Froebel's Gifts Part 1

Froebel's Gifts.

by Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora Archibald Smith.

PREFACE

The three little volumes on that Republic of Childhood, the kindergarten, of which this handbook, dealing with the gifts, forms the initial number, might well be called Chips from a Kindergarten Workshop. They are the outcome of talks and conferences on Froebel's educational principles with successive groups of earnest young women here, there, and everywhere, for fifteen years, and represent as much practical work at the bench as a carpenter could show in a similar length of time. They are the result of mutual give and take, of question and answer, of effort and experience, of the friction of minds against one another, of ideas struck out in the heat of argument, and of varied experience with many hundred little children of all nationalities and conditions. They are not theories, written in the seclusion of the study; and if perchance they have the defects, so should they have the virtues, too, of work corrected and revised at every step by the "child in the midst." If it is objected that many things in them have been heard before, we can but say with Montaigne: "Truth and reason are common to every one, and are no more his who spake them first than his who spake them after."

The various talks have been cut down here, enlarged there, condensed in one place, amplified in another, from year to year, as knowledge and experience have grown; many of the ideas which they advocated in the beginning have been eliminated, as being completely reversed by the pa.s.sage of time, and much new matter has been added as the kindergarten principle has developed. They are as much a growth as a coral reef, though the authors have little hope that they will be as enduring.

The kindergarten of 1895 is not the kindergarten of 1880, for the science of education has made great strides in these past fifteen years. Many things which were held to be vital principles when we began our talks with kindergarten students, we now find were but lifeless methods after all. It is not that time has reversed the fundamental principles on which the kindergarten rests,--these are as true as truth and as changeless; but the interpretation of them has greatly changed and broadened with the pa.s.sage of years, and many of the instrumentalities of education which Froebel devised are destined to further transformation in the future. For this reason, the last book on the kindergarten is sometimes the best book, since it naturally embodies the latest thought and discovery on the subject.

These talks on the kindergarten have purposely been divested of a certain amount of technicality and detail, in the hope that they will thus reach not only kindergarten students, but the many mothers and teachers who really long to know what Froebel's system of education is and what it aims to do. They will never of themselves make a kindergartner, and are not intended to do so; but they certainly should shed some light on Froebel's theories, and establish a basis on which they can be worked out in the home and in the school.

We shall attempt no defense of the kindergarten here. It has pa.s.sed the experimental stage; it is no longer on trial for its life; and no longer humbly begging, hat in hand, for a place to lay its head. As an educational idea, it is a recognized part of the great system of child-training; and to say, in this year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and ninety-five, that one does not believe in the kindergarten is as if one said, I do not believe in electricity, or, I never saw much force in the law of gravitation.

True, Froebel's ideas are often misinterpreted and misapplied; often espoused by ignorant and sentimental persons; often degraded in their practical application; true, the ideal kindergarten and the ideal kindergartner are seldom seen--(though they are worth traveling a thousand miles _to_ see)--all this is true, and no one knows it better than we; but that a divine idea is wrongly used does not invalidate its divinity.

That kindergarten principles are gaining ground everywhere; that every year more free and private kindergartens are established, more training schools opened, more students applying for instruction, more books written on the subject, more educational periodicals seeking for kindergarten articles, more cities adding it to their school systems, more normal schools giving courses in kindergarten training, more mothers and teachers seeking for light on Froebel's principles,--all these are matters of statistics which any one may verify by consulting the Reports of the Commissioner of Education and the various educational magazines.

Our modest volumes, of which the second will deal with the occupations, the third with the educational theories of Froebel, do not claim to be deeply philosophic, nor even to be exhaustive. They are, in a sense, what is called a "popular" treatise on a scientific subject; and though some scientists decry such treatises, yet there are many persons to whom a simple message carries more conviction than a purely philosophic one.

It is hoped that the psychologic principles on which the talks rest are at least measurably correct, though when doctors disagree on vital points, how shall the layman know the extent of his own ignorance?

The authors have always been of a humble and docile spirit, and in the earlier years of their work with children, looking upon all treatises on education as inspired, tried faithfully to make the child's mind work according to the laws therein laid down. But sometimes the child's mind obstinately declined to follow the prescribed route; it refused to begin at the proper beginning of a subject and go on logically to the end, as the books decreed, but flew into the middle of it, and darted both ways, like a weaver's shuttle. If, then, any one of the theories we enunciate does not coincide with your particular educational creed, we can only say that ours, we fear, has sometimes been a "rule of thumb" psychology, and that in our experience it has occasionally been necessary to turn a psychologic law the other end foremost before it could be made to fit the child.

