IDERGARTEN ESI 
 
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 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 %eceived J/^N 4 1893 . 189 
 
 (Accessions No. H-^vIZ^. Class No. 
 
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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2007 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/essaysonkindergaOOfroerich 
 
ESSAYS 
 
 ON THE 
 
 KINDERGARTEN 
 
 BEING A SELECTION OF 
 
 Lectures Read before the London Froebel Society 
 
 SECOND 
 
 EDITION 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SWAN SONNENSCHEIN, LOWREY & CO. 
 PATERNOSTER SQUARE 
 
 1887 
 

 Butler k Tanner, 
 
 The Selwood Printing Works, 
 
 Frome, and London. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Madame de Portugall's Synoptical Table . From, 
 
 No. I, — Shirreff, Progressive Development according to Fr{>be]'i 
 Principles .•••... 
 
 No. 2.— BucKLAND, On Stories in the Kindergarten 
 
 No. 5. — HoGGAN, Physical Education of Girls , 
 
 No. 4. — BucKLAND, The Happiness of Childhood 
 
 No. 5. — Heerwart, Frobel's Mutter und Kose-lieder , 
 
 No. 6.— Shirreff, Wasted Forces . . • , 
 
 No. 7. — Shirreff, The Kindergarten in Relation to Schools 
 
 No. 8. — Shirreff, The Kindergarten in Relation to Family Life. 
 
 5 
 
 19 
 36 
 
 60 
 81 
 
 99 
 116 
 
 133 
 
lESITT) 
 PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT 
 
 ACCORDING TO 
 
 FROBEL'S PRINCIPLES OF EDUCATION. 
 
 By EMILY SIIIRREFF.* 
 
 My purpose this evening is to draw your attention to 
 the Synoptical Table that Madame de Portugall has constructed, 
 to show the intimate connection between the kindergarten 
 and all later studies. You see it here before you, enlarged, 
 and also slightly simplified, in as far as some of the less 
 important details have been omitted, to avoid overcrowding, 
 so that it might be clearly seen from a distance. 
 
 We must suppose this table to represent the whole period of 
 life given to instruction, ie., kindergarten age, from three to 
 seven ; school time, from seven to eighteen ; higher studies, 
 from eighteen upwards, according to opportunities and the 
 degree of knowledge aimed at These different portions are 
 marked out here. All the lower part, beginning from this 
 central point, is devoted to the kindergarten. The school 
 
 * This paper was written (ot a lecture, delivered before the Froebel 
 Society, and is printed in the form in which it was originally delivered. 
 
6 Progressive Development 
 
 occupies the space bounded below and above by the double 
 horizontal lines, b and c, and all the space beyond this where the 
 lines again converge to a point, represents the period of higher 
 culture. The lines, either perpendicular or slightly inclined, 
 ^ that you see beginning in the kindergarten portion, and passing 
 through the other sections, are intended to jnark the con- ^ 
 nection of the lessons or play of one period with the studies of 
 another; each later study being underlined with the same 
 colour as that of the ascending line that leads up to it, and this 
 we must bear in mind is intended to mark a real connection, 
 /for, as Madame de Portugall tells us in her pamphlet, " when I 
 \ say ^ lead up to them,^ I do not mean simply that the branches 
 J of later instruction follow upon them, but grow out of them, 
 \ and that the kindergarten training begins upon the same lines 
 of thought which are followed throughout. There is every- 
 Where development, but not change." Madame de Portugall's 
 purpose in constructing this table was just to bring this con- 
 I nection prominently forward. This conception of continuity is at 
 
 ^ the very root of Frobel's system ; but, like other principles, is too 
 
 often neglected. While the mere exterior of the method grows 
 in popular favour, I cannot do better, in order to point out its 
 importance, than to quote, as Madame de Portugall has done in 
 her short explanation of the table, a passage from Frobel 
 himself. " It is," he says, " of the highest importance, not 
 only for the religious development of man, but for the expan- 
 sion of all his faculties, that his education, starting from one 
 point, should follow a progressive course, and should advance 
 towards the goal uninterruptedly, without breaks or sudden 
 changes. For nothing is more hurtful to the development of 
 the individual than to consider any stage as detached or 
 isolated from the rest. The periods of life known as childhood, 
 youth, adolescence, manhood, old age, are but the links of one 
 and the same chain, and, consequently, the Httle child, the 
 youth, the man in his maturity, cannot be looked upon as 
 
according to Probers Principles. 7 
 
 different beings, strangers one to the other. Life, in all its 
 various phases, presents one complex whole, of which it must 
 be our care to consider the starting-point and the ultimate goal." 
 "The bearing of these words," adds Madame de Portugall, 
 " on all education is immense ; yet the pedagogical principle 
 they contain presents much difficulty, and, even now, attracts 
 little attention. No earnest-minded man, or real educator, can 
 overlook it ; he knows its value, and how much depends on its 
 practical application ; but it is not recognized by the public." 
 
 Let us now turn to the table. It shows us the whole system ' 
 of kindergarten gifts and occupations as resting upon three ' 
 objects presenting three fundamental forms — the hall^ the cuhe^ 
 and the cylinder. All three are contained in the second gift, 
 as Frobel calls his boxes of lesson toys. The ball, the 
 uniform sphere, the cube with its straight lines and flat 
 surfaces, the cylinder that partakes of both, presenting a 
 rounded surface like the ball, and lines and flat surfaces like 
 the cube. The cylinder is the first example Frobel gives of the 
 intermediate transition-forms connecting opposites, which he ' 
 explains as the very ground-plan of nature, and on which his 
 fundamental law of contrasts and connection of contrasts, the 
 law of all harmonious development and creative industry, is 
 based. 
 
 Madame de Portugall's table starts from the ball as the first 
 fundamental form. It occupies the centre of the lowest part of 
 the table. We see it at the root, so to speak, of the spreading 
 branches we have to follow into their various ramifications. As 
 belonging immediately to the ball, we have here ball-games, 
 which are the first in which the baby class is led to take 
 interest, and through the means of which are taught certain 
 movements, single and combined, giving the first idea of time 
 and rhythm. The difference between hard and soft balls, balls 
 of different sizes and colour, etc., is also learned here. From 
 these games there is an easy passage to gymnastic games, which 
 
8 Progressive Development 
 
 are generally made to exemplify some little story or description, 
 and which, being always accompanied with music, carry on the 
 lesson of time and rhythm begun with the ball games, and are 
 closely connected with that very important part of early kinder- 
 garten instruction, the art of story-telling. 
 
 Madame de Portugall places both languages and stories 
 together, as belonging to the early series of exercises. We see, 
 \ without need of explanation, how immediate is the connection 
 \ between the child's first study of language and his first interest 
 in stories. It will not be a grammatical study certainly. That 
 iwill not come till long after, but a study of words and 
 sentences, which the teacher will always make sure her little 
 audience understands. New words, or new forms of expression, 
 will often be purposely introduced into a narrative, and from 
 these new words, names, probably, of things which the children 
 are promised a sight of next day, or which they have seen but 
 not noticed, a fresh tale may begin. For there are no set 
 stories in the kindergarten, nor is it yet the time for fables, 
 save of the most artless kind; the satire and worldly wisdom 
 which underlie their apparent simplicity make them unfit for 
 those who can as yet see a very small portion of the surface of 
 /■hings. The little narratives I speak of are just what the present 
 object, or game, or child's question, suggests. The children, 
 though generally eager to know, and prompt to feel, are ignorant 
 of all, and the teacher knows so much of what surrounds their 
 ignorance — at least we hope she does — that materials can never 
 fail. 
 
 However, I have not undertaken to discourse here upon stor)^- 
 telling, but only to show how fitly stories are placed at the 
 base of all studies connected with language, and how they all 
 spring from exercises with that first fundamental form, the ball. 
 We have already noticed that the earliest lesson upon colours 
 will be given in connection with it; the only thing that re- 
 mains to be noticed on this part of the table is modelling. The 
 
according to FrbbeVs Principles, 9 
 
 first childish attempt in this art is directed to model a ball ; 
 and though the child never produces a correct sphere, he 
 comes nearer to rolling up his lump of clay into a ball than 
 he would at this same stage arrive at producing any object of 
 greater complexity, or requiring accurate lines. No one 
 who has seen a child model his ball will doubt that this first 
 exercise of manual productiveness affords him a degree of 
 pleasure which may give a new vent to the material instinct of 
 activity within him, while exercising his eye and fingers ; and 
 few who have not seen it, realize how soon from the ball he 
 will make an orange, clearly distinguishing the difference of 
 form ; and thence an apple, or a pear, which again lead him 
 eagerly to want stalks, and leaves, etc. : or the ball is hollowed 
 to form a nest, into which little balls are carefully placed as 
 eggs, and thence follows pleasant talk of birds and their haunts, 
 the trees, the hedges, etc. A little reflection upon this will 
 show us how justly Madame de Portugall carries up her section 
 of modelling right through the period of school studies till it 
 reaches sculpture and the fine arts generally. Not one in 
 twenty, perhaps not one in a hundred, it may be, of these 
 children will ever reach that stage; they may have no taste, no 
 talent, no opportunity for it. Yet should they not, the first 
 great object of all education has still been forwarded, by the 
 drawing out of a natural aptitude, a possession prepared for 
 after use if needed, for delight whenever used. 
 
 If we follow on the table the other lines that are carried up 
 from the ball games to the division of school studies, we see in 
 the intermediate portion, reading^, and writing, and knowledge 
 of native place. It requires no explanation to show why the 
 former should be placed immediately following language and 
 Btories, and therefore be marked with the same coloured hnes. 
 If we interest children with stories, it is to excite that pleasure 
 in knowledge, that interest in the life around them^ which will 
 later seek its own food in books; and it is evident that 
 
10 Progressive Development 
 
 writing is only one branch of the study of language— written 
 words are, in our state of civilization, only of secondary neces- 
 sity to spoken words ; and as soon as the child becomes apt 
 in speech, he must be led to seek the art of tracing his words 
 on paper. Reading and writing are taught, as you know, 
 simultaneously in these schools ; but not in the kindergarten 
 proper. Frobel had a dread of all the false notions, the half- 
 understood words that children get hold of by early reading to 
 themselves, and he knew also how short is the time we can 
 command for that more important work of developing their 
 faculties amid the phenomena of the visible world, before 
 book-learning makes its inevitable and ever-growing claim upon 
 the understanding and the memory. Thus you see on this 
 table reading and writing are placed half-way between kinder- 
 garten games and school lessons. They are given over to the 
 transition class which receives the child at seven years old to 
 prepare him for the change from entirely concrete to partly 
 abstract teaching ; from that which appeals to the mind through 
 the senses, and that which appeals to the understanding mostly 
 or altogether. The knowledge of our native place, which occu- 
 pies a parallel position on the table, is also derived, as we 
 are shown by the colour of the lines, from language and 
 stories, with the addition of gymnastic games. The connection 
 of the latter, which may seem obscure to some, is easily traced; 
 for the songs which accompany the games generally have 
 \ reference to facts of the animal or vegetable life familiar to the 
 children, and which are a part also of that later knowledge. 
 They tell sometimes of the seed-time or the harvest, sometimes 
 of the dogs or cows, the sheep, or the fowls and pigeons that 
 come to be fed. The'~<Aild's interest is thus excited in his 
 immediate surroundings. He quickly wants to know more 
 about them, and to noting the difference between field and 
 garden, wood and common, hill and flat ground, pond and 
 running water, is but a step. The transition-class takes up this 
 
^ according to FrbbeCs Principles. 1 1 
 
 same familiar knowledge, and carries it on to the first notion 
 of local topography, and thence to the first outline of physical 
 geography, which, later, will make historical geography intel- 
 ligible and useful, instead of being a mere list of names. The 
 child has been led on, step by step, to acquire the knowledge 
 he had come to wish for, and each step has helped to make a 
 track he will only need to continue. 
 
 It is time now to turn our attention to the other two funda- 
 mental forms— the cube and the cylinder — which we have here 
 on the right and left of the table. All the so-called occicpaiions 
 of the kindergarten, all that series of work by which the 
 children are trained to accuracy of sight and manipulation 
 while acquiring familiarity with the elements of arithmetic, 
 with geometrical forms, and the beauty of symmetrical design, 
 begin here, as the children learn to distinguish the various 
 lines and angles, the surfaces and peculiarities generally of 
 these two fundamental forms, to reproduce them, and de- 
 velop other figures from them. Madame de Portugall, as we 
 see, divides the occupations derived respectively from the cube 
 and the cylinder into four groups, according as their starting 
 point is either the solid itself, the surface, the line, or the point 
 All four groups are found under the head of the cube, three 
 only, solids, lines, and surfaces, under that of the cyli]!ider. 
 Points are first distinguished by the child in the sharp comer 
 of the cube, and therefore such occupations as deal with 
 separate points or dots, as, for instance, bead-work, pricking, 
 etc., belong to the cube-series only. ^-^- 
 
 Let us begin with the solids. There we find modelling again 
 in both series ; the diiference as it is practised in the one or 
 the other being in the different forms, whether circular or rect- 
 angular^ that are copied in each. Building, on the other hand, 
 which is exclusively carried on with rectangular pieces, belongs 
 to the cube-sjeries only. If we follow up the lines from both 
 these sections to the school work, we find that what has been 
 
12 Progressive Development 
 
 learned in this manner from the cube and the cylinderjeads 
 up to geometry. The table indicates this, as usual, by the 
 colour of the lines — the vertical lines being of the same blue 
 that marks geometry in the school division. When we come 
 to surfaces, some of the most important occupations, such as 
 paper cutting, paper folding, are common to both series ; they 
 only take different directions according as they deal wholly 
 with surfaces bounded by straight lines, as when derived from 
 the cube, or by partly straight and partly curved lines, as 
 when derived from the cylinder. In the first series they lead 
 up again, as we see, to geometry, in the second to drawing 
 and needlework. Paper plaiting, one of the favourite occu- 
 pations of the younger children, opens a field for instruction 
 in various branches ; it leads up to arithmetic from the skill 
 it gives in counting, to drawing from the initiation to sym- 
 metrical design, to needlework from the manual dexterity 
 it requires. This belongs to the cube-series, only dealing 
 exclusively with rectangular figures. Occupations based on 
 the study of lines only, differ very much one from the other 
 in the two series. The cube gives us a great variety, of 
 which some, the stick-laying, the laths, and the linear drawing, 
 form a most important part of kindergarten instruction, and 
 which earliest develop the child's intelfigence, as they lead 
 him to compare the direction of lines, the shape and magnitude 
 of figures, and to become familiar with geometrical lines and 
 angles, and forms, and with their correct names. Some will 
 think the latter acquisition is of but little use to him now, but 
 they forget that thus we open one more ingress to the inevi- 
 tably harder studies of later years. For when those children 
 come to a school lesson of geometry, one great difficulty will 
 have been surmounted. The terms used will have a meaning 
 to them ; to them these figures will be real things, which they 
 have handled and constructed, and they will be all the further 
 on the way to learning their properties and uses. In the 
 
accordmg to FrobeVs Principles. 1 3 
 
 cylinder- series, under the group lines, we find thread-laying and 
 metal rings ; curved surfaces being produced by the former, in 
 preparation for learning to trace them with a pencil ; and the 
 rings and sections of rings introduce altogether a new element, 
 both into the designing of patterns, and into the study of lines 
 and forms. For here we have the circle and its divisions, with 
 the angles formed at the centre, and the names for all these 
 new things to be acquired, and endless new designs to be 
 invented. 
 
 This table enables us to see at a glance what immense variety 
 of occupations have been planned in the kindergarten based 
 upon the elements provided for us by these two fundamental 
 forms ; and those to whom the whole subject is new will, I 
 believe, with the aid of some good diagrams of the occupations 
 mentioned, learn more of the motives of the system by viewing its 
 parts thus grouped and arranged, than by going at once to see 
 the practical work. They would, of course, understand any 
 one occupation better by seeing it worked at a kindergarten, 
 but they will get a better idea of the whole of the educational 
 value of the entire method by first studying this table. On the 
 other hand, those who are familiar with the practical working, 
 and can at once fill up the detail, will often acquire a new 
 insight into the principles by having thus brought before thenj 
 the connection, link by link, of earlier and later instruction, 
 and seeing side by side in each group the natural position of 
 these occupations, which to many appear isolated ; which 
 many teachers even treat as mere exercises, more or less 
 ingenious, that might be taken up in . any order, and chosen 
 from at random. This table demonstrates their order, a neces- 
 sary one, springing from a fundamental idea, and it also 
 shows their relative importance, enabling us, when we have 
 mastered the principle, to distinguish rapidly groups devoted 
 to the same purpose, that which affords the most fruitful 
 development of the principle, or which points to the most 
 
14 Progressive Development 
 
 important results. If this were a lecture on the merits of the 
 kindergarten system generally, it would be needful to enter 
 more closely into the value of each occupation as it influences 
 the whole ; but my object this evening is simply to bring pro- 
 minently forward the unity of the system, not merely within 
 itself, but as part of an all-embracing system of human culture, 
 and to draw attention, as I have said, to the use of this table in 
 making this fact manifest. I will not^ however, leave the 
 subject of the occupations without pointing out to those who 
 are only superficially acquainted with the kindergarten what 
 minute pains Frobel took to devise the means of drawing out in 
 children their faculties of observation, judgment, and activity. 
 Now he is not content to do this through one kind of work, 
 but through many kinds ; not in one direction, but in many 
 directions. Each of these occupations has its own special 
 object, but it has also that common object in view — each one 
 helps to lay a foundation for acquiring knowledge, now ot 
 number, now of form, now of natural history ; and it combines 
 with all the other occupations and amusements, in developing 
 the latent power of the infant intellect and will. And once 
 more, I think that as we thus look at the detail of the kinder- 
 garten training as it is given us here arranged in its natura/ 
 groups, we form a better idea of the goal to which every 
 portfon of that detail tends ; a goal beyond the school to which 
 we see the instruction immediately pointing, beyond the 
 higher instruction to which the school studies stretch out, to 
 that real goal of all human life and endeavour — the perfecting 
 of the whole nature for the active service of God and man. 
 
 If we return now to the synoptical table, leaving the kinder- 
 garten, we come to the space contained between two horizontal 
 lines which designates the school period of study. Children of 
 the classes above those who attend the elementary infant 
 schools generally go to school at seven or eight years old. 
 They have, perhaps, already some acquaintance with the art ot 
 
according to Frobels Principles. 15 
 
 reading ; a certain number of these, whose parents have been 
 most careful, will know even something of writing and count- 
 ing ; all the rest the schoolmaster has to teach. Nor does it 
 matter how little they know — his whole success depends not on 
 their power of reading words of two syllables, but on their 
 power of learning; and whether he has to teach arithmetic or 
 grammar, geometry or geography — he must draw largely on the 
 faculty of observation, of comparison and judgment — and he 
 finds them all unused to exercise. He wants accuracy of hand 
 and eye for writing, and drawing, and needlework ; pliancy of 
 limb and attention to time for gymnastic exercises ; and he v 
 has to work with stiff and feeble fingers, with ears unused to | 
 time, and eyes unused to form. But, on the other hand, if his I 
 pupils come to him at eight years old from the kindergarten, \ 
 with its transition classes, then, as this table shows us, each 
 branch of necessary instruction rests upon a foundation already 
 acquired, or is aided by faculties already exercised. 
 
 We all know what the general programme of school instruc- 
 tion is, and we have it in outline here. It may be gathered 
 under three groups : — Language^ represented at first by the 
 mother-tongue, and grammar, and general history ; the science 
 of form and number, represented by arithmetic, geometry, and 
 drawing ; and natural science, beginning with natural history 
 and cosmography. To these may, indeed should be, added 
 music and gymnastics for both sexes, and needlework for girls. 
 These are valuable as portions of the training of the active 
 powers and of the senses which school education so sadly 
 neglects. The most indispensable instruction must embrace 
 the three groups enumerated above, and all further instruction 
 takes its departure from them. Now, if we look at the table 
 and notice the colour of the lines which are traced under each 
 school subject, we see the lines similarly coloured coming up 
 from below from some branch of kindergarten training, higher 
 amid the games or occupations which were derived from one or 
 
1 6 Progressive Development 
 
 other of the three fundamental forms ; and this kindergarten 
 work has trained the very aptitude required for such or such 
 branch of school work, or laid down the first lines of the know- 
 ledge school instruction purports to impart. Nothing, as you 
 see, which is brought before the schoolboy (or girl) is absolutely 
 strange to him. It is, indeed, leading him to the unknown, 
 but it is linked to the known. As compared with the labour 
 of the untrained children, it is like learning a new piece of 
 poetry in one's own tongue as compared with learning a series of 
 words in a foreign language. Once more let me point out how 
 this table helps to fix attention on that most important fact, of 
 the connexion of all the apparently trivial occupations of a 
 nursery class with the difficult lessons and discipline of school 
 years, and through them with the wider studies and experience 
 which finally fit man out for the highest moral and intellectual 
 labour. Opponents of the system, or careless observers, may, 
 perhaps, say that continuity is in one sense a natural and in- 
 evitable one; whatever a child learns by himself, or from 
 others, the story he reads, the sum he is forced to do, the 
 \ animals that he sees around him, the weary grammar over which 
 I he sheds his tears, are all connected, somehow or other, with the 
 knowledge of later years, is absorbed into it, and becomes a 
 part of the intellectual store. Yes — somehow or other! But 
 with Frobel it is purposed beforehand — it is done in orderly 
 sequence ; and each game or occupation has its special object 
 of exercising some faculty, of cultivating some quality, in a 
 methodical manner for future use, and to do this through the 
 means of instruction which lays the methodical foundation for 
 future instruction. 
 
 And if a table like this could mark the moral growth, as it 
 marks the lines of intellectual development, we should see that 
 the qualities most needed by boy and man — the patient re- 
 solution that overcomes difficulties, the love of truth that is 
 cultivated by perfect accuracy of wo'-k and expression, the 
 
according to FrdbeTs Principles. 1 7 
 
 kindly feelings generated by sharing the work and success of 
 others, freedom of thought and invention which lead to 
 respecting the work and the freedom of others, reverence for 
 all greatness and^oodness which is the germ of religion — are 
 casting their roots into the character by the aid of that same 
 early discipline, ready to expand and strengthen as life 
 becomes freer and richer in action and opportunities. 
 
 We have nearly completed our survey of the table. We 
 have examined it through the portion devoted to the kinder- 
 garten, through the school portion, and, finally, we may trace 
 the upper branches of this tree of culture, whose root is in the 
 ball games. Those branches are still gathered in the same 
 groups, only modified as they enlarge. Language now em- 
 braces literature and all that bears on human life and conduct 
 tending to the highest philosophy ; science becomes wider in 
 some directions, and more abstract in others ; the study of form 
 becomes the study of the fine arts ; and in this highest stage 
 of their progress, while each branch demands more special 
 cultivation, yet the links that bind them all become more 
 apparent. The close affinities that underlie all sections of the 
 great field of knowledge begin to be felt, and amid the widest 
 divergencies of special researches there is seen to be a higher 
 harmony in which they converge in the same great search for 
 truth. Lord Bacon has somewhere made a fine remark on the 
 different order of minds that love to seek resemblances or 
 differences, the latter occupying the larger number ; while the 
 higher toned minds seek the resemblance in which apparent 
 differences meet and rise above men's knowledge to philosophy 
 and the higher efforts of imagination. It is the same with the 
 course of human culture as men advance towards the full 
 development of their nature. While special studies demand 
 their time and claim the exercise of special aptitudes, the mind 
 accustomed to the exercise of all its powers cannot be thus 
 limited in its interests and sympathies, and tends more and 
 
 c 
 
1 8 Progressive Development , &c, 
 
 more, as the nature ripens and expands, to rise from the lowe? 
 ground of separate action, to the higher level of philosophic 
 thought and union. 
 
 To {q'n is it given to reach these serene heights ; but inde- 
 Anitely higher than it now is might be the stand-point of all, 
 !f education were systematically directed to the full develop- 
 ment of each man's nature, according to the means of his 
 natural faculties and opportunities ; if no conventional barriers, 
 no dreary morass of neglect, hemmed in the mental growth. 
 How many, now blind to any necessary connection between 
 morals and knowledge, between active life and a life of con- 
 templation or study, how many wandering in apparently 
 opposing tracks of work and opinion, would, if so educated, be 
 able at least to feel the unity of all separate endeavours to read 
 the laws of God as inscribed on the face of nature and in the 
 heart of man, and recognize the duty of living in willing 
 obedience to them. 
 
 To keep this foremost as the ideal of life is the true purpose 
 of education, to which all special cultivation, all men's acquire- 
 ments, must ever be subordinate. Frobel never loses sight of 
 this purpose, and from the craidle, from the ball games with the 
 infants, to the fulness of self-conscious endeavours in the high- 
 est pursuits of science and philosophy, directs us ceaselessly to 
 it If then Madame de Portugall by this visible ouUine of his 
 system helps to make this, his highest aim, more clearly mani- 
 fest, to keep it more distinctly before the minds of all kinder- 
 garten teachers, we may gladly accept her help, and thank her 
 for this new service to the cause. 
 
THE USE OF STORIES 
 
 KINDERGARTEN. 
 
 By anna BUCKLAND. 
 
 Amc»ngst the great thinkers who have planned schemes of 
 education, Frobel, above all others, founds his system on the 
 wide principle, that the highest type of humanity which edu- 
 cation can produce is reached by the equal and simultaneous 
 growth of every faculty. He studies the child as it is, taking 
 it as from God, and on the knowledge gained by close and 
 patient observation of the child's nature, he plans a system of 
 development the result of which is to be, not the expression 
 of an individual educator's ideal of humanity, but the full, 
 rich, harmonious life of every faculty, the germs of which he 
 finds in the child. Hence Frobel's system provides for the 
 nourishment of every root in its earliest stage, on the ground, 
 that all are essential to a noble, perfect growth, and that 
 one-sided culture at any stage produces contraction and 
 deformity. 
 
 Starting from these two fundamental principles — first, that 
 the development of every faculty existing in the child is 
 essential for the production of the highest type of humanity ; 
 and, secondly, that for perfect, harmonious development there 
 
 C 2 
 
 '^^ OF TH?; ^ 
 
20 The Use of Stories 
 
 must be simultaneous growth — we are not surprised to find 
 that in Frobel's system aesthetic cuhure occupies at starting a 
 large space. 
 
 He notices that, of all the mental faculties, the aesthetic is 
 one of the first to unfold in the mind of a child ; and he 
 concludes, therefore, that its training and culture have imme- 
 diate claims on the educator. Whatever the use of aesthetics 
 may be to the child in the work of gaining the ireans of 
 material existence in future life, is not in question; the 
 fact that the faculty is there, is sufficient to show that it is 
 one of the essential roots by means of which the child's 
 nature receives nourishment, needful for its perfect, healthy, 
 vigorous growth. Frobel does not presume, therefore, to treat 
 aesthetics as the mere ornaments of life — " the efflorescence 
 of civilization," as Herbert Spencer calls them — the culture of 
 which may be deferred to some far distant day of idle leisure 
 in a future, golden age, in order meantime to press forward 
 the studies necessary for the preservation and maintenance of 
 material existence. "When," says Herbert Spencer, "the 
 forces of Nature have been fully conquered to man's use, 
 when the means of production have been brought to perfec- 
 tion, when labour has been economized to the highest degree, 
 when education has been so systematized that a preparation 
 for the more essential activities may be made with compara- 
 tive rapidity, and when consequently there is a great increase 
 of spare time, then will the Beautiful both in Art and Nature 
 rightly fill a large space in the minds of all." 
 
 If it were possible to contract education into a training, 
 which had for its first object the obtaining of the means for 
 improved material existence, we might ask whether the race so 
 trained were likely to have any large space of mind left, to be 
 filled by Beauty, in the idle years, after Nature had been 
 forced to contribute all she could to man's material prosperity. 
 A civilization which was separated from aesthetics would tend 
 
/;/ the Kindergarten. 
 
 n 
 
 rather to " lay waste our powers," and lead us on at last to 
 say — 
 
 '* Little we see in Nature that is ours, 
 We have given our hearts aw^ay, a sordid boon. 
 This sea, that bares her bosom to the moon, 
 The vy^inds, that will be howling at all hours, 
 And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers. 
 For this — for everything, we are out of tune 5 
 It moves us not." • • • . 
 
 But a one-sided system of education, even when advanced 
 by so earnest and noble a thinker as Herbert Spencer, must 
 in the end be counteracted by Nature herself, who, by con- .: 
 tinually re-asserting her power, defeats all attempts to cramp ;[^^ 
 her energies in any direction. The vitality of the aesthetic 
 faculty cannot be extinguished by any system which denies it 
 culture, much as it may lose in truth of action for lack of due 
 training. Early history and early literature prove to us that 
 the sense of the Beautiful in Nature and in character wakes 
 into vigorous life before man begins to concern himself about 
 the material wealth laid up in Nature's storehouse, or to seek 
 to turn it to his use through intellect and labour. It is the 
 same in individual life ; the first perceptions of the child are of 
 beauty. The baby crows with delight at the beauty of the 
 round, silvery moon in the dark sky, and the little child gazes 
 with tender love at the beauty of the daisies in the green grass, 
 long before he concerns himself as to the relation to his 
 physical life of the heavenly bodies and of the productions of 
 the earth. 
 
 Those who believe with Frobel that each litde child is a 
 thought of God will readily grant that this early unfolding of 
 the aesthetic faculty is a part of the Divine plan ; for it is by 
 means of this faculty that, as soon as the knowledge of God 
 is presented to the little child, he is able to perceive at once 
 the beauty of goodness in the Divine character, and the sense 
 
22 The Use of Stories 
 
 of this beauty calls forth emotions of admiration, love, joy, 
 and reverence. 
 
 We see, therefore, why Frobel gives so large a space in 
 his system to aesthetic culture ; and why he places it at once 
 under the hands of the skilled educator. He sees how this 
 faculty is one of the essential roots on which growth depends, 
 that it must be supplied at once with fitting nourishment; 
 and he perceives that it is connected with the most solemn 
 relations and duties of human existence. We find, therefore, 
 in the Kindergarten, that the means are provided by which 
 the aesthetic faculty may be developed and trained to a keen 
 perception of beauty in form, colour, and sound, as well as in 
 character and life. Artistic design, lessons on form, combi- 
 nations of colours, drawing, modelling in clay, flowers and 
 beautiful natural objects, music, poetiy, and imaginative litera- 
 ture, are all provided, as necessary to the earliest education of 
 the child. It is of the imaginative literature alone that we 
 now have to speak. 
 
