Chapter I: Froebel’s Anticipation of Modern Psychology

“_A great man condemns the world to the task of explaining him._”

The purpose of this little book is to show that Froebel’s educational theories were based on psychological views of a type much more modern than is at all generally understood. It is frequently stated that Froebel’s psychology is conspicuous by its absence, but in a somewhat close study of Froebel’s writings I have been again and again surprised to find how much Froebel seems to have anticipated modern psychology.

A probable reason for the overlooking of so much sound psychological truth is to be found in the fact that much of it is obscured by details which seem to us trivial, but which Froebel meant as applications of the theories he was endeavouring to make clear to minds not only innocent of, but incapable of, psychology.

Most educationists have read “The Education of Man,” but few outside the Kindergarten world are likely to have bestowed much thought on Froebel’s later writings. It is in these, however, that we see Froebel watching with earnest attention that earliest mental development which is now regarded as a distinct chapter in mental science, but which was then largely if not entirely ignored.

With the same spirit of inquiry and the same field for investigation--for children acted and thought then as they act and think now--it is only natural that Froebel should have made at least some of the same discoveries as the genetic psychologist of to-day.

It would be unfair at any date to expect a complete psychology from a writer whose subject is not mental science, but education. Mistakes, too, one must expect, and these are not to be ignored.[1] Still there remains a solid amount of psychological discovery for which Froebel has had as yet but little credit.

Indeed, just as his disciples have been inclined, like all disciples, to think that their master has said the last word on his own subject, so have opponents of Froebelian doctrines, irritated perhaps by these pretensions, made direct attacks on somewhat insufficient grounds. In a later chapter, an attempt has been made to deal with what seems unfounded in such attacks.[2]

The major part of the book, however, is intended to show the correctness of Froebel’s views on points now regarded as of fundamental importance, and generally recognized as modern theories. For this purpose passages from Froebel’s writings are here compared with similar passages from such undoubted authorities as Dr. James Ward, Professor Stout, Professor Lloyd Morgan, Mr. W. Macdougall, Mr. J. Irving King, and others.

In the first place, it should be noted that Froebel was fully aware of the necessity for a psychological basis for his educational theories.

Writing in 1841, he says:

“I am firmly convinced that all the phenomena of the child
world, those which delight us, as well as those which grieve
us, depend upon fixed laws as definite as those of the
cosmos, the planetary system and the operations of Nature; it
is therefore possible to discover them and examine them. When
once we know and have assimilated these laws, we shall be able
powerfully to counteract any retrograde and faulty tendencies
in children, and to encourage, at the same time, all that is
good and virtuous.”--_L., p. 91._

Nor was Froebel in any doubt as to how these laws are to be discovered, and his order of investigation is very similar to that prescribed by Professor Stout. The latter, though regarding genetic psychology as “the most important and most interesting,” considers that it should be preceded by:--1, A general analysis of consciousness, analytic and largely introspective; 2, An investigation of the laws of mental process, “analytic also, inasmuch as we endeavour to ascertain the general laws of mental process by analysis of the fully developed mind.”

Froebel, too, regards the analytic as a necessary preparation for the genetic, and says that parents and teachers, who wish to supply the needs of the child at different stages of development:

“are to consider life _firstly_ through looking into
themselves, into the course of their own development, its
phenomena and its claims--through the retrospection (Rückblick)
of the earliest possible years of their own lives, and also
the introspection (Einblick) of their present lives, that
their own experience may furnish a key to the problem of the
child’s condition (den Zustand des Kindes in sich zu lösen).
_Secondly_, by the deepest possible search into the life of the
child, and into what he must necessarily require according to
his present stage of development.”--_P., p. 168._

Professor Stout adds later that anthropology and philology may ultimately yield results as important as those yielded by physiology. Froebel could have no idea of the physiological parallel to mental process, but he did not omit the anthropological inquiry, for in another passage he enlarges his first point, declaring that:

“It is essential for parents and teachers, for the sake of
their children, and that their educational efforts may meet
with a rich reward, not only to recall as far as possible the
first phenomena, the course and conditions of the development
of their own lives, but that they should compare this with the
phenomena, the course and conditions of the development of
the world, and of life in general in Nature and History, and
so by degrees raise themselves to a knowledge of the general
as well as of the particular laws of life development, that
the guidance of the child may find in these laws a higher
and stronger--their true foundation, as well as their surest
determination.”--_P., p. 66._

Even his detractors generally allow that Froebel had a wonderful insight into child-nature, but this is too often spoken of as if it were due to some specialized faculty of intuition, not known to psychology.