We have endeavored not to be dogmatic in any of these talks, for we do not claim to have seen and counted all the facets of the crystal of truth. We humbly acknowledge that we have often been wrong in the past, and no reason has latterly been given us to believe ourselves infallible; but these disputed points in the kindergarten are, after all, of no more vital importance than the old theologic controversy as to how many angels can stand on the point of a needle. If the occupations are found to be based on incorrect psychologic principles, do not use them; if a similar objection is made to the gifts, subst.i.tute others. These are all accessories,--they are of no more importance than the leaves to the tree; if time and stress of weather strip them off, the life current is still there, and new ones will grow in their places.

KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN.

NORA ARCHIBALD SMITH.

_August_, 1895.

FROEBEL'S GIFTS

THOUGHTS ON THE GIFTS OF FROEBEL

"A correct comprehension of external, material things is a preliminary to a just comprehension of intellectual relations."

FRIEDRICH FROEBEL.

"The A, B, C of things must precede the A, B, C of words, and give to the words (abstractions) their true foundations. It is because these foundations fail so often in the present time that there are so few men who think independently and express skillfully their inborn divine ideas."

FRIEDRICH FROEBEL.

"Perception is the beginning and the preliminary condition for thinking. One's own perceptions awaken one's own conceptions, and these awaken one's own thinking in later stages of development. Let us have no precocity, but natural, that is consecutive, development."

FRIEDRICH FROEBEL.

"Every child brings with him into the world the natural disposition to see correctly what is before him, or, in other words, the truth. If things are shown to him in their connection, his soul perceives them thus as a conception. But if, as often happens, things are brought before his mind singly, or piecemeal, and in fragments, then the natural disposition to see correctly is perverted to the opposite, and the healthy mind is perplexed."

FRIEDRICH FROEBEL.

"The linking together which is everywhere seen, and which holds the Universe in its wholeness and unity, the eye receives, and thereby receives the representation, but without understanding it except as an impression and an image. But these first impressions are the root-fibres for the understanding that is developed later."

FRIEDRICH FROEBEL.

"The correct perception is a preparation for correct knowing and thinking."

FRIEDRICH FROEBEL.

"No new subject of instruction should come to the scholar, of which he does not at least conjecture that it is grounded in the former subject, and how it is so grounded as its application shows, and concerning which he does not, however dimly, feel it to be a need of the human spirit."

FRIEDRICH FROEBEL.

"The sequences which the child builds, as well as the sequence of the kindergarten gifts, point on the one hand to physical evolution, wherein each form 'remembers the next inferior and predicts the next higher,' and on the other to the process of historic development, which magnifies the present by linking with it the past and the future."

SUSAN E. BLOW.

"Let us educate the senses, train the faculty of speech, the art of receiving, storing, and expressing impressions, which is the natural gift of infants, and we shall not need books to fill up the emptiness of our teaching until the child is at least seven years old."

E. SEGUIN.

"As soon as we, young or old, have taken to the habit of asking the book for what it is in our power to learn from personal observation, we dismiss our organs of perception and comprehension from their righteous charge, and cover the emptiness of our own minds with the patchwork of others."

E. SEGUIN.

"Natural geometry (taking the word in its limited sense of study of form in s.p.a.ce) is the object of a desire which generally precedes the artificial curiosity for the meaning of letters."

E. SEGUIN.

"Without an accurate acquaintance with the visible and tangible properties of things, our conceptions must be erroneous, our inferences fallacious, and our operations unsuccessful."

HERBERT SPENCER.

"The truths of number, of form, of relationship in position, were all originally drawn from objects; and to present these truths to the child in the concrete is to let him learn them as the race learned them."

HERBERT SPENCER.

"If we consider it, we shall find that exhaustive observation is an element of all great success."

HERBERT SPENCER.

"Learn to comprehend each thing in its entire history. This is the maxim of science guided by the reason."

WM. T. HARRIS.

"Geometrical facts and conceptions are easier to a child than those of arithmetic."

THOMAS HILL.

"Instruction must begin with actual inspection, not with verbal descriptions of things. From such inspection it is that certain knowledge comes. What is actually seen remains faster in the memory than description or enumeration a hundred times as often repeated."

COMENIUS.

"Observation is the absolute basis of all knowledge. The first object, then, in education, must be to lead the child to observe with accuracy; the second, to express with correctness the results of his observation."

PESTALOZZI.

"If in the external universe any one constructive principle can be detected, it is the geometrical."

BULWER-LYTTON.