Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/830

794 F K E B E L 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 in structing 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 Middendortf had presented an address on Kindergar tens to the German Parliament. Besides this a nephew of Froebel s published books which were supposed to teach socialism. True, the umle and nephew differed so widely that the " new Froebeliaus" were the enemies of " the old." The distinction was overlooked, and Friedrich and Karl Froabel 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 for bidding the establishment of schools " after Friedrich and Karl Froebel s principles " in Prussia. This was a heavy blow to the old man, who looked to the Government of the " C ultus-staat" Prussia for support, and was met with denun ciation. Of the justice of the charge the minister brought 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, Mari- enthal. " All education not founded on religion is unproductive." This conviction of Froebel s followed naturally from his con ception of the unity of all things, a unity due to the original Unity from whom all proceed and in whom all " live, move, and have their being." " In Allem wirkt und schafft Ein Leben, Weil das Leben all ein ein ger Gott gegeben." " All has come forth from the divine, from God, and is through God alone conditioned. To this it is that all things owe their existence, to the divine working in them. The divine element that works in each thing is the true idea (das Weseii) of the thing." " The destiny and calling of all things is to develop their true idea, and in so doing to re veal God in outward and through passing forms." As man and nature have one origin they must be subject t j the same laws. Hence Froebel did what Comenius had done two centuries before him, he looked to the course of nature for the principles of human education. This he de clares to be his fundamental belief : " In the creation, in nature and the order of the material world, and in the pro gress of mankind, God has given us the true type (Urbild) of education." As the cultivator creates nothing in the trees and plants, jo the educator creates nothing in the children, he merely .superintends the development of inborn faculties. So far Froebel agrees with Pestalozzi; but in one respect he went beyond him, and has thus become, according to Michelet, the greatest of educational reformers. Pestalozzi said that the faculties were developed by exercise. Froebel added that the function of education was to develop the faculties by arousing voluntary activity. Action proceeding from inner impulse (Selbstthatigkeit) was the one thing needful. And here Froebel as usual refers to God. " God s every thought is a work, a deed." As God is the Creator so must man be a creator also. " He who will early learn to recognize the Creator must early exercise his own power of action with the consciousness that he is bringing about what is good, for the doing good is the link between the creature r.nd the Creator, and the conscious doing of it is the conscious connexion, the true living union of the man with God, of the individual man as of the human race, and is therefore at once the starting point and the eternal aim of all educa tion." Again he says : " The starting point of all that appears, of all that exists, and therefore of all intellectual conception, is act, action. From the act, from action, must therefore start true human education, the developing educa tion of the man; in action, in acting, it must be rooted and must spring up Living, acting, conceiving, these must form a triple chord within every child of man, though the sound now of this string, now of that, may preponder ate, and then again of two together." The prominence which Froebel gave to action, his doc trine that man is primarily a doer and even a creator, and that he learns only through " self-activity," may produce great changes in educational methods generally, and not simply in the treatment of children too young for schooling. But it was to the first stage of life that Froebel paid the reatest attention, and it is over this stage that his influence is gradually extending. Froebel held with Eousseau that each age has a completeness of its own, and that the perfec tion of the later stage can be attained only through the perfection of the earlier. If the infant is what he should be as an infant, and the child as a child, he will become what he should be as a boy, just as naturally as new shoots spring from the healthy plant. Every stage, then, must be cared for and tended in such a way that it may attain its own perfection. Impressed with the immense importance of the first stage, Froebel like Pestalozzi devoted himself to the instruction of mothers. But he would not, like Pestalozzi, leave the children entirely in the mother s hands. Pestalozzi held that the child belonged to the family; Fichte, on the other hand, claimed it for society and the state. Froebel, whose mind like that of Frederick Maurice delighted in harmonizing apparent contradictions, and who taught that " all progress lay through opposites to their re conciliation," maintained that the child belonged both to the family and to society, and he would therefore have children spend some hours of the day in a common life and in well-organized common employments. These assemblies of children he would not call schools, for the children in them ought not to be old enough for schooling. So he in vented the name Kindergarten, garden of children, and called the superintendents " children s gardeners." He laid great stress on every child cultivating its own plot of ground, but this was not his reason for the choice of the name. It was rather that he thought of these institutions as enclosures in which young human plants are nurtured. In the Kindergarten the children s employment should be play. But any occupation in which children delight is play to them; and Froebel invented a series of employments, which, while they are in this sense play to the children, have nevertheless, as seen from the adult point of view, a distinct educational object. This object, as Froebel himself describes it, is "to give the children employment in agree ment with their whole nature, to strengthen their bodies, to exercise their senses, to engage their awakening mind, and through their senses to bring them acquainted with nature and their fellow creatures; it is especially to guide aright the heart and the affections, and to lead them to the original ground of all life, to unity with themselves." At the end of the first quarter of a century since Froebel s death, the spread of his ideas, or at least of his methods, seems rapidly extending. Prophets are slowly recognized in their own country, and although he is so thoroughly German in bis mode of thought and exposition that, as Deinhardt says, no other nation could have produced such a man, the Germans as yet are not so ready to learn from Froebel as from the Swiss Pestalozzi. In Austria the Kindergarten has made more way than in Prussia, and it seems to prosper in America. But Froebel s influence is not limited to the Kindergarten, His conception of ecluca-