PLEA FOR FROEBEL'S KINDERGARTEN

AS THE FIRST GRADE OF PRIMARY ART EDUCATION.

BY ELIZABETH P. PEABODY.

ARTIST AND ARTISAN IDENTIFIED. *

THE identification of the artisan and the artist, which Cardinal Wiseman proves to have been the general fact in Greece from the sixth century, and in Rome from the second century, before Christ, was no accident, but the result of the education given to the initiated of certain temples, especially those of Apollo, Mercury, Minerva, and Vulcan.

In Greece and Rome, there was an aristocracy of races and families, each of which had its own traditions of wisdom and art, connected with the names of tutelary divinities, whose personality presumably inhered in leaders of the emigrations from Asia, who were doubtless men of great genius and power, and served with divine honors by their posterity, and the colonies which they led.

This service, in the instance of the gods above named, involved education in the Fine Arts, just as that of Ceres and Proserpine taught the initiated of one degree the science of Agriculture, and those of a higher degree the doctrine of Immortality (which vegetation symbolizes in the persistence of its life-principle and deciduousness of its forms).

In the far East, the productive arts were early included under the word nagic; whose secrets, as an ancient historian tells us, were reserved as the special privilege of royal families, and hence died out.

Under despotic governments, the inspirations of Science and Art invariably have died out into formulas to be worked out mechanically; as has happened in China. But, in Greece and Rome, freedom, though it only existed as a family privilege, fostered individual originality. The initiated, believing themselves subjects of inspiration, would have that confidence in inward impulse, which, when disciplined by observation of nature conceived as living expression of indwelling gods, could not but be beautiful and true. High Art excludes the fantastic, and is always simple,--because it is useful, like nature. The identification of the artist with the artisan will restore it, because the necessities of execution control design when artist and artisan are one. The modern artist is apt to design with no regard to use or nature. He needs the check of the executing hand upon his impracticable conceptions; and will be no less a gainer thereof, than the artisan, by identification with him. Hay, in his several works, especially in the one on "Symmetrical Beauty," shows that the generation of the forms of the ancient vases rested on a strict mathematical basis; and there is abundant evidence that the study of mathematics was quite as profound in antiquity as it has been since; though then it was applied to art, rather than, as now, to the measurement

*The title given to a republication in Boston, in 1870, of Cardinal Wiseman's lecture on the "Relations of the Arts of Design and the Arts of Production," to which this paper of Miss Peabody was appended. The lecture and plea had a wide circulation.

of nature. The wars and reyolutions which convulsed the world in the declining days of the old Eastern Empires, and even of Greece and Rome, broke up the ancient schools of magic and art. They never, however, were quite lost in the darkest ages, but preserved a shy and secret existence; and, at the revival of letters in the twelfth and thirteenth cen turies, were restored for a splendid season of about three centuries, by secret societies, like the Freemasons, and in many ecclesiastical cloisters. Then building and other mechanical work again became High Art.

This adequate education, with its elevating effect on the laborer, both in respect to his inner life and outward relations, can be given now, and in America, only by making our Public Schools give the same profound and harmonious training to the whole nature of all the people that those ancient secret societies gave to the few,-a thing that is to be expected much more by reforming and perfecting the primary department, than by endowing universities; though the latter are the cap-stones of the educational edifice. Even the late (1870) act of the Massachusetts Legisla ture, requiring a free drawing-school in every town of five thousand inhabitants in the State, though it is a move in the right direction (and it is to be hoped that the working men will not let the law lapse by neglecting to call for its enforcement), will be of very little use unless the children shall be prepared for these art-schools in the primary department. It is the main purpose of the present publication to set forth that this can be done, and therefore ought to be done at once. Froebel's Kindergarten is a pri mary art-school; for it employs the prodigious but originally blind activity and easily trained hand of childhood, from the age of three years, in intelligent production of things within the childish sphere of affection and fancy; giving thereby a harmonious play of heart and mind in actively educating-without straining the brain-even to the point of developing invention, while it keeps the temper sweet and spirits joyous with the pleasure of success. Childish play has all the main characteristics of art, inasmuch as it is the endeavor "to conform the outward shows of things to the desires of the mind." Every child, at play, is histrionic and plastic. He personates character with mimic gesture and costume, and represents whatever fancy interests him by an embodiment of it,-perhaps in mud or sand or snow; or by the arrangement of the most ungainly materials, such as a row of footstools and chairs, which become a railroad train to him at his "own sweet will." Everybody conversant with children knows how easily they will "make believe," as they call it, out of any materials whatever; and are most amused when the materials to be transformed by their personifying and symbolizing thought are few. For so much do children enjoy the exercise of imagination, that they prefer simple primitive forms, which they can “make believe" to be first one thing and then another, to elaborately carved columns, and such like. There is nothing in life more charming to a spectator, than to observe this shaping fancy of children, scorning the bounds of possibility, as it were. But children themselves enjoy their imaginations still more, when they find it possible to satisfy their causative instinct by really making something useful or pretty.