 A glance at Madame de Portugall's synoptical table shows 
 us that the line which in later education is marked as litera- 
 ture is reached from stories in the Kindergarten. Literature 
 is thus recognized as necessary at starting for the complete 
 development of the child. It is not to be regarded merely as 
 a source of amusement, but is to be placed among the 
 essentials of education. W^e may notice here the deeper 
 insight which Frobel has into the nature of children, as well 
 as into the meaning and purposes of literature, if we observe 
 the view which Professor Bain takes of imaginative literature 
 in his scheme of education. He sees in it only " a means 
 for indulging the emotions " — " an ingredient in the satisfac- 
 tion of life," and goes on — " In addition to our enjoyment 
 gained from realities, we crave for the contribution to our 
 enjoyment which comes from ideality. Now Ideality is a 
 different thing for different ages, fairy tales and extravaganzas 
 
in the Ki7idergarten, 23 
 
 for the young ; the Poetry of Milton for the old. There is 
 nothing educative in the first instance, we are not aiming at 
 instruction, but drinking in emotion. The gratifying of 
 children with the Literature of Imagination is a matter for 
 the parent, as much as giving them country walks, or holiday 
 treats." --^ 
 
 It is true that the education of a child is by no means con- 
 fined to the school-room ; and the purposes which imaginative 
 literature serves may be answered by the stories given to 
 children by thoughtful parents, as well as by their use in the 
 Kindergarten. The point of difference between Frobel and 
 Bain is not, whether stories are to be given in or out of the 
 school-room, but whether they are to be called "educative." 
 And the reason why Professor Bain denies this term to 
 imaginative literature is, that he does not hold the aesthetic 
 faculty to be one of those roots, the constant and fitting 
 nourishment of which is essential to the perfect growth and 
 development of the whole being. He regards the aesthetic 
 faculty as one that may very well be left out of education 
 altogether, which serves no great purpose in life, and is only a 
 means for an increase of selfish enjoyment. It is against 
 this view that we give some of the uses of stories in the 
 Kindergarten ; admitting that the same ends may be served 
 by stories at home \ but especially urging that they should be 
 used as means of development and training, and not as a 
 mere holiday gratification : for if the stories of childhood are 
 to be sought as a means only for exciting emotion, and put 
 out of the sphere of education altogether, the line of stories 
 will not lead up to Milton in older life, but to the sensational 
 novel, or gossiping journal. 
 
 In giving some of the chief uses of stories in the Kinder- 
 garten, we are at the same time using arguments for the study 
 of literature in later education ; but it must not be forgotten 
 that there are many important advantages in the study of 
 
24 TJie Use of Stories 
 
 our best writers, besides those gained in the early use of 
 stories. 
 
 Stories are the child's first introduction into that grand 
 world of the ideal in character and life ; and the first and 
 highest use of stories is to enable a child to form a pure and 
 noble ideal of what man may be and do. A child who is 
 taught only certain moral precepts, and who has no representa- 
 tion put before him of these truths expressed in characters 
 and actions, rising above the common level, will lack the 
 courage, the energy, the aspiration, and still more the humility, 
 necessary to raise his own character and life to the highest 
 standard — 
 
 " We live by Admiration, Hope, and Love, 
 And even as these are well and wisely fixed. 
 In dignity of being we ascend." 
 
 A second use of stories is in the illustrations they supply to 
 children of the laws governing life. The lesions of experience 
 are only learnt in the course of years ; and children have at 
 once to begin to live in a world in which they are strangers. 
 We may tell children that certain causes produce certain 
 effects, but the lesson is soon forgotten ; if the law, however, 
 is shown in action in a story, the consequences remain fixed 
 in the mind, and again and again through life serve as a guide 
 under similar circumstances. An intelligent old gardener, 
 whose family are now risen in the world and well known, used 
 to read to his children directions for conduct from the Bible, 
 and then illustrate these by stories from Shakespeare's Plays : 
 and this showing of the great truths of life in their proper 
 action in the world gave the lessons a living power, that could 
 not pass away. 
 
 A third use of stories is the sense they give a child of a 
 world beyond his own ; and thus, next to companionship, they 
 serve to destroy that egotism which looks on self as centre of 
 
/;/ the Kindergarten. 2$ 
 
 all things. The child perceives that he stands in brotherly 
 relation to children he has never seen or known, but who 
 enjoy what he does, who have the same difficulties and 
 temptations to overcome, and from this knowledge spring up 
 a genial love for others and the cheerful courage that the 
 sense of companionship gives. 
 
 A fourth use of sto7'ies is for the development of sympathy, 
 or the imagination of the heart. Stories bring before a child 
 a large amount of human experience, with which he would 
 otherwise be unfamiliar ; but by the help of imagination he 
 can conceive what others suffer or enjoy ; and thus, without 
 unduly exciting emotion, it can be kept in healthy exercise ; 
 and the child is trained to quickness of perception in regard 
 to the feelings of others, and is prepared for entering into 
 joys and sorrows beyond his actual range of experience. 
 
 A fifth use of stories is in bringing the power of example to 
 ^ bear upon children. The true influence of example, we must 
 notice, is not that of a pattern to be copied ; children should 
 not be encouraged to practise direct imitations of particular 
 actions, which are held up to admiration, because this leads 
 only to a petty vain attempt to repeat what has been 
 admired, in hope of getting the same applause. But the real 
 power of example lies in the special inspiration it gives to a 
 particular principle of conduct. For this reason, the best 
 example stories are those taken from times or countries in 
 which life was different from the present, so that the action 
 may not be literally repeated, but that it may rather rouse to 
 greater vigour the principle or feeling upon which the special 
 action was founded. The story of the good Samaritan, with 
 its close, " Go and do likewise," illustrates the true meaning 
 and force of example stories. 
 
 In the use of stories in the Kindergarten, it is important 
 that the stock should not be too large. The repetition of a 
 story is not tedious to children. They delight in an old story, 
 
25 The Use of Stories 
 
 for all the world is new to them, and they seek a rest from 
 novelty in familiarity ; just as, when the world grows old to us, 
 we seek a change from monotony in novelty. An old story 
 has a growing influence upon children, whilst the first effect 
 of a new story is often scarcely felt. In fact a good story 
 cannot be thoroughly understood, nor can it answer all the 
 purposes it is meant to serve, until it has been repeated many 
 times. The notion that children's stories have in them nothing 
 educative, that they are to be classed only among the gratifi- 
 cations of life, has led to their being supplied to children in 
 such abundance that they are often only skipped through and 
 thrown aside. One strong plea for the use of stories in the 
 Kindergarten is, that they may be really studied and under- 
 stood, so as to serve for the true development and training of 
 the child, and not for the undue stimulation of the imagina- 
 tion into a spurious, irregular life. It is scarcely necessary to 
 say that the stories selected for the Kindergarten should be 
 true to the principles of good literature ; that they should be 
 simple and free from casuistry, false sentiment, and exaggera- 
 tions of every kind ; that they should be of bright and delicate 
 fancy, sweet, tender, and true. 
 
 A short analysis of children's literature may, perhaps, be 
 helpful in guiding the choice of stories for the Kindergarten. 
 We will divide it into the usual classes of Ideal, or purely 
 imaginative literature, and Realistic, or having a form taken 
 from life in the actual world. Under the head of imaginative 
 literature, we place fairy-stories, allegories, and fables. We 
 will take the composition of a fairy-story first, not only 
 because a fairy-story has the greatest charm for children, but 
 also because it is really one of the higher forms of literature. 
 The idea in the minds of many story-tellers, and story-writers 
 *oo, is that a fairy-story means any jumble of incidents, in 
 which for no distinct purpose or design natural laws are set 
 at defiance. But the very meaning of the word "faerie" is 
 
/;/ the Kindergarten, 27 
 
 spiritual ; and if we analyze one of the genuine old fairy- 
 stories, we shall nearly always find that there is at the heart ot 
 it some great spiritual truth, which forms the soul, as it were, 
 of the story. The incidents of the story are all designed for 
 the purpose of showing this truth in action ; and what makes 
 it " faerie " is, that in order to give the freest scope for the 
 working out of the truth, fancy may create a world for the 
 action of it — a world in which there is no restriction from 
 natural laws and material necessities. It is in fact a kind of 
 superior action given to spirit over matter. 
 
 We may illustrate the composition of a true fairy-story by 
 a brief analysis of " The Sleeping Beauty." The inner truth at 
 the heart of this story is, that hatred works death — " he that 
 hateth his brother is a murderer " — but love is stronger than 
 hatred, and it is through love alone that the works of hatred 
 are to be destroyed. First there is the christening of the new 
 child; at the very beginning its life is threatened by the 
 hatred of the malignant fairy, out of revenge because she was 
 not invited to the feast. The child is to die, though the curse 
 is afterwards changed into the death-like sleep, which is death 
 as regards all the purposes of life. The king tries to defeat 
 the curse of hatred by the unspiritual means of destroying all 
 the spindles in his kingdom; but this, of course, is of no avail. 
 The day comes when, in spite of this precaution, the maiden 
 finds the wicked fairy spinning. She takes the spindle, pricks 
 herself, and immediately sinks with all the world around her 
 into the death-like sleep. Around the castle grows the thick 
 hedge of thorns and briers, as high as the towers, so that it 
 cannot be leapt over ; and this is set by hatred to prevent the 
 entrance of love into the world of death. Then one after 
 another the princes come ; they wish to see the beauty of the 
 sleeping maiden ; but this desire cannot carry them through 
 the thorns and briers. A hundred years pass away, and 
 the curse of hatred still works; time, that all things else 
 
28 The Use of Stories 
 
 destroys, has in itself no power to impair the strength of the 
 curse. At last, in due time, the true prince appears. He is 
 counselled by prudent people not to try to enter, the castle, 
 for he cannot do so but through suffering, and the end may' 
 be only death. But the prospect of suffering, or death, can- 
 not daunt him ; love is stronger than fear and the instinct of 
 self-preservation. He approaches the hedge, and the thorns 
 and briers are to him but as fragrant roses — this is the first 
 victory of love over the obstacles placed by hatred in the way 
 of its ultimate triumph. The roses close behind him, and 
 become again thorns and briers ; love can carry him forward, 
 but there is no smoothing of the way for retreat. At length he 
 enters the castle. The whole world within shares in the sleep 
 of death. The dogs in the castle-yard, the pigeons on the 
 roof, the flies on the window-panes, the servants in the kitchen, 
 the courtiers, the king and the queen, all lie under the power 
 of hatred. At the first expression of a love which can " give 
 and hazard all," the whole world of death wakes to life, with 
 the freshness and vigour of a new spring-day. The deadly 
 curse of hatred is destroyed; thought and work are filled 
 with energy ; everything is in action. " And they all lived 
 happily to the end," is the conclusion of the fine old story. 
 
 If we analyze in the same way any other of the genuine old 
 fairy- stories, such as " Cinderella,'' or " Mrs. HoUe," we shall find 
 that the play of fancy is not the mere irregular wandering of 
 a dream, but that there is distinct unity of design in the 
 incidents, while at the heart of all of them lies some great 
 immortal truth, which gives them their hold on generation 
 after generation, and will preserve them in the perpetual 
 freshness of child-like beauty as long as the world shall last. 
 
 It is in contrasting the old fairy-stories with such books as 
 " Alice's Adventures in Wonderland " that we feel the more 
 strongly the artistic perfection of the old stories. Natural 
 laws and ordinary combinations are set aside in the Alice 
 
in the Kivdergarten, 29 
 
 books, not that fancy may have free scope to create a world 
 for the working out of any great spiritual truth, but only for 
 the sake of the odd effect which incongruity produces. It is 
 Wonderland, but it is not Fairyland. There is humour in 
 the incongruity ; but it requires familiarity with ordinary laws 
 and combinations to feel the humour of incongruity; and 
 children are much less struck with the odd effect than older 
 people ; as a little child once asked — " Why shouldn!t a. 
 walrus go out with a carpenter?" Children miss also the 
 slight satire which underlies some parts, and, together with the 
 humour, gives to the bright fancy of these books a charm for 
 older readers. 
 
 Allegories are more spiritualized than fairy-stories, and 
 have less of human interest. In an allegory, the personages 
 of the story are not human beings, but represent single 
 abstract qualities. The scene also of the story, though 
 taken from the material world, is composed of objects, most 
 of which are symbols. There is consequently less unity of 
 idea, and less unity of art, in the construction of an allegory. 
 They serve good purpose in direct religious teaching, and in 
 moral training. They are useful also in training children to 
 understand symbols, and to see readily the relation of form 
 to essence, and the fitness of certain material things to express 
 abstract qualities. This will prepare them, not only for the 
 later study of our great classic allegories of English literature, 
 but also for the understanding of poetry, and of many parts 
 of the Bible ; and will enable them to see in Nature, not only 
 the beauty of material form, but the deep truths she teaches, 
 so that — " The earth and common face of Nature " may speak 
 to them " rememberable things." 
 
 Fables are stories of imagination, in that speech is given to 
 animals. The essence of a fable is the representation of the 
 faults and follies of human beings, as reflected in the sayings 
 and doings of the lower creation. A fable is therefore neces- 
 
30 The Use of Stories 
 
 sarily a satire ; and this is an element of literature which it 
 would be dangerous for children to learn to love for its own 
 sake. It requires, therefore, careful use in the Kindergarten, 
 and should be reserved only for minor faults common among 
 the children themselves. A good-natured, hearty laugh at the 
 reflection of ourselves in a fable is a very wholesome thing ; 
 lut if the laugh is a sneer at humanity, there is a fear of 
 destroying reverence and love. 
 
 Realistic stories are those best fitted for illustrating the laws 
 by which life is governed, and thus showing to children that 
 the consequences which follow conduct are as sure as the 
 sequence of cause and effect. A good realistic story should 
 consist of one general law of life, shown in its ordinary legiti- 
 mate action. The scenes for the action must be the real 
 world of human character and life. Though a realistic story 
 is thus a sketch from nature, it must be a picture, and not a 
 mere photogi-aph. The attempt to imitate exactly the sayings 
 and doings of children, as in the books called " Helen's 
 Babies " and " Totty's Book," though very amusing to read, 
 is not real literature, because there is no artistic purpose or 
 design in them. Jane Austen's novels are some of the best 
 examples in literature of good realistic stories. There is in 
 each a distinct, intelligent purpose, which is artistically worked 
 out in characters and scenes, drawn entirely from the living 
 around her. 
 
 As one object of realistic stories for children is to accustom 
 them to expect certain results as the consequences of certain 
 actions, it is important that they should deal with the simple, 
 ordinary laws of life, and not with paradoxes or exceptions. 
 In mature literature it has been the work of spme of the 
 finest master-hands to show how the action of a lower law may 
 be on occasions set aside by the intervention of a higher, and 
 that we have to take into consideration a wider range in pre- 
 dicting results ; but exceptions only puzzle children, who use 
 
in the Kindergarten. 3^ 
 
 them at once for generalizing, and it is important to establish 
 first the general law as the common rule for conduct. Extra- 
 ordinary stories, in which wholly inadequate means are re- 
 presented as producing desired results, lay the foundations 
 of idleness and recklessness of consequences in after life, and 
 are the cause of much bad work and senseless disregard of 
 natural laws. Perfect truthfulness to nature is essential in a 
 good realistic story. The incidents must be such as naturally 
 follow certain causes ; the characters must represent real, 
 living children of the true type, not precocious exceptions ; 
 and the feeling must be neither of a kind unusual in a child, 
 nor of a degree beyond what the situation requires. Children 
 so soon detect falseness, and every attempt to produce impres- 
 sion by exaggeration wakens distrust in the mind of a child, 
 almost unconsciously to himself. 
 
 A realistic story for children must not only be true to life, 
 but the characters and scenes should be taken from that por- 
 tion of life which belongs to children. It is a principle of the 
 best school of literature, that all subjects are not subjects for 
 art; because art has a purpose of its own, which is not 
 answered by the merely artistic treatment of every kind of 
 subject. The highest function of art is to lead the mind to 
 the love of the beautiful in nature and human Hfe; and in 
 mature literature the glory of the highest ideal cannot be 
 shown without showing the hard conflict, the upward struggle 
 through darkness and evil to the last victory of light and duty ; 
 but the introductioir of mature evil into children's literature, 
 before they have to enter into conflict with it, and before 
 faith has taken such root as to assure the final victory of good, 
 has a most injurious and depressing effect upon a child's mind. 
 It is needful for the Kindergarten teacher to keep this in 
 mind, because so many stories for children have appeared of 
 late depicting the low current of London life, and dealing, not 
 with the faults of childhood, but with the mature sins of 
 
32 The Use of Stories 
 
 drunkenness, brutality, and coarse vice. True temperance 
 stories for children are those in which the nobleness of self- 
 denial and control over appetite is shown; and feelings of 
 compassion for the erring are most truly and effectually trained 
 in childhood by calling out pity for a companion in age who 
 has yielded to a mutual temptation. The world of the poor 
 belongs to the life of children ; and stories of the poor, of the 
 hardships they have to endure, are useful in awakening sym- 
 pathy \ there are also in such stories to be found the highest 
 examples of patience and unselfish love. 
 
 Stories that belong to other subjects of culture have also 
 their place in the Kindergarten ; but these may be left to their 
 own special lines. Such are Bible stories, natural history 
 stories, stories of travel and adventure, biography or history. 
 
 It has been taken for granted that, in using stories in the 
 Kindergarten, the stories are read by the teacher, and told to 
 the children. It is sometimes said that telling stories is a 
 gift ; but it is only an art, more easy at first to some persons 
 than to others. The chief reason why some persons cannot tell 
 stories is because they have "no story to tell." They have 
 only a dim, confused picture of one in the mind, and the first 
 thing to be done is to get this vague image perfectly clear and 
 vivid. For this purpose, it will be necessary for them to read 
 the story over several times ; and in order to be sure that 
 the impression is strong enough to reproduce it accurately, 
 and without any hesitation^ it may be useful to write it from 
 memory, and compare it with the original. 
 
 The next thing is to look for the leading idea, or inner 
 truth, of the story, and then mark the strong points of the 
 narrative. They are the features that express the soul, as it 
 were, and in telling the story they will require the greatest 
 prominence ; and if the teacher supplies additional details, 
 these should all tend to the further illustration of the leading 
 idea. Children love details, but unnecessary particulars only 
 
tn the Kindergarten^ 33 
 
 confuse, and destroy effect. If, for instance, a room has to be 
 described, the first point to be determined is what idea the 
 room has to express, as poverty, cheerfulness, disorder; and 
 then only such details as strengthen the idea, and conform to 
 it, need be given. Teachers who picture Bible scenes often 
 quite destroy the effect of the narrative, because they do not 
 preserve the relation between the details they supply and the 
 leading idea of the story. 
 
 It is better in narration to keep to one single line, and 
 avoid episodes ; for children easily lose a thread ; and if their 
 interest has once been diverted, it is difficult for them to 
 return to the former line. It is often necessary, therefore, to 
 sacrifice the idea of the simultaneous action of two lines of 
 narration in order to complete one, before taking up the 
 other. For instance, in telling the story of the First Book of 
 Spenser's " Faerie Queene," to a class of children from, twelve 
 to fourteen, it was found necessary, at the part where the 
 Red Cross Knight and Una are separated, to continue the 
 adventures of the Red Cross Knight up to the point where he 
 meets Una again, and then to take up Una's story, and tell 
 that continuously to the same point. Spenser, it wiU be 
 remembered, preserves the idea of simultaneous action, by 
 taking up the story of each in alternate cantos ; but children, 
 even of that age, were incapable of carrying on the two lines 
 of narrative at the same time, and tangled the threads of the 
 story. It is desirable in the repetition of a story to keep as 
 nearly as possible to the first version of it. Children see at 
 once the details of a story, and retain a vivid impression of 
 them in the inward eye. They are always ready to correct the 
 slightest deviation from the original with a serious air of 
 reproof, for it is associated in their minds with a want of truth- 
 fulness. Thus in telling a story, it was once said, there were 
 three plates on the shelf. Every bright little mental eye saw 
 the three plates, as plainly as possible ; and when, on repeat- 
 
 D 
 
34 The Use of Stories 
 
 mg the story, it was said there were two plates on the sheifj 
 an indignant exclamation at once arose, — " There were thret 
 plates, last time there were th7'ee plates." A charitable little 
 child suggested, " But perhaps one has been broken since last 
 time " ; the general feeling, however, was, that the second ver- 
 sion was not strictly truthful. 
 
 Conversations have much more effect if related in the first 
 person ; and this form also gives the story-teller opportunity 
 for varying the voice and manner, according to the character 
 of the speaker. Children always begin to brighten into eager 
 interest directly the story becomes dramatic ; and more feel- 
 ing can be given to the touching passages. 
 
 The use of expectation and surprise is helpful in keeping 
 up the interest of little children, and questions and guesses 
 recall their attention at once, if it should have wandered. If, 
 however, these are used too much, children sometimes become 
 rather confused between the guesses of the class and the facts 
 of the story. 
 
 The difficulty of telling stories to children is one which, like 
 all others, disappears by practice. Persons who are unac- 
 customed to be with children often fancy they cannot tell 
 stories, but if they only get the outlines of one story thoroughly 
 and clearly impressed in their own minds, and repeat this 
 story a few times to children, they will find that very soon they 
 can tell it easily and well. They can then in the same way 
 try another and another. It has been well said that the 
 best way, when you think you cannot^ do a thing, is to 
 go and do it. And certainly there is no art in the world 
 which can be learned only from directions, nor is there any 
 talent so great that it can attain success without practice. In 
 the majority of cases, it is impossible for any one to decide 
 that he is lacking in the necessary ability for any art until he 
 has done his best for some time to acquire it. If a Kinder- 
 garten teacher believes she has no gift for telling stories, let 
 
in the Kindergarten. 35 
 
 her try what she can do without a gift, and the probability is, 
 that she will find herself more richly endowed than she thought 
 she was. It used to be said that teaching was a gift, and 
 so in a certain sense it is ; but we are beginning to find out 
 that it is a gift which nearly every good and loving woman 
 possesses, only she may not at once know just how to use it. 
 The very love for little children, and the sympathy with them, 
 which lie at the heart of the Kindergarten system, will 
 teach its teachers how to put before the minds of children 
 bright pictures from that grand world of the ideal in which the 
 little ones often seem to be more at home than in the real. 
 
 In taking up in this paper the single line of imaginative 
 literature in the Kindergarten scheme, it will readily be under- 
 stood that no plea is put forward for giving it any other than 
 its due place amongst those subjects which help to promote 
 harmonious growth and development. No comparison is 
 intended between the claims of literature and science as agents 
 of education ; because both are believed to be of equal neces- 
 sity to the formation of a complete character, and to a prepara- 
 tion for the duty and work of life. In a system of education 
 which has a place for every God-given faculty of man, there 
 can be no attempt at estimating education values, so as to 
 bring one class of subjects forward to the neglect of another. 
 The Kindergarten system says rather, with Milton, " Let us 
 be humbly wise." Let us take the little child as a thought of 
 God, and in faith and trust cultivate every faculty of its 
 nature; assured that the realization of the Divine ideal in 
 humanity must be its highest type, and that the man or 
 woman, who is most capable of a full, rich, complete life as 
 an individual, is most fitted for advancing the progress of the 
 race in all the best work of this world, as well as best prepared 
 for all that may be beyond this world of immortal growth and 
 worL 
 
 D 2 
 
ON THE 
 
 PHYSICAL EDUCATION OF GIRLS. 
 
 By FRANCES E. HOGGAN, M.D. 
 
 I HAVE chosen the physical education of girls for considera- 
 tion to-night, because it is a subject most fit to engage the 
 attention of all friends of the Kindergarten, from the fact that 
 the need for such education for girls begins when they pass 
 out of the Kindergarten or the nursery into the schoolroom. 
 While in the Kindergarten they have very properly their 
 instruction, their exercise, and their play, in common with 
 little boys; and it would, I believe, be well if this life in 
 common were continued, under careful supervision, through 
 later childhood. We have, however, to take things as we find 
 them, and to consider the special needs of girls in respect of 
 physical education in the present state of society in England, 
 where co-education of the sexes is discountenanced by the 
 majority of unthinking and by some thinking persons, and 
 where, in general, the proper adjustments are wanting which 
 would make co-education of the sexes both harmless and 
 profitable. 
 
 Infants need only be allowed to kick and fling about 
 their little limbs freely, untrammelled by tight or volumi- 
 nous clothing. Their life is spent between sleep, food, and 
 exercise, with a large margin for the latter. Sickly infants ever 
 require medical supervision chiefly in order that their sur 
 roundings may be wisely regulated, suitable food, air, and 
 
Physical Edueatun of Girls. 27 
 
 exercise ensured, and the infant organism placed in the best 
 possible conditions for returning to the healthy standard from 
 which some mischance has caused it to deviate. Healthy 
 infants do not require systematized gymnastic exercises. If 
 their limbs are allowed full play, they will invent the best of 
 exercises for themselves, some of them complicated and 
 comical enough, as, for instance, the feat common to all babies, 
 and which no physical educator has ever attempted to rival, of 
 thrusting the toes into the mouth — a feat which requires for 
 its successful accomplishment much steady and persevering 
 preparatory exercise of whole groups of muscles. Sickly 
 infants may require parts of their muscular system to be 
 specially acted upon and strengthened, so as to restore the lost 
 balance and bring all parts of the body into harmonious rela- 
 tion, but healthy infants will thrive all the better for a little of 
 that wholesome neglect which consists in letting them play and 
 even use their left hand unchecked. It has been well said by 
 a wise friend of children:* **We may leave the infant to 
 nature for exercise ; it will be well attended to and carried 
 through an efficient course of training, reaching every muscle 
 of the body, which we should find it difficult to imitate by 
 art.'' 
 
 Little children in a Kindergarten intelligently conducted 
 may be said to live in an atmosphere of healthful activity. 
 Daily orderly exercise gives them such command over their 
 various groups of muscles that they accomplish with uncon- 
 scious vigour and grace movements which the untrained child 
 goes through clumsily and awkwardly, the clumsiness and 
 awkwardness resulting from a want of co-ordination in the con- 
 traction of muscles which must act together with great delicacy, 
 in obedience to a common impulse communicated from the 
 will, in order to execute many apparently simple movements, 
 such as shaking hands, drawing on a slate, marching, halting 
 • Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, " Lectures on the Laws of Life," 1871. 
 
^S Physical Education of Girls, 
 
 suddenly, &c. Of course, little children who grow up in the 
 
 country, and lead a free out-door life, sliding, jumping, swim- 
 ming, climbing trees, throwing stones, and engaging in all 
 kinds of work and of laborious play, may acquire such control 
 over their muscular system as leaves little to be desired. It 
 is the great merit of the Kindergarten that it is adapted to 
 the wants of town-bred children, debarred from such natural 
 pastimes, as well as to the wants of indolent, ungainly children, 
 and that it renders even the latter apt to execute without 
 awkwardness a great variety of combined movements either 
 slowly, quickly, or with moderate quickness; apt, in short, to 
 exercise control over their whole muscular apparatus, and to 
 adjust it to the requirements of their will. 
 
 The senses, too, which in the majority of little town-bred 
 children of the middle and upper classes are cut off from an 
 adequate supply of objects on which to exercise themselves, 
 and by exercise to develop steadily and healthfully, are 
 methodically trained in the Kindergarten into habits of 
 activity, strengthened by daily pleasurable use, and sharpened 
 by carefully planned exercises and games, which, while they 
 educate, afford at the same time much innocent amusement 
 and delight. 
 
 While on the subject of Kindergartens it may not be out of 
 place to insist on one indispensable condition of their success, 
 viz. that they be intelligently conducted by able, cultured, 
 and efficiently trained women. To give the necessary profes- 
 sional training is the aim of the recently founded London 
 Kindergarten Training College ; and it is the earnest hope of 
 its founders that it may be the means of educating a band of 
 faithful, devoted, large-minded, and large-hearted Kindergarten 
 teachers, who will go out into the English-speaking world as 
 missionaries of the educational reform which Frobel inaugu- 
 rated, and which appeals so powerfully to the best instincts 
 and sympathies of every mother's heart. This reform must be 
 
Physical Education of Girls. 39 
 
 worked for, I again repeat, intelligently and reasonably by 
 adapting the Kindergarten system to the special circumstances 
 of every country, by modifying details of management when 
 found necessary, by allowing even of the possibility of further 
 development in the future. In short, Frobel must take his 
 proper place as a great reformer, an enthusiastic and enlight- 
 ened friend of little children, who systematized and simplified 
 the educational methods which the best mothers and teachers 
 of all ages, led by their intuitive perception of the requirements 
 of very young children, have always been in the habit of em- 
 ploying. He must not be set up as an idol to be blindly 
 worshipped and implicitly obeyed, whose precepts are « to 
 supersede reason and common sense, and to silence their 
 questionings. This would be to erect a fetish, not to choose 
 a guide, and the Kindergarten, thus shorn of healthful in- 
 dividuality and vigour, could never become rooted in English 
 soil. 
 
 Passing on from infants and little children to the physical 
 education of girls, let us consider the wants in this respect of 
 the little girl of seven years of age entering upon school life. 
 She is still on a par with boys gf her own age in activity and 
 muscular strengtii. So far their lines of growth have been 
 parallel, and in general conformation, keen relish for exercise, 
 powers of endurance, and muscular development, they are 
 alike. The boy is perhaps on an average a trifle stronger than 
 the girl, his bones a little heavier, but so slightly marked and 
 so inconstant are these differences that anatomists cannot dis- 
 tinguish between the skeleton of a boy and a girl at this age — 
 they speak only of the characteristics of the child — and it is 
 during the second period of childhood (from seven to fourteen), 
 and the period of youth which succeeds to it, that secondary 
 differences of bodily conformation distinctive of sex super- 
 vene. 
 
 The child of seven, if it has been allowed a reasonable 
 
40 Physical Education of Girls, 
 
 amount of freedom, has, whether it has passed through the 
 Kindergarten or not, been so constantly on the move, has had 
 so much play involving brisk exercise of all its muscles, that 
 it generally thrives and grows strong in spite of many 
 hindrances to the healthful unfolding and strengthening of its 
 faculties founded on misconception and ignorance, or inherent 
 in the conditions of life of its parents. It has probably not 
 yet ceased to use the left hand almost indifferently with the 
 right, notwithstanding oft repeated reprimands on the awkward- 
 ness of so doing. If it has already been confined in a close 
 schoolroom, and made to sit still on an uncomfortable seat or 
 at 'a desk for several hours a day, the chances are that it 
 throws its flexible body into so many contortions, and indulges 
 in so many antics when school hours are over, that no perma- 
 • nent injury has resulted from long enforced continuance in 
 one position. 
 
