emparadising both. By and by, it notices light and colors, and begins to play with its hands and feet. Hence the most characteristic work of Froebel is "The Mother's Cosseting Songs." In this imperfect world, mothers are not always true to ideal motherhood; but ignorance, and often indolence, and other forms of self-indulgence, superinducing stupidity,- even a tyrannous sense of property in the child, and sometimes mere timidity, interferes. And, in general, Froebel saw how little most mothers reflect on the great work they are doing when they play with their children. He wished them to study into the laws they are obeying, in order to discover their scope and meaning, that they may be able to supplement with thought the short-comings of their too often spoilt instincts. Mothers taught him more than they knew themselves; and he repaid the debt by telling them what they taught him in these "Cosseting Songs," which he gathered from many lips and brought together for the enriching of all. First may be seen in the pictured illustrations which accompany the songs, that the plays are merely the sympathetic furtherance of the child's own motions. The mother enjoys the sight of her baby kicking up its little legs, fumbling its little hands, and enjoying its bodily existence generally; and she sympathizingly intervenes, and draws the child to forget itself in its heart-sense of her sympathetic presence. She feeds the instinctive putting forth of its own joy, the first form of its faith, with the expression of her joy; and thus the heart grows with the body, and the mind opens to expect boundless love, which it reciprocates without reserve. healthy child "Loves whate'er it looks upon." A If it is not happy and loving, it is the condemnation of its environment. Some one in relation with it, perhaps more than one, has failed to show the necessary love; and “better were it for such," as Jesus Christ has said, "that a millstone were hung about their necks, and they were cast into the uttermost depths of the sea." If these words mean any thing, and who will dare say they are mere rhetoric? then let us take care that we do not rush into the work of education, without being sure that we shall not do so immense a mischief; and let mothers see to it, that they do not put their children into the care of persons who do not combine love and knowledge of childhood in measures not to be expected of the common run of children's nurses and primary teachers. Not only because every mother is not an ideal mother, but because sometimes children are consigned, by inevitable circumstance, to other nursing than a wise mother's, such a manual as the "Cosseting Songs" is indispensable to instruct nurses. And nurses ought always to be instructed. When Froebel was in Hamburg, he received nurses into normal training. Both mothers and nurses brought their infants of six months old to his house, and he taught them how to play with without fatiguing-them, by carefully respecting those indications of pleasure and pain which are the child's only means of communication. And as lectures on child-nature are a part of the Kindergarten training, those preparing to be children's nurses, even to this day, are admitted to the Hamburg training-school, which was not relinquished when Froebel died, but is now instructed by the best teachers of the Volks-Kindergartens, who go into it by turns. It has its sessions in the evenings; and the normal pupils pay for their instruction, at least in part, by assisting in the morning in the Volks-Kindergarten, which forms also an important part of their training. But at all events, there can be no adequate Kindergarten culture anywhere, unless a specific normal training is constantly kept up to supply the ever-increasing demand which tends to outgo the supply, especially when nurses are admitted, as at Hamburg. Having thus indicated the source whence must be drawn the Kindergarten culture, it is not our purpose to attempt the impossible, by stating it abstractly; for a series of abstractions is more apt to conceal than to reveal a living science. No book can train a Kindergartner, but only at best serve as a convenient reminder to educated experts, and instruct parents that there is one necessary condition of their children's receiving the benefit of Kindergarten culture; viz., a thoroughly educated Kindergartner. And this may be obtained even in America, from a lady of the apostolic succession; a pupil of the training-school of the Baroness Marienholtz, of Berlin, who has devoted her talents, her fortune, the prestige of her rank, and her personal services, to spread the art of her revered master on the conti nent of Europe. Miss Kriege not only has studied a year in this training-school, but all the while frequented the Kindergarten of Madame Vogler, as observer and assistant; and, together with her mother, a lady who is the equal of the Baroness Marienholtz in every thing but the fortune which enables the latter to teach without price, combines every qualification, with enthusiasm, for the spread of a method of education that unquestionably has a great future in this country, inasmuch as it makes a true base to the grand harmonies of our national constitution. As one feature of the normal class is a series of lectures on the being of the child, which are given on one day of the week, it would be desirable that Madame Kriege should admit mothers and sisters who have no intention of making teaching their vocation, but who may thus understand and be able to co-operate in spirit with the Kindergartner, in the education of the children; for it is a great hindrance to the Kindergarten when it is not understood at home. All the educators of the child should understand each other, and co-operate, if the highest results are to be attained. CHAPTER VI. KINDERGARTEN OCCUPATIONS. THERE is a kind of thing done in Kindergarten, which retains the best characteristics of childish play, and yet assumes the serious form of occupation. Fancy-work, if Froebel's method be strictly followed, is the best initiation of industry; for it can serve to a perfect intellectual training. Childish play has all the main characteristics of art, inasmuch as it is the endeavor to "conform the shows of things to the desires of the mind," Bacon's definition of poetry. A child at play is histrionic. He personates characters, with costume and mimic gesture. He also undertakes to represent whatever thing interests his mind by embodiment of it in outward form. Advantage is taken of this, by Froebel, to initiate exquisite manipulation, in several different materials; a veritable artistic work, which trains the imagination to use, and develops the understanding to the appreciation of beauty, symmetry, or order, "Heaven's first law." Froebel's first two Gifts, as they are called, are a box of colored worsted balls, and a box containing the cube, the sphere, and the cylinder. These two Gifts belong more especially to the nursery series, and were published some years since in Boston, with little books of rhymes, and suggestions for playing with babies. But they can be used, in some degree, in the Kindergarten: the first, to give lessons on the harmonies of colors; and the second, to call attention to fundamental differences of form. It is possible, however, to omit these, and begin a Kindergarten with the Third Gift, which is a little wooden box, containing eight cubes of an inch dimension. The first plays with these blocks, especially if the children are very young, will be to make what Froebel calls forms of life; that is, chairs, tables, columns, walls, tanks, stables, houses, &c. Everybody conversant with children knows how easily they will "make believe," as they call it, all these different forms, out of any materials whatever; and are most amused, when the materials to be transformed by their personifying and symbolizing fancy are few, for so much do children enjoy the exercise of imagination, that they find it more amusing to have simple forms, which they can "make believe," first to be one thing, and then another, than to have elaborately carved columns, and such like materials, for building. There is nothing in life more charming to a spectator, than to see this shaping fancy of children, making everything of nothing, and scorning the bounds of probability, and even of possibility. It is a prophecy of the unending dominion which man was commanded, at his creation, to have over nature; and gives meaning to the parable of the Lord God's bringing all creatures before Adam, that he might give them their names. Wordsworth felicitously describes, in that ode which he calls "Intimations of Immortality in Childhood," this victorious play of "The seer blest, On whom those truths do rest, Which we are toiling all our lives to find.” "Behold the child among his new-born blisses; See where, mid work of his own hand, he lies, And this hath now his heart, And unto this he frames his song. |