§ 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 the[385] Mount,” 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 for[386] some 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 the unity of nature; and he longed to study[387] natural 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.[388] Do thou give bread to men; be it my effort to give men to themselves” (K. Schmidt’s Gesch. d. P?d., 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 involved[389] in 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’s Gesch. d. P?d.).
§ 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 G?ttingen, 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 military[390] ardour, 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 crystallography[391] not 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 a[392] year 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 institution[393] never 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 on The 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 of young children, 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 the[394] opportunities thus afforded of examining the recently founded infant schools, Froebel returned to Keilhau, and soon afterwards opened the first Kindergarten, 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, Kleinkinderbesch?ftigungsanstalt.
§ 11. Firmly convinced of the importance of the Kindergarten for the whole human race, Froebel described his system in a weekly paper (his Sonntagsblatt) 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 her Recollections of Friedrich Froebel the 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 he[395] possessed 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 the Cultus-minister Raumer 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, and[396] was 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 heard[397] throughout 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.
[398]
§ 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 the Religio 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 the De Imitatione Christi has 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 thei............