Froebel’s knowledge of child-nature came to him precisely as it comes to the psychologist of the present day, through patient observation of the doings of little children, and thoughtful interpretation of their possible meaning. It is true that he drew his conclusions from too narrow a field, but of this he was well aware. In a letter to a cousin thanking her for the “comparative account of the various manifestations of children,” which she had sent him, he complains, _and this, be it remembered, in 1840_, that “it is a subject to which one can rarely get even cultivated parents to pay attention,” and he adds:

“I would beg of you to collect as many observations for me as
you can, both things which you yourself have observed, and
also remarks made by your Robert and the other children when
at play. If you have the time for this, pray do it for the
furtherance of the cause; other friends are at work for me in
the same way.”--_L., p. 67._

In another letter to this cousin he says:

“It would delight me greatly if you could confide to me what
you remember of your feelings, perceptions, and ideas as a
mother greeting the new-born life of her infant, and your
observations of the first movements of its limbs and the
beginning of the development of its senses.”--_L., p. 110._

To another friend he writes:

“In the interests of the children I have still another
request to make--that you would record in writing the most
important facts about each separate child. It seems to me most
necessary for the comprehension, and for the true treatment
of child-nature, that such observations should be made public
from time to time, in order that children may become better and
better understood in their manifestations, and may therefore
be more rightly treated, and that true care and observation of
unsophisticated childhood may ever increase.”--_L., p. 89._

Froebel made these requests, as he made his own observations, as the result of the conviction with which he declares himself “thoroughly penetrated,”

“that the movements of the young and delicate mind of the
child, although as yet so small as to be almost unnoticeable,
are of the most essential consequence to his future
life.”--_P., p. 53._

“Why do we observe the child less than the germ of a plant? Is
it to be supposed that in the child, the capacity to become
a complete human being is contained less than in the acorn
is contained the capacity to become a strong, vigorous and
complete oak?”--_P., p. 62._

“We cannot pass over unmentioned the fact, essential for
the whole life of the child, for the whole course of his
development, that phenomena and impressions which seem to us
insignificant, and which we generally leave unnoticed, have for
the child, and especially for his inner world, most important
results, since the child develops more through what seems to
us small and imperceptible, than through what appears to us
large and striking … hence--wholly contrary to prevailing
opinion--nowhere is consideration of that which is small and
insignificant of more importance than in the nursery.”--_P., p.
125._

Professor Dewey, one of the few important educational writers who do justice to Froebel as a pioneer, gives as a general summary of his educational principles:

“1. That the primary business of school is to train children in co-operative and mutually helpful living; to foster in them the consciousness of mutual interdependence, and to help them practically in making the adjustments that will carry this spirit into overt deeds.

“2. That the primary root of all educative activity is in the instinctive, impulsive attitudes and activities of the child, and not in the presentation and application of external material, whether through the ideas of others or through the senses; and that, accordingly, numberless spontaneous activities of children, plays, games, mimic efforts, even the apparently meaningless motions of infants--exhibitions previously ignored as trivial, futile, or even condemned as positively evil--are capable of educational use, nay, are the foundation-stones of educational effort.

“3. That these individual tendencies and activities are organized and directed through the uses made of them in keeping up the co-operative living already spoken of; taking advantage of them to reproduce on the child’s plane the typical doings and occupations of the larger maturer society into which he is finally to go forth; and that it is through production and creative use that valuable knowledge is secured and clinched.”[3]

So little, however, are these principles understood as Froebel’s, that in the Pedagogical Seminary for July, 1900, a paper was published on “The Reconstruction of the Kindergarten,” wherein it was maintained that the basis of reconstruction must be the child’s natural instincts. The writer, Mr. Eby, had apparently no idea that the Kindergarten was originally based on this very foundation. He evidently did not know that Froebel has given, in his “Education of Man,” a very fair account of these instincts, omitting nothing of great importance, and pointing, at least, to a better principle of classification than that adopted by Mr. Eby.[4] It is, however, only fair to Froebel to mention that he himself regarded his own account as far from being commensurate with the importance of the subject, for the year following that of the publication of “The Education of Man” he writes:

