io6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN. 



IN studying the plans laid down by Friedrich Froebel for the 

 education of young children, one is reminded of a passage in 

 his letter to Krause, where he says : 



Here there budded and opened to my soul one lovely bright spring morning, 

 when I was surrounded by Nature at her loveliest and freshest, this thought, as it 

 were by inspiration : That there must exist somewhere some beautifully simple 

 and certain way of freeing human life from contradiction, or, as I then spake out 

 my thought in words, some means of restoring to man himself at peace internally ; 

 and that to seek out this way should be the vocation of my life. 



Froebel in his own childhood had suffered much from this con- 

 tradiction in life. He had a severe father and an unsympathetic 

 step-mother; and had himself felt the ill effects of a stern and 

 rigid rule, which merely required conformity to the given law 

 without inquiring if conformity were possible. He had found 

 this kind of rule a hindrance to true development, inasmuch as 

 organic growth can not take place according to rules prescribed 

 from without, but only according to the natural law. Gradually 

 the idea took shape in his mind that this contradiction was not a 

 necessary condition of life, that the soul and the outer world are 

 not meant to be forever at war, that when we have learned to live 

 aright this conflict will cease and they will be at one. 



The idea of the introduction of harmony into education and 

 into life seems to be the keynote of all Froebel's teaching. At the 

 time that the thought above quoted from the letter of Krause first 

 came to him he had not as yet realized that this harmony might 

 be effected by a change in education ; he came gradually to see 

 that the object for which he was striving was the substitution of 

 development for repression and arbitrary rule. He says again in 

 the same letter : 



My experience, especially that gained by repeated residences at the university, 

 had taught me beyond a doubt that the method of education hitherto in use es- 

 pecially where it involved learning by rote, and where it looked at subjects sim- 

 ply from the outside or historically, and considered them capable of apprehension 

 by mere exercise-work dulled the edge of all high true attainment, of all real 

 mental insight, of all genuine progress in scientific culture, of self-contemplation, 

 and thus of all real knowledge and of the acquisition of truth through knowledge. 

 I might almost go further and say that its tendency was toward rendering all 

 these worthy objects impossible. Therefore I was firmly convinced, as of course 

 I still am, that the whole former educational system, even that which had received 

 improvement, ought to be exactly reversed and regarded from a diametrically oppo- 

 site point of view namely, that of a system of development. 



The principles of Froebel, when rightly understood, are not 

 only a guide enabling us to form natural systems of education, 



