Education in The Home, The Kindergarten, and The Primary School Part 10

RELIGIOUS NURTURE.

FRBEL speaks of the child as a trinity, meaning a unity in threefold relation (with G.o.d, with man, and with nature), and says that education, to be perfect, or even healthy, must help him to be conscious of all these relations _at once_, in order to ensure the equipoise of heart and intellect with his spiritual power (or freedom to will), in which inheres his just self-respect and natural religion.

Nature (that is, the material universe, as I have said before) is G.o.d's expression of mathematical and all correlative laws, the apprehension of which builds up the intellect of the individual who, through his sense perceptions, on which he reflects and generalizes, gains _knowledge_ of his surroundings, beginning with that part of nature which is within his own skin.

It was the grand intuition of Oken which has been splendidly ill.u.s.trated by Dr. J. Garth Wilkinson in his _Human Body in its Connections with Man_, that the human body is the metropolis of material nature, in which may be found in _vital order_ all the elements of the material universe which are, outside of the human body, in a more or less chaotic state.

This development of the individual intellect needs more or less aid from the human environment, simultaneously with that nurture of the _heart_ which means man's conscious relation to man. But though morality, which is the performance of man's duty to man, is not religion, which is man's consciousness of relation to G.o.d, it leads to it inversely, because it shows the heart its need of a Father of us all, in order to be happy.

All three processes, the intellectual, the moral, and the religious, must go on together, to make a perfect education, for in proportion as integral education is wanting in those about the child, his intellect will be starved, confused, or darkened with error; and immorality and irreligion will more or less transpire in the individual.

Frbel perfectly realized the deficiency of this integral education to be the cause of all the evil that is the present experience of mankind, in spite of Church and State and the optimism which in form of hope "springs eternal in the human breast" (for the pessimist is the exception, not the rule among men, the great ma.s.s of whom are pursuing some ideal aim, even though it be a low one, their moral sentiment having been perverted and their religion having become a superst.i.tious idolatry either of material forms or of logical formulas).

The system of education which Frbel discovered, or invented, in consequence of realizing this, is what we are endeavoring to learn and apply, that we may bring out of the moral chaos around us the lost equipoise of the threefold nature in our children, by ourselves plunging into infant life in imagination and realizing its innocent heart and unfallen spiritual state, watching it in its own attempts to understand and use its material surroundings and its human environment, to the end of guiding it by our own experience and matured knowledge, from the errors and misfortunes it inevitably falls into if left to its own ignorant experimenting unrevised.

The playthings and means of occupation Frbel invented are to develop the intellect, and are a perfect miniature of nature, and to use them in playing with the child is an art and a science that the kindergartner must add to her moral affections and religion, which are also her indispensable qualifications.

I wish to say this very emphatically, all the more because this part of your education (the art and science that develop the intellect) is not my part of your training course, but the moral and religious nurture; and therefore I must leave the exhaustive a.n.a.lysis of the gifts in their relation to the unfolding intellect as well as of the "schools of work"

(as the series of embroideries, foldings, drawings, weavings, pea-work, etc., are called, and which require your study the whole year) to your accomplished trainers to do justice to.

But before I turn to my specific department, I would say that this intellectual part of the training, which it was the special genius of Frbel to discover, is of equal importance; for it is the duty of man to worship G.o.d with the _mind_, as well as with the _heart_ and _might_, though that is a part of the great commandment, which seems to have been systematically overlooked by many of the churches, if not virtually denied.

To worship G.o.d _with the mind_ means to develop the intellect; as to worship Him with the _heart_ keeps pure the moral sentiments and quickens moral action; and to worship Him with the _might_ lifts the will, quickened by the heart and enlightened by the mind into oneness with the Holy Spirit, more and more forever. And here let me recall to you what I said of Frbel's authority in my second lecture, and beware of deviating from the path he has pointed out (he was nearly fifty years in inventing his technique); and be very careful about adding to his _Gifts_ or _Schools of Work_, though I would not have you mechanical followers. There will be legitimate outgrowths of his method. He himself, in one of his _Pedagogies_, published after his death by Wichard Lange, has suggested a "school of drawing" upon _the curve_, which Miss Marwedel has developed, leading the child naturally through vegetable formation; and Mr. Edward A. Spring, the sculptor, has also suggested and partly carried some children through animal forms, from the worm to the "human face divine"; and we hope both these "schools"

may be published and used. In the musical line, also, in which Frbel was personally rather deficient, Mr. Daniel Bach.e.l.lor, now of Philadelphia, has suggested a series of exercises by means of the correspondence of tones and colors, that makes the children as creative in the discovery of melodies, as they are of the harmonies of color in their weaving and painting.