“Since these spontaneous activities of children have not yet
been thoroughly thought out from a high point of view, and
have not yet been regarded from what I might almost call their
cosmical and anthropological side, we may from day to day
expect some philosopher to write a comprehensive book about
them.”--_A., p. 76._

The problems Froebel endeavoured to solve are precisely those which are absorbing the genetic psychologist of the present day, as stated, for example, in Mr. Irving King’s “Psychology of Child Development,” viz.: “to examine the various forms of the child’s activity, to get some insight into the nature of the child himself”--“to get at the meaning of child-life in terms of itself.”

Every reader of “The Education of Man” will remember how Froebel uses his own boyish reminiscences to help others to understand childish actions often utterly misunderstood. In his paper on “Movement Plays” he writes:

“In that nurture of childhood which is intended to assist
development, it is by no means sufficient to supply
play-material in proportion merely to the stage of development
already outwardly manifest. It is at the same time of the
utmost importance to trace out the inner process of development
and to satisfy its demands.… In the nurture, development, and
education of the child, and especially in the attempt to employ
him, his own nature, his own life and energy must be the main
consideration. The knowledge of isolated and external phenomena
may occasionally be a guide-post pointing our direction, but
it can never be a path leading to the specific aim of child
culture and education; for _the condition of education is none
other than comprehension of the whole nature and essence of
humanity as manifested in the child_.”--_P., p. 239._

Just as Mr. Irving King, writing in 1904, says that we must take as our starting-point the child’s bodily activities, so did Froebel too declare, that:

“The present time makes upon the educator the wholly
indispensable requirement--to comprehend the earliest activity,
the first action of the child.”--_P., p. 16._

To this first action, Froebel devotes a whole paper, “Das erste Kindesthun,” the opening sentence of which contains the words:

“As the new-born child, like a ripe grain of corn, bears
life within itself which will be developed progressively
and spontaneously, though in close connection with life in
general, so activity and action are the first manifestations of
awakening child-life.”--_P., p. 23._

Writing in 1847, Froebel says that “decision, zeal, and perseverance” must be brought to bear upon his plan, in order that:

“(_a_) More careful observation of the child, his relationships
and his line of development, may become general amongst us; and
thereby

“(_b_) A better grounded insight be obtained into the child’s
being, mental and physical, and the general collective
conditions of his life.… Deeper insight will be gained into
the meaning and importance of the child’s actions and outward
manifestations.”--_L., p. 248._

This quotation is important as showing that Froebel was deliberately looking for “_a line of development_,” that he might better understand “the child’s being, mental and physical.” Considering that Froebel wrote between 1826 and 1850, the important points on which he may be said to have successfully anticipated modern psychology are, his recognition that the mind is what he calls “a tri-unity” of action, feeling, and thought; his treatment of early mental activity and his definition of will; his conception of the earliest consciousness as an undifferentiated whole; his recognition of the importance of action not only in the realm of perception, but also in that of feeling; and his surprisingly complete account of instinct. Such anticipations are due to the fact that the idea of development then new to the scientific world possessed his very soul.

“Humanity, _which lives only in its continuous development_ and
cultivation, seems to us dead and stationary, something to be
modelled over again and again in accordance with its present
type. We are ignorant of our own nature and the nature of
humanity.…”--_E., p. 146._

“God neither ingrafts nor inoculates. He _develops_ the
most trivial and imperfect things in continuously ascending
series and in accordance with eternal self-grounded and
self-developing laws. And God-likeness is and ought to be man’s
highest aim in thought and deed.”--_E., p. 328._

Justice has already been done to Froebel’s philosophy by Dr. John Angus MacVannel, who says in his closing paragraph:

“Froebel’s system has that unmistakable mark of greatness about it that makes it worth our faithful effort to understand it, and turn its conclusions to our advantage.… His philosophy of education taken as a whole seems, perhaps, the most satisfactory we have yet had. One cannot but believe, however, that the candid reader will at times find conclusions in his writings sustained by reasonings, that are inadequately developed and important questions by no means satisfactorily answered.… On the other hand we must not forget that it is insight, rather than exactitude, that is the life of a philosophy; herein lies the secret of Froebel’s lasting influence and power.”[5]