 Of boys the same may be said all through their school lives 
 excepting only studious, or very delicate, slightly made boys. 
 The cricket matches eagerly looked forward to, practised for, 
 and entered into heart and soul, the rowing on the river, swim- 
 ming, wrestling, leaping, and the thousand forms of so-called 
 mischief in which boys indulge when let out of school, coun- 
 terbalance the irksome restraints and the positive injuries of 
 their rough-and-ready school life, in this country at least ; and, 
 therefore, in spite of having often little thought bestowed on 
 their school arrangements from the health point of view, they 
 have a chance of growing up strong, vigorous, straight, and 
 capable of physical endurance and exertion. 
 
 With girls it is different. From the time of their regular 
 entrance into the schoolroom, they are expected to lay aside 
 all vigorous play, and to be a hoyden or a tomboy is often 
 thought to be the very acme of impropriety in a young school- 
 girl. Intellectual training in the better class of schools, dull 
 learning by rote in the inferior ones, takes henceforth the first 
 
Physical Education of Girls, '41 
 
 place in a girl's education, and seldom indeed do we find the 
 physical needs of a growing and delicate organization come in 
 for anything approaching adequate attention either in school 
 or home education. And yet with children generally, and 
 with girls especially, the training of the physical powers should 
 take precedence over the training of the intellectual powers, 
 the latter being incapable of unfolding harmoniously in a 
 stunted or deformed body, however brilliant may be the tem- 
 porary or one-sided intellectual development of some over- 
 stimulated or sickly children. 
 
 Let us study first the natural differences between girls and 
 boys in the middle of school life. The difference in strength 
 and solidity of bony structure shadowed forth in early child- 
 hood has become accentuated. The spinal column, with its 
 many beautiful arrangements for supporting the weight of the 
 body, and allowing of easy and vigorous movements,* being 
 largely composed of bone, is weaker in girls, and its adjust- 
 ments, therefore, are thrown more easily out of order. The 
 natural curves of the spine, which develop during child- 
 hood, have a tendency to become exaggerated in girls, and 
 persistent stooping and slight lateral deviations are among the 
 commonest departures from the healthy standard met with in 
 girlhood. The chest is less capacious. The pelvis, or irregular 
 
 * In children the spine or vertebral column is composed of thirty-three 
 separate bones called vertebrae, jointed together, and placed regularly one 
 above another, similar part to similar part, so as to form the skeleton 
 column. Intei-posed between the bodies, or thick parts of each pair of 
 vertebrae, is a plate formed of a thickly felted material called fibro-carti- 
 lage, elastic and tough like indiarubber. Each body has a ring attached 
 to it behind, which is part of a long bony case, the spinal canal, in 
 which the delicate spinal cord is lodged, and carefully protected from jar 
 or pressure under ordinary circumstances. Projecting from this ring are 
 several little levers of bones called processes, which afford points of attach- 
 ment for the muscles, and enable them to give motion of the most com- 
 plex nature to all the parts composing the flexible whole. 
 
4^ Physical Education of Girls, 
 
 bony girdle attached above to the lower part of the spine, 
 below to the lower extremity, is larger in girls than in boys, 
 and the muscular system generally is less well developed. 
 
 From the differences which have thus sprung up between 
 girls and boys may be deduced the special indications for 
 physical education of a girl's growing frame. 
 
 1. The spine is weaker ; therefore it should be less heavily 
 weighted. 
 
 2. The chest is less capacious ; therefore it ought at least to 
 have no hindrances placed in the way of its expansion, but 
 have perfect freedom to enlarge and develop its normal shape 
 and proportions. 
 
 3. The pelvis is larger ; therefore the organs contained in it 
 are more apt to suffer displacement either from compression 
 of the soft abdominal wall about the level of the waist, or as a 
 consequence of severe physical strain, whether caused by 
 exercise too prolonged or by exercise too severe in its 
 nature. 
 
 4. The muscular system is less well developed ; therefore it 
 requires to have the special attention of parents and educators 
 directed towards it, for the purpose of strengthening it and 
 making it fit to sustain the functions of mature life. 
 
 Apart from such general duties towards children of both 
 sexes as a regular supply of suitable food, which is as neces- 
 sary, but not more so, to girls as to boys, and the recognition 
 of the important principle that intellectual training ought, 
 during the years of ordinary school life, that is, up to the age 
 of adolescence, to be subordinated both for boys and for girls 
 to physical and moral training, let us consider one by one the 
 principal things which, from our point of view, require to be 
 modified or reformed in the education of girls. 
 
Physical Educatioit of Girls, 43 
 
 I. Dress. 
 
 Girls' dress cries imperiously for reform. In our country 
 fiannel underclothing is a hygienic necessity ; it is the best 
 means we possess of guarding against the extremes of tem- 
 perature to which our shifting climate exposes us. As a rule, 
 boys, after they have passed through the perilous age of bare 
 necks and short petticoats, which sees so many of them sink 
 into the grave, victims of their mothers' ignorance or folly, 
 are clothed from head to foot in flannel or in woollen cloth, 
 unless they have the misfortune to be born to such pinching 
 poverty that anything more than decent covering for the body 
 is looked upon as superfluous. Girls, as a rule, in all classes 
 of society, have only the merest pretence of flannel under- 
 clothing, which serves merely to exaggerate the difference of 
 temperature between the exposed and the covered portions of 
 the body. The trunk is indeed generally clothed in merino 
 or flannel, but for the upper half of the chest no underclothing 
 is provided, and half or the whole of the lower extremities 
 are cased in cotton undergarments. The texture of the upper 
 garments is often flimsy, and unsuitable to a climate in which 
 summer clothing is never required for more than a few weeks 
 at a time. And even the insufficient warm clothing which 
 the girl usually wears is lessened on festive occasions, when it 
 is thought quite right to lower a girl's flannel by two or three 
 inches, to allow of her exposing her neck and chest more 
 completely at an evening party in the depth of winter. All 
 this is wrong, is a positive sin against nature and against com- 
 mon sense. 
 
 If we want to rear healthy girls, we must protect them 
 against the inclemency of the climate by clothing them in 
 flannel, not by making believe to do so. We must teach them 
 those personal duties to themselves and social duties to others 
 which they and we violate, by recklessly exposing their bodies 
 
44 Physical Education of Girls, 
 
 to the inroads of disease just as much as if they were made 
 to swallow some poisonous draught. Girls should be taught 
 from a very early age that wilfully or carelessly to sow the 
 seeds of illness or weakness in themselves is to sin against 
 their body and to nullify the promise of usefulness to others 
 in which all young creatures should delight. That would be 
 truer education than to teach them the names and dates of all 
 our bloody battles, or the exact order of succession of our 
 English kings. I do not wish to undervalue the teachings of 
 history, and I should be sorry indeed to see girls grow up 
 ignorant of the principal events which have succeeded each 
 other in their own and in other countries ; but if one kind of 
 learning must needs be sacrificed to the other, let it not be 
 the one which is indispensable to the raising up of a healthy 
 generation of women. 
 
 Another important, commonly overlooked, point in girls* 
 dress is that it should be light and suitably adjusted. A 
 heavy material does not necessarily imply more warmth than 
 one of different make weighing much less. Fine soft serge 
 may be as warm as a coarse heavy one, and merino or cash- 
 mere is as warm as velveteen ; but the difference in actual 
 weight to be borne is considerable. If to difference of ma- 
 terial are added differences in length and cut in a dress, and 
 the presence or absence of heavy flouncing or kilting, giving 
 no uniform warmth to the body, but constituting a drag on 
 the spine of the most pernicious and wearisome description, 
 it needs no anatomist, one would think, to pronounce that the 
 choice and adjustment of a girl's clothing so as to minimize 
 drag and to prevent pressure from being exercised on internal 
 organs or on important masses of muscle, instead of being 
 borne by the bony framework of the body, is a necessary 
 subject of anxious thought to mothers and educators, and that 
 dress may undoubtedly be made one valuable means of physi- 
 cal education. 
 
Physical Education of Girls, 45 
 
 At the present day it is generally admitted that the spine of 
 girls is weaker than that of boys, and yet they alone of the two 
 have been singled out to wear numerous heavy skirts, some- 
 times so tight that walking is an unsightly and painful exercise, 
 sometimes, just as blind fashion may dictate, inordinately wide 
 and maintained by hoops at such a distance from the body that 
 currents of cold air circulate with ease between them and the 
 body they cover. It is known that a girFs chest is less capa- 
 cious than that of a boy, and yet it is the girls who are put into 
 stays and compressed round the waist by bands and strings 
 almost always too tight for comfortable breathing, and which 
 should not by rights be there at all to impede the circulation 
 and alter the shape of the viscera they overlie. We recognize 
 that the muscular system is less well developed in girls than in 
 boys, and yet, as if we wanted to make their muscles waste, 
 girls' clothing is so ill arranged that they cannot even walk 
 without discomfort, and are eifectually prevented from deriving 
 much pleasure from exercises of a more vigorous kind, such 
 as rowing and skating,* for which nature has in no way dis- 
 qualified them, and which, when learnt in early girlhood, are 
 so conducive to robust health and innocent enjoyment. 
 
 Girls ought to be first clothed according to correct prin- 
 ciples ; and, secondly, they ought to be taught those principles. 
 They should know, for instance, why it is wrong for them to 
 have twenty to thirty yards of material put into one dress, even 
 though the money to pay for it may be quite a secondary consi- 
 deration ; why their undergarments should be light and warm 
 enough to enable them to dispense with multitudinous skirts ; 
 why no tight strings or bands should fasten round the waist, 
 compressing the lower ribs and important abdominal organs ; 
 
 * Great care is necessary in teaching grown-up women to skate, or even 
 to row, as the consequences of skating tumbles or of over-exertion in 
 rowing may be serious to them ; and no violent exercise ought ever to be 
 taken when the pelvic organs are in a state of congestion. 
 
^5 Physical Education of Girls, 
 
 why they should wear no stays, and allow the chest to expand 
 and grow in its natural form, that is to say, to widen and not to 
 become narrower at its lower part. It is not quite enough to 
 say, as a good New England mother once said to her little 
 girl, a friend of mine, when teazed by her to be allowed to 
 wear stays : " Lizzie, if God had made little girls to want the 
 support of stays, He would have put steel casings round them. 
 You can wear stays, if you like, when you are grown up and 
 your own mistress, but as long as you are my little girl, you 
 wear no stays.'' Girls must be shown what mischief results 
 from compressing the lower part of the chest, and altering its 
 natural shape out of all symmetry and beauty, the impeded 
 growth and displacement of internal parts, the weakening of 
 the muscles of the back, condemned by the use of stays to 
 inactivity, the interference with the orderly course of the 
 circulation of the blood, the general impairment of nutrition 
 and the dwarfing of the physical life, and, through it, of the 
 whole life of the heedless or ill-advised young creature, who 
 seeks to attain through physical deformity to a false ideal of 
 womanly beauty. The Venus de' Medici, of medium stature 
 and perfect proportions, is twenty-seven inches round the waist. 
 How many young women who have grown up in stays, 
 whether they be of medium height or tall, ever attain such 
 healthy development of chest and muscle as a girth of twenty- 
 seven inches at the waist implies 1 
 
 Again, as to boots. It is not enough for a wise mother to 
 say to a girl : " You are not to wear high-heeled boots, be- 
 cause they are bad for you.'' That may do for the period 
 of childhood and early girlhood ; but once released from 
 authority, of course the girl will follow the prevalent fashion 
 of the day, unless she has been convinced that it is fraught 
 with danger. She must have learnt, if she is by her own free 
 'vill to eschew high and slanting heeled boots, that they will 
 ilestroy the natural form of the bones of her foot, and give 
 
Physical Education of Girls. 47 
 
 her in a less degree the deformity of a Chinese lady's foot ; 
 that they predispose to painful joint affections, cause per- 
 manent contraction of certain muscles of the leg during 
 walking and standing, throw the weight of the body forward, 
 and cause even curvature of the spine to be developed, in 
 order to restore the disturbance of equilibrium caused by 
 withdrawing the heel of the foot from its natural function of 
 helping materially to support the weight of the body. Similarly, 
 a disturbance of equilibrium occurs, followed by its own train of 
 evils, when tight or narrow-soled and ill-cut boots, which destroy 
 the natural arch of the foot, or twist and cramp it, are worn. 
 That boots should be of a quality and texture to keep the feet 
 dry and warm is almost too obvious to need insisting on, were 
 it not that many women choose boots for themselves and 
 their young daughters as if boots existed to make their feet 
 look pretty, and nothing more. The whole question of boots 
 is interesting, and by wearing them at all we lose much valuable 
 service which the foot might render as a tactile and prehensile 
 organ. The foot is undoubtedly capable of bearing a good 
 deal of exposure, and in more temperate climates than our 
 own something might be gained, and much enjoyment afforded, 
 by dispensing with any covering for the foot ; but where 
 covering is worn, it should be sufficiently thick and strong to 
 protect the foot from ordinary injuries, and to preserve it from 
 undue extremes of temperature, as well as so fashioned as to 
 allow of a good deal of movement in various directions. 
 
 The above brief remarks have, I hope, sufficed to make it 
 evident to all that girls have been grievously sinned against by 
 their educators in the matter of dress, and that it is impossible 
 to carry out any large measure of reform in their physical 
 education without first introducing a little more common sense 
 into the dressing of girls, and casting aside those trammels 
 to free and healthy development of the body which fashion 
 and the folly of mothers have devised. 
 
48 Physical Education of Girls, 
 
 II. Exercise. 
 
 Having cleared the way^by first reviewing the question of 
 dress, for what may be called the more positive part of our 
 subject, let us now consider exercise, and see whether the 
 rights of girl children to a free development of their faculties 
 are not here also violated. 
 
 Little girls of the working classes are exercised often severely 
 enough. They are less likely to be dragged down by the weight 
 of their skirts ; the danger is rather that their garments are both 
 too few for warmth and of unsuitable materials. They are less 
 often cramped by stiff stays than girls of the richer classes, 
 but when they are put into stays, the consequences are in 
 some respects even more disastrous, as the common kinds of 
 stays, which may be bought for a couple of shillings, are 
 worse cut than the more expensive ones ; and it is no uncom- 
 mon thing for such pressure to be exercised by their stays on 
 the growing breasts of young working girls as to make them 
 incapable as mothers of ever giving their children suck. 
 
 Little girls of the working classes, if they are not dragged 
 down by heavy skirts, are very commonly weighed down by 
 heavy babies. The practice of making an older child act as 
 nurse to her little brothers and sisters, and carry on her arm 
 (almost invariably the left one) heavy babies, which a girl of 
 the same age in well-to-do families would hardly be allowed to 
 lift from the ground, and of sending out very young or slight, 
 delicate girls into service as nursemaids, as the lightest and 
 most suitable work for them, is the most frequent cause of 
 spinal curvature and its long train of evils in the children of 
 the poor. Boys, when they are made to nurse the baby, and 
 this they have to do as a rule only when there are no sisters 
 old enough to do it — the work is never evenly divided among 
 the boys and girls of a family — are both a little stronger to 
 
Physical E ducat io7t of Girls. 49 
 
 bear the burden and less conscientious about their little 
 charges than girls are. They run away and cannot be made 
 to give up their lives to the service of the baby as girls often 
 do, a girl sometimes nursing through a large family of brothers 
 and sisters — at least this was so before the days of School- 
 boards — now there is less (;hance of it — and it is one of the 
 most useful services which Schoolboards are rendering to the 
 community, that they are delivering little girls from the 
 thraldom of the baby, and removing one of the most prolific 
 causes of crooked backs in girls. It may be that they are 
 substituting others, but of this more anon. 
 
 It has long been known that, if you overload a young horse 
 or other beast of burden, its back bends, and its future 
 serviceableness is impaired ; and yet I have known honest, 
 hardworking English mothers who hardly ever took up their 
 babies except to suckle them, and left the entire nursing of 
 them to the eldest little girl of the family, to her physical 
 injury and to the neglect of her schooling. It used to be no 
 rare thing to find the eldest girl in fairly prosperous working 
 men's families unable to read or write like the rest, because she 
 had only had two or three quarters' schooling, having been 
 kept at home to mind the successive babies, of which there 
 was always one from the time she could walk alone until 
 she was sent out into service to earn her own living. 1 mly 
 it may be said that " Evil is wrought by want of thought, as well 
 as by want of heart,'' when we reflect that nothing short of 
 compulsory education has sufficed to lift from the shoulders 
 of little girls so heavy a burden; and when we remember 
 that it was their mothers who placed it there, what more con- 
 vincing proof need we ask of the advisability, nay the absolute 
 necessity, of imparting to women the largest possible measure 
 of useful knowledge, seeing that they contribute so materially 
 by wise household government, or the contrary, to make or to 
 mar the health and usefulness of the rising generation, apart 
 
50 Physical Education of Girls. 
 
 altogether from their own inalienable right to a share in the 
 intellectual banquet of life ? 
 
 If there happens to be no baby in the family, little girls of 
 the working class are still expected to help actively in house- 
 hold work, at times when boys are generally sent out to amuse 
 themselves, in order, as the mothers often express it, " to get 
 them out of the way." Some kinds of household activity, sucli 
 as cleaning rooms and boots, washing up, running errands, 
 &c., afford capital exercise to both boys and girls, but it 
 frequently happens that most of the fetching of water and 
 coals is left to the girl, while the stronger boy is playing in 
 the streets. Again, the girl, when she comes home from 
 school, is often set down to needlework, a useful and neces- 
 sary occupation, I grant, but one which is monotonous in the 
 extreme, wearisome to active little brains, almost always 
 pursued in a stooping posture, and which, as a physical 
 exercise, to use the words of an excellent and judicious teacher 
 of girls,* " may almost be pronounced bad in its very nature.^' 
 It calls into action a limited number of muscles of the hand 
 and arm only (and it may be remarked that those muscles which 
 are active in sewing get plenty of exercise during school 
 hours), while it hardly calls forth any activity in the muscles of 
 the thumb, which good physical education ought to develop 
 to the utmost, the thumb being that part of the hand which 
 is most essentially human in its characteristics. Knitting, 
 especially in the German way, is far superior to sewing as a 
 manual exercise ; and there is much to be said in support of 
 the proposal made by a lady member of one of our provincial 
 Schoolboards, that boys should be taught to knit, as well as 
 girls, as a good and useful manual exercise. 
 
 Little girls of the middle and upper classes, whose parents 
 do not look to their labour as a right which is to take pre- 
 cedence of education, exercise, and play, are often, strange to 
 * Anna C. Brackett, ** Education of American Girls/' 1874. 
 
Physical Education of Girls, 5 i 
 
 say, at a greater disadvantage than even their poorer sisters, 
 when compared with their brothers, in regard to the means 
 afforded to them of physical education and development. 
 They are, as already stated, most unsuitably dressed. Their 
 education is either neglected, on the plea of their brothers' 
 greater needs, if the; family purse is small, and they are not 
 allowed, for fear of becoming unfeminine, to make up for the 
 want of good teaching by living in the open air and growing 
 strong of limb, active, observant, enduring, and fearless, or 
 they are immured in school-rooms for many hours of the day, 
 tormented with accomplishments (which they seldom accom- 
 plish), and, on pretence of pushing them forward intellectually, 
 and making them the equals of their brothers, they are taught 
 the same lessons without being given the same correctives of 
 over-activity of brain, which their brothers enjoy when they 
 rush out of school wild with exuberance of spirits and eager 
 for fun. 
 
 The danger of intellectual forcing of girls is great in our own 
 day, awaking as we are to the educational wants of women. 
 High-schools are growing up in all our large towns for middle- 
 class girls, and girls of the working classes are being slowly 
 but surely gathered into Board schools. There is not much 
 danger that girls' minds will be too well stored, although it is 
 a startling fact that conscientiousness in doing their lessons 
 well is apt to develop uncomfortably early in little girls as 
 compared with little boys. We need not fear that women 
 will become too learned, but we have reason to fear that their 
 intellectual training will be pushed too far at an early age, to 
 the detriment of their physical, and especially of their mus- 
 cular, development. 
 
 Teachers are not all to blame for this. There is in them a 
 natural leaning to exaggerate the importance of the subjects 
 they individually teach, which, however, makes them all the 
 better teachers if it is counterbalanced by similar feeling in 
 
 E 2 
 
52 Physical Education of Girls. 
 
 all the other teachers in the school, and greater breadth of 
 view in the head-mistress. Too much is demanded of teachers 
 and schoolmistresses by parents and guardians. A girl is 
 expected to have made too great and sustained intellectual 
 efforts by the time she leaves school, and school life is regarded 
 far too much as a time for laying in a stock of intellectual 
 provision for the whole of life. With this feeling abroad, 
 teachers have not fair play. They are driven on by compe- 
 tition to force their pupils' brains ; and if they attempt to in- 
 troduce reforms — to give, for instance, more time and attention 
 to gymnastic exercises for girls — the parents are very apt to tell 
 them that they pay their money for education and not for 
 gymnastics. Quite recently I was amazed to hear fall from 
 the lips of one of the most competent members of the School- 
 board for London the remark, that it was wrong to take away 
 more of the time left to the girls from needlework for physical 
 exercise, because the ratepayers' money was paid after all for 
 intellectual training, and because the girls were made to work 
 at home by their mothers out of school hours, and were sure to 
 get plenty of physical exercise in that way. 
 
 I hope I have made it clear to all here present that the 
 exercise which the girls do get at home in working families is 
 not sufficient for their health, at any rate in large towns. 
 Should any still doubt it, a visit to any of our Board schools 
 will convince them that the early grace of childhood has in 
 too many of the girls given place to stooping shoulders, want 
 of accuracy and precision in movement, and awkward, slovenly 
 gait, which may be taken as so many indications that at least 
 that most important branch of physical education, the training 
 of the muscular system, has been insufficient or neglected. 
 
 At least a third of a school-girl's life ought to be spent in 
 sleep. Many girls require even more than eight hours' sleep, and 
 it is poor economy of time to stint them of it when this is so. 
 Of the fifteen or sixteen working hours of the day, not more 
 
Physical Education of Girls. 53 
 
 than one-third should be spent in preparing lessons and in 
 class work throughout childhood, and little girls of from seven 
 to ten or eleven years of age ought to have even shorter hours 
 of work. The remaining hours of the day ought to be devoted 
 to taking food and to training the body. The latter, in the 
 natural healthful conditions of country life, would consist of 
 long walks, to which it is easy to bring even young children 
 by regular practice, rambles in search of natural history 
 specimens, climbing hills or mountains, swimming, rowing, 
 skating, riding, l^wn tennis, and one or two other really useful 
 modern games, according to the time of year, while for wet 
 days there would be dancing in-doors, battledore and shuttle- 
 cock, the old-fashioned games of fives and of cup and ball, 
 which make the hand so nimble and so obedient to the will, 
 and, for all weathers and seasons, looking after and playing 
 with the animals, which go so far to make up the pleasure 
 and usefulness of a country life to children of both sexes. 
 Several hours a day spent in active and varied exercise in 
 country air, with a little sensible supervision and steady dis* 
 countenancing by the mother of all listlessness and moping, 
 would make every girl strong, supple, surefooted, able to walk 
 and to run, quick and steady of hand and of eye, clear- 
 headed, iarge-brained, ready, after passing safely through the 
 critical period which leads from childhood to adolescence, to 
 throw herself vigorously into intellectural work, and capable 
 of learning in a year, at sixteen or seventeen years of age, as 
 much as has been compressed into the whole school life of a 
 young girl of average education. There are few kinds of 
 knowledge which cannot be better taken in by the rapidly 
 unfolding brain of the girl entering in upon young womanhood 
 than by the brain of the child ; and happily even languages, 
 which are so easily acquired by children, need involve no 
 strain of the immature intellectual faculties, as it is merely the 
 imitative part which it is essential to teach in early childhood. 
 
54 Physical Education of Girls. 
 
 Thus far I have said nothing about systems of gymnastics 
 or direct methods of physical training for girls, holding it, as 
 I do, to be better and more natural to let them develop in as 
 much freedom from artificial restraints as possible, and being 
 fully persuaded that the various activities of healthy, happy, 
 and cultured country life are in themselves sufficient to train 
 the senses, and to train the muscular system and bring it into 
 subjection to the will, to do which is the essential object of all 
 physical education. If, however, from motives of convenience 
 or necessity, children are brought up in towns^ artificial methods 
 of physical training must needs be resorted to, in order to 
 supply the place of natural ones ; and it becomes a subject of 
 national importance to study the best gymnastic methods and 
 appliances, to understand clearly the reasons for them, and why 
 it is undesirable to put boys and girls through exactly the same 
 course of gymnastics. 
 
 The training of the senses requires no special adaptation 
 for boys or for girls, the element of sex not entering in here 
 at all. To teach the eye to see properly surrounding objects, 
 the ear to hear and discriminate sounds discordant or har- 
 monious, and gradually to educate it up to a perception of the 
 beauties first of simple melody and later on of more compli- 
 cated musical combinations ; to teach the palate to choose 
 and to enjoy harmless, in preference to harmful, food and 
 drink; to train, in short, all the senses to be keen and quick 
 in action, and faithful ministers interposed between the soui 
 and the outer world, is the office of the educator of the youth 
 of both sexes, and need not now occupy us, who have met to 
 consider physical education in its special bearing on girls. 
 
 Where children grow up in the freedom of country life, it is 
 needless to prescribe minutely how far a boy may run or how 
 high he may climb in excess of a girl, and it is never necessary 
 to tell a big girl that she must not play at cricket with the 
 youths of the neighbourhood. Girls feel no pleasure in taking 
 
Physical Education of Girls, 55 
 
 more physical exercise than their frame is fitted for, any more 
 than a healthy palate prompts to gluttony or excess. There 
 are natural adjustments and instincts of propriety which 
 may safely be trusted more than they are to choose what 
 is really befitting to girls and boys. But if children are 
 taken out of their natural medium, country life, and bred in 
 cities, with artificial gymnastics to develop and strengthen 
 their muscles, instead of the manifold activities of country 
 life, then it becomes necessary to study carefully and to follow 
 faithfully the differences which sex has implanted in boys and 
 girls, and it behoves us to beware that we respect in our 
 systems of physical education the laws of development of 
 either sex. 
 
 We have then to consider that, from their general confor- 
 mation and the special maternal functions for which nature is 
 slowly and silently fashioning them, gymnastic exercises for 
 girls must be less violent, perhaps more frequent, but certainly 
 less prolonged, than those designed for boys. In later girl- 
 hood girls may even require occasional short intermittences 
 on account of temporary weakness or trifling indispositions, 
 whence it is obvious that it is most consistent with delicacy 
 and propriety that the gymnastic exercises of girls should be 
 performed under the direction of thoroughly qualified and 
 efficient women teachers, who can best estimate the varying 
 physical capacity of the developing girl, and who can, as a 
 matter of course, question her pupils on health subjects which 
 cannot with any propriety be discussed by a man with young girls. 
 Again, into the question of gymnastics for girls the consideration 
 of the relatively large size of their pelvis, the position of the 
 organs contained in it, and their liability to congestion, dis- 
 placement and strain in consequence of ill-directed gymnastic 
 exercise, or still more pernicious rivalry between girls of un- 
 equal physical power, enters largely. In short, the gymnastic 
 training of girls involves so many questions of detail and o! 
 
c;6 Physical Education of Gii'Is^ 
 
 compromise between the general and the particular that I fail 
 to see how any one but a woman, qualified for the work by 
 nature and by the best and most thorough training, can carry 
 it out satisfactorily. A woman also can far more efficiently 
 than a man train young women teachers, appreciating, as she 
 only can do, the weariness and actual hard work that it is to 
 them, with their consoHdated frames and disobedient muscles, 
 to master exercises which are mere child's play to supple 
 young girls. 
 
 So far Ling's exercises, the so-called Swedish gymnastics, 
 have been found most suitable for girls ; but I confess I look 
 forward to a time when some woman of genius shall, with all 
 the learning of the schools at her command, joined to her 
 own special feminine instinct, have given us something even 
 better and more completely adapted to the requirements of 
 girls than Ling's system of gymnastics. 
 
 In all systems of gymnastics — and perhaps this is more 
 necessary for girls than for boys, as women's lives are spent 
 more at home, and manual dexterity is of even more moment 
 to them than to men, on account of the variety of work for 
 which handiness is demanded in a household, although, alas ! 
 it is often demanded in vain — training of the hand ought to 
 hold a prominent place. 
 
 The left hand especially requires to be reinstated in its 
 natural position of equal co-operation with the right from 
 which centuries of misdirected educational efforts have driven 
 it. Instead of striving to prevent a child from making use of 
 its left hand, and forcing it to use almost exclusively the right, 
 our endeavour should be to make it equally expert with both 
 hands, not alone for the sake of the increased capacity for all 
 kinds of manual work thus gained, but also as a means of 
 indirectly developing the right or corresponding half of the 
 brain, on which muscular activity reacts as a powerful stimulus. 
 Education has taken a direction so entirely false in regard to 
 
Physical Education of Girls. 57 
 
 the left hand that it has created a wholly artificial necessity 
 for special left-hand gymnastics, to counteract not only actual 
 wrong teaching but inherited wrong tendencies ; for the very 
 slight preference which perhaps a small majority of infants 
 give to the right hand over the left would never, without the 
 injudicious fostering of parents, have resulted in that maiming 
 of the race which righthandedness implies. That the (Us- 
 ability is an artificial and not a natural one is proved by the 
 fact that energetic individuals once as righthanded as their 
 fellows do sometimes teach themselves to become ambidexter 
 when circumstances make it desirable or necessary ; and that 
 they should be able to do so is the less to be wondered at 
 when we reflect there has been in our own day such a prodigy 
 as an artist of considerable merit, born without hands, who 
 painted his pictures with his feet, which long use had rendered 
 as deft as other people's hands. 
 
 In estimating the advantages girls would derive from a 
 rational system of physical education, it is often overlooked 
 that, apart from the general advantage to all human beings 
 of well-developed muscles, and the importance of muscular 
 exercise as a promoter of the venous circulation, together with 
 its strengthening and steadying influence on the nerv^ous 
 system, muscular exercise retards the advent of puberty by 
 directing an abundant supply of blood to the active muscles, 
 whereas muscular inactivity favours congestion of internal 
 organs, precocious sexual development, with all its long train 
 of physical and moral evils, and that hydra-headed parent of 
 female ailments in civilized communities, instability of the 
 nervous system, or disturbed equiHbrium of the motor and 
 sensory divisions. 
 