There is unquestionably danger that the kindergartner may degenerate into mechanical imitation and rote-work in this part of her guidance of the children, nevertheless in some of the charity kindergartens I have seen there was danger of doing injustice to the technique.

On this last day of communion with you on the Frbel education, I would like to speak with some comprehensiveness and particularity on the subject of religious nurture. Mark me, I say religious _nurture_, not religious teaching. The religion that integrates human education is not to be taught. It is the primeval consciousness of filial relation to G.o.d, who alone can reveal Himself; for human language has no adequate expression of G.o.d, founded as it is on the material universe, which is the finite opposite of Creative Being. Every individual child is a momentum of G.o.d's creativeness which the human Providence of education must take as its _datum_. Only childhood symbolizes G.o.d as "the sum of all being," realizing itself in joy incommensurable. Ruskin has happily said the joy of childhood is out of all proportion to the occasions that call forth its expression, and in order to make G.o.d the central conscious truth of the child's intellect, we must give the name father or mother to G.o.d, which is intelligible to the heart, and which will identify its filial aspiration with the parental bounty, as another, yet the same.

But what I want you to observe is, that language being limited in meaning by its origin in material nature, you should talk about G.o.d as little as possible, after having given Him the name that will excite the child's worshipful aspiration, and limit yourselves carefully to regulating moral manifestations, leading children to act kindly, generously, truthfully, in your own a.s.sured faith that G.o.d is present to inspire the truth, generosity, and loving _will_ that is practically prayed for with _good resolution_. (Good resolutions are the special prayers of faith, as children should be taught expressly.)

Kindergartners cannot carry out this course quite irrespective of the theory of human nature declared in their creeds. But the heart is generally larger than the creed, as was once strikingly evidenced to me by Louisa Frankenberg, a dear, devout old German kindergartner, who had learned the art of kindergartning from Frbel himself, in the very beginning of his own experimenting; but she was such a bigot to the Lutheran Church that she could not theoretically admit as a Christian any one who did not swear by its dogma of total depravity. Yet I remember hearing her exclaim, "Oh, Frbel's method is so beautiful!

because the affectionate plays and innocent occupations take the children entirely away from the depravity of their hearts." She said this with a gush of love and faith that showed how much the unbounded human heart is beyond being totally eclipsed by shadows cast by the limited human intellect. It is neither feeling or thinking, but righteous doing, that gives us victory.[11]

The child in the first era of his life has no individual consciousness of separation from G.o.d, and for a certain time it is obvious to all observers that this august unconsciousness even prevents the immediate development of an intellectual conception of him. The child in its infancy (infant, you remember, means _not speaking_) does not see nature as object, but feels it also to be himself, and hence he has no language, for language is the expression of his intellect. Hence the infant's sublime unconsciousness of danger and absolute fearlessness, and its impulse to spring upward out of its mother's arms, the laws of gravity notwithstanding! It stands, as Wordsworth has sung,--

"Glorious in the might of heaven-born freedom on its being's height,"

and only gradually do

"Shades of the prison-house begin to close around the growing boy."

For, as the same poet has it in that ode which is as much inspired as anything in the sacred oracles of the Hebrew or the Christian:--

"Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own; Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind, And even with something of a mother's mind, And no unworthy aim, The homely nurse doth all she can To make her foster-child, her innate man, Forget the glories he hath known And that Imperial Palace whence he came.

Hence, in a season of calm weather, Though inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us. .h.i.ther; Can in a moment travel thither, And see the children sport upon the sh.o.r.e, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."

The "not unworthy aim" of the "humble nurse" is to give the child the sense of "having life in himself" as an individual free agent, so that he may come into intellectual consciousness of the laws of G.o.d by going counter to them, which reveals to him that he is separating from G.o.d in his activity. This separation is _sin_, which is a short word for separation, and the first step in the development of individuality, and therefore pardonable, because it is finite.

Now the true religious nurture is to keep the child in the mood of ineffable joy in which he was created, while he is evolving his sense of individuality and free agency by experimenting freely, but more or less painfully, so that he shall not lose sight of the central Sun, to which everything he is slowly learning through his senses and his reflection is related; and this must be begun by giving a name to the central Sun that shall express the character of his inmost consciousness of joy and love, which is his vision of G.o.d, and needs to be recognized as G.o.d in the understanding.