It was Froebel's wisdom, instead of repressing, to accept this natural activity of childhood, as a hint of Divine Providence, and to utilize its spontaneous play for education. And, in doing so, he takes out of school

discipline that element of baneful antagonism which it is so apt to excite, and which it is such a misfortune should ever be excited in the young towards the old.

The divine impulse of activity is never directly opposed in the kindergarten, but accepted and guided into beautiful production, according to the laws of creative order. These the educator must study out in nature, and genially present to the child, whom he will find docile to the guidance of his play to an issue more successful than it is possible for him to attain in his own ignorance.

Intellect is developed by the appreciation of individual forms and those relations to each other which are agreeable to the eye. There are forms that never tire. In the work of Hay, to which allusion has been made, it is shown that every ancient vase is a complex of curves that belong to one form or to three forms or to five forms; but all vases whose curves belong to one form are the most beautiful. These ground forms are of petals of flowers; and the mathematical appreciation of them is very interesting, showing that the forces of nature act to produce a certain symmetry, as has been lately demonstrated in snowflakes and crystals, that have been respectively called "the lilies of the sky, and the lilies of the rocks," (for the lily is the most symmetrical of flowers). Froebel's exercise on blocks, sticks, curved wires, colors, weaving of patterns, pricking, sewing with colored threads, and drawing, lead little children of three years' old to create series of forms, by a simple placing of opposites, which involves the first principle of all design, polarity. By boxes of triangles, equilateral, isosceles, right angled, or scalene, the foundations of mathematical thought may be laid to the senses. Before children are old enough for the abstract operations of simple arithmetic, they may know geometry in the concrete. And, in these various games of the generation of form, the greatest accuracy of eye, and delicacy and quickness of manipulation are insensibly acquired, precluding all clumsiness and awkwardness.

Froebel's exercises with block, sticks, curved wires, triangles, which lead the children to make an ever-varying symmetry by simply placing opposites, are concrete mathematics, which become the very law of their thoughts. The mind is developed by appreciated forms and their combinations. The same law of polarity is followed in the weaving of colored papers, where harmony of colors is added to symmetrical beauty; and from the moment when a child can hold the pencil, and draw a line a quarter of an inch long, he can also make symmetrical forms upon a slate or paper squared in eighths of an inch.

But to conduct such education as this is a great art, founded on the deepest science both within and without the human soul; and therefore, preliminary to its being undertaken, there must be a special training of the kindergarten teacher. Froebel never established a kindergarten anywhere that he did not also establish normal training for young women, who were to supervise the children at their play and work, so as to make these guided exercises of the limbs and hands a moral, artistic, and intellectual education, all in one.

For moral culture, it is necessary that the children produce things, and play with each other, from self-forgetful motives of gratitude to parents and affection for their companions, or a gentle sympathy for the unfortu

nate. Moral culture cannot be given in a didactic manner. Sentiment becomes selfish weakness unless it is embodied in disinterested action. Even successful and happy play involves mutual consideration. It is necessary that children should act from a motive leading them from within out of themselves. There is no way to learn goodness but to be practically good. Froebel would not have children make things to hoard, or merely to exhibit their power, and stimulate their vanity; but to give away to some object of their affection or respect or pity. Before anything is done, the question always arises, Who is to be made happier or better by it? They can be kept busy the whole year in providing gifts for all their friends' birthdays, new-years-day, and the Christmas-tree; and, especially, if the poor and sick are remembered. Thus their activity is disciplined by their hearts, that supply the motive, no less than by their intellect, that accepts the law according to which the thing is made.