 The special duties of women make large calls on muscular 
 strength ; and if in childhood the opportunity afforded of 
 developing it is missed, how can these claims be met ? Is it 
 not pitiable to see yearly thousands of mothers break down 
 
58 Physical Education of Girls, 
 
 under the burden of maternity borne for the first or second 
 time, while it is no exaggeration to say that not twenty per 
 cent of English mothers belonging to the upper classes of 
 society are physically capable of carrying about in their arms 
 their own babies, but must perforce make them over to the 
 care of strangers ? Is it too much to say of women that they 
 " need strong arms that can cradle a healthy child and hold it 
 crowing in the air, backs that will not break under the burden 
 of household cares, a frame that is not exhausted and weakened 
 by the round of daily duties ? " * 
 
 When I look round among the women whose family history 
 is known to me, and with whose maternal experiences profes- 
 sional acquaintanceship has made me familiar, I find that all 
 those who have safely and easily passed through the crises of 
 motherhood without impairment of general health are muscu- 
 larly well developed ; most of them led as children a free out- 
 door country life ; and a large proportion were their brothers' 
 playmates and comrades in girlhood in all their active sports. 
 This entirely coincides with medical experience generally, for 
 the almost incredible expenditure of muscular force which 
 women have to sustain in a single day during the exercise of 
 their most laborious maternal function, cannot fail to overdraw, 
 if it does not exhaust, the strength and powers of endurance 
 of those women who, as one of our well-known obstetricians 
 has aptly put it, " have never done a hard day's work in their 
 lives before/' 
 
 I am content to rest my claim for the physical education of 
 girls on their universally recognized right to become in fulness 
 of time wives and mothers ; for if it be once admitted that it is 
 due to girls to spare no pains to make them strong for the 
 performance of their special womanly duties, we need ask for no 
 more. Girls of the physical calibre which will make them the 
 fctrong mothers of a strong race are sure to have such a foun- 
 
 * Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, " Lectures on the Laws of Life," 187 1„ 
 
Physical Education of Girls, 59 
 
 dcvtion of health and strength, such firmness of muscle, such 
 well-strung nerves, such well-developed brains (for it must not 
 be forgotten that the size and quality of the brain is largely 
 influenced by the muscular development of the body), that 
 they will be able to accomplish without strain a very large 
 amount of intellectual work ; able, in fact, to do any kind of 
 intellectual work which they deliberately elect to do. And we 
 shall be no more assailed with pitiful tales of girls crushed " 
 under the weight of competitive examinations, of over-active 
 brains in feeble bodies, giving way for years or for life. We 
 shall hear no more, in short, of those disgraceful breakdowns 
 of health on the threshold of adult life which bring such 
 discredit on the movement for the higher education of women, 
 although they are by no means confined to the female sex.* 
 For a girl to break down under pressure of intellectual work is, 
 I contend, a disgrace to those who have been entrusted with 
 her early training, no less than a discredit to herself, and a 
 dishonour to the woman's cause ; and it is high time to raise 
 our voices in strong protest against such waste of precious 
 young human life, such violation of physiological laws, and 
 such criminal ignorance of the conditions and requirements of 
 healthy development in women. 
 
 * In the first mixed class of anatomy at the College of Surgeons, 
 Edinburgh, in 1870, keen competition for the prize took place between the 
 male and female students, and the teachers still speak with wonder of the 
 great amount of earnest work accomplished by all during the session. The 
 ladies gave the best average ; a lady came in for the second place, and three 
 out of the seven took honours ; but a gentleman took the first prize. He, 
 however, went up immediately afterwards for an examination in anatomy 
 before the College of Surgeons of England and failed ignominiously. 
 So utterly had he broken down physically and mentally that, as he himself 
 expressed it, his brain whirled, and he was unable to name correctly even 
 the two bones of the forearm ; and it was many months before he recovered. 
 Yet the ladies were all mentally and physically stronger at the end than 
 they were at the beginning of the session. 
 
THE HAPPINESS OF CHILDHOOD. 
 
 By anna BUCKLANa 
 
 There seems to be a widespread feeling that the present 
 generation, with all its rich stores inherited from the past, 
 and all its own gains in the present, has yet failed in the 
 attainment of happiness. Due allowance must, of course, be 
 made, for the tendency of some imaginations at all times to 
 dwell on the dark side of things ; and we must also reckon 
 for the existence in every age of " melancholy philosophers," 
 who " love to sit down and rail against the world ; " but 
 beyond the vein of sadness, which has its place in every 
 age, there is at the present time a too general expression 
 of disappointment with life and its results for us to doubt 
 that a sense of unhappihess is common ; and the cry for 
 light and good has an intensity which carries the convic- 
 tion that it is also real. Yet the world has not grown old, 
 nor have the conditions of human existence greatly changed. 
 All the sources of human happiness — God, Love, Duty, 
 Nature, are as full and deep as ever, as fresh and pure 
 and unexhausted. 
 
 " For while a youth is lost in soaring thought, 
 And while a maid grows sweet and beautiful, 
 And while a springtide coming lights the earth, 
 And while a child, and while a floM^er is born. 
 And while one wrong cries for redress and finds ^^ 
 
 A soul to ansM'er, Still the World is young." 
 
 The unhappiness of the present generation does not lie 
 
TJie Happiness of Childhood. 6 1 
 
 in the decay of those sources from which happiness is 
 derived ; but in the want of accord between the race of to- 
 day, and the world above and around them. They turn 
 from the springs of joy, because these no longer refresh and 
 satisfy them. They have lost the power of receiving and 
 assimilating what once gave happiness to life, and made it 
 beautiful and precious. It is sometimes suggested that the 
 human race has made in the present century such progress 
 that it has outgrown the power of enjoyment ; the aims 
 of the present generation are so high that life cannot satisfy 
 them ; their knowledge of human nature is so enlarged, 
 their sympathies so quickened, that happiness is no longer 
 possible, except as a selfish dream. 
 
 Yet the greatest men the world has ever seen, the men 
 of highest aims, of largest knowledge of human nature, 
 and of keenest, tenderest sympathy, have shown a simple 
 gladness of heart, and a power of entering into all the 
 life of the world, and of receiving happiness from all its 
 various sources. And this must be so, for the greater is 
 the nature of the man, the larger is his sphere of life ; his 
 outlook is wider, and he fearlessly includes all things within 
 it ; it is by his very many-sidedness that he is capable of 
 receiving a larger measure of happiness from a greater variety 
 of sources. It is not greatness, but narrowness, which is the 
 cause of unhappiness ; and it is not the " progress '' or 
 '* growth " of the present generation which is the occasion 
 of its vein of sadness. Growth is not the hasty running up 
 in a single line ; and progress is not advance only in one 
 direction. The growth of the individual is the equal and 
 constantly increasing development of every faculty ; arid the 
 progress of the race is when " the whole world grows like 
 the few." We do not need to lower our aims, nor to become 
 ignorant and callous in order to be happy; but we need 
 rather to aim at nothing short of perfecting the ideal of 
 
62 The Happiness of Childhood. 
 
 humanity ; and to strive to keep in active exercise every 
 faculty of soul, and mind, and heart. We can only out- 
 grow happiness when one part of our complex nature out- 
 grows another. In a true, complete growth, happiness 
 rises ever before us, extending onwards into a divine ful- 
 ness, and into the long vista of immortality. 
 
 Happiness begins with life ; the little gentle murmurs of 
 contentment are contemporary with the tears and cries ; 
 and very soon the sunny smiles and joyful laugh of child- 
 hood far out-number the signals of distress. It now rests 
 with those who have the care and training of the little 
 one in their hands to provide for him the means of happi- 
 ness, and to guard and cultivate those faculties by 
 which he is able to derive pleasure from all its pure and 
 unexhausted sources. 
 
 But here come in two or three ideas, which prevent 
 parents and teachers from making the happiness of children 
 a direct aim of their guardianship and training. First, 
 there is the old superstitious fear of happiness ; the dread 
 that the hearty enjoyment of the blessings of life will pro- 
 voke the displeasure of some mysterious power which can 
 be thus moved to deprive us of them. Then there is a 
 feeling, that if children are made too happy in this world, 
 they will learn to rest satisfied with it, and have no aspira- 
 tions beyond an earthly life. Again, the notion has become 
 common, that happiness is very unheroic, incompatible with 
 depth of earnestness and intense feeling. And lastly, there 
 is a general idea that all children are naturally so full of 
 happiness that we need not seek it for them in any scheme 
 of education or training ; what we have to do is to seek 
 their ^' good^'^ and they may be left to find happiness for 
 themselves. 
 
 It is certainly time that we got rid of the first of these 
 ideas ; for if we believe, with Frobel, that each little child 
 
The Happiness of Childhood, 63 
 
 is a thought of God, we must also believe that he was sent 
 into a world prepared for him, — a world in harmony with his 
 nature ; — and that, therefore, the smile of God must rest on 
 the little child, who heartily and freely delights in the rich 
 provision made for his happiness. 
 
 And can we believe, that by allowing a child to be 
 miserable in this world we are leading him to love God, 
 its Creator, and raising any aspiration which would make 
 the child desire to enter another world of nearer access to 
 God ? Unhappiness may cause a distaste for this life ; but 
 that is not an aspiration after a higher life ; it is only a 
 desire for a change ; which would be sufficiently satisfied by 
 other conditions of earthly life, without the same drawbacks, 
 even if the state were a lower one. It is rather by a spring- 
 time of happiness that the little child learns to love God, 
 the Maker of the world in which he finds himself, and to 
 believe in and desire an after world of richer blessedness, 
 and of more joyful nearness to the Father of all mercies. 
 
 And need we fear that a happy childhood lays the founda- 
 tion of an unheroic character in after life? Idleness and 
 self-indulgence will do this ; but not happiness. It is grief, 
 which is too often selfish, and discontent and murmuring, 
 which shut up sympathy. A miserable childhood, with its 
 self engrossment, is not the foundation of large-hearted, self- 
 sacrificing love in later life ; nor are weariness and disappoint- 
 ment in childhood a preparation for hopeful work in the ripe 
 season of maturity. 
 
 So far from our being relieved from all responsibility in 
 regard to the happiness of children — because they will be sure 
 to make themselves happy in some way — the fact is, that at no 
 period of our lives are we anything like so susceptible of 
 sorrow as in childhood. More tears are shed in childhood 
 than at any other time ; and this is not merely for the reason 
 that little eyes fill more readily ; childhood's tears are not 
 
64 TJie Happiness of Childhood, 
 
 " idle tears " because the cause of sorrow seems to us so 
 trifling ; they " rise in the heart/' as well as " gather to the 
 eyes ; " and the heart-ache is as sore as that caused by what 
 we call our greater trials. There is no stage of life in which 
 happiness is so dependent on things outside of ourselves as in 
 childhood. In after years, when life is more in our own hands, 
 we are generally, more or less, the makers of our own 
 happiness ; but in helpless childhood — when we look to others 
 for everything, when every delicate fibre of the being clings to 
 something outside of itself, when all the circumstances and 
 direction of life, the work, the play, the health, all the soothing 
 and cheering influences, are in the hands of others — it is 
 clear that the risk to happiness is very great. 
 
 There is then every reason why we should fearlessly and 
 earnestly make the happiness of children a part of our purpose 
 and aim in all our plans for them of education, training, or 
 general life. 
 
 A few suggestions may be useful in regard to some of the 
 conditions on which the happiness of childhood depends ; 
 and these we may divide under two heads — those which must 
 enter into schemes of education and training ; and those 
 which belong to the personal influence of individuals. 
 
 The first essentials of any plan of education which shall result 
 in the happiness of the child are, that the system should include 
 means for the equal development and growth of every faculty 
 of the child ; and that these should be planned in strict ac- 
 cordance with the natural laws of a child's being. Every 
 Kindergarten teacher knows that these two principles are the 
 foundation of FrobeFs system, and that the Kindergarten 
 is a complete series of exercises for every faculty of the child, 
 under which each petal of the little human flower is unfolded 
 in strict accordance with natural laws. That the result should 
 De happiness, we need only enter a Kindergarten to prove, or 
 ask a little child thus educated which are the happiest hours 
 
The Happhuss of Childhood. 65 
 
 )f the day. It is in fact simply " Nature's holy plan ; " and ii 
 " every flower enjoys the air it breathes," and it is with a thrill 
 of pleasure that " the budding twigs spread out their fan," it 
 -nay well be our faith that the unfolding and growth of the 
 ::hild's more sensitive nature are attended by the most delight- 
 ful consciousness of happiness. But on the other hand, have 
 we not also " reason to lament what man has made of man ? " 
 For it is by a system of training which unduly stimulates cer- 
 tain faculties, and utterly neglects others, that we have produced 
 die weariness and feverish restlessness which are the misery of 
 the present generation. What thousands of bright little eyes 
 have been made to weep over the constant taxes on the tired 
 memory ; and what thousands of childish sighs have arisen 
 over painful efforts to use the overstrained reason ; while at 
 the same time the imagination has been craving for its food, 
 and the little hands and feet are restless with suppressed 
 activity. Even a child becomes early conscious of a sense of 
 dissatisfaction under a culture which makes no appeal to the 
 soul, provides no exercise for the imagination, has nothing in 
 it to touch the heart, and gives no employment or teaching to 
 the busy fingers ; and as he becomes older the poverty of such 
 an existence is painfully present to him. 
 
 It is to a wider scheme of education, having for its aim 
 not merely self-preservation and a high condition of physical 
 well-being — but the fuller realization of the Divine ideal in 
 each human being that we must look for the renewal in the 
 next generation of the power of living " a life worth living," 
 a fresh many-sided life of happiness and hope. 
 
 A second condition essential to the happiness of childhood 
 is Freedom. It is a common cry, that children have too much 
 liberty in the present day ; and if the sacred name of liberty ii 
 used here for license to follow every desire the assertion may 
 be true. But this is not freedom ; and it is a fact, that while 
 license is permitted, freedom is checked and suppressed. 
 
 F 
 
66 The Happiness of Childhood. 
 
 Freedom is only the living out of our true real life — the being 
 what we really are ; it is the dwelling under the wide arch of 
 Heaven, with space for abundant natural growth, and the 
 unfettered exercise of every faculty and activity. 
 
 We grant, that the nations of the world which enjoyed in 
 their infancy the largest measure of freedom have made the 
 soundest progress, that they have become the most intelligent 
 and moral, and have shown the strictest regard for law. Yet 
 we often fear to let children alone to live out their true natural 
 life, but make it a duty to be constantly thwarting their 
 wishes and checking their impulses ; driving them by force 
 in one direction, and holding them back with a strong hand from 
 another, until they become miserable through despondency 
 and irritability. We want more faith in nature and in God ; 
 for if we believe that each little child is a thought of God, 
 and that all the laws of its being are divine in their origin, we 
 may well suspect that these are often more true in their 
 promptings than are our plans and notions. 
 
 The ordinary restraints placed upon the freedom of a child 
 arise usually from three causes. They are often a part of an 
 artificial system of education, which has settled how the child 
 is to be trained and taught, without any regard to the natural 
 laws of a child's development. The system has perhaps been 
 handed down from the ignorance of the past, and is therefore 
 continued without thought by later generations. There is a 
 notion that what we had to endure ourselves we ought to 
 make the next generation endure. We have turned out so 
 well, we cannot do better than put our (Children under the 
 same yoke. Or the artificial system is founded on the one 
 idea that happens to be the reigning tendency of the day . 
 and to the preponderating influence of this everything else 
 gives way ; so that the free growth of the child is sacrificed to 
 the tyranny of a single thought. Thelreedom of childhood is 
 again often interfered with by the fact that the parent or 
 
The Happiness of Childhood. 6/ 
 
 teacher has formed a certain ideal, which he holds to be the 
 only model type of childhood. To this one narrow pattern 
 he strives to conform children of utterly contrary characters 
 and natures ; so that their early years are passed in constant 
 truggle or in weak despair. All the while the character and 
 capabilities receive no culture. There is a good illustration of 
 the tyranny of a fixed, narrow ideal over a child's life, and of 
 the misery produced by it, in one of Robert Buchanan's 
 " Village Idylls," where an old Scotch shepherd and his wife, 
 whose sole ideal of highest manhood is a minister of the Kirk, 
 strive in vain to train up a poet son in accordance with this 
 ideal. And how many a gifted boy and girl, full of God-given 
 faculties of a particular kind, have had their childhood em- 
 bittered by attempts to crush the life out of the faculties they 
 had, and to force others they did not possess ! 
 
 Personal tyranny is another great check on the freedom 
 which is essential to the happiness of a child. The arbitrary 
 will of the parent, or teacher, is exerted to domineer over the 
 will of the child, and this is sometimes done in the belief that 
 it is by this means that a child learns respect and obedience. 
 The child is therefore contradicted without being allowed an 
 answer; no attention is paid to his wishes; he is constantly 
 thwarted in his intentions ; and his impulses and tastes are 
 roughly repressed. Even his innocent fancies and feelings are set 
 on one side, and his activities are made to bend under the will 
 of another. But arbitrary rule does not, in itself, inspire respect. 
 True respect is founded on admiration and confidence ; and 
 these are only called forth by character and conduct. Children 
 soon see through all paltry attempts to inspire respect by self- 
 assertion and tyranny ; and they do not learn true obedience 
 by being forced for a few years to bend to another will, which is 
 exerted only for the sake of over-mastering theirs. "It is 
 good for a man to bear the yoke in his youth," but that is the 
 yoke of law^ and not of one will domineering over another. 
 
 F 2 
 
68 The Happiness of Childhood, 
 
 While freedom is essential to the happiness of childhood 
 obedience to law is not less so. Children cannot be taught too 
 early to pay the strictest regard to natural and moral laws ; for 
 they are the principles by which we live in harmony with the 
 world in which we dwell, and when this harmony is in any way 
 disturbed, suffering and discord are the unavoidable results. This 
 habit of strict regard to law is not only necessary to the happiness 
 of childhood, but it is the only safeguard against disappointment 
 with life and its results in later years. So little are children 
 taught to live in accordance with law, that they are constantly 
 expecting the good to come, when the law that produces it is 
 set aside, while they resent the evil, which is the natural result 
 of a broken law. In fact, many children are taught not only 
 to believe in, but to expect, miracles with much more certainty 
 than they are led to see the constant, faithful working of God's 
 laws, and the necessity of obedience to them. 
 
 In leading children to live in accordance with law, the 
 teaching at first need only be very simple. A little child feels 
 that he is in a world he knows nothing about, and he naturally 
 looks to those who have been longer in it to help him to 
 •understand it. At first he has to do with so small a part of the 
 world, and his relations to it are so simple, that the teaching 
 will not be complicated nor over full. The Kindergarten in- 
 troduces him to one object at a time ; and as he learns by 
 degrees the properties of things, and the laws which govern 
 them, it is easy to show him the necessity of obedience to 
 these in his own actions in regard to them. From this he passes on 
 to see the wisdom of God in all these things, and the perfect har- 
 mony which subsists between himself and the world around him. 
 
 When he acquires the sense that all things around him are 
 ruled according to wise and constant laws ordained by God, 
 his Father, he will lose that blind terror of the unknown and 
 unnatural which is one of the great miseries of childhood. How 
 many a little child's life has been made unhappy by the feeling 
 
The Happiness of Childhood, 69 
 
 cf insecurity, and the dread of the power of malignant, myste- 
 rious agencies. 
 
 A habit of obedience to law cannot be acquired, except by 
 the assurance, tliat the law is constant ; and it is, therefore, 
 better not to allow little children to hear of things which are ex- 
 ceptions to the ordinary rule of nature. They need to have 
 the sense of constancy firmly established in their minds before 
 they are made acquainted with those phenomena which result 
 from rare occurrences. And yet it is with these that children are 
 often first made familiar. Many a child has been taught to ex- 
 pect the immediate destruction of the world before he has been 
 told anything of the goodness, constancy and beauty of its 
 wonderful fulness of life. And many a little one has had his 
 happiness broken by the daily expectation of earthquakes, fires, 
 mad dogs, robberies and monsters, before he has learnt that 
 these are unusual occurrences. Even those predictions of 
 terrible storms and sensational weather should be kept from 
 little children, for we cannot tell how these may distress them. 
 A visiting teacher in a preparatory school for little boys hap- 
 pened to mention last summer the prediction that we were to 
 have three days of darkness. This so laid hold of the imagi- 
 nation of one poor little fellow, that on going to bed at night 
 he was heard saying to his companion — "Well this has been a 
 miserable day." And a few years ago, when it was predicted 
 that the tail of a comet would destroy the earth, one little 
 child is said to have died from the terror of expecting it. 
 
 The first step of the little child will be simple obedience to 
 law, and trust in its constancy ; and the result will be the 
 avoidance of suffering and terror \ but as the child comes 
 more and more into relation with others, and begins to look 
 up in love to his Father in heaven, obedience to law becomes 
 in him the sense of duty, and his whole moral nature is raised, 
 35 he feels love and duty to be the springs of obedience. Then 
 he knows something of that deep happiness which attends duty 
 
70 The Happiness of Childhood, 
 
 founded in love, even when the action involves self-denial ; and 
 obedience to every law is now in itself a delight, as he recognizes 
 God to be the author of all that divine harmony, by which — 
 ** The very stars are kept from wrong, 
 And the most ancient Heavens are fresh and strong." 
 
 The culture of admiration is another important means of 
 promoting the happiness of childhood. Admiration is essen- 
 tial to all our best life, and is the source of our deepest, 
 sweetest happiness. It is most closely associated with rever- 
 ence, love and worship. Admiration is cultivated by the 
 training of the aesthetic faculty, and associating with this the 
 observation and perception of beauty wherever it exists, in 
 nature, art, and human character. All education must be 
 one-sided, and all growth deformity if the existence and 
 importance of the aesthetic faculty are ignored, and no pro- 
 vision made for its training and development. 
 
 In Frobel's wide and deeply thought-out scheme we find a 
 variety of means by which, from the earliest years, this faculty 
 receives its due culture. 
 
 In the lessons on colour and form the eye of the little child 
 is drawn to beauty of hue and outline ; he learns from 
 pictures, and by his own drawing and modelling, the charm of 
 art ; in the various objects of nature presented to him he is 
 taught to notice the variety of loveliness and perfection in the 
 works of God; his ear is trained by music and song and 
 rhythmic exercises to delight in sound and in harmony ; and 
 by the "use of stories in the Kindergarten'' the child is 
 introduced to the great world of the ideal in human character 
 and life. Under this careful training the power of admiration 
 is kept in constant exercise, and the happiness which children 
 through this enjoy only a Kindergarten teacher knows. 
 
 It is to this early training that we look with hope for a wider, 
 truer culture of the aesthetic faculty in later life, when the lines 
 started in the Kindergarten are carried on into the study 
 
The Happiness of Childhood, 7 1 
 
 of art and literature. And then the fastidious taste for 
 a particular style, or the false fancy for an exceptional type of 
 character, or single phase of sentiment, will be exchanged for 
 a delight in all the infinitely varied beauty of the whole world 
 of nature and of art ; and the full recognition of every sweet 
 and noble element which has a place in God's ideal of man. 
 
 The careful training of the Kindergarten teaches children to 
 recognize and delight in the bits of beauty in things otherwise 
 imperfect or homely. And this quickness of eye for all that is 
 beautiful and good does not only greatly increase the 
 happiness which is derived from the outward world, but it 
 quickens also the inward eye, to detect broken lights of the 
 divine beauty, shining amongst what is common-place and evil 
 in human character. Here is ground again for the deep joy 
 of undying love, for love is joined with hope, and can suffer 
 long, yet still work on, trusting in the final triumph of good 
 
 From admiration we pass naturally to love as another 
 essential to the happiness of childhood. And here we reach 
 the harmony between man and the world above and around 
 him, without which life is full of discord, misery and despair. 
 Love begins with life, and all love, instinctive love, and 
 gratitude, are a joy to the child ; but love founded on 
 admiration, and the satisfying of the ideal, is not reached at 
 once ; it is the result of previous steps. It has to do, there- 
 fore, with those conditions of happiness which must enter into 
 the scheme of education and training. But through these a 
 little child may be led to find the love of God a source of 
 deepest, sweetest happiness. " We needs must love the 
 highest when we see it ; " but the eye needs some preparation 
 before we can see the highest ; there are steps in the ascent, 
 and we must be careful, too, to guard against clouds and dark- 
 ness intervening. Let the thought of God be first associated 
 in the mind of a child with all the good gifts and blessings of 
 life, but not with its catastrophes and terrors. The attempt 
 
T2 The Happiness of Childhood, 
 
 to impress a child with an idea of the greatness of God from 
 this side produces a wrong conception, because a child cannot 
 associate love with anything but gentleness and tenderness. 
 Thus a little child was told, that the thunder was the voice of 
 God, and this at once produced the remark, " Then I don't 
 like God at all, and never shall." Too often the representa- 
 tion of God made to little children has been such as to pro- 
 duce fear and misery, rather than love and happiness ; and 
 many a tender little heart has been filled with self-reproach- 
 ful grief, because it could not love the object represented as 
 claiming its best affections. There is, of course, a sense in 
 which suffering is the very act of love ; but this is a hard 
 lesson, and the tender nature of a little child cannot at first 
 Teceive it. The more, however, the little child learns to love 
 God in the brightness and happiness of life, the better he will 
 be prepared to still trust and love in the darkness and the 
 storm. 
 
 It is unnecessary to enter here on the general subject of 
 religious teaching ; but in order that religion may be the 
 happiness of childhood, two things are necessary in regard to 
 it. The teaching must be personal and intelligible. All that 
 makes God known, as the Divine Father, his works, his 
 dealings with man in past ages, and the manifestation of 
 himself in Christ, the Saviour and lover of little children, a 
 child can lay hold of and live by ; and unless the religious 
 teaching lead to the personal adoration and love of the 
 Most High, and to trust and obedience, it can be no joy or 
 support to the child. The learning by heart of abstract 
 theology, in whatever way put forth, or of words expressing 
 feelings a child does not experience, can only be dark and 
 wearisome ; for a child learns through the imagination and 
 the heart ; he can see and love long before he can understand. 
 
 God only teaches what the mind can receive; Christ, the 
 Great Teacher, reserved the most important truth until his 
 
The Happiness of Childhood. 73 
 
 disciples could receive it ; but the minds of little children are 
 often loaded with a mass of unintelligible religious teaching, 
 beneath which they sink oppressed and discouraged. It is 
 this forcing of everything at once upon a child, before he can 
 grasp it, that often makes religious teaching a misery rather 
 than a joy. It is sometimes held to be a duty to teach 
 advanced religious truth to children, so that what they have 
 learnt in childhood may be their support in later years ; but 
 unintelligible teaching cannot be a preparation for later 
 experience and needs. It either passes from the mind 
 altogether, or it creates false and grotesque conceptions of 
 solemn things. There is no real need to prepare in childhood 
 for the wants of after life. The best foundation is to teach the 
 child what he can receive and assimilate at the time, that which 
 shall be his Hfe, and strength, and happiness in childhood. 
 There is plenty of religious teaching in the world suited to 
 advanced intelligence, and we may trust that all good seed 
 will be provided with the needful means for its aftergrowth 
 and fuller development. That religion may be a source of 
 happiness in childhood, let us think of the child and not of 
 the man. 
 
 An important part of training, as regards the happiness of 
 children, is in self-denial and love to others. Even a child 
 feels the misery of selfishness, and there is scarcely a more 
 unhappy sight than a little creature spoilt by indulgence, and 
 full of itself. The very means taken to make children happy 
 may easily become a cause of misery, if the great object of 
 the loving parent is to satisfy every desire of the child, to 
 give all, and demand nothing in return. The self-engross- 
 ment and weary satiety that are a part of the unhappiness of 
 the present generation, have been produced by the too anxious 
 devotion of parents to the physical well-being of their children, 
 and the supplying them with a super-abundance of objective 
 pleasures. 
 
74 The Happiness of Childhood, 
 
 A large family will supply naturally a good deal of the train* 
 ing needed for love and self-denial ; but even here it very often 
 happens that while this has been supplied to the elder ones 
 by the claims upon their kindness and care by the little ones, 
 the younger children themselves grow up in thorough selfishness. 
 With an only child the case is still worse. Children need 
 companionship with those of their own age and standing; 
 they need to belong to a community of equals, in order that 
 they may learn sympathy, love, self-repression and harmony 
 of action. Those who know the happy life of the Kindergarten 
 will readily grant its immense influence over children in 
 giving them this kind of training. The spirit of love which 
 prevades every part of Frobel's system is shown most strongly 
 in the means for training children in thoughtfulness for each 
 other, in unselfish generosity, and in the sense of the brother- 
 hood of humanity and its union, through combined action. 
 
 The exercise of compassion and sympathy, joined with 
 active kindness, is always a joy to children ; if no attempts 
 are made to force or overstrain the feeling. There is a God 
 given callousness in childhood to the deeper sorrows of life, 
 and we must in no way seek to break this up. The feel- 
 ings of children can only be trained through the sorrows 
 they can realize and understand. Many a little child has 
 heard without a pang of feeling of terrible accidents and 
 losses of human life, and has yet smudged with heart-felt tears 
 the page in " Original Poems " about " the little bird who 
 built a warm nest in a tree," and was robbed of its young by 
 some boys who were " wicked and rude." The sympathy ot 
 children with the oppression of the small and the weak is 
 readier than with the sufferings of men. The story is very 
 characteristic, of the little boy to whom his Mama showed a 
 picture of Daniel in the lions' den. The child sighed and 
 looked much distressed, whereupon his mother hastened to 
 assure him that Daniel was such a good man that God did 
 
 I 
 
The Happiness of Childhood, 75 
 
 not let the lions hurt him. " Oh," replied the little fellow, 
 ** I was not thinking of that ; but what I was afraid of was 
 that those big lions were going to eat all of him themselves, 
 and that they would not give that poor little lion down in the 
 corner any of him/' 
 
 It is through the little troubles which grieve childish hearts 
 that children learn pity and sympathy. The real feeling called 
 forth by the little bird fallen from its nest and mother's care 
 is an a.ctual development in tenderness ; and the gentle treat- 
 ment of the pet kitten is a real exercise of kindness ; and 
 these, if we will only wait till the right time comes, will 
 blossom into genuine philanthropy. The attempt to force and 
 overstrain the feelings of children by those stories of crime and 
 wretchedness which are now so often placed in children's 
 hands is attended by great danger. It is a shock to the simple 
 faith and happy innocence of childhood, and seems to produce 
 in the end a morbid taste for sensational fiction, accompanied 
 by a hardened indifference to real sin and suffering, 
 
 It seems scarcely necessary to say that plenty of employment, 
 work, and play is a necessity to the happiness of childhood. 
 The plaintive little cry, ^^ What shall I do ? I want something 
 to do," shows a state of fretful dulness that demands imme- 
 diate attention. Children require help in finding something 
 to do, and to send a child away with an exhortation against 
 idleness, and the command to find some employment, is no 
 better than the Egyptian taskmasters, who said to the Israelites, 
 " Ye are idle, ye are idle," and sent them to make bricks with- 
 out any straw. A child must be provided with materials for 
 work, and also for play, and he must be taught how to use 
 them. The exercise of invention and construction is a great 
 delight to a child ; but both need training, and often help and 
 suggestion. Invention is often slow, and needs quickening, 
 and the little fingers need practice in dexterity, so that the 
 result may g^'ve pleasure and satisfaction to the worker. Here, 
 
y6 The Happmess of Childhood. 
 
 again, the wonderful thought and ingenuity of Frobel have 
 provided in the Kindergarten a training in work which makes 
 it a constant source of happiness to the child. 
 