In the Old Testament we see that it is the _name_ of the Lord which is set forth as the only means of escaping that idolatry which is destructive of progressive spiritual religion. The name of the Lord, or Ruler, with the Hebrews was JEHOVAH, a word made up of the three tenses of the substantive verb _to be_, "was, is, and shall be," and which Philo, the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher, translates THE ETERNAL. It was understood by the worshippers to be the ineffable Creative Reality, so that when they came to the word in their sacred ritual they did not speak it, but reverently bowed their heads in a moment's silence, or paraphrased it, THE LORD G.o.d.

But Jesus, the bright, consummate flower of the Hebrew race, used the name Father (_my_ and _our_ Father), which you may observe was original with him. That word expressed the whole of his theology. He made no disquisitions on G.o.d'S being, but simply recognized the vital relation of mankind to its Creator by this word, which any child who has come to see that he and his mother are two can understand and will love.

Frbel has proved by his nursery method that the child shall get _this idea_ and name of G.o.d from his mother; and at all events when children come to the kindergarten they will generally already have heard some name for G.o.d, adequate or inadequate. Now all you have to do--but that is a great deal, indeed the greatest thing--is not to cloud the child's intuitive knowledge of G.o.d by your inadequate words as was done in the case of M. D., who was afraid of the omnipresence of G.o.d, as I mentioned in my narrative of F. H., and in the case of his unfortunate mother at her mother's funeral. In the case of little F. the mistake was not to have given any name before his sense perceptions had made "a prison house for the growing boy." But you have seen how the shades were dispelled by my taking it for granted with him that a Heavenly Father existed, which he joyfully accepted at once, for I knew that

"In the embers was something that did live, And Nature yet remembers What was so fugitive."

The naming of G.o.d in the kindergarten should be in music, which is the natural language of spirituality (or aspiration), lifting the soul above the cold level of the intellect that cognizes the correlations of the natural universe. Frbel finds support of his faith in the efficacy of song, that puts devout expression into the works of nature, in the historical fact that the civilizing literature of all nations begins in religious hymns. The different characteristics and the different destinies of nations are seen in germ in the national songs, which are in large degree and sometimes exclusively addressed to _the Powers above_. The Li-king of the Chinese, the Rig Veda of the old Aryans, the Puranas of the Hindus, the Garthas of the Iranians, the recently discovered early poetry of the Egyptians, and even the magical formulas of the Babylonians, all express with more or less exaltation of spirit the primeval intuition of Supreme Being, and use the particulars of material nature as words of G.o.d pointing to that unity of all life that is the music of the spheres. Is it not heard in the voice of the healthy infant, which is the most exquisite music on earth, and later seen in the pictures made by the imagination before language that is coined by the human understanding has introduced prosaic, that is, a.n.a.lytic definitions, and drawn the human individual away from feeding its heart on the fruits of the Tree of Life (which are music and poetry) to the fruits of the tree of knowledge, which are evil as well as good. The kindergarten exercises should begin and end with spiritual songs and hymns; indeed, they should come in any time at the call of the children, who, it will be found, will oftener call for hymns of praise than for any other songs.

The hymns of the kindergarten repertory should be entirely free from all that is didactic and denominationally doctrinal. Their object is not to teach any science, whether intellectual, moral, or theological; but to express childish joy in existence, or quicken the original childish faith, which in all ages and nations has expressed itself in music and the dance. Nor should the singing of hymns in kindergarten be ever perfunctory or a thing of course. A good kindergartner begins the day with bringing all the children into company for preliminary conversation, and asking each in turn what is in his mind; or the cla.s.s as a whole may be asked some general question, perhaps about the weather, which always has something beneficial that can be brought to the attention; then they could be asked, "Could you have made this weather? Who made it? and would you not like to thank the Heavenly Father for it?" Something similar to this should precede all the hymns to rouse their sense of free activity, and prevent routine, and then they will sing with the heart and understanding also. I remember going one day into a kindergarten with Mr. Alcott when such a preliminary conversation was going on, which was followed by this song of the weather, the children making the ill.u.s.trative gesticulations with their arms. They began with the weather of the day, and continued with several varieties, for it is not often the whole song is sung at one time. The intense delight of the children when themselves personifying the weather, poured itself out in the chorus, which they had first learned to sing with a will,--

"Wonderful, Lord, are all thy works, Wheresoever falling.

All, their various voices raise; Speaking forth their Maker's praise Wheresoever falling."

(See Appendix, Note F.)