They become intellectual by learning that there is always a law as the innermost secret of every object of nature and art. The rule involving the law is suggested in words at each step of the procedure, and repeated until the idea of the law is caught. As crude material and simple groundform is varied into varieties of beauty, they get a knowledge, deeper than words can convey, of the substantiality of law, seeing it to be no less a factor of the thing than the material out of which it is made. In its turn, the material itself becomes the subject of an object lesson, not only as to its structure, but its origin; and this, when considered in its use, or the delight it gives, leads the mind inevitably to the spiritual Fountain of all good things.

The child's own active heart witnesses to a heavenly Father, and precludes any necessity for didactic teaching on that point. It is only neccessary to refer to Him when the little heart is full of generous love, and the little mind is realizing that its own thought is an indispensable factor of the thing done. Thus art-education is religious; because art is the image in man of God's creativeness. It has been profoundly said that, if science is irreligious in its effect, because it deals only in appear ances, and its method is analysis which murders, art is necessary to strike the balance in education, because it deals in substances, and not only produces, but makes alive by giving expression to matter. Since what makes the crude and unformed material which the child uses a thing of beauty or use, is the immaterial æsthetic force within him, which applies the law (itself an immaterial entity), he necessarily infers and appreciates that the universe as a whole is the guarantee of an immaterial Creator who loves its intelligent denizens.

It is impossible for a kindergarten to be carried on by a teacher who does not understand this constitution of human nature on the one hand, and the laws of the universe, in some degree, upon the other. No mechanical imitation, and no patterns are permitted; but the children are led on to act from their own thoughts by first acting from the teacher's suggestion or direction of their thoughts. It is astonishing to most persons to see how, almost immediately, they begin to invent new applications of the laws given. Originality is fostered by questions leading them to give an account of how they produce effects, which prevents destructive tendencies, and gives clearness of intellectual consciousness; and no strain

is put upon the brain, because the child is always kept within the child's world and made of ability there. In the moral sphere, also, questioning is a better mode of suggestion than precept. Unless there is a certain freedom of feeling, and virtue preserves a certain spontaneity, hypocrisy may be superinduced. Children love others as naturally and well as they love themselves, if not better; and love has its own various creative play, and its own modesty, which should be sacredly respected. Wake up the heart and mind, and moral dictation will be as superfluous as it is pernicious and, above all, children should not be led into professions, or praised for goodness; but goodness should be presumed as of course.

In short, kindergarten education is INTEGRAL, resulting in practical religion, because it gives intelligence and sentiment to the conception of God and his providence, and prevents that precocity which is always a one-sided, deforming, and ultimately a weakening development. It is greatly in contrast with the ordinary primary-school teaching, which generally begins by antagonizing all spontaneous life (keeping children still, as it is called), in order to make them passive recipients of knowledge having no present relation with the wants of their minds or hearts.

But if the training which fits for kindergarten teaching not only involves knowledge of the sciences of outward nature to a considerable extent, but a study of the philosophy of human nature also, yet it is such a philosophy as any fairly cultivated, genial-hearted young woman, of average intellect, is capable of receiving from one already an adept in it; for it is the universal motherly instinct, appreciated by the intellect, and followed out to its highest issues. Froebel's philosophy and art are just the highest finish to any woman's education, whether she is to keep a kindergarten or not. Froebel considered women to be the divinely appointed educators of children, for the first seven years of their lives at least, until they become fully conscious of their power of thought, and know how to apply thought for effect. For two or three years their place is in the nursery, whose law is acknowledged to be amusement. The nursery method of sympathetic supervision of children's spontaneity (which never should be left to uninstructed nurses) is simply continued in the kindergarten, where symbolic plays, for general bodily exercise, and the "occupations," as the quieter games of production are called, suggest conversations which are the first object lessons. It is quite enough intellectual work for children under seven years of age to learn to express their thoughts and impressions in appropriate words; to sing by rote the songs which describe their plays; to become skillful in the manipulations that the occupations involve; with such objective knowledge as is directly connected with the materials used. They can then go, at seven years old, from the kindergarten to the common primary school, with habits of docility, industry, and order already acquired; wide-awake senses and attention; tempers not irritated by stupid and unreasonable repressions of their nature, and wills unperverted, and reasonably obedient. Is it not plain that, thus educated, they will easily learn to read? and the knowedge acquired from books will stimulate production in large spheres of life, and the love of labor will not be in danger of dying out when the progressive rise into "the perfect, good, and fair" is guaranteed by works, that shall bring the life which is to come into that which now is.