 But children also need help and suggestion for their play. 
 Play is, as Frobel saw, the instinctive life of the child express- 
 ing itself in action ; and he provides for this joyful activity a 
 number of games in which the mind of the child finds 
 pleasure, and the activity is regulated and harmonized, without 
 in any degree suppressing it. The natural plays of children 
 most frequently represent scenes of real life ; but a child's ex- 
 perience and knowledge of life is very narrow, and children 
 often weary of repeating the same scenes. In the games of 
 the Kindergarten they are supplied with a large number of 
 dramatic representations of occupations and scenes taken from 
 a variety of different phases of life, such as they could not 
 become acquainted with in their limited experience. 
 
 Toys, which are " not too bright and good for human 
 nature's daily food," contribute largely to the happiness of 
 childhood ; but even simple toys must not be supplied in such 
 abundance as to produce satiety. Nothing can be worse for 
 a child than to have the toys which he has carelessly broken, 
 or thrown aside, constantly replaced by new ones. 
 
 Good toys, which are to make children happy for many a 
 day, must either be such as lay hold of the imagination and 
 the heart, or they must give exercise to a child's activities. 
 We may generally judge what toys answer these ends by the 
 place which certain toys have long held in the estimation 
 of children. Generations of babies have hugged and loved 
 little, white woolly " bow-wows," with black bead eyes and 
 squeaky fore-grounds ; and the little boy of to-day believes 
 in his straight-legged, spotted horse, with its furry mane and 
 tail, and cares for its stabling and good treatment with as 
 much faith and love as his father and grandfather had for the 
 same horses in their time ; while the little mothers of the nur- 
 
The Happiness of Childhood, 77 
 
 sery still wash and dress and pet their dolls with the 
 same loving tenderness as their mothers and grandmothers 
 bestowed upon the wooden babies of their childhood. Other 
 old toys, the Noah's Ark, the Farmyard, and the Doll's 
 House, keep their places in the regard of children, through the 
 power they have of engaging the imagination. Amongst toys 
 which exercise a child's activity the box of bricks is always a 
 deserved favourite, and does not weary, from its capability of 
 being used in so many different ways. Some new toys of this 
 class have lately been introduced, which give much happiness 
 to children. Amongst these is the little kitchen-stove, in which 
 tiny real dinners can be cooked, and fairy cakes and pies 
 baked. There are also washing-tubs, pails, and mangles, by 
 which busy little washerwomen can get up dolls' clothes in 
 first-rate style ; as well as milk-pans, churns, and stamps for 
 making real butter. The box of gardening tools must not be 
 forgotten. A little garden is a constant source of healthy 
 delight to every child. It was part of Frdbel's plan that every 
 child should grow up as much as possible under the influences 
 of nature, and learn her lessons from herself ; and the original 
 Kindergartens were held in summer in an open space of ground 
 shaded by trees. Each child had a little piece of ground 
 given to him, where he sowed seeds, and watched the process 
 of their growth, and dug and raked the earth ; and gardening 
 formed a part of the Kindergarten occupations. The uncer- 
 tainty of our climate makes it difficult for Kindergarten teachers 
 to carry out this part of the system in England ; but as Fro- 
 bel's system is better understood, and when those who have 
 themselves been trained in it become the fathers and mothers 
 of the coming race, care will be taken that the home supplies 
 what the Kindergarten may not be able to accomplish. 
 
 It was also a part of Frobel's plan to have pet animals kept 
 for the children in the Kindergarten to care for and look after. 
 The influence of pet animals has been already referred to as 
 
yS The Happiness of Childhood. 
 
 promoting gentleness and tenderness of feeling ; but besides 
 these good results, there is great delight in the mutual affec- 
 tion that springs up between children and their pets ; and 
 there is great pleasure in attending to the wants of animals, 
 and in watching their habits. The clever little dog, the play- 
 ful kitten, the pretty rabbits, the gentle dove, the hen and her 
 soft little brood, are unfailing sources of happiness in child- 
 hood. 
 
 The happiness of children does not entirely depend on 
 conditions belonging to education and training; it is also 
 greatly promoted or checked by the influence of persons 
 around them. It is not enough to provide the essentials 
 of happiness ; we must be careful also that we do not destroy 
 the effect of these by our own manner and tone. The special 
 checks to the happiness of children arising from those around 
 them are, irritability, gloom, coldness, and want of sym- 
 pathy. 
 
 Many a well-intentioned parent has made his children 
 miserable, in order that he may indulge his own irritability. 
 The constant fault-finding, the perpetual worrying of children 
 about trifles, seldom spring from any desire for their real 
 improvement ; but it aff'ords a convenient outlet for irritability, 
 because children are obliged to take and bear what grown-up 
 persons would resent and put down. Harsh words, severe con- 
 demnation of little things, refusals of innocent requests, snub- 
 bing and contradicting, wear the hearts and spirits of the little 
 ones until they become in their turn as peevish and miserable 
 as those who have made them so. 
 
 Children need to live in the atmosphere of cheerfulness. 
 Their sensitive and delicate natures are far more susceptible 
 to surrounding influences than ours, and they readily take 
 their tone from the persons with whom they live. They 
 are soon cast down by a gloomy parent, teacher, or nurse, 
 whereas they revive like little flowers, and hold up their 
 
The Happiness of Childhood, 79 
 
 drooping heads in the presence of a sunny spirit. If we 
 would, as Frobel urges, " live for our children/' we must cast 
 aside our irritability and gloom, and show them at all times 
 the sweetness and light of a loving and bright spirit. And the 
 effort to do this is like mercy " twice blest ; it blesses him that 
 gives, and him that takes.'' 
 
 Children also need warmth, as well as light. They under- 
 stand but little of the deep love which by self-sacrifice and 
 constant thought seeks their good in all the arrangements of 
 their lives. Many things which a kind and wise parent orders 
 for his children, are not perceived by the children themselves, 
 and much of the conduct of a teacher is misunderstood by his 
 younger pupils ; it is necessary, therefore, to give to children 
 the assurance of love, not only in well-meant deeds, but in the 
 little marks of tenderness and affection, shown by words and 
 caresses. These are the natural expression of a little child's 
 love, and he looks for these in return, and is chilled and 
 repelled by coldness of manner, even where there may be a 
 depth of real love existing in the heart. 
 
 Many children suffer very much in childhood from the want 
 of sympathy in those around them. They see that they are 
 misunderstood and misjudged, and yet they cannot explain 
 themselves, or express their real feelings, because they know 
 that if they were to do this older persons would not feel with 
 them. We must not forget that children live in quite another 
 world from ours ; but it is one in which we ourselves have 
 once dwelt. It is possible to us, therefore, to look at things 
 from their point of view, although they cannot see things from 
 ours. We have stood where they now stand, and we must 
 strive to become again as little children, to see with their eyes 
 and feel with their hearts ; we must seek to remember what 
 were once our great interests in life, what we chiefly prized, 
 what were our loves, our joys, our griefs, our ignorance, and 
 our fears. 
 
8o The Happiness of Childhood. 
 
 And we may gain help also in the endeavour to sympathize 
 more with children by studying the writings of Frobel. His 
 long and patient observation of child nature gives to his writ- 
 ings on this subject the trustworthiness of scientific con- 
 clusions ; for every statement is the result of a series of careful 
 observations made of children, under all the circumstances 
 of their daily lives. 
 
 The happiness of childhood is a sacred trust placed in our 
 hands, and the responsibility lies with us of promoting and 
 guarding it, unselfishly and wisely. It is something to be able 
 to give to human beings a few short years of happiness ; but 
 this is not the end. Childhood soon passes away, and the 
 years of labour and care are long; but then comes the time 
 when, as Carlyle says, " the man finds that he can do without 
 happiness, for instead thereof he finds blessedness.'' Now 
 this blessedness of the life of later years, is, we believe, but the 
 ripening of those early blossoms of happiness, that make bright 
 the days of childhood ; and it is with this most important 
 consideration also in view that we would press so strongly on 
 those who have the training of the next generation in their 
 hands that they should endeavour by all means in their power 
 to seek and to preserve the Haopiness of Childhood. 
 
 I 
 
MOTHERS' SONG AND TALK.' 
 
 By ELEONORE HEERWART. 
 
 This lecture is intended for Kinder-Garten teachers, in order 
 to draw their attention to a book which contains Frobel's prin- 
 ciples, and shows his way of training little children ; it is 
 therefore a guide-book for those who have set themselves the 
 task of spreading the knowledge of a rational and, at the 
 same time, philosophical education. Students of Frobel's 
 theory, above all, must study his original works, and not be 
 satisfied with abridgments and adaptations. The fountain- 
 head supplies the living spring, which will impart freshness 
 and buoyancy. 
 
 In our work, especially, we continually need to be re-invigor- 
 ated, as we are surrounded by so many prejudices and 
 obstacles, and as we hear numerous objections, which tend 
 to damp our enthusiasm or shake our convictions. 
 
 However, for those who do not read German, there is now 
 an American translation of the " Mutter und Kose Lieder,'* 
 with a preface by Miss Peabody. Much can be learned on 
 this subject also from the second part of " Child and Child 
 Nature ; "* and besides these, several efforts have been made 
 to translate the songs into English, which translations, how- 
 ever, exist only in manuscript. 
 
 • A translation of Baroness MarenhoIz-Bulow*s book, published by 
 Soiinenschein and Allen. 
 
 G 
 
82 *' Mothers Song and Talk'' 
 
 The most familiar games out of the book, with explanations, 
 will be found in "Music for the Kinder-Garten/' (Boosey 
 and Co.) 
 
 I purpose to speak chiefly to Kinder-Garten teachers, who 
 would like to become acquainted with one of Frobel's books, 
 which is not easy to translate into English, and which is really 
 not translatable into any language but that of a mother's sweet 
 conversation and loving tones to her darling child. 
 
 A mother will understand the substance of this book ; a 
 mere critic or casual observer will not. For mothers Frobel 
 has written it ; fi'orn mothers he has learnt what he has 
 written ; and therefore it might be asked, "What have others 
 to do with it ? " It was, however, to women that Frobel has 
 given his charge, when he addressed the meeting on that 
 memorable day, June 24th, 1840, in Blankenburg (a small 
 town in the principality of Schwarzburg Rudolstadt, Thiirin- 
 gen, Germany), from which place and date the Kinder-Garten 
 may be said to have originated. 
 
 All women may act as universal mothers; in all kinds of 
 relationships they must manifest a motherly spirit ; and from 
 this no teacher must exempt herself — least of all, a Kinder- 
 Garten teacher. 
 
 The book, therefore, of which we speak to-night, addresses 
 itself to all who take charge of children, and thus represent 
 the mother. What does it mean when a mother brings you a 
 child into the Kinder-Garten ? 
 
 I understand it thus : "I bring you my child ; take care of 
 it as /would do ; '' or, " Do with my child what it is right to 
 do ; " or, " Do with it better than I am able.'' A silent 
 agreement is made between the parents and you, the teacher ; 
 the child is passed from hand to hand, from heart to heart : 
 what else can you do but be a mother to the little one, for the 
 hour, morning, or day, when you have the sacred charge of a 
 young soul ? In hope and trust the child is brought to you, 
 
" Mothers' Song and Talk!' 83 
 
 and you have to show yourself worthy of the confidence 
 which is placed in your skill, your experience, or your know- 
 ledge. We thus identify the teacher with the mother, and 
 even include every one, who is in the presence of a Httle child, 
 among those who have duties to fulfil, and who might learn of 
 Frobel how to perform them. 
 
 This book, " Mutter und Kose Lieder," or " Mother's Song 
 and Talk," was published in 1843. 
 
 Frobel's first wife, who died in 1839, had furnished him 
 with valuable materials ; the family circles of his friends in 
 Keilhau had given him opportunities of watching the develop- 
 ment of little children (for he had none of his own) ; the 
 beautiful landscapes on hill and dale, which surrounded him, 
 had ever shown to him that children must be brought up in 
 harmony with nature ; his own loss of a mother's tender care 
 made him the more appreciate the importance of a mother's 
 love in early infancy ; and his own experience of the social 
 life for which children must be prepared, all are causes which 
 resulted in the issue of this book. 
 
 In it Frobel addresses the mother; he speaks to her in 
 language that must surprise everyone, for he seems to feel in 
 his own heart all the vibrations of love, joy, hope, fear, and 
 anxiety which a mother only knows when watching her infant ; 
 but he also expects her to know her duty thoroughly. She 
 must understand that every movement, every cry, every smile 
 of her little one, are indications of an inward development. 
 The child soon shows the germs of physical, mental, and moral 
 abilities, and these must be nurtured, protected, and guided. 
 
 In this book Frobel puts in the mother's lips such words, 
 
 and he fancies her heart is full of such music, as make her 
 
 seem as though she felt her dignity and responsibility. " A 
 
 child" suggests the idea of a "gift from God" to Frobel, as 
 
 it did to the Hebrews of old ; and to Him it must be brought 
 
 again, as Hannah did with Samuel. 
 
 G 2 
 
84 " Mothers' Song and Talk:' 
 
 The mother should see a "three-fold heaven" united m 
 the possession of her child — namely, the happiness of past, 
 present, and future — and hers is the sacred duty of preserving 
 that happiness. 
 
 The words Faith, Love, Hope ; or Light, Love, and Life, 
 are the types of her feelings and actions towards the child 
 who lies before her in the cradle. 
 
 The child's smile is to the mother the sign of health, of 
 bodily comfort, and the beginning of the joyous laughter that 
 will ring through the house in future years, if health and hap- 
 piness have been preserved. A cry will find an echo in her 
 heart ; she hastens to open her ever-ready arms, and, by her 
 love, her wisdom and her skill, soothes the pain, and does not 
 rest until she sees the welcome smile again. 
 
 A movement of arms or feet teaches her that the child feels 
 its strength and wants to use it. She helps, she lifts, she 
 teaches, and while playing with her infant's hands and feet, she 
 is never short of a talk or song. 
 
 The Clappers in the Mill, the sound of which reach her ear, 
 suggest the up and down movement of the feet. 
 
 *' The Weathercock" (No. 9), that of the hands and wrist. 
 
 "The Clock" (No. 12), that of the arms. 
 
 "The Mowing of the Grass" (No. 13), and 
 
 " The Swimming of the Fishes" (No. 16), that of the arms 
 and whole body. 
 
 "The Baker" (No.- 18). 
 
 "The Bird's Nest" (No. 19). 
 
 "The Pigeonhouse" (No. 21). 
 
 '♦The Piano" (No. 26). 
 
 "The Wheelwright" (No. 45). 
 
 " The Carpenter" (No. 46), that of the hands. 
 
 Thus Frobel provides a series of pages for the mother, 
 which contain Pictures, Mottoes, Verses and Music. 
 
 In looking at the whole book we find that it may be divided 
 
''Mothers' Song and Talk!' 85 
 
 into four portions, each of which has its peculiar feature ; 
 namely, — 
 
 1. The Symbolical. 
 
 2. The Emotional. 
 
 3. The Practical. 
 
 4. The Explanations. 
 
 A few hints must suffice in speaking about the first and 
 second parts. 
 
 I.— THE SYMBOLICAL. 
 
 On the outside cover of the book are the words 
 
 Mother's Love, 
 Mother's Song, 
 Mother's Play. 
 
 The figures represent the mother holding her boy and girl in 
 her arms ; the former already turns his face outward as if to 
 say, " Into the wide, wide world I'll go !" The girl cHngs to 
 her mother, as if to say, " Here is my home." At the mother's 
 feet are scattered roses and thorns, the representation of the 
 way in which the children will repay her care in the future. 
 
 On the other side of the cover is a picture of the father, who 
 protects his daughter and leads his son ; the words round the 
 border meaning 
 
 Clear mind, 
 
 Noble actions, 
 
 Pious courage. 
 
 The title-page shows us a little picture of a mother who is 
 surrounded by her own and neighbour's children, whom she 
 teaches, she knowing the meaning of the call, 
 
 " Come, let us live for our Children ! " 
 
 Then there are a boy and girl who are busy in a garden ; 
 another girl looks into the depths of a lily ; her brother eniovs 
 
86 '* Mothers' Song and Talk!' 
 
 the fragrance of the flower. He stands on a cube, she on a 
 ball. (Kinder-Garten teachers will here see a reference to the 
 symbolical meaning of the 2nd gift). 
 
 Art and nature are interwoven on this page. Pillars, richly 
 decorated, point heavenwards ; from above shines the sun or\ 
 the picture below, and the stars unite in forming a crown, which 
 will await the mother when she enters heaven. The angel of 
 peace is represented as descending upon the scene, and 
 making it into an earthly paradise. 
 
 II.— THE EMOTIONAL. 
 
 The second portion contains one picture and seven pieces 
 of poetry, which tells us what the mother would feel on 
 beholding her infant, in whose rosy cheeks, wondering eyes, 
 and chubby liands and feet, she delights. See page 2 of 
 " Mutter und Kose Lieder," the song set to most appropriate 
 music, " O Kindchen du mein." 
 
 III.— THE PRACTICAL. 
 
 The third portion is the practical or educational part. The 
 series of pictures and songs are scenes taken from children's 
 life in country parts of Germany, and more particularly from 
 the part where Frobel lived during the years 1838 to 1844 \ 
 namely, in Keilhau and Blankenburg. Indoors and out of 
 doors, in the yard, garden, field, wood, and in the workshops, 
 the children are represented. Birds, fishes, domestic and wild 
 animals, come before their notice ; trees, flowers, wind and 
 water, sun, moon and stars, attract their attention, and rouse 
 their admiration. What a world of wonders ! what a range for 
 observation ! What varied sources from which to gather know- 
 ledge ! and what use the mother makes of all this ! There is 
 not a movement outside that she cannot imitate with the 
 
''Mothers' Song and Talk:* 87 
 
 child ; and thus she creates pleasant moments, and numerous 
 physical exercises, by which she fixes the subject more firmly 
 upon her child's mind. The fingers, hands, wrists, arms, legs 
 or whole body, are strengthened by imitating the Weathercock 
 Clock, the Mowing, the Baking, the Pigeons, Chickens and 
 Hare. Even for the fingers alone, the mother knows special 
 movements, so that a toy is always at hand — the cheapest toy 
 in the world — one's own fingers ! The mother also knows 
 that it is necessary to train the senses, not only because books 
 on education speak often of that training, but because she 
 knows her child has active organs of the senses which want to 
 do something, since the mind is longing for food, which the 
 senses convey. The ear must hear language, music, the gentle 
 accents and warning voices of father and mother ; it must dis- 
 tinguish the sounds of the wind, water, the noises of animals, 
 and when the ear has been trained to distinguish external 
 sounds, it will learn to listen to the voice of conscience and of 
 God. (See "Mutter und Kose Lieder," Picture 51, the 
 Cuckoo). The eyesight is directed to objects far and near, 
 the pigeons flying (Picture 15), the hares running (Picture 33), 
 the light flickering on the wall, and farther away still are the 
 calm beauty of the moon, and the twinkling stars in the dark 
 blue sky. No wonder the little boy (Picture 30), wanted to 
 climb up the ladder to the moon ! — heaven and earth he would 
 hold in the little span of his hand. No wonder the little girl 
 by her mother's side (Picture 31) called the two bright stars 
 she saw the first time in her young life, " Father and Mother 
 Stars," for she knew who were to her the brightest stars on 
 earth. 
 
 The senses of taste, touch, and smell, all, also, receive care 
 and attention. 
 
 Another side of the child's development needs great care. 
 This is the moral one ; and many an opportunity the mother 
 finds for developing it. 
 
88 " Mothers' Song and Talk!' 
 
 The pictures of "All's Gone'' (No. lo), "The Boy and 
 Girl at the Fair" (Nos. 52 and 53), are lessons on content- 
 ment. 
 
 The "Grassmowing"(No. 13), "The Target-maker" (No. 17), 
 "The Charcoal-burners" (No. 38), "The Builder" (No. 39), 
 and the " Wheelwright " (No. 45), teach respect for others. 
 
 "The Wolf" (No. 34), and "The Boar" (No. 35), contain 
 warnings against greediness. 
 
 "The Fishes 1' (No. 16), "The Bird's Nest" (No. 19), 
 speak against cruelty to animals. 
 
 " The Visitors and the Children " (Nos. 47, 48, 49), are 
 about behaviour in the presence of strangers. 
 
 "The Clock" (No. 12), and "The Baker "(No. 18), are 
 lessons on punctuality. 
 
 "The Grassmowing" (No. 13), "The Charcoal Burners" 
 (No. 38), "The Carpenter" (No. 39), "The Brook" (No. 
 40), and " The Joiner " (No. 46), teach our dependence on 
 the help of others. 
 
 The a|(ections also need nourishment, and the manner of 
 stimulating them is suggested in the pictures of " The Child 
 faUing, and the Mother lifting it up " (No. 8), " The Flower- 
 basket " (No. 20), and the "Pigeon-house" (No. 21); and 
 the religious training receives special care in " The Brook " 
 (No. 40), and the " Church-door " (No. 54). 
 
 The artistic tastes, too, are not forgotten in this book, being 
 specially recognized in the picture of the " Piano and Fingers " 
 (No. 26), " Drawing" (No. 55), and the "Window" (No. 37), 
 for architecture. Poetry also accompanies every picture. 
 
 Without force or hurry the child has learned to know the 
 world it lives in. Unconsciously it moves through the 
 wonders of nature, guided by the hand of father and mother; 
 but they are conscious of what they have taught the child. 
 All its powers must be unfolded, because a harmonious edu- 
 cation is tlie plan they have laid out for it. They are aware 
 
''Mothers' Song and Talk!' 89 
 
 of their sacred duties ; they feel that an immortal soul is given 
 to their charge. Nothing is too small for their notice that 
 concerns its welfare — nothing too trifling ; but in all its move- 
 ments, silent wishes, and gentle hints, they see the " Father of 
 the man." 
 
 So much, to night, for the practical part of the book. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The last division contains the explanations of the pictures 
 by Frobel himself — where he says : — 
 
 " Now, after fifty years, it is clear to me what I have longed 
 for since I was a boy. Will it be fifty and more years before 
 thou, oh, mother ! knowest what thy child's life requires of 
 thee?" 
 
 The child's education is thus grounded, and his affections 
 established at home; and on this foundation the.. Kinder- 
 garten teacher is to build her training, which must be in perfect 
 harmony with the former. This book, therefore, must also be 
 her guide-book. As Frobel himself says of it ; that in it he 
 has " laid down his principles ; and whoever understands this 
 book, understands also what is his aim." The finger, hand, and 
 arm exercises furnish the Kindergarten teacher with numerous 
 games ; those which were played in the nursery can be con- 
 tinued in a larger circle of children. Examples thereof are the 
 "Pigeon-house,*' "Fishes," "Basket," ** Bird's Nest," and 
 " Weathercock " ; and adaptations, as the " Chickens," 
 " Garden," " Clocks," " Hare," " Brook," " Cooper," and 
 " Cuckoo." 
 
 The Kindergarten teacher recognizes the child's power of 
 imitation, which was so easily trained, and she suggests more 
 difficult actions that may be imitated ; but she checks what is 
 
90 ''Mothers' Song and Talkr 
 
 not to be copied. Certain animals have graceful movements 
 and gewtle habits, others hnvr not. 
 
 Frobel gives ns m ( \;im|)U of the latter in the picture of 
 the " Wild Boar and WoK/' 
 
 That of the bonr m.iv ,( < m strange to us here ; but in some 
 forests in Germ.'in\ ilu v nv kept in large numbers — as, for 
 instance, in the inoimiim , .md park of the Prince of Schwarz- 
 burg Rudolstadt (wIk ii«( ilu- scenes in pictures 34 and 35 
 were taken), sevci.il imiKlicds of iIksc .'inlmals are kept. 
 
 A wordhasto l)e ;i(M((l .ilioui ihc pocirv, miruc, and pictures 
 themselves. Fr()l»cl composed ihc \(i:-c, , hmhewas not a 
 
 poett The rules <»l .m .hIisIk loim wcic no hiiidr.incc to hiiTl 
 when an idea had t.u W (j\i.rc:.sc<l. Many Umcs jic succeeded 
 in his poetry, many times he di<l noi. What does it matter? 
 
 We must do it ])rtt(r If we (111. 'riu> music and diawlni^s 
 were executed iind.'i ln'. due. don lo cxpicss wli.il Ik incani, 
 and they mn\ U\ .md haxc Ixsai, alla< kcd hv l>odi artists and 
 amateurs. Mam son-s aic too In-.h and too diltu iilt, hut llic 
 leading idea i< m (\.i\ one. The dia\\iii:;s lia\c' faultS in 
 their human and animal h-incs; |)nt tlicv \\<\c doiK^ l>v V\\ 
 Unger, who was nu)ic k>\ a lands( ape pamter thai a pamler of 
 
 figures. 
 
 Much can be said, but this sketch may help you in finding 
 out the hidden treasures of this extraordinary book, which 
 begins with the words : — 
 
 " Let us live for our children," and 
 " There is deep meaning in children's play." 
 
^^ Mothers' Song and Talk!' 91 
 
 Ext7^acts from " Child and Child- Nature," 
 with reference to FrobeVs *' Mutter u. 
 
 KOSELIEDER." 
 
 The key-note of the book is the analogy between the 
 development of humanity from its earliest infancy, and that 
 of the individual. The fact that the germs of all human 
 faculties and dispositions, as they show themselves in the life 
 of humanity, in its passions, its efforts after culture, its whole 
 manner of existence, are traceable in the nature of children as 
 manifested in their instinctive utterances, this fact, I say, must 
 be taken into account, in order that the games of children may 
 be turned to their natural purpose, viz., the assistance of the 
 child's development. 
 
 And even Frobel in the book in question has only taken the 
 first step towards the attainment of this purpose, has done no 
 more than point out in what manner it is possible. The filling 
 up of gaps in the system, greater perfection of arrangement, 
 and improvement in the outward form will not be difficult 
 when, through more universal practical application, FrobeFs 
 great educational theory meets with more and more thorough 
 understanding. Genius has but to give utterance to its 
 thoughts, and they will in due time become embodied in 
 appropriate forms. 
 
 Frobel rightly calls this book a family book, for only by its 
 use in the family, in the hands of mothers, can it fulfil its pur- 
 pose, and contribute towards raising the family to a level of 
 
92 " Mothers' Song mid Talk,'* 
 
 human culture corresponding to the advanced civilization of 
 the day, and preparing mothers for their vocation in the 
 highest sense. 
 
 Frobel made his " Mutter u. Koselieder " the foundation of 
 his lectures to Kindergarten teachers on his theory, and over 
 and over again repeated : " I have here laid down the funda- 
 mental ideas of my educational theory ; whoever has grasped 
 the pivot idea of this book understands what I am aiming at. 
 But how many do understand it? Learned men have too 
 great a contempt for the book to give it more than cursory 
 attention; and the majority of mothers only see in it an 
 ordinary picture-book with little songs. No doubt there are 
 finer pictures and better verses to be had than mine, but of 
 what use are they if wanting in any educational power ? Only 
 a small minority of people get from my book a real under- 
 standing of my educational theory in all its fulness, but, if 
 only mothers and teachers would follow its guidance they 
 would at last see, in spite of all opposition, that I am right." 
 
 1. That the first mental development of the child goes on in 
 its play, and that this play needs, consequently, to be as much 
 systematized as the instruction imparted at a later age. 
 
 2. That by rightly meeting and assisting the natural force 
 which vents itself in play, or by faulty and mistaken treatment 
 of it, it may be directed either to good — z,e., to its true use — 
 or to evil — t.e,, its abuse ; and 
 
 3. That the examples given in the " Mutter und Koselieder *' 
 are psychologically based on the instinctive life of the child, 
 even though they are not always expressed in the most perfect 
 form. 
 
 However much or little the nature of children may have been 
 studied, no one has come up to Frobel in his searching analysis 
 of every phase and detail of their development. Following 
 
" Mothers' Song and Talk!' 93 
 
 the example of modern natural science, which has descended 
 from the study of the greatest phenomena to that of the least, 
 and is making its most important discoveries through micro- 
 scopic investigations, Frobel, in the field of human nature, 
 goes back to the smallest beginnings, and finds thus the first 
 link in the chain which connects one moment of human develop- 
 ment with all the others. He finds the law which lies at the 
 bottom of all systematic development, and discovers the means 
 for the application of this law. In the growth of the child he 
 sees the same system of law as in organic growth generally, and 
 he points out the complete analogy between the development 
 of the child and that of the organisms of Nature and of 
 humanity as an organic whole. 
 
 During the first years of life the physical development is the 
 most marked and prominent, but the growth of the soul, 
 though unperceived, goes on, nevertheless, all the while ; for 
 in infancy body and soul are still completely in union, and 
 can only be developed through mutual interaction. It is on 
 this principle that Frobel has compiled his " Mutter u. Kose- 
 lieder." The games intrcduced in this book are adapted both 
 to cultivating the limbs and senses, and guiding and assisting 
 the mind in its first awakening stage. 
 
 When a child of about a year old is taken out of doors, the 
 things that first attract its notice are those that move. Move- 
 ment signifies to children life, and is what they first become 
 aware of. Hence the child's glance will at once be arrested 
 by a weather- cock, or any other object, moved by the wind. 
 
 The child awakens to life in its mother's arms, its mother is, 
 so to say, its own wider life. Without her care, without her 
 looks of love, existence would offer a sorry prospect to the 
 young new-comer. The mother must be her child's first 
 mediator with the world and mankind. 
 
94 " Mothers Song mid Talk!' 
 
 The first utterance through which the child expresses iijj 
 love-relationship to human beings, to its mother, is smiling. 
 The human heart alone is capable of laughter and tears, and 
 for the newborn infant this is the only language at command 
 to express its wants and feelings. 
 