Mr. Alcott, with his eyes full of tears, turned to me, and said, "This must have an immense influence upon character." In religious conversation children have the advantage of us in their as yet uneclipsed original vision of G.o.d, and we have an advantage of them in knowledge of outside things and the adaptation of means to ends. By this knowledge of ours we can generally guide them to accomplish their purposes when they are such as will really give them pleasure and do no harm to any one else. They get our knowledge by confidingly doing as we direct, and a confidence in the method which brings about the results they have instinctively foreseen. We save their minds from getting lost or bewildered in the chaos of particulars by winning their attention to the orderly connections of things, and leading them to realize how they connect little things in order to make larger things, and how opposites are connected in the world around about them. To recognize their own little plans and open their eyes to G.o.d's methods and plans; and because they cause new effects, they realize that all effects have causes, and in the last a.n.a.lysis realize one personal cause. They must believe in themselves as a preliminary to believing in G.o.d. Let them with things create order; and you will have influence with them in proportion to their feeling that you respect their free will, and divine in a genial way what they want; and this you can do if you inform yourself of what is _universal_ in human desire, keeping your eyes open to what modifications _their_ individuality suggests; and it is your cognizance of these individualities which makes your part of the enjoyment. If there are no two leaves alike, much more are there no two human individuals precisely alike, and human intercourse is made refreshing by these various individualities playing over the surface of the universal race-consciousness. If you respect the individuality of a child, and let it have fair play, you gain its confidence. Nothing is so delightful as to feel oneself understood. It is much more delightful than to be admired. But to give a child's individuality fair play in a company of children, you must open children's eyes to one another's individualities, and you will find that if you suggest their respecting each other's rights in the plays, there is something within them that will justify you. The consciousness of individuality is the correlated opposite to the conscience of universality. Justice is an intuition. The opposite poles of a human being are self-a.s.sertion or personal consciousness on the one side, and generosity or _race_ consciousness on the other.

We have seen that the maternal instinct, which the kindergartner is to make her own by cultivating it, cherishes the indispensable innocent self-a.s.sertion (which is only changed into selfishness by lack of that social cherishing which keeps generosity wide awake to balance self-a.s.sertion). We must sympathize with the play instincts of the child, so that it may get knowledge of its body in its parts and its powers of locomotion, manipulation and speech, giving self-respect to the consciousness of power, while the simultaneous knowledge of limitation is prevented from becoming fear by experience of the motherly providence, which is the first comprehensible form of that love which in due time calls forth ideal worship of the Infinite G.o.d, if G.o.d has been adequately named in natural sympathetic conversation with an earnest self-persuasion but without sanctimonious affectation. Unless you have unaffected spontaneity of faith yourselves, you should not dare to talk about G.o.d to the child.

The religious nurture which Frbel proposes therefore consists simply in so living with children as to preserve their primeval joy by tenderly and reverently respecting it, as that human instinct prompts which is in the highest power in the mother. Sympathetic tenderness is the first of all means for moral culture. The child's faith in G.o.d must be cherished into self-reliance. There is a self-distrust that is really a distrust of G.o.d, and no harm we can do a child is so great as to lead it to doubt its own spontaneity. The common religious teacher--even a conscientious mother--sometimes does this, and so far from nurturing the child's conscious union with G.o.d, starts a morbid self-consciousness, the opposite of religious peace. In order not to make this mistake, let the mother and kindergartner read and ponder Frbel's _Mother Love_ and _Cossetting Songs_.[12]

If you ask me what aid the moral culture derives from the religious nurture, I reply, the name Heavenly Father, given to the inmost consciousness, keeps the heart happy and the will self-respecting, by preventing those indefinite fears, incident to a sense of helplessness, which engenders selfishness. Hope and Faith are correlatives, and conscious or necessary means of goodness (which is enacted thereby), not agonies of will in the absence of this support. In the majority of cases moral discouragement is the secret of children's naughtiness; and, as Dr. Channing used to say, "there is nothing fatal to child or man but discouragement," which often exists close beside manifestations of pride and self-will.

When I kept school, in my earlier life, I became the confidante of many cases of wrong-doing and conscious wrong feeling. Sometimes the confidentialness was altogether spontaneous on the part of the children, and in other cases I took the initiative, drawing out the confidence, by intervening on occasion to console and help, especially when I saw that the sensibility had been wounded, or there was moral puzzle. And my experience and observation in this line justified the faith in which I began to keep school; viz., that children are all _but perfectly_ good, in all cases, and are never so grateful for anything else, when they find themselves naughty, as for spiritual and moral help, given as _G.o.d gives_, "upbraiding not."

