promotion of perfect conditions.... Froebel spoke of women because men have held the reins of education in the past. Even in the matter of bringing children into the world....
Above all things do not encourage the child to occupy his time with trivialities, to the neglect of the grand phenomena of nature—the beauty and poetry everywhere, along the dewy borders of the country road, the hedges and fields, the rocks and imbedded fossils, insects and plants. To study botany, geology, physiology and even psychology in youth, is excellent occupation.