 Extracts from " Music for the Kindergarten/' 
 by Eleonore Heerwart, 
 
 We head the list of these games with four from FrobeFs 
 ** Mutter und Koselieder," which may also be played only as 
 a finger and arm exercise ; " but these four — " The Basket," 
 '' The Weathercock," '' The Pigeon-house," and " The Bird's- 
 nest," do not exclude others from being used as proper finger- 
 games, for we might also act " Gentle Bee," " The Fishes," 
 "The Clappers," "The Trees," "The Sawyer," "The Clocks," 
 "The Cooper;" nor does it mean that the first four games 
 are only finger and arm exercises ; on the contrary, they are 
 used in the Kindergarten as real Kindergarten games, espe- 
 cially "The Pigeon-house;" but we wish to point out that 
 most of the games can be played at home, with one, two, or 
 more children, as well as with a larger number in the Kinder- 
 garten, and they will then furnish mothers with suitable con- 
 versations and pleasant employments when they spend their 
 time in the sweet companionship of their httle ones. 
 
 In fact, Frobel meant " The Basket," ".The Pigeon-house," 
 &c., for the use of home, and wrote them especially for 
 mothers. Their adaptation to the Kindergarten was a secon- 
 dary thought. 
 
 A Kindergarten game means a game which is played by 
 many children, and conducted by a " teacher," The subject 
 
** Mothers Song and Talk:' 95 
 
 is chosen from daily life, from nature, and especially from the 
 sphere in which the child lives. 
 
 The object of the game is to spend a happy hour with the 
 children, to teach them the words, music, and time, and make 
 these bear upon the child's physical, mental, and moral de- 
 velopment. 
 
 "THE BASKET.''— No. 48. 
 
 This arm-and-hand exercise is translated from Frobel's 
 " Mutter und Koselieder, No. 20," the picture of which 
 shows us children who are gathering flowers, supposed to 
 have been planted by themselves. The flowers are to be 
 given to the father as a birthday present. The mutual affec- 
 tion between parents and children will grow when it is 
 nourished, and will remain the strongest tie on earth. 
 
 As a game in the Kindergarten, it may be played by holding 
 little baskets filled with flowers, or by holding the hands in the 
 shape of baskets, the thumbs representing the handle. A 
 graceful movement of the body, and swinging up and down of 
 the arms, keeping time with the music, -will, give life to the 
 game. 
 
 " THE WEATHERCOCK."— No. 49. 
 
 If asked, "What is the first plaything for children?" we 
 may reply, " Their own hands," for these are always near, and 
 cost no money. 
 
 Always to find something for the active little fingers to do, 
 is a great task to many mothers ; but let Frobel teach them 
 from his book of " Mutter und Koselieder" how many things 
 the little fingers can imitate, and they will no longer be at a 
 loss for a game. 
 
 The child, in looking at the tops of houses, may happen to 
 see a weathercock being turned by the wind. Immediately 
 the mother seizes the opportunity for telling the child to 
 imitate it with its arms and hands. The arm from the elbow 
 
96 " Mothers' Song and Talkr 
 
 must be held erect, and the hand at right angles with it, turned 
 with the inside towards the face. When the song begins the 
 hand is turned outwards, and for every bar one movement is 
 made. The wrist especially is strengthened by this exercise. 
 
 " THE PIGEON-HOUSE."— No. 50. 
 
 Is it necessary to suggest how " The Pigeon-house " should 
 be played ? It should be remembered that the children always 
 form a ring, which in this case should be a closed one, to 
 enable the children to say, " My pigeon-house I open wide.'' 
 A step or two backwards will widen the ring ; the arms a little 
 raised will allow the pigeons to fly out and about, until the 
 words " But soon they return " be heard, when they fly in 
 again to sing their soft *' Coo, coo.'' 
 
 The pigeons may tell where they have been, and what they 
 have seen in the fields. 
 
 Other pigeons are then chosen, who do the same. 
 
 To vary the game, there may be a farmer who owns the 
 pigeons, and who fixes the hour when the house should be 
 opened. The sound of a clock striking the hour may be 
 imitated. 
 
 If Frobel had left us no other game than this one, it alone 
 would entitle him to be called " the children's friend," for it 
 has given joy to many little ones, 
 
 "THE BIRD'S-NEST."— No. 51. 
 
 Children are delighted when they see birds, but they must 
 learn to see and spare them. 
 
 In his book of " Mutter und Koselieder " Frobel gives us 
 a picture, a verse, and a lesson, that we may know how to cul- 
 tivate in children love for birds, and respect for the parental 
 feeUngs of the feathered tribe. There would be no throwing 
 of stones at swallows' nests under the eaves of houses, nor 
 
^'Mothers' Song and Talk!' 97 
 
 climbing of trees to take the eggs away, and other cruelties, 
 if in every house and every place where children meet the life 
 of birds were made the subject of talk, song, and a simple 
 finger or hand game such as " The Bird's-nest." 
 
 It may form the introduction to the following game, or suc- 
 ceed a story and description of birds. 
 
 The children ma)" either sit or stand when they play *' The 
 Bird's-nest." 
 
 The hands imitate the shape of the nest. The thumbs repre- 
 sent the old birds. 
 
 It is well to mention the name of a special bird, as linnet, 
 robin, &c. 
 
 " THE FISHES.''— No. 62. 
 
 According to Frobel's " Mother's Song and Talk," Picture 
 No. 16, the little child, after having become acquainted with 
 the familiar world at home, is now introduced into a new 
 scene, where, in the cool forest, a silvery brook winds its way 
 over rocks, between grasses, and rushes, and shady trees. 
 
 New life shows itself before the wondering eyes of the 
 child ; it hears the rustling of the branches, the singing of the 
 birds, the splashing of the hasty brook, and it sees the golden 
 lights between the tall trees, the soft green moss ; and in the 
 clear water the astonished child discovers the trout, for the 
 first time in his life. The little boy thinks, "That little fish is 
 quick, but I will be quicker," and into the water he makes his 
 way. After some fruitless attempts he succeeds in catching a 
 little trout, which he hands to his sister, who stands on the 
 bank and watches the movements of her brother. She holds 
 the little fish and looks at the large eyes, the glittering scales, 
 the forked tail, which moves to and fro : but all at once it 
 stops ! — the eyes ! — the trout is dead ! For the first time in 
 her young life she sees a creature dead in her hand, by her 
 hand, or at any rate by her brother's hand. She calls him, 
 
 H 
 
C)8 ** Mothers' Song and Tdlk.^* 
 
 shows the dead fish, and the boy's yet unhardened heart also 
 feels that he has caused the death of the little trout. He had 
 only wished to play, and did not mean harm. For his 
 whole life he may have learned a lesson that even in play we 
 must count the cost in order to make it what it should be, a 
 harmless game at the least. There in the solitude of the wood, 
 by the silvery brook, the early cruelty was checked by the 
 first sad experience. A boy not yet spoilt by harsh, inconsistent, 
 superficial treatment, righted himself by the dictates of his 
 sorrowing heart. 
 
 The game of the fishes, which is derived from this picture, 
 teaches us to imitate their movements, but not to persecute 
 the fishes. Although the remark seems superfluous it may be 
 permitted here, for it gives the rule for all games in the Kinder- 
 garten and for all children, that cruelty should in no way be 
 represented. 
 
 The ring is the pond, some children are fishes and imitate 
 swimming by a movement of their arms, and the diving and 
 rising by stooping when the song indicates it. The movement 
 should be practised by all the children, as it requires great 
 attention, owing to the ^-time in each bar. The subjects for 
 conversation are very many before and after the game, and 
 may be varied according to the kind of fish which is chosen. 
 In no other game is it more necessary for the Kindergarten 
 teacher to be acquainted with the habits and structures of 
 the animals, as in this all vague and undecided answers of the 
 children should be rejected. 
 
WASTED FORCES. 
 
 By EMILY SHIRREFF. 
 
 It is a subject of melancholy contemplation to the friends of 
 education, that after public recognition of its importance for 
 so many years, in some parts of the continent of Europe for 
 a period of more than half a century, no great material re- 
 sults of its influence have yet become manifest. Nations that 
 were careless and pleasure-loving before, show the same spirit 
 still ; the unthrifty have not mended their ways ; the wor- 
 shippers of gold have not set up nobler idols ; the military 
 spirit has not decreased ; the indolent indifferentism that takes 
 no interest in pubHc affairs till roused by some great crisis, 
 still reigns where it reigned before ; those who believed that 
 new eras may be inaugurated by the stroke of a pen or the 
 machinations of secret societies, still hold their belief In 
 short, the great masses of mankind through the most civilized 
 nations of the world show little trace of the efforts made to 
 raise, through education, their moral and intellectual condition. 
 We are an educational society, .and this question is one 
 which must interest us deeply ; for either we are wrong in 
 attributing so much influence to education, or we ought to 
 be able to discern the causes that have so far neutralised that 
 influence. The inquiry is, however, so large that we must 
 limit ourselves to a small portion of it. We must leave aside 
 the consideration of the wide social and political causes that 
 
 H 2 
 
lOO Wasted Forces, 
 
 are antagonistic to the spread of the sounder views and prin- 
 ciples which should be the result of wide-spread education, 
 and confine ourselves to strictly educational considerations. 
 Among these, three points deserve special attention : — ist, 
 That while calling it education, we have actually given only 
 elementary instruction. 2ndly, That the earliest and most 
 plastic period of life has been neglected, thus leaving an 
 almost impossible task to be performed in the succeeding one. 
 3rdly, That the educational power of women has been 
 neglected, left, to an enormous extent, untrained and unused. 
 
 These three points are closely connected, the one with the 
 other, and are all intimately bound up with our own work as a 
 Froebel Society. The first will scarcely be contested by any 
 one. The utmost endeavours of elementary schools barely 
 compass giving the first and simplest notions of necessary 
 knowledge, with more or less use of the instruments for acquir- 
 ing more, and such general benefit as results from the order 
 and discipline of school life, and the influence of moral and 
 religious teaching, whose precepts are too often at variance 
 with the whole experience of the children out of school. If 
 this were really education, we could only laugh at our own 
 folly in expecting such large results from so small a thing. 
 When we speak of benefiting a people by education, we must 
 mean that the mass of men and women should learn how to 
 think more clearly, to judge more correctly, to act according 
 to more fixed principles, to have, in short, more common 
 sense and juster notions of duty ; and finally, to have percep- 
 tion enough of the difference between ignorance and know- 
 ledge to wish to take advantage of such opportunities as life 
 may present to them to add to their stock of acquirements. 
 
 How far the education of the well-to-do classes of any 
 nation has hitherto produced such results generally, I will not 
 inquire into here; but what right have we to expect they 
 shall follow from the reading and writing and other small 
 
 j 
 
Wasted Forces. loi 
 
 achievements of the elementary school ? Yet, I believe such 
 achievements to be as much as schools can compass at 
 present. Better methods might, doubtless, produce some 
 improvement; and just views of education would do yet more ; 
 but time fails for what has to be accomplished ; the imperative 
 necessities of life limit the years that can be given to school 
 instruction, and the work of those years is rendered doubly 
 heavy by the neglect of those that have gone before. 
 
 The infant-school system is designed to remedy some of 
 these defects, and there is no doubt of the great benefits it 
 has conferred. Unfortunately, the very large numbers taught 
 together in these schools render nugatory much of the endea- 
 vours to educate them. They are of an age to require indivi- 
 dual attention, and they are dealt with in masses. The 
 general influence on character of the order, regularity, obedi- 
 ence, cleanliness enforced, is inestimable ; but with regard to 
 strictly intellectual development, the system was not originally 
 constructed on a scientific plan, and the effects are rather 
 incidental than direct fruits of this method. The object- 
 lessons are good, but they do not promote the natural deve- 
 lopment of faculty like the Kinder-Garten exercises, and the 
 manipulations of the latter are altogether wanting. The direct 
 teaching is intended to prepare for later school-work, but it 
 prepares by laying a foundation of reading and writing ; not 
 the foundation of quickened faculties, exercised heads, and 
 habits of comparing and judging, of speaking and moving 
 accurately, which is the preparation of the Kinder-Garten. 
 In short, these schools, invaluable as they have been, do an 
 imperfect work, and of the vast numbers who have never been 
 brought even under their influence, it is not too much to say 
 that the child comes under the schoolmaster's hands, not 
 ignorant merely, but with his moral and intellectual growth 
 already warped. Rapid expansion of faculty has been going 
 on from his birth, unwatched and undirected, and most of 
 
102 Wasted Forces, 
 
 what he has learnt for himself has been inaccurately learnt, 
 or rather hinders than aids the instruction he now comes to 
 receive. Thus the second point indicated above, the neglect 
 of the early period of life during which the mental and physical 
 growths are so important, is evidently a principal cause of the 
 failure of education, and it is a cause with which we, as the 
 Froebel Society, are immediately concerned. If education is 
 not only to give instruction, but to discipline the faculties and 
 bring them into fit condition for observing, learning, and 
 thinking aright, it is obvious that the whole of this work cannot 
 begin at once. The child must have gradually learnt to use 
 his mental powers as he has learnt to use his limbs and bodily 
 strength before we exact from him any systematic exerti'on of 
 the one or the other. While he is still quite incapable of 
 acquiring abstract or general knowledge, he is capable of 
 learning to observe correctly what is before him, and to draw 
 a right inference from one thing he really understands to 
 another, which is the foundation of all accurate study and 
 thought hereafter. The child inevitably uses his faculties as 
 he uses his limbs. The only question is, whether he shall 
 grope with the former, or learn to use them rightly and with a 
 purpose, as he learns to walk or to throw a ball. This is an 
 obvious and quite elementary truth to any disciples of 
 Froebel, and the Kinder-Garten is designed to supply this 
 early education, or such portion of it as can be given out 
 of home ; but to the ordinary framers of educational systems, 
 national or other, it has not yet been made obvious, and so 
 they neglect little children and hope that book learning will 
 at a later period do the work of education. 
 
 The third point I have mentioned is inevitably bound up 
 with this question of infant training ; for that early portion of 
 child life is altogether in the hands of women, either as 
 mothers, nurses, or teachers, and if their educational power 
 has been neglected we can hope for no reform that will lay a 
 
Wasted Forces, 103 
 
 better foundation for the after -work of the schoolmaster, or 
 afford him that help he requires from the co-operation of home 
 influence. We may fearlessly lay down the axiom that edu- 
 cation in its true sense, as a real civilizing power, will remain 
 in abeyance till women are recognized as the natural educators, 
 and till then we shall continue to make vain efforts to supple- 
 ment with instruction the absence of the wider influence of 
 education. 
 
 No one realized this truth more fully than Froebel, and 
 after fruitless attempts to inaugurate a complete system of 
 education during the ordinary school period, combining the 
 development of faculty in children neglected up to the age of 
 seven or eight, with the indispensable course of school instruc- 
 tion, he realized that education must begin from the earliest 
 dawn of life, and that mothers must be the educators This 
 principle underlies his whole system ; the Kinder-Garten pre- 
 supposes it, and appeals to it throughout. When we give a 
 little attention to the subject, this fact is so self-evident that 
 we only wonder how any one could for a moment have doubted 
 it, or mistaken the true position of women as regards educa- 
 tion. In one sense it never has been mistaken, for that 
 mothers must bring up their children, to use the common 
 expression, and that when the mother's care fails, such " bring- 
 ing up " must be delegated to another woman, is the most 
 universally acknowledged fact of every-day life ; but what is not 
 so universally understood is, that the bringing-up is another 
 name for education, and that education, to be effectual, must 
 be conducted with a purpose and according to knowledge. 
 Froebel did not discover a new fact, or even propound a new 
 theory when he hailed women as the true ministers of the 
 great work of reformation which he undertook. He only 
 strove to give a new direction to the old activity, and to make 
 manifest the true ground on which it should proceed. Pesta- 
 lozzi, and even Rousseau before him, had made a public appeal 
 
104 Wasted Forces. 
 
 to women ; but Froebel renewed it with fresh force, and his 
 views of education afford the simplest and fullest exposition 
 of the duties incumbent upon them. Rightly or wrongly, 
 for good or for ill, mothers have always and must always 
 educate their children. Owing, doubtless, to its transcendant 
 importance, this one great human duty, which God has placed 
 ' under the safeguard of the strongest affection of woman's 
 nature, is never consciously, wilfully neglected save by the 
 most depraved in any class ; only they call it " bringing up," 
 not education, leaving the latter for school-years and school- 
 discipline. This mistake is the root of endless evil. It 
 seems an error in words only ; but words are powerful things, 
 for they help to form associations, and lead to wrong action 
 when the associations they have formed are wrong. Froebel 
 admitted no such distinctions between the influence of parents 
 or teachers at one period and another, and when he speaks of 
 education, he meaiis one and the same continuous process, 
 beginning in infancy, and carried on through varied phases 
 and by various means, till the grown-up man and woman take 
 into their own hands the task, which will end only with the 
 close of earthly existence. 
 
 With such a view of education, when Froebel called upon 
 women, he called upon them only to undertake their natural 
 task, that which love and necessity equally bound upon them, 
 with a wider and more distinct purpose ; as something not 
 apart from the later task of the schoolmaster, but preparing 
 the way for it, laying down the preliminary lines of his work, 
 and, indeed, overlapping it in many directions, as home-life 
 overlaps school-life. This substitution of a definite, far-search- 
 ing purpose for the instinctive mother's care, of conscious 
 education for desultory " bringing-up," is what has never yet 
 been accomplished, except among a small minority ; and the 
 reason is that education is ill-understood and women have not 
 realized that if they are to undertake a serious task, the success 
 
vVasted Forces, 1 05 
 
 of which depends on knowledge of its conditions, they must 
 acquire the knowledge. 
 
 It is this duty of women to fit themselves for their natural 
 vocation as educators that I wish to press upon your attention 
 to-night. I need scarcely remind you how specially it bears 
 upon our own pecuHar work, which more than any other is 
 helped by the action of mothers. There is no doubt such a 
 thing as an instinctive gift for education, as there is for every 
 other art which the majority of men have to acquire patiently 
 and laboriously; and thus some women who have never 
 studied the subject succeed in educating their children, and by 
 their very success nourish the popular prejudice, that no 
 special study is required for the performance of this natural 
 duty. But when an unusually able woman, or the mother of 
 unusually gifted children, morally or intellectually, produces 
 an admirable result, without study of rules or principles, the 
 way to test her success as a guide for the multitude, is to try 
 and imagine what would be the result of the same high-handed 
 ignorance of principles without the natural gifts. A system 
 for common use must be fit for the mass of mankind, and the 
 mass is not gifted. Every theory may safely assume the 
 mother's love, because this is natural — all but unfailing ; but it 
 cannot assume the possession by the mother of the native 
 power which can supply the lack of knowledge, whether of 
 human nature, in which the principles of education have theii 
 root, or of those branches of instruction which furnish the 
 subject-matter of education. Thence it is evident that when 
 women are appealed to as natural educators, it is implied that 
 they will make education their study, and acquire the know- 
 ledge requisite for assisting the mental and physical develop- 
 ment of their children during those years which prepare the 
 course of all future years. It is not indispensable for mothers 
 to be teachers, but if they do not know what constitutes good 
 teaching they will not know what results to look for. There 
 
ic6 Wasted Forces. 
 
 is no need that they should have made a deep study of either 
 physiology or mental philosophy, but unless they clearly realize 
 that mental and bodily health depend upon conditions which 
 can be learnt only through some elementary knowledge of 
 those two sciences, how can they ensure those conditions for 
 their children, or how judge if they are or are not observed in 
 the educational institutions, Kinder-Gartens or schools in which 
 their children are to be placed ? 
 
 All school education requires the foundation, the support 
 and complement of home education; but to the Kinder-Garten, 
 dealing with children at such a tender age, it is absolutely 
 indispensable, and the want of it constantly cripples the 
 teacher's best endeavours. A child of ten years old and 
 upwards may begin to distinguish between the teaching and 
 general influence of school and home. He can recognize 
 where he is most stimulated to do well, to behave well ; what 
 praise he most cares to work for; and, unfortunate as it is when 
 the home holds a lower position in his estimate than the 
 school, the higher influence is not lost. The little child, on 
 the other hand, can distinguish nothing ; but he suffers from 
 the jar produced by differences of treatment he cannot under- 
 stand. The work of the Kinder-Garten teacher is not indeed 
 lost, but it is thwarted by the child being placed at home under 
 intellectual and moral direction proceeding on different prin- 
 ciples, or most Hkely no principles at all, but simply the 
 spontaneous unreasoning action of ignorant affection. Of 
 the many sadder cases where even such care as this does 
 not exist, but only neglect caused by the different forms 
 of vice or folly belonging to the different classes of society, 
 it is needless to speak. School-training in one way or 
 another, according to age, is then the only resource; but 
 once more, however, good it may be, it can but partly com- 
 pensate for the absence of home education, and thus the 
 study of education by women, their serious preparation for 
 
Wasted Forces, lOJ 
 
 this great duty, is the pivot on which all ultimately turns. 
 Vain will be any hope of lifting education out of the groove of 
 routine teaching, till this is acknowledged ; till society remem- 
 bers and enforces this truth: that whatever the position, 
 occupations or other family duties of a woman, one sacred 
 office is laid upon her who undertakes the responsibility of 
 motherhood, and that is the care of her children in every sense 
 in which care is needed ; guarding them from suffering ; pro- 
 moting their bodily and spiritual welfare, aiding nature's 
 gradual work of development in every direction. Such care 
 is in a measure that of the physician as regards the right con- 
 ditions of health, and it is also the true cure of souls. All this 
 will be generally conceded and even looked upon as a truism ; 
 yet, I repeat, it is practically denied every day and every hour, 
 by the assumption that such a task can be executed without 
 study or preparation ; by the assertion, implied if not put into 
 words, that natural instincts and parental love will give the 
 required ability for discharging the responsibilities of a parent. 
 
 We have now considered the three causes of failure I 
 pointed out in the beginning, to explain the disappointment 
 which has followed the high hopes of those who looked to 
 national education as the " regenerator of nations, and we 
 have found wasted forces in three directions ; ist. The waste of 
 labour and money in giving instruction which was vainly 
 expected to produce the fruits of education. 2nd, Waste of that 
 immense natural form of development of the child's faculties 
 during the years we put to no account. 3rd, Waste of women's 
 educational power and position, which we find fatally to involve 
 the other two. This last, therefore, is the one which claims, 
 on every account, our most earnest consideration, in order 
 that, having found the central source of failure, we may, if 
 possible, help towards finding a remedy. 
 
 So wide-spread and deep-rooted an evil is not, however, 
 easy to reach. It is only from a higher and purer view of 
 
 ^ V^ Otf XHi? ^ 
 
io8 Wasted Forces, 
 
 women's position generally, that we can hope for any wide 
 recognition of this terrible waste of civilizing power, or any 
 large endeavours to redeem the past. But in all practical 
 questions reforms may begin in a corner which shall presently 
 spread over a wide field, and, therefore, all who can persuade 
 a few women will help to turn public opinion. It is in this 
 belief that I have brought forward the subject this evening, 
 thinking it well that we, who are practically concerned in 
 education, should consult together what we can do, individu- 
 ally or as a society, to quicken in women, and in young 
 mothers especially, the perception of their duty in this par- 
 ticular. It is our special object to win over mothers of little 
 children to study Froebel's doctrine, and to take an interest in 
 his method. It must then be our endeavour to present these 
 to them in a manner which shall arrest attention and excite 
 interest. As a society we might possibly organize some plan 
 for spreading knowledge of the first principles of education. 
 For real students there are plenty of good books, and now 
 that the whole subject is taken up in a new spirit, there are 
 excellent lectures which, we trust, are not attended by pro- 
 fessional students only. Our work should be a preliminary 
 one, to endeav5ur to inspire those who know nothing with the 
 desire to learn something ; to persuade women who have no 
 professional inducement to take up the subject, that it is the 
 real and sacred profession of all women who have taken upon 
 themselves the responsibilities of motherhood. We do not 
 want lectures on the Art of Teaching, — that may come after- 
 wards, — but on the Art of Training, on the elementary 
 notions of education, based on observation of the child's 
 nature as it puts out its earliest shoots, and on the simplest 
 methods of aiding their growth, and preserving them from any 
 adverse influence which might thwart their development. 
 Such teaching as might be given on a few texts from Froebel's 
 "Song-book for Mothers," or Mdme. von Marienholtz's 
 
Wasted Forces, • 109 
 
 ** Child Nature," would give a new turn to the thoughts of 
 many earnest, intelligent women, who have not hitherto had 
 their attention directed to such views ; and if the lectures 
 could be illustrated practically through Kinder-Garten occupa- 
 tions conducted before the audience and duly explained, and 
 could their educational value be further exemplified by 
 reference to Mdme. de PortugalFs Synoptical Table, I think 
 we might win many converts. Probably we should win, before 
 long, a sufficient number to form here and there new centres 
 of information, independently of our direct action. 
 
 One of the reasons of the difficulty we find in getting 
 Kinder-Garten training properly appreciated is, that its office in 
 education is precisely that which has no immediately visible 
 results, and is based on considerations strange to those who 
 have not studied the subject. If it taught reading and writing 
 more rapidly than other systems, that would be a tangible 
 merit, and, for the same reason, the manual dexterity cultivated 
 by it, is seen to be a good thing. But the cultivation of the 
 faculties themselves, to make them more fit for future work, of 
 developing the child's own powers in every direction instead 
 of teaching it grammar or history — ^this fundamental mental 
 disciphne is only understood by those who have learnt some- 
 thing of what the various mental faculties are, and why such and 
 such a mode of bringing them into action produces good or 
 evil results. To persons who have given no attention to these 
 things seeing is much the same as observing; little difference 
 is perceived between knowing a thing by rote or knowing it 
 with understanding ; and reasoning suggests something for the 
 use of the learned only, and they find it hard to believe that 
 the same process is needed to avoid blunders in those common 
 judgments which seem so easy. It is when we begin to dis- 
 entangle these things, and thus to perceive how much has to 
 be done to prepare the child to see, to think, to act, and to 
 learn with some correctness, that we feel the merits of Froebel's 
 
no Wasted Forces. 
 
 system; and it is just this part of the study of education that 
 we should endeavour to place before young mothers in as 
 clear and simple a form as possible. We have, I believe, 
 peculiar opportunities of doing so, through the medium ot 
 the Kinder- Garten itself, with its practical illustrations, and, I 
 trust, we may seriously consider how best to enter upon this 
 hitherto neglected phase of our work as a Froebel Society. 
 
 But apart from this action of the Society, individual 
 teachers might help materially, if they could persuade the 
 mothers of their pupils to enter into the subject with them; 
 to visit the classes frequently and to read any short explana- 
 tions of what they see there. We cannot doubt that the 
 mistresses of Kinder-Gartens, having the cause at heart, would 
 welcome the opportunities for such conversations, and they 
 might, perhaps, do something more to create the opportunities. 
 It might be possible to gather a few ladies together to discuss 
 difficulties. Small meetings might be organized by competent 
 teachers, which a few might be invited to attend, and allowed, 
 perhaps, to bring a friend, and at these, the occupations could 
 be practically exhibited more fully than with a class of children, 
 and their inter-dependence and educational value explained. 
 Great good might, I feel convinced, be done in this way. 
 Here a few and there a few would be won to intelligent com- 
 prehension of the system, and their example and advocacy 
 would win others. When once a little knowledge is gained, 
 the more earnest minds will not stop there ; when interest is 
 really kindled, the inspiring spirit will be kindled too. 
 
 Members of the society who are not teachers might, at 
 least, lead those who want knowledge to the sources where it 
 may be found ; they can speak their own convictions, though 
 they may have no practical familiarity with the method ; they 
 may persuade, any of their own friends wl)0 are inclined to 
 send their children to the Kinder-Garten, to become scholars 
 themselves. All minor difficulties will vanish if mothers learn 
 
Wasted Forces, ill 
 
 enough to feel the value of what their children are learning. 
 The Kinder-Garten would assume quite a new importance in 
 their eyes, and there would be many earnest endeavours to 
 bring the home management into harmony with it. 
 
 And now I can hear objectors say : *' Supposing you have 
 done your utmost with the women of the educated classes, 
 how does this view of mothers' duty apply to the far more 
 numerous class of the uneducated ? If it is as educators of 
 the race that we appeal to women, the appeal must include 
 them also.'' Perfectly true; but it can reach them only 
 through the medium of their happier sisters, and the general 
 influence of higher views. It is only too certain that educa- 
 tion, like all other benefits of human knowledge, will ever be 
 relative to the class addressed. Means and leisure must 
 ultimately give the measure of what can be attained, however 
 just and liberal the system under which we live. But what we 
 may expect is that more and more as true Christian civilization 
 grows among us, those who have most intellectual advantages 
 will facilitate to those who have least, the acquirement of what 
 tends to elevate their condition as human beings. If it is 
 reckoned even now a fair measure of justice to put all grades 
 of instruction within reach of the poor man who aspires to 
 culture, still more must it be simple justice to bring to every 
 home that degree of instruction which is needed for the better 
 fulfilment of a great duty. Hence I cannot doubt that as 
 society awakens to the importance of the universal educating 
 power of mothers, means will be found to spread universally 
 that simple knowledge of first principles, which will rescue 
 infancy from a very large portion, at least, of the ignorant 
 treatment that now stunts, when it does not distort, the normal 
 growth of mind and body. We see various subjects taken 
 up for adult instruction among women, not one of which 
 approaches in importance this one, or is so likely to kindle 
 interest and rouse native power in the hearers. We have 
 
fI2 Wasted Forces, 
 
 cooking classes and sanitary lectures and mothers' meetings, 
 &c. Why should not the education of little children be the 
 subject of instruction given in the same manner — given widely, 
 frequently and earnestly, by women who have themselves had 
 every opportunity of acquiring the knowledge they would 
 impart. And let us remember that such instruction will be 
 greatly helped by the appeal it makes to the strongest feelings 
 of the woman's heart, however rough or uncultivated she may 
 be. When a few real disciples are won from among the many, 
 they will in their turn become apostles. Each reformed home 
 will become a centre of good example, until gradually, however 
 slowly, a new sense of duty is created; and public opinion, 
 become more enlightened, will find the means of continuing 
 with greater facilities, the work set on foot by the zeal of a few. 
 Since the foregoing pages were written, a great controversy 
 has been going on concerning the pressure put upon children 
 by modem school-teaching, in which, doubtless, many present 
 have taken a keen interest. It would be out of place here to 
 enter into the details of that controversy ; I only wish to point 
 out, how largely it all ultimately turns upon the serious defi- 
 ciency 1 have dwelt upon this evening — upon the ignorance of 
 mothers with regard to education. If mothers were penetrated 
 with the truth that they must educate their children themselves, 
 whoever else may assist them, whether in giving instruction or 
 in any other way, these disputes would not arise or would be 
 quickly settled. Children would go to school with due mental 
 preparation. If sent to a day-school they would remain under 
 the same watchful maternal care for the far larger portion of 
 their lives still spent at home. The twenty hours a week, or 
 thereabouts, spent under the school tuition, would not be 
 supposed to exonerate from responsibility the parents who 
 control the remaining 148 hours; but the responsibility 
 would be discharged with knowledge of what it involves, and 
 knowledge of each individual child, and the mother would be 
 
Wasted Forces, 113 
 
 capable of consulting intelligently with the school-teacher, and 
 of laying down a scheme of home life and study which should 
 co-operate with, instead of thwarting the school scheme. 
 Naturally, mistakes would still occur on both sides, but we 
 should never see the misconception, the antagonism, the 
 divided, often contrary influence, the early neglect and the 
 impatient ambitions that thwart the work of the best schools 
 now. The least we should expect of mothers who had some 
 knowledge, however slight, of education, would be that if, for 
 any reason, they wish to be rid of the charge of their children, 
 they should send them to boarding, and not to day-schools, 
 since the chief advantage and merit of the latter is that they 
 still leave the greater part of the child's life under parental 
 management and influence. 
 