When they are not grateful for moral help, it is the fault or mistake of the grown-up counsellor. Even in the worst cases I always took it for granted that nevertheless they loved goodness better than the naughty self which for the hour had got the victory over the better self.

Spiritual being, whether finite or infinite, is only to be discerned by aspiring faith. Yet I do not think it right or wise to suggest to little children that _their_ wrong-doings, which are more weaknesses than presumptions, are _sins against G.o.d_. Children can comprehend their relations to each other, and the violation of each other's rights to happiness, and can be easily led to sympathize with the pain or inconvenience of those they make suffer, which touches their sense of justice and generosity; they can appreciate wrong and its consequences to their equals and to themselves in the _present life_. But G.o.d is too great to be injured by them; and to bring G.o.d to their imagination as personally angry with them, overwhelms thought, and annihilates all sense of responsibility, with all self-respect. Children can comprehend perfectly that wrong-doing, in particular cases, is an injury to themselves, as well as a harm to their neighbor; also that they forfeit, for the time being, their privilege of being, as it were, in partnership with G.o.d in making others happy, as well as being companions with Him in making things grow; and an occasional hint of this, when they are very happy and successful, is well. But to suggest that they are forfeiting this privilege of divine companionship and partnership, is quite painful enough, be this forfeiture ever so partial. Old sinners are to be disciplined, perhaps, by that love of G.o.d which speaks in the thunder, the earthquake, and fire, breaking through the crust of selfish habit to awaken attention to the still, small voice of conscience, in which alone the Lord is _in person_. But the naughty child, at his worst, needs only to think of G.o.d as sorry for him, and "waiting to be gracious," like the father of the prodigal son.

I can ill.u.s.trate this by anecdotes of a child to whose moral life I was obliged to call in the aid of the religious sentiment, and even of the specific Christian revelation of pardon for all past wrong repented. It was the case of a very sensitive child of nine years of age, whose mother was gifted with the finest imagination and moral instincts, but was married to a cold, Dombey-like husband, whom she unfortunately thought superior to herself, whom she idealized, and endeavored to make her children satisfactory to his worldly ideal. The result in their characters was more or less disastrous to each, ending with the suicide of one. This child's conscience of the duty of satisfying both parents I soon found to be abnormal; and her sense of her father's contempt for her intellect, and her mother's painstaking that she should satisfy him, so worked on her sensibility that it suspended her reasoning powers; and no matter what it was she failed in, whether in missing an answer to a question in arithmetic, or in failure of good temper when tormented, she fell into despair. I endeavored to show her that a mistake in any school exercise was no crime, but only made an occasion for her learning more thoroughly the thing in hand, and to show her that, unless she had fort.i.tude to bear failures, and courage and hope to overcome them, I could not help her out of them; and I never rebuked any naughty manifestation of a moral character of any one in her presence, but she would burst into tears, and tell me how much naughtier she was. One Monday morning I asked my children, as I was wont to do, if there was anything interesting that they had heard at church or Sunday-school the day before, when, almost with a shriek, she cried out, "Oh, don't ask me that." I said gently, "Come with me into my chamber," which she did, crying all the while. "Mr. Greenwood preached about the prayers, and he said we should not look about the church, or think of anything else, while the service was being read; and I always do, and I can't help it, because I am so bad." I took her into my arms, and said, "It is a sure proof that you are not bad, that you are so distressed at the thought of doing wrong. Bad people do not care, and so they grow worse and worse; but your conscience seems to forget the Heavenly Father, who did not give it to you to discourage you, but to help you to see what way you must not go, and to remind you that He is close by to help your good resolution, which is the prayer of your will."

"But I read in a hymn that G.o.d sets down everything we do wrong in a book; and at the judgment day He will read it all out to the a.s.sembled universe. I told a lie once."

"Did you?" said I, tenderly. "Tell me all about how you came to." "I cannot," said she, "because then I should have to tell something bad about somebody else, which I must not." "How long ago was it?" "It was when we were living at ----." I saw by this that it was several years before.

She had a little brother, of whom she was very fond. I took hold of a locket that she wore about her neck, that contained the hair of the lady for whom she was named, and the memory of whose great virtues had been impressed on her imagination, and said:--

"What if Edward should take this locket and break it, and take out the hair and throw it in the fire?" With a great deal of energy she said:--

"He never would do such a naughty thing."

"He might do it without being naughty; he would not know that you never could get any more of Miss ----'s hair; and he would do it from innocent curiosity--and what if he should do it, what would you do?"