 1 would not, however, close these remarks without saying a 
 few words in extenuation of what may appear to some very 
 severe and undeserved strictures upon mothers generally, whose 
 earnest desire to do their duty I never doubt, even when, in 
 my opinion, they fall most sadly short of it. There is nothing 
 strange in the fact that women have neglected to study educa- 
 tion, or at least to study it on scientific grounds, and nothing 
 for which, in the past, they could be held seriously to blame. 
 Their neglect was that of the nation at large. Education has 
 never, till of late years, held its rightful place in this country. 
 The subject has been simply a practical one, to be solved by 
 putting children under tuition for a certain number of years, in 
 order that they might acquire such knowledge as might be 
 wanted for use, or show, according to the station in life they 
 were to occupy. Moral training was always, thank God, more 
 .seriously thought of; but rather as a part of religion than of 
 education. Women themselves were denied all serious cul- 
 ture, and the very fact that the training of young children is 
 necessarily women's work, was sufficient to class it as trivial 
 work. Women being unused to study and reflection, naturally 
 
 I 
 
114 Wasted Forces. 
 
 acquiesced in the opinions prevailing around — and this state of 
 things must be very slow to change among the majority, 
 immense as the improvement has been among the few. It 
 is a slow and painful process, as we too well know, for an 
 individual to repent and amend ; it is yet more difficult and 
 laborious for a nation ; what then must it be when half the 
 human race, fettered in its development by the errors of the 
 other half and its own, awakes from its mental torpor to 
 recognize the neglected duties, the slighted responsibilities, 
 which have been so many snares to themselves, and so many 
 occasions of evil and mischief to others ? Very slowly can 
 those who have inherited this burden come to the full con- 
 sciousness of what it is now incumbent upon them to do ; and 
 very slowly will the great number grope their way towards 
 doing it. It is well to remember this when we seem to blame 
 J>ersons, and are rather blaming the conditions under which they 
 have grown up and lived. 
 
 It would be impossible to estimate what society has suffered 
 from neglecting, nay, stifling the educating powers of women ; 
 and if ever real civilization is to be attained, if ever we are to 
 see more than a nominal Christianity triumph, if the moral 
 force of humanity is ever to be drawn out fully and har- 
 moniously with the intellectual force and spirit to predominate 
 over matter, it must be, in large measure, by the rightful 
 influence of women, created mostly through education, and 
 thus permeating society through all the channels of private 
 life, creating associations, forming habits, moulding social 
 opinion. Such is the power which nature placed women in a 
 position to exercise through their sway over men's best affec- 
 tions, their social influence, the greater moral purity and 
 refinement which tends to keep the higher spiritual interests 
 predominant over the lower material, the imaginative over the 
 calculating, the unselfish over the narrow utilitarian ; and lastly, 
 and once again, through their unlimited power over early 
 
Wasted Foras, 1 15 
 
 childhood, by which they can instil and perpetuate the best 
 habits and associations of their own lives. Such, I repeat, is 
 the sway which nature gave women to exercise, and of which, 
 through ignorance, through the faults born of a depressed 
 condition, they have been careless, while too often seeking 
 compensation for their outward dependence by the easy sway 
 over men's passions and vanity. 
 
 But now, we trust, the time is come when they will rouse 
 themselves to nobler aims. The cry for education sounds 
 through every nation, and Government after Government takes 
 it up, and laws are passed, and schools built and teachers 
 appointed ; yet, as I said before, even in those countries where 
 this has gone on longest, we find but small results on the 
 character of the people. And why ? because instruction has 
 been common and education very rare ; because women, with 
 whom the strongest educating power rests, have been inert. 
 Now, let women once be fired with the noble ambition of 
 fulfilling in its highest sense the mission Heaven has laid upon 
 them, and the dawn of a better era may, at length, be seen. 
 
 I ? 
 
THE KINDER-GARTEN 
 
 IN RELATION TO SCHOOLS. 
 
 By Emily Shirreff. 
 
 It has seemed to me that on the occasion of this third 
 annual meeting of our Society, I could not choose a more im- 
 portant question to dwell upon than that of the relation of the 
 Kinder-Garten to schools, — in other words, of this peculiar form 
 of infant training to the system of instruction which will 
 fashion the next periods of childhood and early youth. How 
 will the one affect, or be affected, by the other ? This is the 
 question on which the wide acceptance of Froebel's method 
 must ultimately hang. Could it be shown that after education 
 will be hindered or in any way rendered more difficult by it, 
 clearly all efforts to introduce it must stop. Could it be sup- 
 posed to be a matter of indifference — neither to make, nor 
 mar, the after-work of school — then it would remain a matter of 
 mere choice or fancy for individual parents to decide as they like; 
 but if it can be shown that all the work of the Kinder-Garten 
 is laying a more solid foundation, or tracing more direct paths 
 for the workers of a later period, then it behoves us to give a 
 hearty national welcome to this foreign system, and to work it 
 with zealous good will. And this is the conviction with which 
 J. speak to you to-night, the conviction on which our society is 
 
The Kindergarten in Relation to Schools, 117 
 
 founded. As we hope that there are many strangers among us 
 this evening, it would be very desirable to give some slight sketch 
 of FroebeFs system ; but in a paper such as this, without the 
 means of demonstration and with much other matter pressing, 
 it is scarcely possible, and I can only touch briefly on the 
 chief characteristics of his method. 
 
 Froebel is perhaps over-rated by a few, but he is sadly under- 
 rated by the great majority even of those who make education 
 their business ; — if they made it their study it might be other- 
 wise. This misconception of FroebeFs work comes partly 
 from ignorance of his life, of the history of his labour to estab- 
 lish the principles he adopted in his youth, and to which in 
 his old age he gave partial expression in the Kinder-Garten. 
 It was the whole scope of education, the whole training of man 
 to do his duty in a loving spirit to God and man, that occupied 
 all the best years of his life. The title of his book, " The 
 Education of Mankind," itself shows how wide was its pur- 
 pose. But men werejtoo_eager for knowledge to attend to the | 
 culture of the human being ; and everywhere instruction over-; 
 laid education. Thus the conviction was forced upon him; 
 that the real groundwork must be laid before school instruc- 
 tionTegins. All thoughtful writers on education had felt this 
 to a certain degree. We find the principles laid down with 
 more or less distinctness in writings of different epochs, and 
 Pestalozzi made it the foundation of his system. He appealed 
 to mothers as Froebel did after him to women generally \ but 
 his system was imperfect Froebel was the first to bring a wide 
 study of human nature to bear upon infant life, and to re- 
 duce to system the observations thus made. His leading 
 principle is that with a view to full harmonious development 
 the child must be allowed to grow freely according to the laws 
 of his nature — physical, moral, and intellectual. Growth in 
 one direction must not be allowed to hinder or supersede 
 growth in another. All the faculties are necessary for perfect 
 
Ii8 The Kindergarten 
 
 life, and Froebel watched children closely to ascertain the 
 order of development indicated by instinctive tendencies. 
 
 The intellectual faculties are first awakened by the child's 
 surroundings ; light and bright objects attract it even in the 
 cradle ; when it can run it manifests ceaseless curiosity about 
 all it can see or touch, and expresses that curiosity as soon as 
 it can speak, — the pleasure children take in all this is evident 
 to every one, but it requires an observer to note how mental 
 activity forms an element in that pleasure. We are accustomed 
 to give that name only to the conscious labour of riper years, 
 and we often overlook the fact that the very same faculties that 
 must do the work of those years are beginning to unfold ere 
 the child can freely speak or run about. Froebel knew that it 
 was so, and felt that from that time also began the possibility 
 of giving a right or a wrong bent to those faculties, of aiding or 
 thwarting their action. " The purpose of education," says 
 Mme. Marenholtz von Bulow, " is to aid natural development 
 in all its fulness. Since, then, development begins with the first 
 breath, so also does education begin then." How this may be 
 done has been minutely laid down by Froebel in his advice to 
 mothers, and the Kinder-Garten is the practical exposition of 
 his principles as regards children from three to seven years of 
 age. I can only allude to a few points. For instance^ _a child 
 will exercise his observation upon everything around him, but 
 we can place within his reach the^ object we wish him to ob- 
 serve. He will after a time reason after his own fashion ; it is 
 ours to lead him to find the right conclusions. He will be\ 
 ceaselessly curious, and his curiosity is too often repressed or 
 foolishly answered; Froebel knewjhat such curiosity is the root | 
 of love of knowledge, and on it he builds to make instruction 
 a delight. 
 
 The moral side of the child's nature awakens later than the 
 physical and intellectual, and its growth is too often blunted 
 by over-indulgence, or by rewards and punishments ; Froebel 
 
/;/ Relation to Schools, Xig 
 
 felt that it will expand only in an atmosphere of love, and the 
 two great instruments of all education, habit and association, 
 must be used even from the cradle to prepare the way for the 
 exercise of will and conscience at a later day. 
 
 Physical activity, which first manifests itself in the pleasure 
 the infant takes in moving its limbs, becomes play with the 
 growing child, and as physical exercise play is generally much 
 and rightly valued ; but the mental activity drawn out in play, 
 and forming a great part of true delight, is too commonly 
 overlooked. Froebel recognized and saw character, imagina- 
 tion — the first dawning of the creative faculty — manifested in 
 play. Having thus observed all the child's natural tendencies, 
 he devised a system by means of which they should be 
 healthily developed — and the system is Kinder-Garten training. 
 
 The principles, then, on which Froebel built his system may; 
 be summed up briefly under four heads : — ist. — All the facul-! 
 ties of the child, mental and bodily, are to be severally! 
 drawn out and exercised as far as age allows. 2nd. — The 
 powers of habit and association — which are the great instru- 
 ments of all education — of the whole training of life must be I 
 brought to bear from the earliest dawn of intelligence, with a 
 systematic purpose. 3rd. — The active instincts of childhood 
 are to be cultivated througii rnanual, no less than through 
 mental work, and such manual exercise made an essential part 
 of the training. 4th. — The senses are to be trained to accuracy 
 as well as the hand. The children must learn how to observe 
 what is placed before them, and to see it truly ^ an acquirement 
 which any teacher of science or of drawing will appreciate. 
 To work out these principles Froebel devised his practical 
 method of infant education, and the very name he gave to the 
 place where his play lessons were to be given marks his 
 purpose. We have adopted that foreign name ; let us, then, 
 see what it means. 
 
 A Kinder-Garten — not a child's garden in ordinary sense, 
 
120 The Kindergarten 
 
 although such gardens form an important adjunct, but a garden 
 of children — as we might say a garden of roses — a place of 
 culture for that... rnost wonderful thing that lives and grows 
 upon our earth, the infant human being, and we feel at once 
 how appropriate is that name, when we remember FroebeFs 
 views of education. We find the same kind of analogy of 
 thought, though in the inverse order, in our term of a " nur- 
 sery garden," a piece of ground where young plants are tended, 
 as are children in the nursery, while the Kinder-Garten is the 
 spot where children can expand and grow and enjoy life, as 
 plants do in a garden. In the school children are taught, they 
 are recipients of knowledge ; Froebel considers them simply 
 as being endowed with faculties of many kinds ' that must 
 develop freely according to their nature, that must not be 
 urged in this direction, or cramped in another, but be placed 
 in the most favourable circumstances to attain their full growth 
 according to the laws impressed on them by the Creator, as do 
 the plants in the soil and climate that suits them. 
 
 No books are to be seen in a Kinder-Garten, because no 
 ideas or facts are presented to the child that he cannot clearly 
 understand and verify. The object is not to teach him arith- 
 metic or geometry, though he learns enough of both to be very 
 useful hereafter, but to lead him to discover facts and truths 
 concerning numbers and lines and angles for himself Thus 
 in the play lessons with little wooden cubes and other figures, 
 the teacher simply rules the order in which he shall approach 
 a new thing, and gives him the correct names, which hence- 
 forth he must always use ; but the observation of resemblances 
 and differences (that groundwork of all knowledge), the 
 reasoning from one point to another, and the conclusion he 
 arrives at are all his own — he is only made to see his mistake 
 if he makes one. Ordinary object lessons, such as Pestalozzi 
 gave, and such as our infant schools give them, appeal to 
 vision only to help the understanding ; in the Kinder-Garten 
 
Y 
 
 In Relation to Schools, 1 21 
 
 the child handles every object from which he is taught, and 
 must learn t^ reproduce it. If a thing is drawn for him, or 
 built for him, with his Httle bricks, he forthwith builds or draws 
 the same for himself; his hand no less than his eye is exercised 
 in many ways to delicate and accurate work, and the instinct 
 of activity is thus satisfied. This simultaneous training of the 
 senses and han ds toget her with the mental faculties, is one 
 striking characteristic of FroebeFs system ; and throughout 
 the long series of occupations, drawing, paper-folding, plait- 
 ing, etc., this is systematically exercised. What can be thus 
 obtained of accuracy and deftness of handling, may best be 
 seen in the modelling which little creatures of five years old 
 produce. Another characteristic of FroebeFs system is the 
 value for play and its adaptation to purposes of education. 
 Through it the child's natural activity is brought into full 
 healthy exercise, while it is so directed that the games accom- 
 panied by singing stir the imagination and cultivate all the 
 moral qualities which we value so highly later on the school 
 playground, habits of acting together, of bearing and forbear- 
 ing, of good-humour under failure, etc. ; and the words of the 
 song keep up the interest in human actions, and in forms and 
 changes of nature that the child has witnessed. K^hird and 
 yet more important characteristic is the observation and love 
 of nature. Before coming to books a child's curiosity must 
 be satisfied about outer objects, and thus gradually transformed 
 into intelligent interest and desire for knowledge. Not till this 
 part of education is brought into a certain state of forwardness 
 did Froebel consider that children should be allowed to read 
 and write and thus approach the ordinary avenues to 
 knowledge. To live with books and be ignorant of nature, of 
 the facts and laws in the midst of which God has placed our 
 lives, was to Froebel no less senseless and irreligious. 
 
 He taught no catechism to little children, but he would have 
 them learn to worship God through nature, to love Him as the 
 
122 The Kindergarten 
 
 Father of whose love and government their earthly paients 
 present the intelligible type. The key-note of FroebeFs sys- 
 tem may be said to be that we live and move and have our 
 being in God, whose visible manifestation is the universe 
 on which He has impressed His laws, which He has en- 
 dowed us with faculties to decipher and obey. Thus to 
 Him we are responsible that the children He has trusted to 
 our care shall be trained into fitness so to obey and under- 
 stand His will. It is, as serving religion, no less than as 
 developing the creative faculty, that Froebel lays great stress 
 on the cultivation of the imagination, which is so deadened 
 by ordinary teaching. He felt how much we need to kindle 
 early that sacred spark which illumines life with beauty, which 
 lights the flame on every altar where man sacrifices his baser 
 instincts to lofty ideals — gain to patriotism — self to humanity 
 — the world to God. The child in whom a soul has thus 
 been awakened brings to the dull routine of school an impulse 
 that will give life to that routine itself It will take years of i 
 bad teaching and bad management to make such a child lose I 
 the feeling that his life is something beyond school lessons or 
 school play, that it is in what he does and in what he loves. 
 
 The one real difficulty to overcome with Kinder-Garten 
 children is that of passing from object-lessons to book-lessons ; 
 but if this transition be made under the guidance of Kinder- 
 Garten teachers, it is accomplished without trouble or annoy- 
 ance to the little ones. In the preparatory or transition class ^ 
 as it is usually called, in which this change is effected, the 
 children learn to read and write and to work sums with figures, 
 and thus when they go to school at eight years old they know 
 all that is expected at that age, and much besides that others 
 do not know. 
 
 Nothing illustrates the benefit of the early development of 
 intelligence in the children, while all their lessons have been 
 play, than the facility with which this work of the transition 
 
In Relation to Schools, 1 23 
 
 \ 
 classes is effected. A child's difficulty in learning to read is 
 
 that he has no skill in perceiving the different forms of 
 letters, and no habit of attaching one correct name to the 
 j form he recognizes — his eye and ear are equally unexercised ; 
 but the child trained in the Kinder-Garten has exercised both 
 in a great variety of ways, and he distinguishes the forms of 
 ' the letters very rapidly. So with writing^we have first that 
 same difficulty of seeing correctly, and the next great difficulty 
 of the unpractised hand, at once feeble and clumsy, that can- 
 not trace the given line even when the child has been brought 
 to see its form and direction. Now in the Kinder-Garten the 
 little hands have been daily exercised, not only in drawing 
 lines in various directions, but in delicate and accurate work. 
 The children have learned to perceive when they have 
 worked correctly, or incorrectly ; thus writing becomes a com- 
 paratively easy application of an art already acquired. As re- 
 gards such arithmetic as children are expected to learn at that 
 age, the only difficulty for the Kinder-Garten pupil will be the 
 method of working a simple sum on the slate ; he is used to 
 deal with numbers, both with units and fractions, and he is 
 quite familiar in a practical way with some elementary notions 
 of geometry. He has also been interested with stories from 
 history, and he knows something of that foundation of phy- 
 sical geography that may be made so interesting to children, 
 that may be taught practically in a field or by a roadside, or 
 in a class-room, wherever we can find or make inequaHties of 
 soil, and show how water runs in one direction instead of 
 another. As regards elementary knowledge, then, he will be 
 quite on a par with other children, and, owing to the method 
 pursued, he will possess it better. Thus we may be sure that 
 as soon as the mechanical difficulties of reading are over- 
 come he will at once read intelligently, because he will feel an 
 interest in what he can understand, and will know when he 
 does not understand ; and his wish to learn more will spring 
 
124 The Kindergarten 
 
 from recollections of the pleasure he has had in learning 
 hitherto. 
 
 I have said what are the leading characteristics of Froebel's 
 system, and it follows from thence that it is mainly , distin- 
 guished from ordinary school teaching by making the know- 
 ledge of ideas wait upon the knowledge of facts, and by 
 making the cultivation of the memory subordinate to the de- 
 velopment of the faculties of observation and reasoning, and 
 of the active tendencies of the child, both physical and mental. 
 This mental discipHne is, of course, part of the purpose of 
 all school teaching ; but Froebel learnt by his own experience 
 as a schoolmaster, and we may see it verified every day, that 
 the press of matter to be taught leaves scanty time for this 
 gradual development of human faculty, even if at school age 
 many a wrong habit and bias had not already been given. 
 
 I Thus to rescue early childhood from such errors and to guide 
 the development aright from the first, was, he felt, the only 
 means by which we might ensure that after school-work should 
 
 ' bear its proper fruit. If we doubt the need of such prepa- 
 ration let us consider for a moment what is the ordinary con- 
 dition of a child going to school at eight or nine years old. 
 
 It naturally differs very much in different classes of society. 
 In the upper ranks, where mothers have leisure, and ought to 
 have cultivation — where attendance is abundant, and may be 
 good, children ought to come well prepared with the elements 
 of such knowledge as the school demands — reading, writing, 
 some arithmetic, and perhaps a little geography and English 
 history. In the working classes, where children go through 
 the infant school, they also come in some measure prepared, 
 they have learnt order and obedience, which too many careful 
 homes neglect to teach. But between these two extremes we 
 have the large middle class, through its great variety of de- 
 grees, in which mothers are more or less occupied, where 
 servants of an inferior kind are employed, and where generally, 
 
In Relation to Schools. 125 
 
 at least, the most that can be done is to keep children out of 
 positive mischief. In what state of forwardness children from 
 such homes come to school, not merely at eight years old but 
 at ten, or for girls even at twelve and fourteen, let those who 
 are practically engaged in school-work declare. But if these 
 children had spent four or five years in the Kinder-Garten and 
 the transition class, they would not only bring, as we have 
 seen above, those elements of knowledge that are required, 
 but have learnt in some degree how to learn, and in the 
 measure of their progress have nothing to unlearn. Let those 
 who labour day by day with inert minds, never yet awakened 
 to a wish for knowledge, or a sense of beauty, or a feeling of 
 pleasure in mental activity, tell us how much valuable school 
 time they would save if the raw material were thus prepared 
 to their hand. And this element of time is one that must 
 seriously be taken into consideration with schools of every 
 grade. This, it is that cramps the best teacher's efforts and 
 grinds down admirable theories of education to indifferent 
 schemes of instruction. 
 
 It seems a long time from seven to seventeen, but modem 
 life demands much, and its demands force the work of instruc- 
 tion into grooves it is difficult to abandon. The University, or 
 professional exigencies, govern schools. Upper schools govern 
 both the lower and the preparatory ; and thus each step pre- 
 pares for a higher step of knowledge, and the only thing that 
 is not prepared for is Hfe itself, making its thousand calls upon 
 will and character which we have allowed chance influences to 
 form ; life which calls for all active energies, and of which, as 
 Matthew Arnold so truly says, " Conduct makes up three 
 parts, and knowledge only one." And the intellectual qualities 
 tliat affect conduct, judgment, accuracy — that power of reason- 
 ing promptly and correctly concerning things we habitually 
 deal with, which we call common sense, — these are the direct 
 fruits, not of varied knowledge but of the mental discipline 
 
1 26 The Kindergarten 
 
 which should accompany the acquisition of knowledge. Un- 
 fortunately, the pressure of the modern demand for knowledge 
 and instruction overpowers education, and will continue to do 
 so, unless we can counteract this deteriorating influence by 
 using for true educational purposes those early years that are 
 free from outer claims ; thus making the child by the time he 
 goes to school amenable to the higher discipline of good 
 teaching. 
 
 But hitherto we have considered the case of children of the 
 upper and middle classes only: it is time to turn to the 
 children of the poor, for whom every motive that makes 
 Kinder-Garten training a valuable preparation for schools is 
 strengthened tenfold. The boy who is to go through a great 
 public school to the University sorely needs time, as we have 
 seen above, to acquire the indispensable amount of instruction 
 without neglecting education ; but he has a grand life before 
 him if he knows how to use it — leisure — means of knowledge, 
 stimulants to ambition which might almost suffice alone to 
 rescue men from selfish sloth ; he has time, if he learn how to 
 use it, to repair the omissions of the past, as far as the laws of 
 nature will ever allow the past to be repaired. Others, again, 
 who go through our grammar and middle-class schools into 
 the world of commonplace business will find in a life of in- 
 creasing labour a remedy at least to the mental inertness that 
 follows ordinary school teaching. They also have opportuni- 
 ties of knowledge — a variety of interests that may serve to 
 keep the soul alive amid the deadening influence of ceaseless 
 money-making labour ; but when we look to the children of 
 the poor we know that their school life is their all of educa- 
 tion, except such as life itself gives to every human being 
 according to the influences domestic, social, or political under 
 which he lives, and that this practical education for them can 
 scarcely be an elevating one. What we have then to do is, in 
 those scanty years that poverty can grant to school discipline, 
 
In Relation to Schools, 127 
 
 to make that discipline such that the child shall be fit to learn 
 the lesson of life in a right spirit. Instruction gives him 
 possession of the most indispensable keys to knowledge — it is 
 hard enough often to do that ; but education of a higher order 
 will alone give him the wish to use those keys, and teach 
 him to feel that he cannot live upon bread alone, however 
 large a portion of his existence must be given merely to 
 providing the bread. Intellectual life is a barren desert to 
 the child who leaves school with such knowledge as an ele- 
 mentary school can have taught under the given conditions, 
 and whose intelligence has received no other training than 
 such teaching can afford. There is barely time for what is 
 imperatively laid down; how can the schoolmaster mould 
 the dull, ill-trained children that come to him full of false 
 ideas and wrong habits, into thinking, observing human 
 beings, able to work and to think intelligently and accurately ? 
 And yet if he has not done that, what have these schools done 
 for the nation that pays for them ? There is in the rudiments 
 of knowledge no talisman for making good citizens; and 
 though no one more fully appreciates than I do all that 
 school does for children, of that class especially, independently 
 of instruction, yet I say if we cannot supplement the instruc- 
 tion with such mental discipline as shall teach them how to 
 use the knowledge, and create a desire to do so, then we are 
 not educating the people. Nor am I alluding here to the 
 desire to use knowledge which springs from the wish to rise 
 in the world — that motive is put forward too often and too 
 strongly to need any help of mine — rather would I see it less 
 powerful ; what I mean by using the knowledge acquired at 
 school, is that use whereby life is made a better and nobler 
 thing, whereby the face of the earth is beautified through all 
 we know of the many forms of life that speak of God and His 
 laws all around us, whereby a man does whatever he has to d d 
 more intelligently, and fulfils every duty with a better under- 
 
128 The Kindergarten 
 
 standing. It is this influence of such poor culture as we can 
 give which alone can entitle us to say that our schools are 
 educating another generation to do good service to the 
 nation, and how, I ask again, can time be found for such 
 careful mental discipline added to the hard labour of teaching? 
 But if Froebel's system prevailed in our infant schools, then 
 we might hope that school teaching beginning upon such a 
 foundation of mental discipline as that system affords, and 
 with the help of the progress already made in certain branches 
 of instruction — the years from seven to eleven or twelve 
 would produce fruits which at present the most zealous 
 master or mistress cannot dare to hope for. And if the 
 children through stress of poverty leave school very early, 
 they will yet take with them some ineffaceable good. It is easy 
 to forget reading and writing through years of disuse, it is 
 not easy to forget the use of our eyes when we have learnt to 
 take pleasure in observing, nor the habit of judging, of 
 reasoning upon what comes before us, when once the mind 
 has been stirred to take pleasure in the exercise. It jnust be 
 remembered that the development of moral and intellectual 
 faculties is as natural, as much apart of the laws of our being, 
 as physical development, the only difference being that it 
 carries with it conscious action, and therefore the possibility of 
 being mentally influenced for good or evil ; thus the degree 
 of such development that the child has attained under our 
 guidance at a certain age has a far more permanent character 
 than the degree of his knowledge. The latter is given from 
 without, the former is his own growth, an intrinsic part hence- 
 forth of his being, and therefore it is that I say the child 
 trained in the Kinder-Garten will keep what he has gained, 
 while the mere school-taught child may lose all he has pain- 
 fully acquired before he reaches manhood. 
 
 Differences of knowledge must exist between different classes 
 of men, like differences of material means, the one in a great 
 
 i 
 
In Relation to Schools. 129 
 
 measure owing to the other. The poor cannot be said to be 
 disinherited of wealth, because wealth is not a natural posses- 
 sion, nor one that ever can belong to all. But those are 
 indeed the disinherited of the earth who are depriv^ed of what 
 nature designed for them, whose true human capacity has not 
 been unfolded. The poor man suffers privation from deficient 
 knowledge as from deficient comfort; but he suffers wrong 
 when his education is so defective that he cannot use his 
 human faculties aright, when his senses are blunted, his 
 observation and judgment insecure — his moral sense and 
 activity uncultivated. And it is this disinheriting of our poorer 
 brethren that we may avoid b) an early methodical training 
 such as Froebel has taught us. 
 
 We owe, then, no small deb^ of gratitude to the London 
 School Board for their effort to ;ry this great experiment, and 
 I trust that Sir Charles Reed, who has so kindly consented to 
 take the chair this evening, wilk tell us something of his views 
 of the subject and the prospect of success he sees before him. 
 Full success can be expected only when all infant school 
 mistresses are duly trained for Kinder-Garten work. They 
 may then be trusted to introduce such modifications as the 
 large numbers in our infant schools may render necessary. 
 
 I ought, I fear, to apologize for the length of time I have 
 detained you ; yet I must touch upon one other point, which I 
 consider of the highest importance, and this is the advantage 
 of Froebel's system to all that portion of our population who 
 are engaged in industrial pursuits. When boys or girls leave 
 school to be apprenticed to some trade they go to their new 
 work with hands and eyes absolutely uncultivated ; the girls 
 have, perhaps, done some needlework, and are so far in a 
 better condition than the boys ; the occupation of the latter 
 since leaving school has probably been of the roughest descrip- 
 tion, or has not required any peculiar manipulation — as in the 
 case of messengers, etc. When, therefore, they come to learn 
 
 K 
 
130 The Kindergarten 
 
 a trade they begin with clumsy fingers, with that untrue hahii 
 of vision^ if I may so express myself, which belongs to those 
 who have never learned the difference between accurate and 
 inaccurate impressions, and all these preliminary disadvantages 
 have to be got over before the smallest progress can be made 
 in the technical part of whatever new work they have to learn. 
 Now if we suppose these children to have been first trained in 
 the Kinder-Garten, taught there to observe resemblances and 
 differences of forms and colours, and directions of lines, to 
 reproduce accurately what they have observed accurately, to 
 have acquired a certain sureness and delicacy of handling, 
 which would be further cultivated by drawing at school — then 
 these boys and girls would enter any industrial apprenticeship 
 or any technical school in a very different condition. They 
 w^ould be at once able to grapple with ordinary difficulties 
 instead of beginning the education of their hands and senses, 
 and would in consequence reach much sooner the degree of 
 proficiency that ensures payment for work. The moment of 
 beginning to receive wages would be hastened in proportion 
 to the time saved from that preliminary preparation which is 
 in fact not technical learning at all, but part of the indis- 
 pensable training of the human being apart from any peculiar 
 purpose. When mental discipline generally is neglected in 
 childhood it is with some tacit assumptic n that school studies 
 will supply it ; but this combined mental and physical training 
 we generally ignore altogether. Yet when we withhold that 
 cultivation of the senses and of manual dexterity we are not 
 merely heaping difficulties in the way of a few who must later 
 acquire what we do not teach them early, but we maim 
 children generally in the use of some of the most important 
 faculties, we rob them of what nature designed for them, we 
 venture to choose what part of their natural gifts it suits us to 
 put them in possession of 3 in their helpless ignorance we have 
 not honestly done our part as guardians, for we have buried in 
 
In Relation to Schools. 13 1 
 
 a napkin the talents for which they will have to render account 
 We might find instances to illustrate the loss so incurred in 
 every department of industrial and art labour, just as we 
 might have traced in a variety of directions what I have barely 
 indicated of the loss so incurred by children of the leisure 
 classes ; but it is impossible in one lecture to treat so large a 
 subject in anything but the most cursory manner, and I can 
 only hope that I have said enough to establish my main pro- 
 position, that the Kinder-Garten is the right and true vestibule 
 of the school, that it prepares the child for all it is to learn 
 there, and provides the groundwork for the full cultivation and 
 discipline of all the faculties which school as at present consti- 
 tuted, having to labour against the neglected condition of the 
 children who enter, cannot have time to undertake. 
 
 Education, which is the preparation for life, must be one in 
 purpose and in spirit throughout all its pTiases. Froebel built 
 altogether upon this truth, and therefore begins from the first 
 what each successive step isjo^iinfold and strengthen. When, 
 therefore, we ask if the Kinder-Garten affects school life — if it 
 furthers its work, it is questioning whether Froebel did or did 
 not adjust the means to the end, whether his method is educa- 
 tion at all, or only a way of amusing and exercising little 
 children. If the latter only, it may have an importance of its 
 own, but not the importance we claim for it. Now if we once 
 admit its true human purpose as far as it goes, if we acknow- 
 ledge that the faculties whose dawning power he watches and 
 draws out, are the same faculties which in their ripe vigour the 
 philosopher, the poet, the statesman, use for the benefit of 
 mankind ; if the will and character he teaches us to .discipHne 
 in the nursery are acknowledged to be germs of the same 
 powers that make useful citizens, social benefactors, the leaders 
 and heroes of our race, then school years, which are only one 
 stage of that unbroken process of efibrt and discipline, which 
 'we call life, cannot stand isolated. Those who rule them 
 
 K 2 
 
132 The Kindergarten in Relation to Schools, 
 
 cannot neglect or ignore what has gone before any more than 
 they can be indifferent to the claims of the years that are to 
 follow. Shakespeare says of man that " He looks before and 
 after," and this is more specially true of the educator than of 
 any other human being save the statesman. 
 
THE KINDER-GARTEN 
 
 IN RELATION TO FAMILY LIFE. 
 
 By Emily Shirreff. 
 
 The last time I had the pleasure of addressing you, my theme 
 was the Kinder-Garten in relation to schools ; to-night I move 
 a stage further back in the consideration of the system, and 
 wish to dwell on the Kinder-Garten in relation to family life. 
 The other was most important to be brought forward, to be 
 pressed forward even, in the interest of our outward work 
 The Kinder-Garden, as I have said, will not be valued, its 
 peculiar mode of training will not be estimated properly in 
 the scholastic profession till men have realized what benefit 
 scholars will derive from their pupils being prepared for them 
 in the Kinder-Garten. But our subject to-day is a wider and 
 more important one still. School is but an episode of life, 
 Home is the centre, the pivot of life itself That nation is at 
 a great disadvantage that has not good schools, but that nation 
 is poor to the roots that has not a healthy home life. When, 
 therefore, we speak of a thing as true and good — of such 
 things, I mean, as affect the conduct of life — it is well to see 
 what relation it bears to the holiest portion of life — that of the 
 family. There virtue or vice, strength or weakness, duty or 
 self-indulgence, love or selfishness, must do their fullest work ; 
 there human life may be made most wretched, or may be 
 
134 27^^ Kindergarten 
 
 blessed as though a ray of Heaven's own light shone upon its 
 homeliest details. Into this life, under one or other of its 
 manifold forms, each human being is born, and here all that 
 is good or all that is bad around him, must necessarily begin 
 his education years before that of school begins. Our busi- 
 ness to-night is to inquire what Frobel's system can do to help 
 the good, to avert the evil, to direct the strong impulses which 
 parental love creates but cannot enlighten. The first effect of 
 its influence is to raise our estimate of the early helpless years 
 of human life, to make us see in them not a mere period 
 of physical growth, but the seed-time of all that cultivation 
 and discipline may bring to a rich harvest in after years. 
 
 In ordinary apprehension education is associated with 
 lessons ; even in well kept nurseries, where a most valuable 
 education is actually begun, it is not called by that name, it is 
 not considered as simply the beginning of the same work that 
 will be continued through childhood and youth, and therefore 
 no method rules it, no distinct purpose is kept in view. Were 
 it once so considered it would rise in importance, it would no 
 longer be left to nurses, but would become the mother's first 
 care, it would no longer be left to mothers alone, but would 
 grow in importance with fathers also. They have been accus- 
 tomed when they thought of the education of their children 
 to look forward to a more or less distant time, to consider the 
 school they would choose, the subjects — classical or modern — 
 they would have them instructed in, &c. ; but of that first growth 
 of habits and associations, of notions and capabilities which 
 springs up in the early home years, and will be carried by the 
 child to school, to affect his whole career there, the father has 
 seldom thought at all, and this is what acquaintance with 
 Frobel's system will make him think of; one of the greatest bene- 
 fits that system can confer upon us is this, of turning the serious 
 attention of parents to the importance of that early training, 
 and through it to a new sense of their own responsibility, since 
 
In Relation to Family Life. 135 
 
 with them alone it must rest. The evil that I pointed out in 
 speaking of the relation of the Kinder-Garten to schools is 
 the evil of instructing children instead of drawing out their 
 faculties, of dealing with abstractions, while the interest of the 
 young mind can only be awakened by external objects; the 
 evil that is laid bare, as we consider the Kinder-Garten in re- 
 lation to family life, is the neglect of early training owing to 
 ignorance on the part of parents. In the case of schools, 
 therefore, we hope the Frobel system will lead the way to a 
 vast reform in our methods of education ; in the case of home 
 life we trust that it will awaken women to a true sense of their 
 most important duty, that it will make them realize that, for 
 good or for ill, and consciously or unconsciously, every mother 
 necessarily educates her child from the first hour of dawning 
 intelligence, and that while other teachers have simply made 
 choice of a vocation, they have no choice left, but are educa- 
 tors by right divine. There perhaps never was a time when 
 children held so large a place in home life as they do now, 
 and the sense of responsibility for their welfare, mental and 
 physical, is gravely acknowledged ; but women have not yet 
 realized that the right care for that welfare needs knowledge 
 as well as love, and this is what the influence of Frobel's sys- 
 tem will bring home to them. 
 
 Let us now inquire what is the position of the Kinder- 
 Garten among us at the present time, before we consider what 
 it may become, and what influence it may exercise. It is making 
 w^ay undoubtedly, and has some true and ardent supporters \ 
 but it has many supporters for the sake of novelty. Fashion 
 is even beginning to set in the same direction, and curiosity 
 has been keenly excited in many places. But among all who 
 visit it, of those who even send their children to it, how many, 
 apart from the few mentioned above, take it au serieux, and 
 not as a mere harmless way of keeping children quiet and 
 amused, one expedient among many for evading the necessity 
 
136 The Kindergarten 
 
 of discipline before school time ? This frivolous view of the 
 Kinder-Garten is one of the ^greatest obstacles our teachers 
 now have to encounter ; the effects are everywhere visible ; 
 classes are opened, competent teaching provided, and a fair 
 number of children gathered together, but the following week 
 perhaps half those children are kept away, and the classes 
 necessarily thrown into confusion ; sometimes the treachery of 
 our climate is really to blame ; but more often, I believe, it is 
 mere fancy, mere ignorance that it is a thing of real import- 
 ance that they are playing with ; for, after all, in spite of the 
 climate, there is no country in which children take such regular 
 out-of-door exercise as in England, and if they can walk out 
 at all, they might walk to the Kinder-Garten, and there they 
 would get a great deal of healthy exercise without exposure to 
 the weather, so that in truth there is less danger for children 
 who spend the morning there than for those who depend for 
 all their exercise on the daily walks. Another common 
 obstacle I believe to be the jealousy of nurses. They do not 
 like such a rival to their authority or to their affection. These 
 women are as ignorant as the cottagers' wives, but far more 
 mischievous, for the poor woman labouring for her family is 
 glad of the relief of getting her children cared for, while the 
 nurse only feels the loss of power and possibly of affection. 
 In other ways the right influence of the Kinder-Garten may 
 often be more thwarted among the rich than among the poor. 
 The latter may by their ways and their ignorance unconsciously 
 oppose the influence of school ; but they are generally im- 
 pressed with the vast superiority of school teaching to any 
 they could give, and they do not consciously oppose it; but 
 with the upper classes this is quite different ; if parents do not 
 go entirely with the school, they express their different opinion, 
 and display their indifference. Servants take the cue from 
 them, and set up a jealous antagonism to the schoolroom 
 authority. Thus the child's reverence for the instruction he 
 
hi Rclatio7t to Family Life, 1 37 
 
 receives is lessened, and the very fact of his realizing a divided 
 opinion among those whom he ought to revere is so far de- 
 structive of the educational value of the training. It is, then, 
 in some important respects most difficult to establish the 
 system in rich homes with nursery establishments where, un- 
 less the mother gives the right tone, the prevailing influence 
 round the child is a disastrous combination of luxury and 
 ignorance. It is there that caprice is most likely to reign, it 
 is there that children are supposed often to need change of 
 air, to be wanted for some visit, to be so loaded with toys and 
 books, and surrounded with slaves to their pleasures, that the 
 simple toys and amusements of the Kinder-Garten have less 
 charm ; also, I am sorry to say, it is from such homes that chil- 
 dren come occasionally to the Kinder-Garten with a degree of 
 ill-breeding that speaks of a very low moral tone when at 
 home ; children who are not only rebellious against authority, 
 but haughty and insolent to their companions, and even to their 
 teachers. What education is going on in homes where such 
 things are possible, and what is to become of children whose 
 mothers are to such a degree ignorant of education ? 
 
 With regard to lower social classes, we have already pointed 
 out one advantage possessed by the children of the poor ; 
 another is that they are obliged to attend school, and thus 
 whenever the schools are good they are brought early under 
 more promising educational conditions than those of their 
 richer neighbours, unless among the latter the mothers are fit 
 for their task. The Kinder-Garten will, as I have had occasion 
 more than once to point out, open to them a prospect of im- 
 provement that is undreamed of now, by adding the cultiva- 
 tion of their faculties of mind and sense to the instruction 
 they now receive. In this class the Kinder-Garten will gradu- 
 ally exercise remarkable influence over family life, for when 
 girls have been educated themselves in that system, and espe- 
 cially if the time should come that I am so anxious to see. 
 
138 The Kindergarten 
 
 when every girl before leaving school is made to pass a certain 
 time as a student-teacher in the Kinder-Garten department, 
 every house in the country will receive the seeds of educa- 
 tional principles, the wife of the labourer no less than the 
 peeress will understand God's command to her when He grants 
 her the joy and privilege of motherhood, she will know that 
 she has yet another duty to perform for her child beside the 
 physical care which had seemed before to be the utmost she 
 could compass. She may possess little knowledge or time to 
 do much herself, but she will refrain from doing mischief, and 
 will feel increased confidence in placing her child in better 
 instructed hands. Again, the instruction given to the eldest 
 child will fit the mother herself to do more for the next. Her 
 own experience will be supplemented by what she has seen 
 the elder gain from the greater knowledge and experience that 
 have directed his training. 
 
 But between the artizan's or labourer's home, where the 
 temptation is neglect through ignorance, and the wealthy 
 homes where the danger is corruption through luxury and 
 servility, we have to consider the vast middle class in its in- 
 numerable gradations. There we find the most varied forms 
 of family life, and in all, the admittance of Frobel's system 
 would bring improvement, while in all some peculiar circum- 
 stances present more or less obstacles to its admittance. 
 
 In many the mother does the whole or nearly the whole of 
 the house-work, and is more burdened than the labourer's wife, 
 because she has to provide for the claims of gentility as well 
 as for the more positive needs of life. She is too ignorant to 
 care for the training of the Kinder-Garten, and cannot be 
 troubled to take her children there. In many others the 
 struggle is to have a little money over at the end of the year, 
 since expense must be met for elder children, or for healthy 
 excursions, &c., so the expense of teaching babies, who mignt 
 be crawling or toddling about the floor for another year or two, 
 
J 
 
 In Relation to Family Life, 139 
 
 seems foolish extravagance. This form of objection is the most 
 general, and in various degrees it prompts all the discontent 
 about school fees, and the too common neglect of girls' edu- 
 cation, because it can be neglected without apparent loss, 
 while the boys cannot hope for employment unless they reach 
 a given standard of instruction. There is too often truth — 
 painful truth — in the objection, many a family can meet the 
 expense of education only by a real sacrifice ; but the feeling 
 that is now growing that such sacrifice must be made if the 
 worldly prospects of boys are not to be destroyed, will receive 
 altogether fresh intensity and be extended to both sexes when- 
 ever the spread of FrobeFs principles shall have convinced 
 parents that not instruction but education, training of the entire 
 capabilities of the human creature, is the debt they owe to each 
 child. Then mothers will study education, and the fathers 
 will feel the importance of providing the means for it. 
 
 Two of the greatest obstacles the Kinder-Garten has daily 
 to encounter are — ist, the late age at which the children are 
 sent ; 2nd, the monomania of parents with regard to reading 
 and writing ; both these show ignorance of the right principle 
 of education, and both would disappear if Frobel's views of 
 infant training were accepted. The expression, a late age, as 
 applied to the children of six years old, sounds, perhaps, rather 
 strange ; one might imagine a good deal of laughing at it ; but 
 it is correct, nevertheless, as applied to Kinder-Garten pupils. 
 In FrobeFs system the instruction, occupations, and games are 
 all addressed to minds that have not been previously instructed 
 in any other manner ; they aim at giving, in one sense, first 
 impressions, the first that are purposely directed to fix attention 
 and provoke an exercise of reasoning, and they are carefully 
 graduated ; each links on to the other, leading the infant in- 
 telligence a little further at each step, but ever in the same 
 direction, and with constant care not to break the sequence or 
 scatter the attention. The whole intention of this infant 
 
140 The Kindergarten 
 
 training is to form habits and associations — moral, intellectual, 
 and physical — at a time when there is nothing to hinder the 
 direction we wish to give. Now, if children of six years old 
 are sent into a Kinder-Garten, they come with their own 
 stock of previously acquired notions and habits, and we have 
 to undo as well as to train, and run the great risk of mischief 
 to the younger children. Children of six know, or think they 
 know, many of the things that their younger companions are 
 learning ; but they have learned them differently, without order 
 or system, without the links that in Frobel's system connect 
 the knowledge and the skill acquired with the knowledge that 
 is to come next in orderly sequence. If, then, parents have 
 kept their children in the ordinary way till six years old, they 
 had better do their best with them still in the same way, and 
 not send them to get confused notions of a better system and 
 help to confuse others. In many cases children are sent be- 
 cause mothers think it very likely in some way to be a good 
 thing for children who are getting beyond nursery management 
 and are too young for school ; they will be kept in order for 
 some hours of the day, and perhaps they will learn something 
 — at any rate they are safe, and the nurses or mothers have 
 more time for other work. It is hardly necessary to remark 
 that when FrobeFs system shall have been studied widely, and 
 that parents know why the Kinder-Garten occupations and 
 games may be expected to produce a good result, all such 
 capricious playing with them will be at an end ; the parents 
 will have educated themselves into a comprehension of the 
 value of educational principles in dealing with their children. 
 The other obstacle I have mentioned — the monomania 
 about reading and writing — has partly the same origin. There 
 is the same desire to teach the children something that will 
 keep them quiet, and lead to their amusing themselves without 
 trouble to their elders; and there is that same profound 
 ignorance of educational principles that leads parents to 
 
ht Relation to Family Life, I4I 
 
 believe that teaching to read is education. Doubtless, besides 
 being the most important instrument for acquiring knowledge, 
 it can also be made an instrument of mental training in the 
 hands of an educator ; but in how many homes can this be 
 said to be the case ? What more mechanical than the ordin- 
 ary teaching to read and to write, and what less educational 
 than the heaping of story-books round a child to let him 
 amuse himself, that is, to pick up wrong notions, because he 
 only half understands what he reads, to use words that convey 
 no meaning, and adopt sentiments without a perception of 
 what they imply. 
 
 The mother's hurry to teach her children to read is often 
 based on this wish to keep them quiet and amused, and often 
 also on the feeling that her children must not lag behind other 
 children ; she would have a sense of shame if Jane or Harry 
 next door could read to themselves while her own Jack or 
 Mary were unable to do so. The father's impatience is 
 generally of a different kind ; he knows that schools grow 
 more and more exacting, that there is in this uncomfortable 
 phase of the world's history a larger and larger quantity of 
 knowledge to be acquired, and he cannot separate knowledge 
 from books, nor the power of acquiring it from reading and 
 writing. One father I have heard of who avows that he can 
 take no interest in his boys till they begin the Latin grammar 
 — where the limit of his interest in his girls, if he has any, 
 may be placed, I do not know. If there be anything that 
 the girls get rid of as rapidly after they leave school as boys 
 shuffle off the Latm on which eight years of life have been 
 mainly spent, perhaps this father would take his stand there. 
 He worships a school fetish, and with that we cannot 
 meddle. 
 
 Now, if we could once get Frobel's system widely known, 
 if the notion that the training and discipline of every human 
 faculty from the earliest dawn of intelligence is the education 
 
142 The Kindergarten 
 
 that must underlie all other education, if this notion, I repeat, 
 could be received, all this would be at an end. Reading and 
 writing, to say nothing of Latin grammar, would be reduced to 
 their proper level as instruments of instruction, to be used 
 when the mental and bodily faculties are so developed that 
 they can be used with advantage. If parents who suffer 
 under this mania for early reading could be persuaded to 
 postpone the comparison of their children's acquirements 
 with those of other children for two years or so, and let those 
 two years be spent in our transition classes, we might perhaps 
 make ready converts. It is quite right that care should be 
 taken that children do not go to school unfit to take their 
 place in class with those of the same ages ; let us then 
 consider what a child going to school at nine years old can 
 fairly be expected to know — reading, writing, spelling, a little 
 French or Latin, as the case may be, the four rules of 
 arithmetic, some notion of Scripture history and geography, 
 and the same with respect to our own country. If a child 
 goes to school at nine, knowing these things accurately, we 
 may, I think, safely affirm that he or she will be well placed in 
 the school, and keep that place. Now, any Kinder-Garten 
 teacher will surely promise that a child who has been kept 
 strictly to Kinder-Garten work even till seven years old, and 
 then passed on to the transition classes, will in two years 
 attain such a degree of forwardness in school learning, with- 
 out the least pressure or difficulty. If we look closer at the 
 work of those two years, we shall see how this is effected. 
 Writing is singularly easy to him ; of geography he has learnt 
 something, and in a thorough manner ; the working of figures 
 is new, but arithmetic far beyond what is required is familiar 
 to the child ; and though reading is a novel and difficult art, 
 the Kinder-Garten exercises have given facility and accuracy 
 in tracing resemblances and differences, and in recognising 
 forms ; the child's memory is so trained to this, that letters 
 
/;/ Relation to Family Life. 143 
 
 and combinations of letters will quickly be discerned and 
 remembered. Also we must remember that if he did not 
 learn to read in the Kinder-Garten, he learnt to speak 
 distinctly, and to use accurate and well articulated words. He 
 has a larger vocabulary than other children, because his atten- 
 tion has been turned to more things. Thus the actual school 
 learning required by the age of nine will be of easy acquire- 
 ment ; but in addition to this, he will have gained many things 
 that enter into no school time-table, and it is to this that it 
 must be our business to turn the attention of parents. We 
 must make it evident to them what their children have gained 
 in general development of mental and physical capacity. The 
 latter will be shown in suppleness and dexterity of limb, in 
 delicacy and accuracy of eye and hand, the mental growth 
 will be manifested by quickness and accuracy of observation, 
 by clearness of apprehension, leaving no doubt whether a 
 thing is understood or not ; by the development of active 
 creative powers, for Kinder-Garten pupils can do as well as 
 understand ; by interest in what has been learnt, because the 
 mind has never been wearied with uninteresting matter, has 
 never wandered in the dreary fog of half comprehension ; by 
 some power of reasoning, accurately on the objects brought 
 under consideration, the why, whence, and how of such things 
 having habitually roused the children's attention. It will be 
 shown by a sense of beauty and symmetry in form, by a 
 readiness to apprehend certain elementary truths of geometry 
 which in the concrete have been familiar ; the moral benefit 
 also will have been considerable. Little children learn much 
 by living with their equals, the gentleness, the habit of working 
 together, and sharing a common interest, the affection they 
 learn to feel towards their teachers, the reverence kept up by 
 remaining always under the rule of their superiors, and not 
 under servants, and the cultivation, through contemplation of 
 nature, and of human goodness in many forms, of that deeply 
 
144 The Kindergarten 
 
 rooted religious sentiment in the child's nature which rises to 
 the notion of God, by realizing the wisdom and goodness of 
 parental love. All this adds to the moral influence of home, 
 and thus reacts upon it. In a word, the parents will not fail 
 to recognize that their children, besides the little bundle of 
 knowledge required for entrance upon school life, will carry 
 these minds and bodies trained to enlarge their small posses- 
 sions in every direction. And if parents do realise this fact, 
 then the Kinder-Garten has educated them, as well as their 
 children ; in one important particular, it will have made them 
 see the difference between the instruction they might have 
 given in the common way with books alone, and the education 
 that has been given by drawing out the children's own facul- 
 ties within the circle of visible objects That circle comprises 
 largely natural phenomena, which most children are eager to 
 know about, but concerning which they seldom get the answer 
 they require. Natural History, birds, beasts, and flowers, the 
 commonest facts of general physics, the changes of seasons, 
 the sun, moon, and stars, these excite the curiosity of all but 
 the dullest children ; but how many of those who are around 
 them in general can direct and stimulate that curiosity in the 
 right direction. How many, in speaking of some particular 
 object, can draw it even in outline, or, if it be a plant, give it 
 its right name ? But if once the value of Kinder-Garten train- 
 ing can be made apparent, surely no intelligent mother — from 
 the so-called educated classes — will allow herself to remain 
 dumb and helpless before her child, from ignorance of the 
 facts that he learns from the Kinder-Garten teachers. The 
 mother cannot expect to keep always on a level with the 
 advanced instruction given to her sons or daughters, but 
 surely she could not bear to think that she was unfit to satisfy 
 the desire for knowledge of her little child, when once she 
 has satisfied herself that such knowledge is good for the child. 
 She would not choose to be so out oi sympathy with the 
 
/// Relation to Family Life, 145 
 
 creature round which all her heart-strings twine, as not be 
 able to enter into every phase his unfolding intelligence is 
 going through. Ignorance, however, in matters such as these 
 is harmless as compared to that of principles of education, of 
 the knowledge which enables us to watch and aid the develop- 
 ment of childish faculty, to guard mental and physical health ; 
 and this it is which the influence of FrobeFs system with the 
 weight .it lays upon infant training will force upon the attention 
 of mothers. On the importance of early impressions the 
 scientific fatalist and the earnest Christian like Frobel take 
 their stand together. Both agree that the surroundings of the 
 child from the first are what impress the pliable nature and 
 form associations that affect the whole development. Yet the 
 mother, who would give her life to make her child's life 
 happy, remains ignorant. But when once Kinder-Garten 
 principles are generally accepted, young mothers will feel that 
 so large a task must require preparation, that to learn the 
 A, B, C of work to be performed at the moment the work is 
 pressing is not the act of a reasonable being ; thus the principle 
 that education begins with the dawn of life will lead to a pre- 
 paratory study of education, and will in time lead to the 
 acceptance of this important doctrine that no woman's own 
 education is complete without a study of education ; she may 
 be accomplished in many ways, or may even have reached 
 high attainments, but she is not trained for life which is the 
 real office of education, unless she has studied how to acquit 
 herself in that most important position that life can possibly 
 open to her. I think I may say that my experience as a single 
 woman has not been different from that of most others, yet I 
 have more than once had the care of childern thrown upon 
 me, and I believe the exceptions are rare where women are 
 not called upon more or less to deal with children, and I long 
 for the time when it shall be deemed as unseemly for a woman 
 not to understand their proper management as it is for a man 
 
 L 
 
146 The Kindergarten 
 
 to be unfit to do active service in defence of his hearth and 
 country. The service in each case is pointed out by Nature, 
 and the man or woman is a recreant to the highest social duty 
 who is unfit to perform it. 
 
 The principal means therefore by which the influence of 
 the Kinder-Gartens will work a reform in family life will be 
 by raising in their own eyes, and in that of men, the estimate 
 of woman's natural position, and of the tone of character and 
 culture that are indispensable to her fulfilling the mission 
 worthily. A slighting view of early education naturally 
 detracts from the respect due to that mission, and feeds that 
 most mischievous of all ignorant delusions, the notion that 
 simply because a woman is a mother, she is fit to fulfil her 
 duty to her children. 
 
 It is easy to believe that little is needed to enable any 
 woman to educate very little children, so long as education 
 means only putting words into a child's mouth, or even main- 
 taining such moral discipline as, thank God, is cared for in 
 most English homes ; but this same charge is seen to be far 
 from easy, when education is held to mean the careful watch- 
 ing that tends, but never thwarts, the unfolding of the child's 
 own nature ; that studies the first symptoms of character, of 
 peculiarities in the mental as well as the physical organization ; 
 that allows no neglect of the bodily for the mental growth and 
 welfare, nor of the latter for the former; but keeps all in 
 harmonious order, respecting the entire freedom of individual 
 development, while guiding it so step by step that as the 
 bodily organs strengthen, the mental growth shall correspond ; 
 that what the eyes behold shall excite first pleasure, then 
 curiosity, then attention, then observation and memory of 
 what has been observed ; till the child is led to discover for 
 himself one after another some wonders of the marvellous 
 world upon which his senses have just opened. All these 
 faculties will be active, no doubt, without our care, but their 
 
/;/ Relatio7t to Family Life, 1 47 
 
 exercise will tend to no given purpose, there will be no 
 method, and therefore no orderly advance, and no preparation 
 for future progress. So also with the active instincts ot 
 children. The little things will play, with or without our help ; 
 but we learn nothing, and can teach nothing from their play, 
 if we do not carefully watch it as the manifestation of natural 
 aptitudes and desires, that we have to train for higher uses. 
 These are some of the educational points to which Frobel 
 directs attention, and the Kinder-Garten games and occupa- 
 tiorks — the practical system in which these principles are 
 embodied — afford at once a study and a guide to those who 
 are concerned in education. When, therefore, mothers become 
 familiar with that systera they will be able to test their own 
 capability for the office, which, under any circumstances, they 
 cannot give up. The Kinder-Garten, which we hear accused 
 of taking children out of home, robbing the mothers of their 
 right and privilege, &c. — the Kinder-Garten can perform but 
 half its work, can at best take hold of the child partially 
 and imperfectly, unless rounded and supplemented by home 
 education. Instead of displacing the mother, it makes the 
 imperative necessity of her care more apparent. And for 
 this reason it is that the appeal to mothers from a Frobel 
 society is so urgent. It is a question of all but life or death 
 to the system we hold to be so valuable. 
 
 The extreme difficulty we find in attracting students for 
 Kinder-Garten training arises partly, no doubt, from the long 
 prevailing English prejudice against training teachers, but 
 still more from that same ignorance of the importance of 
 early education that I have already deplored. Any one has 
 been thought sufficiently instructed to teach little children ; 
 the thing that seemed so easy was trusted to ignorant hands, 
 and this whole department has fallen into contempt. When, 
 therefore, young women are told that two' years of serious 
 study are required to prepare for our Kinder-Garten examina- 
 
 L 2 
 
148 The Kindergarten 
 
 tions,. they naturally turn back surprised and disappointed 
 This will all be changed when women generally take a highej 
 view of their natural position ; then it will be felt that no 
 labour is too great for those who are to undertake its duties, 
 and that if women had no other object in view to make them 
 desire culture of the noblest kind, they would have it in the 
 first great duty of training themselves to be educators of the 
 next generation. With the increased sense of the value of 
 infant education, there must arise an increased value for the 
 influence and the education of women. The former would be 
 seen to extend over the most important field of human 
 interest ; the latter could no longer be a matter of indifference 
 — of passe temps — of preparation for mere success, whether in 
 drawing-rooms or in the labour-market; it would have a 
 serious and a lofty purpose, apart from ambitions great or 
 small — it would consecrate, once and for all, the power of 
 women to the highest service of the nation. Frobel appealed 
 solemnly to women to enter upon this high form of service ; 
 and if his system, as it takes its place among us, tends to hasten 
 such a reform, we may surely say, that great and beneficial as 
 the influence of the Kinder-Garten is in relation to schools, 
 it will be in relation to family life deeper and more far-reach- 
 ing still. 
 
 Finally, what can we as members of the Frobel Society do 
 towards promoting this reform ? Those among us who are 
 teachers have this very clear before them. The more strictly 
 they adhere to principles in their course, the more they bring 
 them forward and banish mere mechanical teaching, the 
 more they will force parents to see that this is no nursery 
 amusement, but education as earnest and thorough as any 
 given by school or university ; and we who are not teachers, 
 can aid in the missionary work that belongs to all pioneeis of 
 reform. We can each within our own circle strive to make 
 the new education known, can take care to put it on the true 
 
In Relation to Family Life, 149 
 
 grounds, to show where it differs from education addressed to 
 the memory; we can try to bring young girls to learn and to 
 help in Kinder-Garten teaching ; we can also do good by 
 trying to extend a plan I heard of with great pleasure the 
 other day, that of mothers taking it by turns to attend the 
 classes with their children, bringing a number of different 
 minds to imbibe the spirit of the system which will lead to a 
 certain number resolving to study it thoroughly, while others 
 will do so partially for some practical purpose at the moment, 
 but none, we may safely affirm, will remain indifferent. And 
 thus here a little and there a little, by slow and often halting 
 steps, our small society will become one of the most powerful 
 instruments of a reform, which, beginning at the core of 
 national life, will gradually affect the most powerful currents of 
 national thought and feeling. 
 
 
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 Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London. 
 
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